Gambetti 109community, stabilizes the power generated by collective action and insti-
tutes the conditions of remembrance.^45 It was Lefebvre’s insight that any
“‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be ‘real,’ but failing to produce its
own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction
unable to escape from the ideological or even the ‘cultural’ realm.”^46 The
claim that any imaginary that attributes agency to publics is ideological
stems, in part, from the failure to grasp the materiality of discursive prac-
tices.^47 A public is not only constituted through linguistic performativity,
but through material and practical performativity.
This may be the basis on which to build a theory of social solidarity
and commitment, as Calhoun suggests, as “a setting for the development
of social solidarity as a matter of choice, rather than necessity. Such choice
may be partly rational and explicit, but is also a matter of “world-making”
in Hannah Arendt’s sense. ... New ways of imagining identity, interests,
and solidarity make possible new material forms of social relations. These
in turn underwrite mutual commitments.”^48 Speaking in terms of rela-
tionality, the world opened up between the actors and spectators becomes
their common “inter-est” that binds, the “inter-esse” (being between) that
characterizes togetherness.
e city of Diyarbakir, for instance, had become a common con-Th
cern for its inhabitants, shifting attention from who the Kurds were (as
a public or as an ethnic group) towards how the city could be made a
better place in which to live. Commitments other than an imaginary
Kurdish unity were then being made—not only by Kurds but also by other
minorities in the region as well as by Turks. New material practices and
social policies were instigated to resolve infrastructural problems, issues
concerning women, forced migrants or children (especially those roam-
ing the streets for pocket money). One practice that was particularly
innovative was the initiative taken by locally elected mayors to negotiate
with Ankara concerning local as well as national issues, thus short-cir-
cuiting the formal leaders of the Kurdish party. But the broader Kurdish
movement was unable to seize upon the collective energies generated in
Diyarbakir; it could not, in other words, translate this “commun-ication”
into transformative practice elsewhere in Turkey. Solidarity must become
the basis on which to construct a form of community that does not reit-
erate or reinstall the power structures it set out to resist and overturn in