The Wager of Popular Address

This paper examines how popular protests contest the limits of political intelligibility not only vis-à-vis the state but also within and among the diverse social constituencies engaged in protest. Reflecting on the Gezi Park protests in Turkey during the summer of 2013, I explore how participants often drew on already existing semiotic forms (icons, slogans, flags, etc.) but did so in ways that dislocated them from their familiar historical reference points. I highlight those aspects of public address that center on the protestors’ efforts to invite one another to cross historical lines of difference, thereby announcing an incipient popular politics. I move across a number of instances where acts of salutation were freighted with political significance, even provocation. The question of popular sovereignty, I argue, can be understood to begin at precisely this moment, in acts that put into question the form of relationality between those who have not typically shared a history of political action. Understood in this sense, the popular is not determined by statist accounts of a unified “nation.” Rather, it is an expression of antagonism, in which the intelligibility of “the people” is put at risk in its invocation.