The Strange Deadness of the Collective
co-authored with Barış İne

Check your city’s map, either a physical copy or a digital version in one of your smartphone applications. Most of the oblong figures and circles picture private buildings and workplaces. Some others represent shops, malls, sport arenas, and performance venues where economic gain is the priority. Next on the list: museums, schools, and universities whose rules and procedures have been designed by local and national governments. What space is left for people to come together and act as a collective for social and political purposes? Parks and squares perhaps. Examples from recent history will validate you. Tahrir Square, the symbol of the failed Egyptian revolution… Gezi Park, which gives its name to the political uprising against the authoritarian government in Turkey — it now hosts more police officers than citizens. Or Occupy Wall Street, that continues to live as a slogan without being spatially visible. None of these sites are marked on the map with their collective meanings. Maps are not for this purpose.
Collectivity is not only people coming together, but an act to reclaim a space. Let’s go back to the the example of the park: When we are in a public park, we tacitly consent to performing a certain set of actions. There is a societal contract on public spaces that we agree to. The first obligation this contract requires of us is to become anonymous. We can go in and out without making a statement or leaving a mark other than being a statistical piece of information. Or, we might choose to dissent like the people in Tahrir, Gezi, and Occupy did. We can make use of the park by going beyond the permitted actions. When we try to make a statement in a public space, the reaction of the state will be swift and violent to efface the political demand, because this demand gives birth to something collective, a force that includes both the singular individual body and the demand of the collective whole. The state cannot tolerate the demand to take the space out of the realm of anonymity or equality. This is because the state can only exist by reproducing “society,” a historically stratified relations of inequality and distinctions (1) ingrained in and through schools, workplaces, and private property, but not the public space proper.
The state’s violent repression against the collective propels us to a different public space: online social networks. Notwithstanding their intangibility, social networks, as their name hints, creates a sense of collectivity without having a physical space. The immense popularity of these networks frequently puzzles us: Why do people prefer to spend time on Facebook over talking to their neighbors? First, what we believe to be the collective entity of individuals, that is the society, is not collectivity as such because it is founded on the erasure of the various types of collective groups and associations (neighborhood, workplace and religion-based collectivities, to list a few). Society is the erasure of these groups and associations. This is not necessarily their annihilation, but their non-economic and frequently mutual solidarity based relations to economic and interest-ridden ones. Today what we have in lieu of true collectivity, which should generate solidarity and mutual aid, is the society, which creates nothing but deep inequalities — something that you cannot see on a map. The reaction of the non-homeless majority to the homeless minority in public is a good example of how the collectivity-effect of social networks functions vis-a-vis the society: when a homeless person boards a crowded subway train or bus, where the other passengers have no room to move away, the repulsed passengers tend to pull out their phones and summon a collective via social network apps in order to escape from the ugly reality of homelessness. Is it any wonder that the more a human infant speaks and masters the adult language (hence the society), the more they experience moments of seeing monsters? For children’s mental well being, developmental psychologists today recommend reading stories to them, which is a crucial remedy to cope with the ugly reality they face while growing up to the society. But what is this ugly reality? It is that the society, supposedly the entity of individuals sharing certain values, cannot help its single individual member to live a decent life that balances freedom and equality. Thus social networks provide the collectivity-effect with which users have a sense of both individual freedom and equally shared dignity. But, Online social networks, having no demand for physical space, may only create habits rather than actions leading to change. And habits help the state and the society attribute a character of naturalness to these inequalities.
So what is left for us? Seemingly, the only public space where singular persons can leave a mark both as an individual and as a part of a collective is cemeteries. In all public spaces today, the state attempts to make any collectivity ephemeral and untraceable. Only in a cemetery as a public space can we simultaneously be in the space of past, present and even future — because all humans eventually die. They are singular (under individual gravestones) and a multitude as being the dead, the collective non-living entity of the cemetery(2). Being singular dead is the only condition of individuality that the society can tolerate. But the dead as a collective versus the individual dead body still stands as an entity that the society cannot completely subsume. The condition of being collective in a specific place or claiming a space collectively is almost exclusively reserved for the dead — under the condition of individual gravestones. Only if one is dead then one can claim the space (other than your individual private property) on the map altogether with fellow dead bodies. Otherwise any public mark is subject to violent erasure from our maps and our lives. We should save the collective — as the dead resists its reduction to individual dead bodies — before police surround the cemeteries with do-not-cross tapes.
Footnotes:
- We use the term distinction as used by Pierre Bourdeiu: Distinction (vis-a-vis other groups, social classes, and casts) is the marker of social-capital drawn by non-economic assets (such as education).
- In “Crowds and Power,” Elias Canetti discusses the dead as the uncontainable force due to its irreducible collective entity. He further argues that our modern perception of the dead cannot tolerate this collective of human bodies because it resists the societal recognition of its individual members. However, according to Canetti, the dead as invisible crowd has been humanity’s oldest conception.
