Sekülerleşme ve Devlet: “Mardin Tezi”, Edebiyat Alanları ve Toplumsal Sermaye
Secularization and the State: The “Mardin Thesis”, Literary Fields, and Social Capital
It is a commonly held view that state intervention into secularization processes has given those processes an elitist character and thus prevented them from attaining permanence. Associated, among others, with the late Şerif Mardin, this thesis applies to culture as well as to politics: the secularization of culture (defined as the autonomization of cultural practices from religious authority) was tainted, Mardin and his associates hold, by the heavy hand of state bureaucrats who wanted to get things done quickly and without taking into account the priorities of people other than themselves. This article is an attempt to evaluate the Mardin thesis from within by assessing the impact of a particular state action on the human capital of two fields of literary production, i.e., poetry and the novel.
While the secularization of the field of poetry took a remarkably inclusive turn for the Turkish context in the 1950s, in the field of the novel the picture resembles the Turkish stereotype: a vicious and sterile cycle of contention between elitist, top-down secularization on one hand and anti-secularist Islamism on the other. In articles published elsewhere, I showed that a crucial difference between the two fields concerned their autonomy, in the Bourdieusian sense, from politics: featuring a higher dose of such autonomy, the field of poetry was able to “bracket” dangerous political conversations, thus making it less likely for typically left-leaning non-pious poets and typically right-leaning pious ones to give up on each other before truly weighing each other as partners in a shared literary enterprise.
This article traces the two fields’ levels of autonomy from politics to an unintended consequence of the persecution of socialist writers in the 1940s. By making it harder for left-wing writers to stay in touch with the semi-formal institutions of the world of poetry, such as coffeehouses and journals, this action ended up pushing those writers to the novel, where one could thrive in relative isolation. In the novel, such ex-poets instituted the dominance of the village novel, a genre with very little autonomy from politics. The places they were forced to vacate in the field of poetry were eventually filled by formalistically-minded poets of the İkinci Yeni movement, whose relative indifference to politics in the 1950s allowed some pious poets to build friendships and literary alliances with non-pious peers in the context of a nonreligious (but not anti-religious) framework of rules for the assessment of poems and poets.
As such, not only were the two processes of secularization related, they also corresponded to the formation of distinct patterns of social capital. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, I document the networks that dominated the two fields and illustrate the effects of those networks by focusing on two events—the failure of Attila İlhan’s challenge to İkinci Yeni’s cosmopolitan formalism and the failure of the formalist novelist Yusuf Atılgan to prevail over Fakir Baykurt in the 1958 Yunus Nadi Award. In both events, robust network assets were fundamental for the eventual winners of the struggle, and the losers were characterized less by the lack of literary merit than by the lack of such network assets.
This article interprets these findings as casting doubt on the meaningfulness of the Mardin thesis—that thesis is neither right nor wrong but simply meaningless. This is because, for an act to be prescribed as a moral duty, it must be viable given the actor’s resources—“ought” presumes “can.” By contrast, it does not seem possible for the state not to affect the processes of secularization in culture: when state elites intervened against socialist writers in the 1940s, what they had in mind was not at all the inclusiveness of poetry’s or novel’s secularization; they were motivated by geopolitical concerns such as the building of a safety net against the Soviet menace that haunted them. Because of the sheer size of the state’s resources and its inherent inability to control the indirect consequences of the deployment of those resources, the state shapes secularization even when state elites are not trying to affect that process.
What this calls for, this article argues, is a theory of secularization in which the state is not the privileged independent variable to be intelligently guided by enlightened cadres but a loose cannon that will enter the picture in unpredictable ways in unpredictable moments. Theories of secularization must take the perspective of civil society instead and reconcile themselves to a high degree of uncertainty when the state is involved, unless forces in civil society converge, focusing all their energies in the same direction. In that case, the actions of the state will simply not matter much.
