What was the cause of this allergy — that they were abusing the notion of ‘academic autonomy’ that they so fiercely defended, in its most negative sense as ‘the freedom to marginalize a certain kind of knowledge‘?
Our basic hypothesis here is this:
Establishing and maintaining an ideological hegemony is only possible if the loyalty noose between the epistemic community and the layers below it, is carefully being kept INVISIBLE. A situation in which an epistemic community (a politicized academic group) exposes it’s liaison with propagandists or agitators indicates the collapse of their ideological hegemony.
The Second International Workshop for Russian Studies was held on 30 December 2022. The location of the Event was again Bosphorus University in Istanbul. The second Workshop was the continuation of the First International Workshop for Russian Studies that was held on 10-12 October 2019 at Bosphorus University.
The phrase “Eurasia: Historical Background and Geopolitical Analysis” was stressed as the thematic subtitle of the Event, in order to halt the expected manipulative/speculative attempts to associate our Project to the Ukrainian conflict.
We traced the same targets and principles that were mentioned in the preface of the Proceeding printed and published in 2021 (of the First Workshop in 2019), with title “OUR MISSION”.
Let’s first summarize these targets and principles insigned in the first book and then deal with some of the confusions in our audiences:
- This Project will be run on the annual basis as long as the two neighboring States in the Black Sea —The Turkish Republic and The Russian Federation— and one University —The Bosporus University— will exist on The Planet Earth. That is, it will be traditionalized.
- The Project has been designed as an academic project in the domain of History. The purpose is to bring into discussion the matters that have not yet been digged so far and to introduce new referential knowledge to the world scientific literature in the domain of History. However our emphasis on “world scientific literature” does NOT refer the indexes such as SSCI, AHCI, owned by a Canadian private company. These indexes —although they are often considered as “worldly” by scholastic Western “academic” circles— committing scandalous censorings became an undeniable fact even by the Western scientists.
- Our Project claims pioneering a new method in the critique of historiography: we claim entrapping what it is untold, skipped, intentionally avoided, rather than the quest for new findings. Our stance here is comparable to psychoanalysis. We will hereunder exemplify this method by giving an actual application of it to academia —in particularly, to Bosporus University.
Why should the Bosporus University be the hosting institute for our Project?
As in the process of organizing the first Workshop in 2019, we listened to many advices during the process of organizing the second Workshop that it would be difficult to continue this Project at Boğaziçi University and that it would be more appropriate to choose another university. However, these suggestions, which tried to dissuade us, on the contrary, confirmed us that Boğaziçi University is the most suitable place to meet our goals — especially with respect to the second and the third ones we cited above. To elaborate hereunder:
At least one of the academic units of Bosphorus University was expected to adopt and host the Project. In this respect, the faculty members of departments such as History, Sociology, Political Science, Atatürk Institute, which are prospected to naturally link themselves to the Project, were repeatedly visited and/or called, countless times eroding their phones and doors. The following point was very interesting: they were made well informed that everything —in terms of equipment and financing (transportation, accommodation, preparation of the conference room, making announcements, etc.)— was ready and that they were just asked to contribute in academic terms. If not, they were asked at least to give moral support to the event, by announcing it to their students in their classes, to attend the Workshop as listeners, commentators, moderators, and so on. For some strange reason we did not receive any positive response from any academic unit to our insistent invitations. Only three of our professors made individual contributions, and as far as we know, they were put under pressure by their colleagues for their contributions to our Project. We still do not understand why one of these three supporting professors insisted us to organize this event somewhere other than Bosphorus University, even at the Pushkin Institute in England. These suggestions of course motivated us in the opposite direction. Was it because our Professor had predicted that we would have been motivated in the opposite direction —with good intentions, thanks to his deep teaching experience— that he was making these persistent suggestions? We even considered this possibility.
What was the cause of this allergy — that they were abusing the notion of ‘academic autonomy’ that they so fiercely defended, in its most negative sense as ‘the freedom to marginalize a certain kind of knowledge‘?
One of the allegations circulating as the reason for this allergy was this: The organizers of this event were Eurasianist. It was ‘Eurasianism’ to organize a History workshop on Russia with invited academics from Russia. This point is especially important and it has once again confirmed to us that the only correct place to meet our targets was Bosphorus University. A community showing scholastic reactions in academia perceives the scientific activities that don’t comply to its puzzle-solving format (Kuhn), as a threat to itself. They try to marginalize them. They typically reflect and ascribe the opposite version of their ideological stance to them. Because they are more concerned with the role of agencies in knowledge production than producing the knowledge itself. The situation here is even worse than what it is defined as ‘paradigm dependency’ and than the problems investigated in the literature addressing the oppressive nature of science and rationality (Marcuse, Habermas, Arendt, etc.). We are talking about the privates of a ‘truth regime’ (Ranciere, Foucault) who mark up the conceptual boundaries of what can be spoken, questioned, researched and who marginalize those coming from outside of these boundaries by rendering the “outsider” inaudible, imperceptible. Hence, our task is to read and carefully examine their silence as a sign of anxiety and anger. It is only when their resistance is broken and an academic ‘collision’ with the confronted epistemic communities is achieved that new valuable referential information are to be produced. Therefore, Bosporus University is the only right place for our Project to achieve these goals. Their quandary attempts to escape, to hold back, to marginalize our Project (by labelling it as ‘Eurasianist’ and so on) —besides its infamousness— is still a big plus since it also signifies that they well understand what we are doing.
Who are we? “Intelligentsia” and its strata as a social class
Now let’s go through the question, whether are we Eurasianist or something else or what are we really?
The first answer we will give without hesitation should be that we are at least the same thing as you are, as long as we can do this convocation to them from outside of the borders of their truth regime. To define this thing, we propose the term intelligentsia. It means ‘intellectual’ in Polish but is in use with a broader meaning in world political literature. ‘Intellectual’ is rather understood as a progressive type of intelligentsia. Intelligentsia, however, is a broader term, it can either be progressive or regressive¹.
Hence, similar to the scholastic community we invite to work with, we are also a fraction of the intelligentsia. But we have a difference: we are a non-scholastic fraction of it.
We define intelligentsia as a social class that owns and monopolizes the mental and physical tools that either reproduce (the status-quo-intelligentsia) or alter (revolutionary intelligentsia) the cultural capital (Bourdieu). The most primitive version of it, is the mage in primitive tribe. Later rise the other historical variants of it, namely the clergy and then a wide spectrum ranging from the academia to the media, artists, activists, politicized students who have —either openly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously— undertaken political missions. Since it does not directly participate in the production of surplus-value but lives by extracting a share from it, it is seen as a parasitic class according to the vulgar Marxist view.
Like other social classes, we can speak of strata within the intelligentsia. The lowest layer is the agitator. Above that, in the middle, there is the propagandist. The uppermost stratum consists of various epistemic community types that are usually nested in academia.
The master-signifier that works like a keystone: what if it moves?
Our basic hypothesis here is this:
Establishing and maintaining an ideological hegemony is only possible if the loyalty noose between the epistemic community and the layers below it, is carefully being kept INVISIBLE. A situation in which an epistemic community (a politicized academic group) exposes it’s liaison with propagandists or agitators indicates the collapse of their ideological hegemony. We will explain this formula by referring to the concept of master-signifier.
The master-signifier is the key signifier around which an ideological discourse is maintained with consistency and stability. A master-signifier signifies only itself. It is the point-de-capiton where the stitching begins in the fabric of the discourse. It secures the semantic integrity of the discourse by contradistinguishing all other signifier/signified pairs from each other (as ‘money’ functions as universal value quantifier which guarantees the differentiation of exchange values of all services and commodities in a market — Zizek). For example, the word freedom, which was widely spoken during the Gezi riots was such a master-signifier. Everyone was free to fantasize what they understood by freedom. This unrestrained imagination of what it is freedom was achieved due to the opinion leaders’ (the upper strata of the intelligentsia) succeeding to keep the definition of the word freedom as blank (or ambiguous). Storming the streets for the sake of freedom without discussing what it is, had been made possible when the rioters tendered this discussion to the intelligentsia and didn’t care about the discussion itself. Intelligentsia, with the privilege of using rhetoric, metonym, and metaphor, undertakes this bidding — but for never ending it. It’s ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hounds’ (Laclau, Ranciere).
The revealing of the liaison of the agitator and the propagandist with the upper-class intelligentsia, however, ends the game. In the past, professors used to avoid making comments or express opinions about the political actions of the students. Even when we asked to a teacher whose political stance we know very well, “What should we do, Prof?” they would halt the dialogue by replying, “You will decide this by yourself.”
The political power of academia, paradoxically, depends on its abstinence from politics. This rule has not changed since 387 BC. The power of the academy to influence the city continues as long as it can stand outside the city.
Recently, we have been observing such a collapse in the ideological hegemony of liberal-left intelligentsia. In November 2021, the sewer broke out: a group of so-called “academics”, mostly Turks working on “gender studies” settled in the Western countries fed by the EU or German funds, exposed their ringleader professors, claiming that they could not get enough of these funds (in a sense, they were defrauded). This incident exposed the scandalous liaison of the two strata within the intelligentsia, i.e. the propagandist and the epistemic community.
Bosphorus University stands out as one of the main spots of this collapse too. In the Election/Assignment debate, the master-signifier ‘academic merit’ has been coined as an unquestionable precondition for fulfilling the academic autonomy. However, in order for this master-signifier to function, it had to be kept out of the scope of discussion (a discussion that is to be tendered to academia) avoiding any questioning of it such as who decides the ones who merit and by fulfilling whose requirements and so on, for really securing the academic autonomy… Sadly, as the teacher-student liaisons of their allegiance were exposed during the protests, namely the actions such as the kicking on the rectorate car and many other of that kind of vandalisms that wasn’t overtly condemned (even embraced) by the profs, moreover the dissemination of student-signed propagandist and defamatory articles on social media directly by profs’ directives, they altogether turned what it is called as ‘academic merit’ into an academic charade.
Thus, to those who remained silent to our insistent invitations and to those who overtly or covertly asked “Who are you?”, we already replied “We are the intelligentsia like you, but unlike you, we are a non-scholastic fraction of intelligentsia.” Because there is a lesson we have learned from the above scandals: We will not use our Project in politics. We will keep propaganda and agitation away from our workshops. Because we know that following this principle without compromise, suspending all kinds of ties with politics from the moment we entered the University, makes us stronger even in politics.
Discussion on what will be the language of the workshop
From the beginning, it was decided that our Russian Studies Workshop would have three languages (Russian; Turkish and English), and this decision remained valid. Simultaneous translation between Turkish and Russian is provided.
However, right before the start of the Second Workshop, there was another language debate within the Committee of Organization. Our Professor was asked to quickly translate her opening remarks she prepared in English into Turkish and make her talk in Turkish (let’s call it the ‘A’ manipulation).
During the First Workshop, there was another version of this discussion: some of our professors said that Russian and Turkish were not necessary, that everyone already knows English, that those who do not should know, and even further, that whoever does not speak English should be considered as “unqualified” as an academic and that it was unnecessary to book the presentations of those —who they called as— ‘unqualified’ (let’s call it ‘B’ manipulation).
Despite these manipulations we have not compromised on the starting principle. We conducted the Workshops in three languages as we planned and will continue to do so.
However, our insistence on this principle (our staunch rejection of both the A and B manipulations that we described above) should never be understood as finding a middle ground with democratic and/or politically correct motives. We are neither democrats nor politically correct liberals. Hereunder we describe the logic at stake:
There is a large body of literature on the relationship between language, power and the cultural hegemony (Gramsci, Foucault, Fanon, Phillipson…). We can comprehend the ‘B’ manipulation as a desire of the scholastic epistemic community to manipulate a type of knowledge that is annoying to their epistemic hegemony, in a way to relieve it’s digestion.
Manipulation ‘A’, on the other hand, is a vulgar reaction against this epistemic community. It wishes to exclude them from our Project.
Both manipulations deviate our Project from its real purpose, Because our aim –as we mentioned in the first and the third items cited at the beginning– is specifically to address and investigate this indigestion. ‘University’ is by definition an inclusivist institution. Therefore our task here is to include them at least for provoking their indigestion, making possible a closer examination of it. As we mentioned before, this drilling advent into the unwritten rules consolidating the epistemic community is even more significant to us than bringing up new information. We believe this is the unique way to reform the scholastic academia. We are not unaware of the relationship between language and cultural hegemony. People unconsciously tend to appropriate the values and desires of the world in which they speak their language, etc… However, we are already cautious in this regard and we pursue a different strategy that is not taken into account by the corpus in question. This strategy is immanent critique. It’s the prevalent method of Frankfurt School. It’s based on demonstrating that the opponent’s thesis cannot reach the principles and ideals that it claims to have. More generally, every philosophical argumentation and polemic operates in this way: the opponent’s claim is first taken as true, then the logic that this claim follows is advanced to it’s ultimate end and that way it is shown that it contradicts the values it originally advocated (Zizek).
Manipulation ‘A’ is unacceptable because it aims to completely isolate the scholastic epistemic community from our Project. Philosophy fights against the ideas, not against people as the bearers of ideas. We accept English as one of the three languages of the Workshop for only practical reasons, since it’s also the education language at Bosphorus University. Having simultaneous translation between Russian and Turkish been put on as an alternative to English limits the unconscious performances that are self-generated in the use of the language, enabling us studying the indigestion in question more closely.
A brief review of the Second Workshop
With a lower budget and fewer guests compared to the first, this time we held a Workshop in one day instead of two. However, the public interest, participation and excitement was above the first Workshop. This is undoubtedly the success of the Atatürk Thought Club students. All preparations fit in 15 days.
There have been two accidents by moderator, one smiling and the other sad. The moderator warned Ali Rıza İşipek that he had exceeded the time in his presentation via Zoom. However, due to a technical problem, Isipek did not hear the moderator’s warning and continued his presentation. It was the most crucial part of the presentation and all the audience concentrated on watching the tables that İşipek was showing on the screen and listening to what he said. As the moderator tried to stop Işipek, the audience’s more hasty attention to the screen for catching more information, caused smiles.
Prof Semih Koray’s talk, which included evaluations on current world politics, was planned as the closing remarks in the program. However, as a result of a moderation mistake Prof Semih Koray was invited to deliver his talk at around 15:20, when the round table discussion of historian academics should have started. This mistake led to the reaction of historian scholars. This error was tried to be recovered by interrupting Prof Koray in the 13th minute if his talk and the round table debate started. However, Prof Semih Koray rightly reacted to this incident. We apologize to him. Due to the dissension, the Workshop ended before Dr Mehmet Perincek could make his presentation.
We are grateful to the Rector of our University Prof Mehmet Naci İnci, Head of Atatürk Research Center, Prof Yüksel Özgen and ATAM and Bosphorus University staff contributing and facilitating the realization of our second Workshop. We are especially thankful to the Director of the History Institute of Saint Petersburg State University Prof Abdulla Khamidovich Daudov for their support to our project, Prof Aleksandr Eduardovich Kotov and Associate Professor Dmitrii Vladislavovich Ovsiannikov, who set out to contribute to this academic event by suspending all kinds of their New Year’s Eve plans. And of course, we are grateful again to our honorary guest, Prof İlber Ortaylı — his kind and resolute support to our Project boosts our motivation and decisiveness.
Let’s finish with an Inca proverb: “Don’t grab the cougar’s tail, but if you do, never leave it off”.
We will continue.
Organization Committee
____________________
¹ Here we oppose the etymological formation of the word intellect, inter+leggere meaning reading in between (and reflecting what it is read) to the colloquial use of the term signifying reason.