Supporters of the AKP hold the portraits of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul. Thanassis Stavrakis /Press Association. All rights reserved. In his latest book, The Uprising, “Bifo” Berardi
(2012) borrows some concepts from one of the most important figures in the
study of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in order to describe the prevailing
social impasse: instead of engendering a radical transformation or revolutionary
upheaval, systemic disruptions in the social field increasingly consolidate and
even give a boost to the power of the dominant paradigm, process, or group.

In the field of cybernetics, Wiener in the 1940’s
distinguished between two forms of feedback. Negative feedback, on the one
hand, occurs in a system when the received looped data (i.e. information about
the results of an action, event, process, etc.) act in the direction of
refining or rectifying the preceding results. Considering the socio-economic
field, one may speak of the occurrence of negative feedback if, for instance, trade
union action against academic casualisation compels the government to ensure
secure employment for all scholars. Positive feedback, on the other side,
occurs when the system perpetually increases the perturbation from the
reference state over time, in a snow-ball effect. Here, one might consider the
fact that the recent European financial collapse has actually, against all
expectations, not led to a substantial change in European economic policy; on
the contrary, it has strengthened the rigor of neoliberal monetarist policies
(e.g. drain of common-wealth, cuts, bail-outs) throughout the EU.

On July 17, WikiLeaks made an announcement on
Twitter that the organisation would ‘publish 100k+ documents on Turkey’s
political power structure’. The hashtag, attached to the statement,
#TurkishCoup gave an early idea about the general content of the upcoming
release. The next day, it was added that the set of documents, including ‘300
thousand internal emails from Erdoğan's AKP [Justice and Development Party]’,
might also reveal some controversial information beyond those relating to the
botched and disastrous military coup. Notwithstanding sustained attack and
unprecedented censorship, the first batch was put on-line successfully on July
19. WikiLeaks seemed convinced that the ‘mega-leak’ would ‘both harm and help
AKP’.

In terms of the positive feedback loops described
above, Turkey has become a paradigmatic case of this over time. There are abundant
striking examples. Allow me to note only two of them by way of illustration. In
2013, the Turkish public witnessed one of the biggest corruption scandals in
Turkish history. The allegations, via solid leaked materials, were directed
against ruling political party ministers as well as Erdogan and his family. The
tapes, transcripts, and footages were published on various social media
channels, hence the public did indeed get a chance to learn about the
corruption claims as thoroughly as possible. Only three months later, AKP not
only won the local elections with 43% of all votes but it also increased its
votes by almost 5%. So how could the AKP have increased its votes even though
the vast majority of party supporters/electors had not dismissed and had even
affirmed the dire corruption allegations in the first place.

As a second and more recent example, in May 2015,
the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet published videos, photos, and
footages by way of evidence that Turkish Intelligence Service (MIT), under the
formal control and command of government, had transported weapons and militants
between Turkey and Syria. The news had caused a political storm in the country
and triggered a polemic concerning the connection between AKP and DAESH in the
parliament as well as in public, a storm which ultimately ended up with the editors’
incarceration and AKP’s general election victory both in June 2015 (40.87%) and
November 2015 (49.50%).

Might the recent WikiLeaks documents, touted as
potentially ‘harmful’, facilitate negative feedback on Turkey’s current
political system. Or on the contrary, might one expect that the documents
would, in all likelihood, consolidate and, at worst, amplify the social
enslavement (understood as the control of a population) that many opposition
groups have been experiencing for a long period of time in Turkey.

If so, how can one make sense of the fact that
socio-political disruptions in Turkey consistently boost the power of the
ruling party, and add electoral votes to support for the AKP? This is certainly
a tough question requiring both a holistic approach to an answer as well as extensive
empirical study.

The starting point, nevertheless, might be the
notion of the production of subjectivity, developed by such luminaries of
French post-structuralist thought as Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, with
respect to the different modes by which human beings make themselves and are
made into subjects.

In my view, the strength of the AKP lies in its
on-going long-term project, started well before 2002, of investing in and
inventing a new type of subjectivity and a particular modus vivendi which
increasingly correspond and conform to the desired social, economic, and
political conditions. In other words, the AKP has been rather successful in
shaping a diffuse network of preconditions (i.e. social, material, affective,
and cognitive apparatuses), into a new mode of governmentality in conjunction
with a new mental regime (manifest in corporate, state, education, media, etc.
institutions) which entail a general mutation in the way human beings make
themselves and are made subjects.

The success of the AKP manifests itself in the
strong articulation between reformulated vectors of subjectivity and party
ideology. This is why it is difficult not to see any interventions, whether
they are internal (e.g. a military coup) or external (leaks, warnings,
blackmail), as doomed to failure in Turkey’s current political climate.