I began thinking about hope on January 11th 2016, when a group of scholars representing Academics for Peace held a press conference to read the petition, “We Will Not be a Party to this Crime.” The statement expressed academics’ worries about Turkish government E’s security operations against the youth movement L of the armed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in the southeastern cities of Turkey. They were concerned about the devastating impact the military involvement had on the region’s civilian population.¹ The petition also called for the resumption of peace negotiations with the PKK. In reaction, the President of the Turkish State deemed these academics “pseudo-intellectuals,” “traitors,” and “terrorist-aides.”² On January 13, 2016, an extreme nationalist/convicted criminal threatened the academics in a message posted on his website: “We will spill your blood in streams, and we will take a shower in your blood T.”³

As I’m composing this text, I read that the indictment against the Academics for Peace has become official. The signatories face charges of seven and a half years imprisonment under Article 7 (2) of the Turkish Anti-Terror Act for “propaganda for terrorism.” This afternoon, the moment I stepped into the building where my office is, I overheard an exchange between two men who I think are shop owners downstairs:

“I was at dinner with Sedat Peker.”

“I wish you sent him my greetings.”

Sedat Peker is the name of the nationalist mafia boss who had threatened the academics. I thought about the current Istanbul Biennial organized around the theme “A Good Neighbor.” It is a pity that local issues such as living with neighbors who want to “take a shower in your blood” were missing from there.

I began taking hope seriously on July 16, 2016, the night of the “coup attempt” against President Erdoğan. The public still doesn’t know what exactly happened on that night. Perhaps, hope was one of the least appropriate words to depict the mood of the day in a context where “shit had hit the fan.” (I’m sorry I lack more elegant terms to describe that night and what followed).⁴ Perhaps, it was because, as the visionary writer John Berger once wrote: “hope is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn’t like a confidence and a promise.”

On November 4th, 2016, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, the co-chairs of the HDP (The People’s Democratic Party),⁵ were imprisoned. Five days later, the world woke up to the results of the US Presidential election, which was not surprising at all for us mortals located somewhere near the Middle East. I began to compile obsessively a bibliography on hope⁶ - a “Hope Syllabus” of sorts - as a response to the numerous ‘Trump Syllabi’ that started circulating online P among academic circles.⁷ So, why “hope,” and why now? How can we release hope from Pandora’s jar? How can we even begin talking about hope when progressive mobilizations are crushed by sheer force before they find the opportunity to grow into fully-fledged social movements? What resources and visions can hope offer where an economic logic has become the overarching trope to measure happiness and success? How could hope guide us when access to arms is as easy as popcorn? Can hope find the ground to take root and flourish in times of market fundamentalism? What could hope mean when governments and their media extensions are spreading lies, deceptions, and jet-black propaganda? Can hope beat the growing cynicism aggravated by distrust in politics? In brief, are there any reasons to be hopeful despite the evidence? I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer these questions. I definitely can’t. I can only offer preliminary remarks and suggest some modest beginnings to rekindle hope by reflecting on some readings I’ ve assigned myself as part of the “Hope Syllabus” I’ ve been compiling for an ongoing project I tentatively titled as “A Sociology of Hope.” I am thankful that Words for the Future gives me the opportunity to pin down in some form my many scattered, contradictory, and whirling thoughts on hope.

In what follows, in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s work, I argue that if we are true contemporaries, our task is to see in the dark and make hope accessible P again. Then, I briefly review Chantal Mouffe’s ideas on democracy P E democracy to discuss how the image of a “democracy to come” is connected with the notion of hope as an engagement with the world instead of a cynical withdrawal from it regardless of expectations about final results or outcomes. I conclude by reflecting on how critical social thought and the arts could contribute to new social imaginaries by paying attention to “islands of hope” in the life worlds of our contemporaries.

The Contemporaneity of “Hope”

In the essay “What is the Contemporary?” Agamben describes contemporaneity not as an epochal marker but as a particular relationship with one’s time. It is defined by an experience of profound dissonance. This dissonance plays out at different levels in his argument. First, it entails seeing the darkness in the present without being blinded by its lights while at the same time perceiving in this darkness a light that strives but can not yet reach us. Nobody can deny that we’ re going through some dark times; it’s become all we perceive and talk about lately. Hope—as an idea, verb, action, or attitude—rings out of tune with the reality of the present. But, if we follow Agamben’s reasoning, the perception of darkness and hopelessness would not suffice to qualify us as “true contemporaries.” What we need, then, is to find ways of seeing in the dark⁸.

Second level of dissonance Agamben evokes is related to history and memory. The non-coincidence with one’s time does not mean the contemporary is nostalgic or utopian; she is aware of her entanglement in a particular time yet seeks to bring a certain historical sensibility to it. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s conception of time as heterogeneous, Agamben argues that being contemporary means putting to work a particular relationship among different times: citing, recycling, making relevant again moments from the past L, revitalizing that which is declared as lost to history.

Agamben’s observations about historicity are especially relevant regarding hope. As many other writers and thinkers have noted, hopelessness and its cognates such as despair and cynicism are very much linked to amnesia. As Henry A. Giroux argues in The Violence of Organized Forgetting, under the conditions of neoliberalism, militarization, securitization, and the colonization of life worlds by the economistic logic, forms of historical, political M E P, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but also celebrated⁹. Mainstream media M U’s approach to the news and violence as entertainment exploits our “negativity bias”¹⁰ and makes us lose track of hopeful moments and promising social movements. Memory has become particularly threatening because it offers the potential to recover the promise of lost legacies of resistance. The essayist and activist Rebecca Solnit underscores the strong relation between hope and remembrance. As she writes in Hope in the Dark, a full engagement with the world requires seeing not only the rise of extreme inequality and political and ecological disasters; but also remembering victories such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Edward Snowden¹¹. To Solnit’s list of positives I would add the post-Gezi HDP “victory” in the June 7, 2015 elections in Turkey and the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US. Without the memory of these achievements we can indeed only despair.

Although the media continually hype the “migration crisis” and “post-truth” disguising the fact there is nothing so new about them; it does not report on the acts of resistance taking place every day. Even when the media represent them, they convey these events T as though the activists and struggles come out of nowhere. For instance, as Stephen Zunes illuminates, the Arab Uprisings were the culmination of slow yet persistent work of activists¹². Likewise, although it became a social reality larger than the sum of its constituents, the Gezi Uprising was the culmination of earlier local movements such as the Taksim Solidarity, LGBTQ T, environmental movements, among numerous others A. These examples ascertain that little efforts do add up even if they seem insignificant. We must be willing to come to terms with the fact that we may not see the ‘results’ of our work in our lifetime. In that sense, being hopeful entails embracing A T O uncertainty U L, contingency, and a non-linear understanding of history. We can begin to cultivate R E A L hope when we separate the process from the outcome. In that regard, hope is similar to the creative process.¹³ In a project-driven world where one’s sense of worth depends on “Likes” and constant approval from the outside, focusing on one’s actions for their own sake seems to have become passé. But, I contend that if we could focus more on the intrinsic value of our work instead of measurable outcomes, we could find hope and meaning in the journey itself.

Radical Politics and Social Hope

Over a series works since the mid-1980s, Chantal Mouffe has challenged existing notions of the “political” and called for reviving the idea of “radical democracy.” Drawing on Gramsci’s theoretizations of hegemony, Mouffe places conflict and disagreement, rather than consensus and finality, at the center of her analysis. While “politics” for Mouffe refers to the set of practices and institutions through which a society is created and governed, the “political” entails the ineradicable dimension of antagonism in any given social order. We are no longer able to think “politically” due to the uncontested hegemony of liberalism where the dominant tendency is a rationalist and individualist approach that is unable to come to terms with the pluralistic and conflict-ridden nature of the social world. This results in what Mouffe calls “the post-political condition.” The central question of democracy can not be posed unless one takes into consideration this antagonistic dimension. The question is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how to reach a rational, fully inclusive consensus. What democracy requires is not overcoming the us/them distinction of antagonism, but drawing this distinction in such a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism L O P. In other words, the question is how can we institute a democracy that acknowledges the ineradicable dimension of conflict, yet be able to establish a pluralist public space in which these opposing forces can meet in a nonviolent way. For Mouffe, this entails transforming antagonism to “agonism”¹⁴. It means instituting a situation where opposing political subjects recognize the legitimacy of their opponent, who is now an adversary rather than an enemy, although no rational consensus or a final agreement can be reached.

Another crucial dimension in Mouffe’s understanding of the political is “hegemony.” Every social order is a hegemonic one established by a series of practices and institutions within a context of contingency. In other words, every order is a temporary and precarious articulation. What is considered at a given moment as ‘natural’ or as ‘common sense R P’ is the result of sedimented historical practices based on the exclusion of other possibilities that can be reactivated in different times and places when conditions are ripe. That is, every hegemonic order can be challenged by counterhegemonic practices that will attempt to disarticulate the existing order to install another form of hegemony.

It may not be fair to chop a complex argument into a bite-size portion, but for this essay I take the liberty to summarize Mouffe’s concept of radical democracy as the “impossibility of democracy.” It means that a genuinely pluralistic democracy is something that can never be completely fulfilled (if it is to remain pluralistic at all). That is, if everyone were to agree on a given order it would not be pluralistic in the first place; there wouldn’t be any differences. This would culminate in a static situation that could even bring about a totalitarian society. Nevertheless, although it’s not going to be completely realized, it will always remain as a process that we work towards. Recognizing the contingent nature of any given order also makes it possible not to abandon hope since if there is no final destination, there is no need to despair. Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas about radical democracy as “a project without an end” resonate with the idea of hope: Hope as embracing contingency and uncertainty in our political struggles, without the expectation of specific outcomes or a final destination.

In the wake of the Jörg Haider movement in Austria, a right-wing mobilization against the enlargement of the EU to include its Muslim neighbors, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe addressed the concept of hope and its relation to passions and politics in a more direct manner¹⁵. They argued that it is imperative to give due credit to the importance of symbols—material and immaterial representations that evoke certain meanings and emotions such as a flag, a song, a style of speaking, etc.— in the construction of human subjectivity L U A and political identities. They proposed the term “passion” to refer to an array of affective forces (such as desires, fantasies, dreams, and aspirations) that can not be reduced to economic self-interest or rational pursuits. One of the most critical shortcomings of the political discourse of the Left has been its assumption that human beings are rational creatures and its lack of understanding the role of passions in the neoliberal imaginary, as Laclau and Mouffe argue. It’s astounding how the Left has been putting the rationality of human beings at the center of arguments against, for instance, racism and xenophobia, without considering the role of passions as motivating forces. For instance, as I’m writing this text, the world is “surprised” by yet another election result –the German elections of September 24, 2017, when the radical right wing AfD entered the parliament as the third largest party. I agree with Mouffe that as long as we keep fighting racism, xenophobia, and nationalism on rationalistic and moralistic grounds, the Left will be facing more of such “surprises.” Instead of focusing on specific social and economic conditions that are at the origin of racist articulations, the Left has been addressing it with a moralistic discourse or with reference to abstract universal principles (i.e. about human rights). Some even use scientific arguments based on evidence to prove that race doesn’t exist; as though people are going to stop being racist once they become aware of this information.

At the same time, as Laclau and Mouffe contend, hope is also an ingrained part of any social and political struggle. Nonetheless, it can be mobilized in very different and oppositional ways. When the party system of representative democracy fails to provide vehicles to articulate demands and hopes, there will be other affects that are going to be activated, and hopes will be channeled to “alt-right” movements and religious fundamentalisms, Laclau and Mouffe suggest. However, I argue that it’s not hope what the right-wing mobilizes. Even if it is hope, it is an “anti-social kind of hope” as the historian Ronald Aronson has recently put it¹⁶. I rather think that it is not hope but the human inclination for “illusion O U” that the right-wing exploits. During the Gezi protests in June 2013, I realized it would be a futile effort to appeal to reason to explain Erdoğan supporters what the protests meant for the participants. It was not a “coupt attempt,” or a riot provoked by “foreign spies.” Dialogue is possible if all sides share at least a square millimeter of common ground, but this was far from the case. On June 1, 2013, the Prime Minister and the pro-government media started to circulate a blatant lie, now known as the “Kabataş lie.” Allegedly, a group of topless male Gezi protesters clad in black skinny leather pants attacked a woman in headscarf across the busy Kabataş Port (!) I don’t think even Erdoğan supporters believed it, but what was most troubling is that it did not matter whether it was true or not. The facts were irrelevant: the anti-Gezi camp wanted to believe it. It became imperative for me to revisit the social psychology literature as mere sociological analysis and political interpretations failed to come to terms with the phenomenon. I found out Freud had a concept for it: “illusion.”

Although Freud’s concept of “illusion” is mostly about religion, it’s also a useful concept to understand the power of current political rhetoric. In everyday parlance, we understand illusions as optical distortions or false beliefs. Departing from this view, Freud argues illusions are beliefs we adopt because we want them to be true. For Freud illusions can be either true or false; what matters is not their veracity or congruence¹⁷ with reality but their psychological causes. Religious beliefs fulfill the deeply entrenched, urgent wishes of human beings. As inherently fragile, vulnerable creatures people hold on to religious beliefs as an antidote to their helplessness¹⁸. Granted our psychological inclination for seeking a source of power for protection, it’s not surprising that the right-wing discourse stokes feelings of helplessness and fear continuously and strives to infantilize populations, rendering people susceptible to political illusions.¹⁹ As the philosopher of psychology David Livingston Smith asserts, the appeal of Trump²⁰ (and other elected demagogues across the world) as well as the denial that he could win the elections come from this same psychological source, namely, Freud’s concept of illusion²¹. We suffer from an illusion when we believe something is the case just because we wish it to be so. In other words, illusions have right-wing and left-wing variants, and one could say the overblown confidence in the hegemony of reason has been the illusion of the Left.

Critical Social Thought, Art, and Hope

As someone who traverses the social sciences and the arts, I observe both fields are practicing a critical way of thinking that exposes the contingent nature of the way things are, and reveal that nothing is inevitable.²² However, at the same time, by focusing only on the darkness of the times—as it has become common practice lately when, for instance, a public symposium on current issues in the contemporary dance field becomes a collective whining session—I wonder if we may be contributing to the aggravation of cynicism that has become symptomatic of our epoch. Are we, perhaps, equating adopting a hopeless position with being intellectually profound as the anthropologist Michael Taussig once remarked?

If critical social thought is to remain committed to the ethos of not only describing and analyzing the world but also contributing to making it a better place, it could be supplemented with studies that underscore how a better world might be already among us. It would require an empirical sensibility—a documentary and ethnographic approach of sorts—that pay attention to the moments when “islands of hope” are established and the social conditions that make their emergence possible.²³ One could pay attention to the overlooked, quiet, and hopeful developments that may help us to carve spaces where the imagination is not colonized by the neoliberal, nationalist, and militarist siege. That is, for a non-cynical social and artistic inquiry, one could explore how communities E A make sense of their experiences and come to terms with trauma and defeat. These developments may not necessarily be present in the art world, but could offer insights to it. Sometimes communities, through mobilizing their self-resources, provide more meaningful interpretations T M O and creative coping strategies M than the art world’s handling of these issues. It is necessary for us to understand how, despite the direst of circumstances, people can still find meaning and purpose in their lives. It is essential to explore these issues not only in a theoretical manner but through an empirical sensibility: by deploying ethnographic modes of research, paying close attention to the life worlds of our contemporaries to explore their intellectual, practical, imaginative, and affective strategies to make lives livable. Correspondingly, one could focus on the therapeutic and redeeming dimensions L of art as equally crucial to its function as social critique. For this, one could pay more attention to the significant role of poeisis - the creative act that affirms our humanity and dignity — ²⁴to rework trauma into symbolic forms.

One such endeavor I came across is the storytelling movement I observed in Turkey.²⁵ More and more people have taken up storytelling, and more and more national and international organizations are popping up. The first national storytelling conference took place last May at Yildiz University. I was struck when I went there to understand what was going on. People from all scales of the political spectrum were sitting in sort of an “assembly of fairy tales.” It has also struck me that while some journalists, the “truth tellers” are being imprisoned; imprisoned politicians are turning into storytellers, finding solace in giving form to their experiences through poeisis. Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chair of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), penned three short stories while in prison since last November, which, I think are quite successful from a literary point of view. Alongside other essays and additional short stories, Demirtaş’s prison writings culminated in the recent publication Seher (September 2017)²⁶. The choice of the book’s title is also telling: In Turkish “Seher” means the period just before dawn when the night begins to change into day.

In The Human Condition the political philosopher Hannah Arendt addresses the question of how storytelling speaks to the struggle to exist as one among many; preserving one’s unique identity P, while at the same time fulfilling one’s obligations as a citizen in a new home country. Much of she wrote after she went to the US in 1941 as a refugee bears the mark of her experience of displacement and loss. And it’s at this time when she offers invaluable insights into the (almost) universal impulse to translate overwhelming personal and social experiences into forms that can be voiced and reworked in the company of others. It was, perhaps, Walter Benjamin who first detected the demise of the art of storytelling as a symptom of the loss of the value of experience. In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller” he reflects on the role of storytelling in community building and the implications of its decline. He observes that with the emergence of newspapers and the journalistic jargon, people stopped listening to stories but began receiving the news. With the news, any event already comes with some explanation. With the news and our timelines, explanation and commentary replaced assimilating, interpreting, understanding. Connections get lost, leading to a kind of amnesia, which leads, in turn, to pessimism and cynicism, because it also makes us lose track of hopeful moments, struggles, and victories. The power of the story is to survive beyond its moment and to connect the dots, redeeming the past. It pays respect and shows responsibility A to different temporalities and publics, that of the past and the future as well as today’s.

Here, I’m not making a case for going back to narrative forms in performance or a call for storytelling above and beyond any other forms. The emphasis here is more on storytelling as an example of a social act of poeisis rather than the product of narrative activity. The critical question for me today is can artists, curators, and social thinkers bring to life the stories that are waiting to be told? Sometimes, instead of focusing on how to increase visitors to our venues, it could be more rewarding to take our imagination to go visiting. I conclude my reflections on hope with a quote from Arundathi Roy:

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative—they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told.” ²⁷

I leave it to you for now to imagine the shapes it could take.