Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

The Gezi Park Movement was reactional, spontaneous, horizontal, and multi-layered. Gezi took the place of one of the most important occupy movements in the world. It was a resistance where different groups of people having completely different requests about their daily life, their identities, or their rights. The characteristic of this resistance was to transform the Gezi Park to a common space assembling this unidentifiable “multitude.” Class perspective explains the class belonging to define a social movement, or aim to rule after undermining the government. Referring to the new social movements’ perspective, they describe a social movement as a movement which is not aiming to rule but they search a –more or less- continuing social organization. Gezi Park actors belonged to a refined class, they did not aim to rule or come to power; components were people who were not known to each others before the movement and even after the Gezi Park movement. From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptional toolbox seems useful to analyze a multitude’s movement like Gezi. Deleuze and Guattari’s “desire flows” definition is the main guide of this study. The definition of desire from Deleuze and Guattari argues that desire is revolutionist and to understand the working principles of the social movements. They insist on we need to focus on “how desire moves in the social”. Additionally they conceptualize “everything” as a rhizomatic assemblage which allows to make connections with everything and to change every components of the earth. As we focus on the movement’s working process, “Body without Organ (BwO)” term of Deleuze and Guattari is our guide to understand this bottom-up organization style (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) of the movement. According to Deleuze and Guattari BwO belongs to the realm of antiproduction and this is a kind of assemblage which puts together all the organs but in a chaotic way. This study does not aim to identify the actors of the Gezi Park Movement, ask what Gezi actually is, or comment on the consequences of Gezi incidents. On the contrary, this study aims to understand how the “Gezi Park machine,” operated as an ever changing mechanism on an everyday basis while at the same time collecting many different subjects (people, animals, plants, expressions, actions, and more…) in the same place. The research tries to understand the changing actors alongside visual, written, and verbal productions created on the Park; most important of all, it will pay attention to the functions of irony and fun in the Gezi Park Movement’s discourse. This paper analyses newspaper headlines, photographs, and graffiti produced during the occupation movement.