The Event
“The event is what always escapes our rational grasp, the domain of absolute contingency”, Foucault quotes L’Homme in Power, Knowledge The event is a term, 1 2 defined by its way of being a shock, a surprise. It is 3 built on conditionality, sets of information which allow it to come to be. And it is only through the analysis of this conditionality, an event can be investigated to the level of full grasp, to liberate it from recurrence. Here, the question is not what happens —as Deleuze suggests, the significance of the event is not in what happens, or not to whom it happens, as for an event to be there is always a subject, and the event is interconnected, coexisting with the subject, but why 4 and how it happens. Through this comprehension of the event and the revealing of its singularity, the essay will first be defining the event within the happening of Kahramanmaraş earthquake, then delve into the conditions allowing it to arise to offer a question which elucidates this occurrence.
Turkey is a geography accustomed to earthquakes, nothing is unexpected about it. Accordingly, there is a certain way of living with the anxiety stemming from the knowledge of one’s inhabitance in deficiently built houses. Yet still, there is an assumption, a certain misbelief on the building as an inhabitable place, the permanent home, a place to live. In Kahramanmaraş, the number of collapsed buildings proves this wrong. Earth becomes concrete, water becomes snow. The flat, recently invested in for its guaranteed durability and compliance with the earthquake building regulations, is not a dwelling, becomes a tomb. Earth
becomes concrete. The wall thought to be owned, comes to light, with the paint and the crayon drawings remaining on the exposed façade of the adjoining house. The assumption is proved wrong, no one owns the wall, the house, the street or the lives lost. Hence, the event happens in the number, seven thousand five hundred eighty four.
Histories of each life condense into this concrete number. Memories are anonymized, and can be fathomed only through an abstraction as such. The number is “the code of the incommensurable, in the shape of a common measurement.” The scale of the 5 event misleads one to the supposing for the ample conditionality of it. Here, it is the essay’s view that there are only two prerequisites leading to the formation of enkaz, the debris of the earthquake, within which the latter will be of deeper investigation. These are first, the construction of the houses with the disregard of building regulations, hence leaving apartments entirely defenceless when faced the major earthquakes, and second, the state of remaining, obliging of the incompetently built structures, or additions to such, by way of declaring amnesia through the legislature of the Turkish Republic. The essay will be inquiring on this case of forgetting, practised since the country’s establishment, starting from the first application of amnesia in written history to the posterior states of the affected cities in the Kahramanmaraş earthquake.
4
2
3 159-176. Giles Deleuze reference in: Giorgio Agamben, “The Event,” in The Adventure (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), pp. 65-84.
5
French anthropology journal created by Émile Benveniste, Pierre Gourou, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Michel Foucault, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews An (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester press, 1980).
Jean-Luc Nancy and Robert D. Richardson, “The Surprise of the Event,” in Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009), pp.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Technique Du présent: Essai Sur on Kawara ... (Villeurbanne, France: Le Nouveau Musée/Institut d'art Contemporain, 1997).
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8
Amnesia in Athens and the Contemporary Derivation
When this poet brought upon the stage his drama of the capture of Miletus, the whole theater burst into tears; and the people sentenced him to pay a fine of thousand drachmas, for recalling them to their own misfortunes. They likewise made a law, that no one should ever exhibit that piece.
Herodotus, VI, 21
In 403 BC Athens, words which brought suffering (pathos) became unlawful and forbidden by the senate. 6 This city, where the historiography starts with Herodotus in the form of first-hand memory, became the host to an early proclamation of the forgetting of tragedies called, mnêsikakein. The word mnêsikakein, which translates as ‘recalling the misfortunes’, is derived from -mnesi, the Greek root for ‘memory’ and -kaka, the ‘misfortunes’. In her book The Divided City, 7 French historian of Classical Athens Nicole Loraux argued that when we infer what Athenians meant by -kaka was not just the ‘misfortunate’, but also implied the ‘events’ happened. Then, the interpretation of mnêsikakein shifted from ‘bringing back the memory’ to an act of ‘recalling against’. The utterance of the misfortunate event was seen to be brought by a search for revenge, hence, banned by the senate.
This instance of the mnêsikakein is considered the first documented example of amnesty laws. The 8 outlawing of the things remembered that cause agony. The Greek meaning of the word mnêsikakein presents the origin of the contemporary term amnesty. However, the two uses of the primary and the currentday terminology are located at entirely different ends. In modern politics, amnesty refers to the sovereign act of oblivion or forgetfulness for past acts. Although so 9 closely intertwined, the inherent disparity is made apparent as the former case of Greek-use situates forgetting within the act of imposing: amnesia is ordered, recalling is banned, erasure is the solution. Whereas in the latter case of contemporary, amnesty offers the forgetting: it grants oblivion and forgives. The one who forgets has been replaced within time, from the public identity to those of the legislature.
The term amnesty is oblivious in itself too, forgetful to its origins, thus, calls for an analysis of its embedded ambiguity belonging to 21st-century politics. In his book Truth and Method, German philosopher Hans Gadamer writes: “The text, whether law or gospel, […] must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application.” Here, 10 Gadamer points at the fundamentals of hermeneutics, yet the quote still serves effectively when applied for an
examination of the diverged meanings of the term. In contemporary legal structures, amnesty in essence alludes to a proposed contradiction with the laws, a forced replacement, a supplantation in the constitution. Nevertheless, this recognized definition can be met with two contrasting adoptions of the term. First, comes the amnesty which stands against the adamant structures of law and its practice to achieve justice before the illegitimate uses of these legislations. This case is to be exemplified by the activities of the well-known human rights organization Amnesty International. When the performed legal 11 structures are deemed corrupted, amnesty serves as a force of saviour. Likewise, the people who are declared to be criminal offenders upon their use of human rights, most commonly freedom of expression, are subject to a process of searching for peace, an erasure of the oppressive laws. Consequent to an autocratic reputation of a political structure, amnesty becomes a concept to advocate for.
The case differs when the context in which the parliament, as the representative of the followed legal structure, is the one to initiate the amnesty. “The text must be understood at every moment, in a new and different way.” Here, amnesty comes from the hands 12 of the state. It is a hand looking to make peace with its citizen, expectantly or supposedly. The members of parliament take this role on, using their magic wand, to keep the state, which includes themselves, and the citizen content in short-run scenarios. The event happens on the foundation of this hedonistic conditionality. When the laws prior to the granting of amnesty are proven to be effective in the long term — hence the reason the parliament is not seeking a permanent modification in the constitution, yet still disregarded by an opportunist erasion, then, amnesty mutates and becomes hard to defend. It presents a lawful crime, for its own conclusion is nothing but a foreseen massacre.
The convention of amnesty habitually ties itself to concrete numbers. A thousand drachmas of a poet or seven thousand five hundred eighty-four buildings in ruins, they all become the counted memorabilia of what remains, the cost of a voice and a gifted silence.
6 pp. 145-163. ibid
Nicole Loraux, “On Amnesty and Its Opposite,” in The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Ats (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2006),
7 ibid
Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2002).
9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Recovery of the Fundamental Hermeneutic Problem,” in Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp.
11 ibid 12
10 318-323. “Who We Are,” Amnesty International, November 26, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/.
6
Amnesty in the Turkish Parliament and the Kahramanmaraş Earthquake
Its first economic benefit is that treasury lands get sold to citizens at the best rates, the treasury wins and the citizen legalizes their own houses or workplaces. … A second benefit is that from now on the municipalities will not be allowed to collect taxes from land but only from the residences or workplaces, [with this law] loss in taxes are prevented too. A third benefit is that we will generate an income in total. … It seems that it won’t be less than 40-50 billion Turkish liras [7.8-6.2 billion GPB].
Mehmet Özhaseki, the previous Minister of Environment and Urban Planning interviewed on zoning amnesty
In 2018, five years before the Kahramanmaraş earthquake, the Turkish Parliament agreed on an omnibus bill, covering a range of pardons for the 13 debts owned to the government for various reasons.14 Included in these sanctions was a law, zoning amnesty, that seems to be introduced periodically and always before the presidential elections. The zoning amnesty (imar affı) is a retroactive law, an official pardon that the Turkish Parliament has been putting forward at intervals since the 1980s to exempt illicitly constructed buildings from demolition or related fines and to enable their certification in the building registration system. The buildings subject to this law with an illegal status are documented not to have been built in the permitted zones of construction, without parking or shelter providence for residents, or failing to be built up to the minimum standards of fire and earthquake safety regulations. Following the Kahramanmaraş earthquake, officials remain silent over inquiries about the number of buildings that collapsed which were excused by the previous amnesties. In this case of a 15 scheduled oblivion, amnesty becomes responsible for its own doings and the implicit interpretation it makes possible. The act of forgiving seeds an expected tolerance for future offences, and this is perhaps its most fatal consequence. Hence, the concept of amnesty is not only historical—where one could believe it was applied with a lack of experience and that would make the end of its effects, but also preceding, paving the way for potential crimes with the reduced comprehension of their harm.
In his essay Living and Building, Giorgio Agamben writes: “The historical a priori of architecture would then today be precisely the impossibility or incapacity of modern man to inhabit, and for architects, the consequent rupture of the relationship between the art of construction and the art of dwelling.” Agamben argues that the dissolution of the architect and the resident resulted in the construction of uninhabitable houses. In the case of Turkey, this was realized by the conventionalized separation of the architect from the design of the dwelling, and it is the tyranny of the contractor that one is led to. Known as the müteahhit, meaning the one who promised and undertook a responsibility upon an agreement, these individuals are appointed to work with architects and engineers on a contract-based relationship. Regardless, there is a deviated norm of the müteahhit as the decision-giver of a project, the estate developer. Throughout the country’s recent history, this unsolicited authority of the contractor has resulted in the extinction of architects and engineers. In the decades prior to the earthquake, the contractors have not only been disintegrating from the complementary professions of the industry—therefore resulting in the downgrading
of these functional parties to mere marks of signature in the planning documents, but also positioning themselves physically afar from the pro fi tably incompetent structures. Here, is the rupture of the constructer from the art of construction and the construction itself. Eventually, the impacts of the chronic forgiving were made apparent in the growing ignorance of the müteahhit , and the induced irresponsibility of architects and engineers.
The system was destined to sustain itself. Even if it was founded upon tenuous constructions or meant sacrificing the historic fabric of the Southeastern cities, and taking the risk of their utter destruction, it had to be provided with the cash flow upon chosen financial strategies. Zoning amnesty, the peacemaker hand of the state as claimed to be by Özhaseki,16 became the subject of neoliberal accounts of the Turkish state. “Through such strategies, the government has further encouraged inclusion into the market through a cost-benefit calculation about the future, rather than the defence of an existing setting” writes Ceren Ark-Yıldırım. Yet, despite the state’s 17 monetary motivations behind its peacemaking, only 23 billion were gained out of the 50 billion Turkish liras anticipated, which came equal to fifty thousand 18 ninety-six deaths in the Kahramanmara ş earthquakes. The duplication of the constitutional 19 displacement has been successfully harvested through the merciful conducts of the state.
In the following parts of his essay, Agamben continues with the complex relationship between the verb ‘to have’ and ‘to be’, to note that the former does not exist in most languages. Instead, in Arabic and many Altaic languages such as Turkish, ‘to have’ is replaced by the expressions of ‘being at’ or ‘being of’. Following 20 the amnesties, the contractor is stripped down from his ‘being at’, afar from any hazard and liberated from illegal acts. The promise he holds, of the inhabitable house, is overruled. Hence, the inhabiter is no more, becomes a depremzede, the one who suffers from the earthquake. The zoning amnesty, argued to be born 21 out of short-term economic bene fi ts and the neoliberal strategies of the government, paved the way for the complete devouring of its resources. The risk taken over the inhabiter, got realized. The instance of 2018 and its contemporary anteriors contributed to twelve times greater damage in the earthquakes than the predicted income of the amnesties. The primary 22 function of the state, to defend its citizens and to sustain itself, and of the contractor, the mere obligation to perform an able construction, has evanesced in time. One is only left with a material reflection of an erasure, an alternate reproduction from which the event emerges. Omnibus
14 “İktidarın yanıtlamadığı soru: Yıkılan binaların kaçı imar affı gördü?” Diken, February 24, https://www.diken.com.tr/iktidarin-cevaplamadigi-soru-yikilan-
15 binalarin-kaci-imar-affindan-yararlandi/ Özhaseki: "(İmar Barışı) Bu Bir Af Değil, Bir Barış Nihayetinde, Dünya News, 2018, https://www.dunya.com/video-galeri/ekonomi/bu-bir-af-degil-bir-imar-
16 barisi-nihayetinde-video-414288.
17 Eastern Studies 22, no. 5 (2020): pp. 613-628, https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2020.1799595.
Ceren Ark-Yildirim, “The 2018 ‘Construction Peace’ in Turkey: A Neoliberal Inclusion or Populist Electoral Exchange?,” Journal of Balkan and Near
18 kurum-imar-barisi-nda-23-5-milyar-lira-12551156/.
“Bakan Kurum: İmar Barışı'nda 23,5 Milyar Lira Ödeme Alındı,” Sondakika.com, October 21, 2019, https://www.sondakika.com/haber/haber-bakan-
19 https://www.cnnturk.com/turkiye/49-gun-depremde-olu-sayisi-ne-kadar-oldu-guncel-yarali-sayisi-kac-hangi-ilde-kac-bina-yikildi-kac-kisi-oldu.
Numbers stated in 26th March 2023, “49. Gün! Depremde Ölü Sayısı Ne Kadar Oldu, Güncel Yaralı Sayısı Kaç? ,” CNN Turk, March 26, 2023,
20 deprem: earthquake, -zede: the one who suffers
Giorgio Agamben, “Abitare e Costruire,” accessed January 20, 2023, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-abitare-e-costruire.
21 World Bank Group, “Earthquake Damage in Türkiye Estimated to Exceed $34 Billion: World Bank Disaster Assessment Report,” World Bank (World 22 Bank Group, February 27, 2023), https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/02/27/earthquake-damage-in-turkiye-estimated-toexceed-34-billion-world-bank-disaster-assessment-report.
bills are laws which concern a number unrelated issues to be agreed on en masse. 13 Examples are traffic fines, taxes, highway tolls, pay rises for pensioners, etc.
7
Traces of Amnesia
The city echoes: ''It is forbidden to recall the misfortunes:' And each citizen, one by one, swears the oath: "I shall not recall the misfortunes,'' meaning the past, just as Achilles says to Agamemnon: "Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us.” This is the cue for the official exit of memory. Yet we suspect that, in all its deliberateness, such a forgetting leaves traces.
Nicole Loraux
The earthquake of the 6th of February creates a mark in the history of Turkish politics. Yet even more, it creates the unforgettable memory in the minds of millions who got directly affected. Amnesia writes the memory, for once, never to be forgiven. As Loraux argues, forgetting leaves traces. The trace of the zoning amnesty, the forgetting of the laws once painstakingly committed, is not just made of the miles of concrete dunes or the replacement tents that have been inhabiting the surviving families for months on end, but also on the collective autobiography of a generation, and the ones to come too. The incommensurable quality of each moment solidifies through a number of distrust, for it seems too little for the underwent suffering and too much to take in. The 2023 earthquake becomes the worst natural disaster in the country’s history by the incalculable loss it brings.
In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger writes on the word bauen, meaning ‘to build’ in High German. He argues that the ‘real meaning of the word, namely to dwell, has been lost to us’. It is simply the meaning of ‘taking shelter’, that is being referred to. This is what 23 separates the space of the dwelling and the other forms of architecture. When a dwelling provides shelter, a bridge does not. In the amnesic setting of 24 the earthquake, the number of collapsed buildings
demonstrate that the dwelling was not only distant to bauen in practice but also to habitare, to live, and in relation to habeo, to have, anything that was thought to be owned. The wall thought to be owned, the lives 25 thought to be owned, are dissolved, within the lost link between to build and to dwell, and to dwell and to live.
Here, one is presented with two displacements, one inventing the other. First, of the law: momentarily from the constitution, from the memories and also from the expectations. Once it is displaced, there is no reason for one to expect it to remain again. It has been shown that it is not permanent, can be changed, erased, altered and exploited if it is for the few months’ benefit of the legislature and the so-called prosperity of the citizen. And last: the displacement of the tangible, of the houses in ruins. Once standing up with the volume to fit in, now removed from their few years history of a location, to make space for another grief. But memories persist, of the room she took shelter in, of the corner he felt the shaking, of the column which took the mother and of the slab at a 45-degree angle and of the rebar bent out and of the bed in the light and of the window in shards, of the home once belonged.
23 ibid 24 This etymologic connection between
“Abitare 25 e Costruire,” accessed January 20, 2023, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-abitare-e-costruire. 8
Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2000), pp. 145-161.
Latin word habitare and habeo is used in Giorgio Agamben’s essay Living and Building. Giorgio Agamben,
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Figure.3 Collapsed apartment in Adıyaman, one of the ten cities affected by the earthquake.
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Herodotus, Histories 6.21.2 Translated by A. D. Godley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.
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Websites
“49. Gün! Depremde Ölü Sayısı Ne Kadar Oldu, Güncel Yaralı Sayısı Kaç? ” CNN Turk, March 26, 2023. https:// www.cnnturk.com/turkiye/49-gun-depremde-olu-sayisi-ne-kadar-oldu-guncel-yarali-sayisi-kac-hangi-ilde-kacbina-yikildi-kac-kisi-oldu.
“Bakan Kurum: İmar Barışı'nda 23,5 Milyar Lira Ödeme Alındı.” Sondakika.com, October 21, 2019. https:// www.sondakika.com/haber/haber-bakan-kurum-imar-barisi-nda-23-5-milyar-lira-12551156/.
Hubbard, Ben, Gulsin Harman, and Safak Timur. “Amnesty in Turkey for Construction Violations Is Scrutinized After Quake.” New York Times, February 12, 2023.
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Figures
Figure.1 (Cover). Hamra, Khalil. Photograph. Associated Press.
Figure.2 Anonymous.
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Figure.3 Anonymous.
