Significance of Gezi

This paper defines Gezi as a struggle against the neoliberal-cum-neoconservative conduct of conduct under the AKP rule and its leadership taking the form of an ahistorical pastoral form of power through a de facto pseudo-presidential regime. The action process during the Gezi insurgency is not limited with a mere opposition to this form of power. It bears the character of autonomy politics through prefigurative experimentations with different ways of being and direct democracy in the reclaimed public spaces. Therefore, it is not only against a certain form of conduction in Foucauldian sense but conduction itself in search of possibilities for reinventing the daily life and social and political existence. There was no particular group, organization or identity which represented and led the movement. It has been an active and creative process of action of mostly the unaffiliated and unorganized people, especially young who underwent a process of self-transformation within the process in terms of gaining a political subjectivity. Though Gezi has not been revolutionary in the generic sense of the term the subjects experienced a creative praxis of self-transformation from repressed, subordinated, exploited and inactive subjectivity towards autonomy through creative social and political action.