When discussing
heritage today, the common place reaction that we give is that heritage is a
field of power relations, a field of contestations for claiming the past.
Therefore, we tend to ask questions like ‘whose heritage’, ‘who decides on
heritage’, ‘who owns heritage sites’, ‘who renews them’ etc. That is, we tend
to agree that heritage is always a “discriminatory editing of the past”, rather
than representing the ultimate truth of a contextual past.
From this point
on, one option is to reject heritage by declaring it an ideological artifice
belonging to the powers that be. The second option is to accept it as a
possible vocabulary for the oppressed, and to force the possible ways in which
the powerless could make use of the term for practical struggles, usually for
legal maneuvers, or for the virtue of the fact that heritage provides the
subaltern with a vocabulary of opposition that could be accepted by the general
public as viable. Yet, it is as if no one is really content with this binary,
that sounds all too sociological, and also all too bracketed.
I would argue
that the only way to critically engage with this scholarly and political
discontent, is to take one step back, and target not heritage as a sociological
field of power struggles, contested claims to the past, but target the
ideological operation at work that, at a more fundamental level, defines time
periods, objects, aesthetic forms, visibilities as ‘historical’ or ‘cultural’
and therefore worthy of heritage. That is, one needs to deal with not the
object that is determined by adjectives ‘historical’ or ‘cultural’, but with
determinatives. Today we should ask: what are worthy of being ‘historical’ or
‘cultural’ when defined in heritage terms? How can we decipher this operation?
Even when we
stand opposed to the concept of heritage, we tend to affirm its place as a
sociological category of problem posing. To put it differently, an
anti-heritage stance is not enough; the question is how to annihilate heritage
as a conceptual terrain. The point is not to define heritage as a social field
of power but to deal with the more fundamental artifice at work, and
deconstruct the ideological operation
that defines objects as historical or cultural, which are then defined as
worthy of being inherited. When we are stuck at the sociological analysis of
the field of heritage politics, what we might be missing is this more
fundamental ideological artifice that delimits the historical and the cultural,
and defines it with reference to what ‘remains’, and what is to be done with
the ‘remains’, or the infinite possibility of meanings to be attached to these
remains. As such, the object of heritage claims, whether they are uttered by
the powerful or the powerless, is never ‘the past’; but the ‘historical’ and
the ‘cultural’ as defined by a present ideology.
The
cultural-historical cannot be reduced to what remains, or to a present
ideological operation that defines a relationship to past. This is because past is never only what
remains, or that which is possible to ‘be heir to’, therefore possible for
being inherited. Past is as much filled with the heirless, those persons, objects,
affects, visibilities, aesthetic visions that have never remained, or were not allowed
heredity. [Deleuze would call this ‘pure memory’ in Bergsonism] To follow a suspended discussion; heritage is always a
heritage of the soil, the land, and not the water or displacement or the dream
of what lies beyond the horizon. Or, it is always a heritage of a determination
or filiations whether historically true or mythical. What heritage does is to
make the past telluric, translate the historical/anthropological into archeological;
living into dead. This is how neighborhoods become targets of heritage
interventions; social life is translated into living heritage; simply put, dead
life. Etymologically, heritage is conditional upon the death of a hereditary ancestor:
in heritage politics, the term commits a murder; that is, kills the past that
fills the present and projects the past into the archeological.
Heritage inters
history, and delimits the historical, limits it to that which remains in
material, and wards off the never-actualized, and the always repressed. For
this, we need to remember the historiographer’s impasse about the impossible
documentation of the subaltern. Subaltern is that which the material culture
bears no witness to. The binary of the tangible and intangible that is used in
heritage vocabulary is false because the intangible is always already deduced
from material remains, it is an interpretation of the documented.
As such, an
emphasis on heritage forecloses the desire for the yet-to-come, that which
never existed; or, it forecloses the possibility of redd-i miras, rejecting heritage. Especially when voiced through
the myths of those who never owned land, heritage limits the imaginations of
the landless to grounds and settlements, that is why, even when voiced in favor
of the powerless, it can only be framed as ‘right to the city’. It feeds on a
mechanism of desire that is already defining of their own landlessness. In Marxist
terms, it is a bourgeois ideology that coaxes the non-owners into desiring the
world of the owners.
This is most
apparent in Turkey where the ruling power has in the recent years started
referring to the historical and cultural context as “these soils” (bu topraklar). The more the culture is defined in telluric terms,
the more it excludes that which has been displaced without material remains. For
what has not remained and always displaced, a better trope is the river, which,
surprisingly was never mentioned throughout the whole discussion on waters and
seas. Rivers include violent mysteries and utopias at once; and they are
nothing but displacements (flows). The bodies of the condemned are lumped to
rivers for getting rid of. Rivers flow to a non-place, an atopia without horizons. Rivers carry that which is not seen but not
interred, and are sources for imagining the beyond in an irreversible journey.
Heritage refers to world as a topology of settlements, whereas rivers witness
the world in its virtual multiplicity.
Binlerce senedir nehirler dünyayı
görmeye çıkarlar
Binlerce senedir böyle öğrendik dünyanın
birçok yerlerinde
akan
ırmakları, büyüyen bitkileri.
Bazı yosunlarla bazı eğreltiotlarıyla
bazı balıklarla konuştum,
Dünyayı görmeyen kalmamış
(ilhan berk)
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