On Alarm - Reaction

Burç Kostem

On July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish Armed Forces attempted to topple the government, allegedly under the orders of the US-based cleric and former ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP), Fetullah Gülen. Soldiers were ordered to occupy major buildings such as the state-owned television and radio station (TRT), the Borsa İstanbul (İstanbul stock exchange) and the Presidential Palace.

One memorable sound from this night was that of F-16 jets blasting through the sky. The planes blasting through the Ankara skyline were at a low enough altitude that each time they passed, the poorly kept buildings of Ankara’s old neighborhoods such as Ayrancı and Bahçelievler shook.  Sonic booms, like the ones over Ankara and İstanbul’s skyline on the night of the coup attempt are related to a strategy of “Shock and Awe”, intended to induce fear in the listener, momentarily incapacitating them in a state of ambient “bad vibe” (Daughtry 2015; Goodman 2012). Yet during the night of the coup attempt, this feeling of dread lasted very briefly. And one was transported, rather quickly, from the feeling of shock and uneasiness induced by the sound, to the feeling of fear that came from searching for its source; from the hazy world of indistinction and iconicity, to the physical world of cause and effect that is proper to indexicality.

In Charles Sanders Peirce’s work, indexicality indicates a close and physical connection between two events, indicating a unique sense of causality, like a hot stove and the sensation of burning. For Peirce, the sense of referentiality implied by indexicality is physical, participating in what he calls secondness. Peirce gives the example of someone exclaiming, adding that indexes “take holds of our eyes… and forcibly directs them to a particular object” (Peirce 1992, 225). “There!”

In their depositions to the police, the generals who ordered the low altitude flights over Ankara and İstanbul, refer to this incident as an “A/R uçuşu (alarm reaksiyon)” (CNN Turk 2017). The phrase is the equivalent of what in English is called “Quick Reaction Alert” (QRA), a state of air-defense alertness maintained by members countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), at all times (Yavuz 2010; Bila 2012). This involved maintaining a small fraction of the air force, ready to take flight at all times, to quickly respond to an imminent threat such, as an enemy bomber. During the night of the coup, these very F-16s prepared to respond to an imminent threat, themselves became the source of said threat, creating terror over Ankara and İstanbul, with one of the jets eventually bombing the parliament.

In a fascinating collection of photos and sketches that shed light on the concept of threat, architect Atıl Aggündüz, has attempted to map out how the 12 people huddled together in his apartment in İstanbul during the night of the coup attempt, reacted to the sound of jets engines outside (140 Journos 2016). As Aggündüz notes, his drawings depict how bodies that were at first congregated near windows, plugs and furniture, slowly receded away to different corners of the room, yet still making sure to stay close to a plug to receive updates through social media.

First, like the sound of a jet engine, indexes by themselves assert nothing. Rather they are referential, in that their performance works when it implicates a physical connection to an imputed object. The affective mood of such indexes is “imperative and exclamatory” (Massumi 2010, 202). Take cover! In the case of the F-16s flying above Aggündüz’s neighborhood, the imputed object of threat is not only the symbolic awareness of the ongoing coup and its promise of violence, but also a more intuitive sense that the listeners ought to “Stay away from the streets!”. 

Second, in the context of threat indexicality indicates a state of alertness. Building on Peirce’s work Brian Massumi (2010, 204) has argued that threats rely on a logic of indexicality, where the sign’s performance immediately activates the body into a response. During the night of the coup, the shaking of the windows in Aggündüz’s living room activated the bodies in his apartment into a state of alertness. Aggündüz insisted on the bodily nature of this performance, explaining that the fear he and his friends felt was not necessary a psychological state but lived spatially and socially. This state of alertness also commands attention. Aggündüz explains how his guests stepped away from the windows while maintaining attention. “Even those who could not see the window,” he adds, “listened to what was going on” (140 Journos).

Third, threat works through a strange, “quasi-causality”, one that acts through the future. As Massumi explains, “threat as such is nothing yet – just a looming. It is a form of futurity. Yet has the capacity to fill the present without ever presenting itself. Its future casts a present shadow, and that shadow is fear. Threat is future cause of a change in the present” (2010, 175). It is a “quasi” cause since, the event which triggers the state of alertness and activation is suspended. During the night of the coup, it didn’t matter to know that the low altitude flights were a scare tactic, one still stepped away from one’s window, in apprehension of the virtual image of a jet crash landing into your living room. 

Last, this means, strangely, that threat is never-ending. Its virtuality can always be further actualized. One gets a glimpse of this in the increasingly byzantine securitizations schemes and threat scenarios that seem to multiply in Turkey after the coup attempt, as if by self-propagation. For threat, every broadcast, every message, every securitization is already implanted with the virtual concern for the disruption of its own signal. Whatever very real threat had been overcome the night of the coup attempt, its reverberations would be felt throughout the coming years of Turkish politics, shaping an increasingly securitized atmosphere.

Text by Burç Kostem; images by Atıl Aggündüz