The Late Ottoman Surreal

I begin by discussing two efforts to study non-Muslim political discourses in the Ottoman parliament during the armistice period. Both counter the Turkish nationalist reading of the late Ottoman period, but each does so in strikingly different ways. I start with these two accounts in part to mark that my concern is not to argue, yet again, against nationalist historiography but to take that critique as my point of departure. The problem that I am drawing into focus is not principally an argument for or against a given ideological framing of historiography but about the temporal presuppositions that underlie history-writing itself.

In an important essay on the armistice debates in the Ottoman parliament, Aktar describes how the dramatic transformations in the political establishment at the time impacted the Ottoman public sphere. The leading figures of the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress), who had served as central figures in Ottoman government during the war years, had fled the empire. The cabinet that assumed power continued to be largely run by CUP loyalists, but it too was forced to resign within only a few weeks, replaced by a new cabinet that now contained no Unionist deputies. Alongside these transformations in parliamentary power, the period also witnessed a new burst in political criticism in the press—criticism that the CUP had largely suppressed during the war years. Noting that the political constraints on public discourse had been to some degree alleviated, Aktar suggests that “the Ottoman capital rediscovered political opposition and self-criticism in a relatively free political environment.”Footnote ⁹

Kévorkian gives a rather different assessment of the time period in his magisterial book on the Armenian genocide. For Kévorkian, the distinguishing characteristic of the parliamentary debates of the time was not the lifting of formal limits on public speech but the affective tenor of the chamber.

Kévorkian’s account can be extended to the Rum deputies as well, who had witnessed many in their community suffer from forced deportations and mass dispossession, and were commonly being painted in broad brush strokes as traitors working on behalf of an enemy state.

I find Kévorkian’s invocation of the concept of the surreal apt, but he does not elaborate its significance. He uses the term in a colloquial sense to emphasize the extraordinarily incongruent and profoundly disturbing scene of encounter: the fact that these parliamentary deputies had to speak within the restrained register of parliamentary collegiality to those who were complicit in the evisceration of their own communities. I want to suggest that what Kévorkian terms the surreal involved an uncanny experience of historical time: the very act of speaking in this collegial register sustained the pretense of a common future that the genocidal violence of the preceding years had laid to ruin.

A remarkable ambiguity subtended the project of reform for the non-Muslim deputies of the parliament. The Ottoman state in the period in question still upheld the tenets of constitutional rule and the principle of citizenship without regard to race or sect—tenets connected to the long arc and promise of modernizing reform. However, for many non-Muslim deputies, who had been erstwhile supporters of Ottoman reform, the very promise of ıslahat had lost its credence in the course of the Balkan wars in 1912–1913 and with the onset of the Armenian genocide in 1915.Footnote ¹¹

The surreal draws our attention not primarily to the content of the political debate but to the disquieting tenor of the scene of interaction. The mood of the chamber that Kévorkian depicts with the term surreal suggests something about the conditions of possibility for political criticism that are not indicated in Aktar’s account. What Kévorkian describes as the cold-blooded murder of some of the Armenian deputies established the historical backdrop of this ostensibly free parliamentary discourse in 1918. The life and work of non-Muslim deputies of the Ottoman parliament had been directed toward an anticipated future that, by 1918, no longer seemed viable. At the heart of this surreal experience, I argue, was the uncanny sense that the future of political freedom, which the modernist horizon of reform had promised, now belonged to an irrecoverable past—a former future or a future’s past.Footnote ¹²

A Biography of Reform

Conventionally, scholars have narrated the long project of modernizing reform as an unfolding series of critical dates in the nineteenth century: the Gülhane Edict of 1839; the ıslahat fermanı (Reform Edict) of 1856; the Ottoman Nationality Law in 1869; and the promulgation of the Ottoman constitution and the opening of the Ottoman parliament in 1876. The ıslahat fermanı declared freedom of worship for followers of any religion, formally abandoning the extant practice of considering non-Muslims as social subordinates. Sharkey argues that the broader effort to establish and expand rights of citizenship in the empire entailed a “budding ideal of Ottoman belonging,” and it precipitated a shift in the idea of political subjectivity from coercive imposition to “voluntary incorporation among people who shared, or with some effort could share, common social and political aims.”Footnote ¹³ The nineteenth century project of reform purported to establish the very idea of an Ottoman politics that could embrace all of its subjects.Footnote ¹⁴

Understanding the politics of reform in terms of this sort of periodizing and sequencing of critical dates presupposes a specific concept of historical time, and I will have more to say about the significance of this temporal form in the next section. For now, let me echo a point made by Suciyan that the imperative to reform had uneven effects, differentially privileging some regions and populations at the expense of others, and the liberties it proclaimed were experienced by some Ottoman subjects as impositions and sometimes as oppressions.Footnote ¹⁵ The story we tell about reform will necessarily shift depending on the site or personage through whom we tell it.Footnote ¹⁶ The narrative I present here will be a necessarily partial account, seen through the lens of Emmanouilidis’ biography.

Emmanouilidis’ life trajectory and professional career was profoundly shaped by the Ottoman state’s project of reform, suggestive both of its promise and its failure.Footnote ¹⁷ Born in 1867 in the central Anatolian town of Tavlusun, east of Kayseri, Emmanouilidis studied law both in Istanbul and in Athens. He came eventually to serve as an Ottoman deputy for the Aegean province of Aydın. He was an ardent supporter of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Even as late as October 1912 he was on record delivering a public speech in Sultanahmet Square in Istanbul, with Talat in attendance, that called for the Ottoman state to defend its territorial integrity in the response to the outbreak of the Balkan Wars.Footnote ¹⁸

Emmanouilidis’ geographic and social mobility emerged from a social background made possible in the late Ottoman context. He belonged to a Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox community of Cappadocia often referred to as Karamanlı. The written form of their language was Turkish, composed in the Greek script.

In the ideological framework of the nation-state that emerged later in the twentieth century, Turkish nationality and language came to be associated with Islam, on the one side, and Greek nationality and language were linked to Orthodox Christianity, on the other side. For nation-states committed to this dispensation of ethno-religious affiliation, the combination of language and religion among the Karamanlıs has often been difficult to reconcile with the clean boundaries imputed to political jurisdictions. Indeed, the conjoining of Turkish language with Greek Orthodox religion has led to situations where scholars and political officials alike have often struggled to locate the Karamanlıs on one side of the divide or the other.

In negotiations over the population exchange of 1923, Greek, Turkish, and British political figures initially indicated that the Karamanlıs would be exempt from the forced migration, as they were defined in ethno-linguistic terms as Turkish, but eventually they were included in that process.Footnote ¹⁹ Greek scholars have tended to define Karamanlıs as Turkified Greeks, while Turkish scholars have argued that they are Hellenized Turks.Footnote ²⁰ Because they were known as a Greek Orthodox population that used aspects of the Turkish language in their liturgy and even developed a Turkish-language literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Karamanlı communities posed an especially sharp problem of categorization for a nation-state system in the twentieth century that identified political belonging in terms of a neat alignment of language, religion, and ethnicity.

In the late Ottoman context, the Karamanlı of Cappadocia fostered a network of political elites that by the early twentieth century included significant figures in Ottoman political life. Emmanouilidis’ uncle, Aristidis Pasha Georganztoglou, was a member of the chamber of deputies (Meclis-i Mebusan), and it was his seat that Emmanouilidis, with the support of the CUP, would eventually assume when Aristidis moved to the upper house of parliament, the Meclis-i Ayan. Footnote ²¹ By the early twentieth century, members of the Karamanlı elite like Emmanouilidis were able to develop close relations with the political leadership of the Young Turk Revolution.Footnote ²²

This pursuit of political possibilities within the framework of Ottoman reform was not always easy to manage, especially given the ongoing military conflicts between the Greek and Ottoman states that persisted across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the Hellenic consulate did not support Emmanouilidis’ initial bid for office in the Ottoman parliament in 1911, supporting instead a candidate it viewed as more critical of the Turkish leadership. The consulate viewed Aristidis and then Emmanouilidis as traitors. The Greek Orthodox patriarchate also frequently lobbied against Karamanlı political actors who were often viewed as loyal to the CUP.Footnote ²³ Greek nationalists within the clerical and lay leadership of the Ottoman Rum often accused Emmanouilidis, along with other Greek Orthodox deputies supported by the CUP, of being “anti-national.”Footnote ²⁴

Emmanouilidis eventually fled the empire after the armistice period. Relocating to Greece, he occupied several positions of political leadership, including as a representative in the Greek parliament. Some members of the Turkish Muslim elite viewed his move to Greece as confirming their long-held suspicions about his actual political commitments. The Turkish statesman Celâl Bayar wrote in his memoirs that “[a]s soon as the armistice was signed, [Emmanouilidis] assumed the role of the leader of the Rum deputies and openly moved to the opposition camp (muhalefet).”Footnote ²⁵ He went on to offer a more stinging accusation about Emmanouilidis’ loyalties: “After working openly and covertly in favor of Greek interests until the very end in Turkey, Aydın’s Ottoman deputy went to Greece and assumed his true identity, becoming a member of parliament there.”Footnote ²⁶

Bayar published his memoirs after a long career as a prominent leader of the Turkish nation-state, serving as its prime minister and a lengthy term as its president. His comments reflected a typically nationalist insistence that one was either friend or enemy of the state, for which the mere fact of being an Orthodox Christian warranted suspicion of one’s loyalties.

We do not need to concede Bayar’s claim that Emmanouilidis’ stance in 1918 was that of a Greek nationalist, foretelling the politics he would come to espouse in the coming decades. I want to hold our historiographical attention in the actual speech event in 1918, as it was unfolding for Emmanouilidis himself. He was still speaking at that time as a deputy of the Ottoman parliament.

Emmanouilidis’ own station in parliament—his capacity to speak and be heard in imperial political life—was unthinkable outside its anchoring in ıslahat’s progressivist narrative of Ottoman equality and belonging. The institution in which he spoke, the speech genre afforded by that institutional context, and his own formation as an Ottoman Rum politician were, collectively, a product of the reform process itself. Even his rebuke of ıslahat in 1918, to which I will now turn, was posed not as an external critique of the Ottoman state but as a reflexive intervention into Ottoman self-understanding.

The End of Islahat

For governing authorities in the aftermath of the armistice, it was imperative to distance the political present from the criminal actions of the CUP leaders who had recently fled the empire. The concept of “crisis” was a narrative device crucial to this task. On 19 October 1918, less than a week after Talat and his cabinet resigned, the new Grand Vizier Ahmet İzzet Pasha presented his newly formed cabinet’s program to the parliament. İzzet Pasha addressed the chamber in the first-person plural, remarking that they were living “in an age of our history marked by crisis” (tarihimizin buhranlı devrinde).Footnote ²⁷ The concept of crisis marked the empire’s defeat in the war and the uncertainty that it faced in the forthcoming peace negotiations with the European powers.

The invocation of the concept of crisis as a way of signaling a certain point in history is notable, if not unusual. Roitman interrogates some of the characteristic ways that discourses of crisis presuppose certain understandings of historical time. She argues that “crisis-claims evoke a moral demand for a difference between past and future.”Footnote ²⁸ This insight will be crucial to my account of late Ottoman politics, but I also want to qualify the claim. Any such moral demand must nonetheless draw on existing social and discursive forms in order to be intelligible to its audiences, and so the demand itself often requires mooring in traditions that hearken back to the historical past.Footnote ²⁹ For Ottoman officials, the discourse of crisis both presupposed and was meant to restore the project of reform. Announcing that his government would open “a new era of prosperity and tranquility for all peoples and elements,” İzzet Pasha declared that his regime would “secure the principles of ıslahat.”Footnote ³⁰

As outlined in the new government’s program, this historical effort required several key elements, including signing a favorable armistice, punishing Ottoman subjects responsible for committing violent crimes against other imperial subjects, and establishing conditions for domestic peace, including returning deported citizens to their original residences. None of these aims was easy to achieve, and indeed the government, whether under İzzet Pasha or his successors, never adequately resolved the problems they identified. The concept of crisis stood as a signpost for a period between the calamitous war that had ended and a prosperity that remained to be achieved.

The coupling of crisis with reform—the presentism implied by the former conjoined to the continuity indicated by the latter—was not a contentious discursive move, at least not for most of the deputies in parliament. For İzzet Pasha and, indeed, for most of the parliamentarians, ıslahat was not identified as part of the discredited past: it was an element of the tradition of Ottoman modernism that, emerging in the nineteenth century, remained an uncontroversial piece of the present. No one in the chamber on that day remarked on its use. It was only several weeks later that Emmanouilidis issued his remonstration of the term.

What made it possible to couple reform with crisis was the fact that the former functioned as the imagined historical backdrop for the latter. Islahat presupposed a certain expectation of historical transformation—an expectation that was itself the product of a certain historical moment. Mardin suggests that the early nineteenth century witnessed “the establishment of the respectability of change.”Footnote ³¹ Mardin’s startlingly succinct comment helpfully marks the emergence of a distinctive historical sensibility. The notion of reform presumed the possibility of a historical trajectory in which the future broke from the past—“the idea that ‘something had to be done’ was given theoretical expression as well as official recognition.”Footnote ³²

What crisis and reform both presupposed was a characteristic sense of the temporal rhythms of history. A number of scholars have recently concurred that the emergence of a distinctive orientation to historical time arose in the nineteenth century. Clements argues that a remarkably diverse range of Ottoman communities of this time period not only grappled with new categories of nation, sect, and race but also a new understanding of historical time. What needs closer investigation, he submits, is not only the “historicity of modern concepts” but the “historicity of history itself.”Footnote ³³

This new orientation was perhaps most evident in the changing form of history-writing in the nineteenth century. Shifting away from Islamic eschatology, writers of history in the late Ottoman empire began to periodize the past in the tripartite scheme of ancient, medieval, and modern. They re-situated Islamic and Ottoman pasts as only one element of a secular and global story.Footnote ³⁴ This new sensibility to history, as Kolland has convincingly established, undergirded the increasing centrality of certain “temporalized” concepts of society and politics, such as progress (terakki), evolution (tekamül), civilizing (temeddün), and revolution (inkılap).Footnote ³⁵

Islahat, I maintain, disclosed one of the paradigmatic concepts of historical time for Ottoman modernism, one that İzzet Pasha’s account of crisis reinforced rather than disturbed. It represented a particular notion of historical movement, a present open to futurity that superseded the past. The concept of reform implied an expectation of historical transformation, indeed of progress and improvement, whether of state administration, political rights, or religious life.

This conception of historical time was written into the 1856 Reform Edict itself. The text claimed to establish a “good and fortunate era,” positioning the Ottoman Empire among the community of “civilized states.”Footnote ³⁶ The decree goes on to position itself as building upon the previous Gülhane Edict of 1839, defining itself within a linear trajectory of historical progress.Footnote ³⁷ As Wick argues, the ıslahat fermanı “inaugurates a new era, no less, placed in an implicitly linear history of the empire grounded in the chronometric time of progress.”Footnote ³⁸ For Wick, it is no accident that subsequent historians have often reproduced the narrative that from 1839 to 1856 there followed a relatively stable and coherent progression because the 1856 decree itself adopted the historicism that would underwrite subsequent historiography.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, for many actors in the Second Constitutional era, including Emmanouilidis, ıslahat indicated an internally unified historical trajectory that began with the edict in 1839. On that view, the 1856 decree extended, rather than deviated from, the earlier Gülhane proclamation and consequently precipitated the writing of the constitution and the establishment of the parliament.

In 1918, when İzzet Pasha framed his cabinet’s program with the concept of crisis, he was addressing the broader Ottoman anxiety about wresting a possible future from the calamities of the war. For the incoming government, this moral demand could not be articulated as a call for the end of the empire as such. The notion of crisis only made sense in relation to, rather than as a fundamental break from, the project of Ottoman reform. The sense of historical futurity, we might say, had to be moored to an ongoing tradition of reform. The concept of crisis in 1918, in this respect, belonged to the same understanding of historical time that gave purchase to the project of ıslahat. Mehmet Emin, deputy from Trabzon, revealed the consonance between the historical temporality evident in the abiding notion of ıslahat and the more recent invocation of crisis at war’s end. “This nation is innocent,” he insisted. “It must be exonerated in the eyes of history.”Footnote ⁴⁰

It is rather remarkable that during the armistice debates Emmanouilidis went out of his way to indicate that he was not attempting to criticize the government or pursue the punishment of specific individuals. He insisted that his motion describing the massacres and expulsions of Armenian and Rum communities was not meant to “carry the meaning of either a judgment (hüküm) or a critique (tenkit),” and that it was not put forward “with the thirst for revenge (intikam şevki).” Or further: “This is not even a demand for justice (adalet).”Footnote ⁴¹ This demurral of critique is perhaps surprising. It would not have been difficult for Emmanouilidis to situate this motion in terms of the prevailing opinion, expressed by many members of parliament, that the crimes of the previous government cabinets needed to be investigated and legally prosecuted. Instead of attempting to distance the Ottoman present from the misdeeds of its recent past, Emmanouilidis called into question the very discourse of ıslahat that undergirded the historical self-understanding of the Ottoman state, its parliament, and the parliament’s deputies.

Emmanouilidis offered a vantage point on the present strikingly different from İzzet Pasha and Mehmet Emin: “What I would like to call attention to is that the policy of ıslahat that has existed until today is bankrupt (ıslahat siyaseti iflas etmiştir). It is not appropriate to speak yet again about ıslahat.”Footnote ⁴² He returned to this theme in the 18 November session of parliament. By that point, the political situation had changed. The government led by İzzet Pasha, which had signed the armistice with the European powers and sought to guide the empire toward a new future, had already fallen. A new cabinet was in charge, headed by Tevfik Pasha, and the 18 November session began with the foreign minister delivering the new government’s proposed program for approval by the parliament. The debate in the session was centered on this proposal, with particular attention to the issue of how the government intended to address the stipulations imposed by the armistice.

Emmanouilidis repeated his disavowal of political critique: “I do not want to critique the earlier cabinets today. It is not the time for that. I do not want to demand their accountability.”Footnote ⁴³ He proceeded to again situate the present conjuncture in relation to a century of reform, this time by citing the illustrious names most closely tied to the history of ıslahat:

Reşit Pasha was credited with being the key author of the Gülhane Edict of 1839. Ali Pasha was the architect of the Reform Edict of 1856. Emmanouilidis was drawing into view the entire arc of the project of Ottoman reform. He continued: “The politics [of the previous reformers] led to the internal policies of the Talat Pasha and Prince Said Halim Pasha cabinets. No one can predict what kind of politics Tevfik Pasha’s domestic policies will ultimately lead to.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Emmanouilidis’ hesitation to critique or punish the wartime cabinets would be difficult to understand without recognizing the connection between the more direct political interventions levied by many other parliamentarians at the time, on the one hand, and fidelity to the historical temporality of reform, on the other. To engage in political critique from the dais of parliament, as so many in the chamber were attempting in 1918, presumed that one was still in the age of reform, committed to its correction, revision, and ongoing progression. The duty to punish was an obligation felt by those who, whether explicitly or tacitly, narrated the political present as belonging to the historical time of ıslahat. Emmanouilidis’ challenge, by contrast, was to reconceive the present moment as standing at the end of ıslahat.

I do not wish to dismiss Emmanouilidis’ claims as merely a disavowal of the politics he was actually espousing. He was situating the present moment as coming after reform—a stance evincing a remarkably vexing historicity. His comments presupposed the respectability of change, to again invoke Mardin’s phrase, but he was also referring to the failure of this particular concept of historical time itself. It was an uncanny gesture, summoning the all-too-familiar temporality of historical change as a motif for figuring its collapse. If ıslahat was at its end, then his reluctance to view himself as a critic makes sense: it was past time for critique.

Infelicitous Speech

Emmanouilidis’ rebuke of the concept of ıslahat put him in an unusual relationship to the medium of his own speech. The parliament was a product of that reform process, as was the history in which Rum and other non-Muslim individuals came to be recognized as bearers of political rights, including the right to serve as deputies in parliament. To proclaim the end of ıslahat in the paradigmatic political site of Ottoman modernism was a profoundly contradictory act. This contradiction, I want to suggest, was not simply an unintentional effect of his discourse. We can view it, instead, as a response to what Kévorkian called the surreal nature of the encounter. Emmanouilidis was attempting to open a sense of historical perspective in a moment that, for populations subjected to systematic dispossession and genocide, felt devoid of historical possibility. It is here, I argue, that we should return to his history of clamor.

In contexts of communicative interaction, noise can be disruptive. It impedes the exchange of discourse, and it stands in the way of denotational understanding. Noise is a feature of the pragmatic, rather than semantic, conditions of interaction, and so one starting point for thinking about the clamor of the late Ottoman parliament is speech-act theory.

Austin’s account of performativity famously draws attention to certain types of statements that cannot be assessed in terms of their truth or falsity. The theory seeks to understand speech as social action, whereby in saying something one is already doing something.Footnote ⁴⁶ Speech, in these sorts of statements, is not only descriptive of action; it is a form of action in its own right. The question is not whether such discourse is true but whether it is felicitously or infelicitously enacted. Infelicities arise when something goes wrong in the course of spoken discourse, and an utterance fails to go off according to its conventional format. Austin is attentive to the fact that linguistic utterances can go awry in the course of social life, and that speech is subject to the vulnerabilities that afflict social action more generally.

The possibility of failure in social action is important for a history attentive to noisy interruptions. In such moments, the issue is not only about the truth of a Rum deputy’s statements, nor about the persuasiveness of the discourse, but about whether the contextual conditions were in place for his discourse to register as an act of parliamentary speech in the first place and whether his voice could even be heard.

My own use of the concept of infelicity is not entirely in keeping with Austin’s account. Certain questions about the historicity of failure that concern me are not discussed by Austin and fall out of view in his theorization. First, he treats the context of a speech act—and thus also the parameters for distinguishing success and failure—as relatively unambiguous and not typically subject to social disagreement. For Armenian and Rum deputies in the post-armistice moment of 1918, the contextual framing of parliamentary speech was precisely what could not be assumed. Emmanouilidis spoke as an Ottoman parliamentarian in order to insist that the very arc of reform that had defined the context of parliamentary politics had lost its relevance. At stake was the validity of the contextual framing itself.

While Austin seems to be aware that failure is a necessary risk of performativity, his account nonetheless tends to reduce that risk to accidents and misfires.Footnote ⁴⁷ But in the wake of the ruination of modernism and its rhythms of historical progress, the failure of a parliamentary speech act was not accidental. The clamor in parliament was not simply a contingent effect of the moment. The infelicity was itself a product of history.

This leads to my second departure from Austin. Because he views infelicities as the mark of a failed action, Austin is not concerned with the historical form that an infelicity can take. Taken as an accident or misfire, the temporality of an infelicity is reduced to the contingency of its occurrence, isolated from the longer rhythms and patterns of political history. As the sign of an ostensibly failed action, an infelicity nonetheless can be subsequently referenced, construed as a precedent, perhaps even a model, for action in a later moment. In that process, it can come to bear a historicity in its own right.

Emmanouilidis claimed, from the paradigmatic site of political reform that was the Ottoman parliament, that he and his colleagues stood in the wake of ıslahat. This claim was not simply a failure to meet the felicity conditions of political speech. He was provoking a tension between the enactment of his own utterance and its institutional setting, and this tension, it turns out, belonged to a history all its own. He came to recognize the impediment to his own political speech as possessing historical depth and providing a distinctive orientation to history. It was dissonant with the promised horizon of reform, which was conventionally centered on imperial decrees and critical dates that structure a linear and progressive development. The history of clamor was defined by speech-events whose distinguishing feature was that they were interrupted, unheard, and characteristically uneventful. He was repeatedly, persistently, acting in the form of an infelicity.

To develop this argument, I offer a close reading of two moments that closely follow Emmanouilidis’ own efforts to historicize the clamor of the parliament. I will begin by following his own gesture, returning with him to the parliamentary records of 1914. How did the problem of performativity arise in that earlier instance, and what form did his own infelicitous speech take? I will then come back to the post-armistice moment of late 1918, examining how Emmanouilidis reflected on the unfinished temporality of noise and the enduring infelicity of his own speech.

A History of Clamor

Scholars of late Ottoman history have recently begun to examine aural cues evident in written archival materials.Footnote ⁴⁸ The parliamentary records offer a particularly important source in this respect, because they represent spoken discourse as a practice that unfolds in time and in ongoing interactions between social actors, including interjections.Footnote ⁴⁹ Stenographic notations can convey a sense of the clamorous din of the chamber in moments of intensifying debate and also, then, reveal some of the effects of these signs of discontent in the subsequent comments of those subjected to it.

On two occasions during the 1918 sessions, Emmanouilidis referenced his own words from an earlier session of parliament. He mentioned how he warned the parliament four years prior that the actions being taken at the time by the government went against the constitutionalist principles of 1908.Footnote ⁵⁰ Several weeks later, he again returned to an earlier parliamentary session, this time detailing how he interrogated then-interior minister, Talat, in 1914 on the deportation of the Rum and the status of their properties.Footnote ⁵¹

In revisiting the debates in 1914, I want to engage in a particular kind of reading practice, one that takes its cue from Emmanouilidis himself. He explained to his colleagues in the chamber what he was looking for in the parliamentary minutes—the sounds of disruption, the frailty of his voice, and his failure to effectively produce meaningful discourse. Following Emmanouilidis’ own reading practice, I am concerned as much with parenthetical stenographic notations, which give clues to the tenor of social interchange, as I am with the discursive content of any given speech. What was relevant to Emmanouilidis in 1918, and so what should be relevant to us now, is the minutiae of speech as practice, rather than speech read primarily for its semantics.

The session in question took place in the summer of 1914, and the debate in the chamber concerned the massive political and economic effects of the recently concluded Balkan Wars (1912–1913). As a consequence of the wars, the Ottoman state ceded territories that many in the Ottoman elite considered their own homelands. These territorial and jurisdictional shifts led to massive waves of forced migrations and population transfers, and the Ottoman state was faced with the task of resettling the largely Muslim populations coming from the Balkans. These groups were resettled in many parts of western and central Anatolia, including in what had been largely Rum villages and towns. Ottoman Rum communities were increasingly questioned as to their loyalty and belonging, and by 1914 many Rum communities of eastern Thrace and western Anatolia were expelled from their towns and villages.Footnote ⁵²

Economic boycotts launched in Ottoman cities, ostensibly to promote the businesses of Ottoman merchants, had a particularly damaging effect on local Rum communities. Çetinkaya argues that during an earlier round of boycotts in 1910–1911, businesses run by Ottoman non-Muslims were generally accepted as part of the native economy in the Ottoman empire. After 1912–1913, however, they “were no longer treated as a constitutive element of the empire and were excluded from the national economy.”Footnote ⁵³

The idea that, as Ottoman subjects, the Rum were guaranteed legal protection from the state was a basic tenet of the policies of ıslahat. What was being called into question with the boycott and the forced expulsions in 1914 was not the legal basis of reform but whether these Rum communities were still considered Ottoman subjects at all. In place of a multi-denominational conception of Ottomanism, the boycotts advanced the notion that the Muslims migrating from the Balkans ought to be treated as privileged subjects.

In 1914 Emmanouilidis spoke at length in parliament about the economic boycott. He insisted that, while anyone had the freedom to shop where they like, the issue became a political problem when economic decisions turned into targets of political propaganda. He further claimed that the boycott led eventually to the forced migration. These arguments were persistently challenged by other deputies in the chamber, some of whom refused to accept that the boycott had taken place at all or that it functioned to achieve the aims of propaganda.

From the outset of his remarks, Emmanouilidis immediately sparked outrage in his audience by summoning the specter of an external witness to the Ottoman parliament: “[I]f they see that the Rum deputies have willfully kept silent, they will not ascribe this [silence] to the powerlessness (iktidarsızlık) or lifelessness (hayatsızlık) of the Rum deputies, they would think that the honor of the entire Parliament has been harmed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ “It will be said or it could be said that conditions are placed on speaking freely in the National Ottoman Parliament,” he declared, to which some deputies in the chamber immediately responded defensively, “That has never been said.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The spectator that Emmanouilidis was invoking (“if they see”) was that of the European powers.

Reacting to the initial interruption, Emmanouilidis quickly sought to clarify his intentions: “I am saying that I proved the opposite of this with this motion. Preserving our honor, we proved with this motion that in this parliament free speech (serbest-i kelam) without limit is protected.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It was a peculiar statement, as if belaboring a point that was not itself centered on the substantive content of the motion itself, regarding measures that the government should take with respect to those fleeing from their own homes. Instead, Emmanouilidis was claiming that the sheer act of presenting a motion demonstrated the validity of free speech in the Ottoman parliament. In effect, he was informing his colleagues in the chamber that the motion had a performative function, in the sense given by Austin: in its enunciation it enacted a constitutionally granted political freedom—precisely the kind of freedom that European figures would otherwise claim to be absent.

What made the statement especially unusual was that he put the matter in the past tense: he and his colleagues had already proven that the parliament enshrined an unconditional freedom of speech in having had their motion read aloud in this venue. The performative was already felicitous, in Austin’s terms, and we know this, according to Emmanouilidis, because it had already transpired.Footnote ⁵⁷ The use of the past tense embedded an assertion about Ottoman politics, namely, that his freedom to speak in this venue was not at risk in this moment because it had already taken place. However, he was in actual fact still engaged in the speech act, the performative belonged to the ongoing moment and not to a completed past event, and in that regard the conditions of its enactment were not yet fulfilled. As will be indicated below, this rendering of the performative enactment of freedom as already completed was subsequently put into question in the unfolding of the speech event itself.

Indeed, as Emmanouilidis’ speech unfolded, he was repeatedly heckled by deputies who disputed his claims or simply expressed irritation with the length of his discourse. The parliamentary minutes are replete with parenthetical notations about the noise from the audience, to which Emmanouilidis often felt compelled to respond. For instance, describing why the motion was put forward not only in the interest of the Rum but of all Ottomans, Emmanouilidis was immediately greeted with impatience. Deputies in the chamber were reported to have demanded that he get to the point—“concrete things, speak plainly.”Footnote ⁵⁸ A short while later, Emmanouilidis addressed the boycott more directly, arguing that the different elements of the country should help one another in making economic progress, but that the entire issue loses its legitimacy when it is argued that the progress of the Turks requires that they only buy and sell among each other. At this point the deputy from Kengırı, Fazıl Berki Bey, interrupted, “No, nothing like this has happened, sir.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The deputy from Bursa, Rıza Bey, interjected with exasperation, “Will we have to listen to this for hours?”Footnote ⁶⁰

As the overall tenor of the chamber became confrontational, Emmanouilidis grew increasingly defensive. The chatter in the audience continued through his speech, marked at points in the parliamentary minutes with the notation, “noise” (gürültü). Emmanouilidis attempted to speak above the din but also felt compelled to address the growing frustration with his discourse: “Today, 150,000 people have abandoned the homeland (noise). It cannot be the case that you won’t listen to this for half an hour. I am not here as a representative of Greece, I am an Ottoman deputy and my greatest wish is to remain Ottoman (noise).”Footnote ⁶¹ The interior minister, Talat, told people to calm down, but this mild admonishment did little to settle the chamber. Ziya Bey from İzmit addressed the chair of the parliament: “How are we to keep silent?” Hüseyin Fazıl from Ayıntap complained: “Are we going to have to pass the whole night like this?”Footnote ⁶²

In response to the continual flow of interruptions, Emmanouilidis began to comment again on the principles of parliamentary speech with which he began, but he cast the issue in an entirely different light: “Is your time that valuable? I will keep my composure. However much they cut me off, I will continue to speak. If they remove me from the podium, I will step down. In any case, I am not able to continue. I see that initially all of you claimed to uphold the freedom of speech. I see all this noise now as contrary to the freedom of speech…. I will not say much that can be said, I will not say many things out of the interest of this country, in order to preserve unity among the elements (anasır beynindeki ittihadı), to not cast the seeds of discord.”Footnote ⁶³

At the outset of his speech, Emmanouilidis claimed a performative function for his motion—that, in enunciating it, he was enacting an unconditional political freedom. Here, the very interactional dynamics that followed his actual act of speaking in parliament led to a reconsideration of the limits of speech. Unsettled and flustered by the disruptions of his colleagues, Emmanouilidis arrived, finally, at a question that was not contained in the motion he put forward to the government minister but was about its very utterance: “Do I have the right to ask these things of the government or not (Hükümetten sual etmeye hakkım var mıdır, yok mudur)?”Footnote ⁶⁴

In a legal sense, this question was merely rhetorical because there was no formal restriction on a parliamentarian posing questions of this sort to the government. However, the question was far more ambiguous if we treat it as a performative utterance—that is, if we position it in relation to his own earlier claim that in presenting the motion they had already enacted political freedom. Emmanouilidis was not ready, at this point, to proclaim that ıslahat as such had fallen into ruin. To the contrary, he continued to present his own voice as an instance of the freedoms afforded by parliamentary politics, but it was his voice that was also persistently drowned out by the noise in the chamber.

The historical project of ıslahat was at stake in both the acts being narrated in the parliamentary motion (the violence directed against Rum populations) and in the act of Emmanouilidis’ narration itself. In one and the same speech, Emmanouilidis could ask about the political and economic rights of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects and also ask about the status of his own right to pose this question to the government. The speech event had legitimacy as an instance of parliamentary freedom only to the degree that it was not subject to the violence that defined the boycott and migration. When, by the end of his speech, he asked if he had the right that he initially suggested his motion embodied, he was marking the possibility that the violence he was describing was, in fact, constraining his act of description itself. He was linking the dynamics of his own unfolding speech event to the violence that his speech was attempting to portray.

When Emmanouilidis asked, “do I have this right,” his very act of stating the question in effect presumed that right. It was, again, a performative speech act in that it presupposed that he was authorized to speak in this chamber and to address the parliamentary deputies within it as his colleagues. Yet it was precisely the interactional pragmatics of the speech that testified to the real purchase of the question. His colleagues sought to refute his claims before he fully expressed them and to call for the closure of his speech before he brought his own discourse to an end.

“Do I have this right”—to whom can this question be addressed? If he did not have the right, then the question itself did not have an audience, and it could not be given a hearing. In the event, the question was entirely ignored by the other deputies in the chamber, perhaps because the question was perceived to be purely rhetorical and therefore not a matter deserving serious discussion. It is also possible, however, that the question was perceived to be all-too-significant, and to respond to it would require a more thorough reassessment of the structures that qualify the unconditional exercise of freedom within Ottoman politics. Perhaps what was intimated by the pragmatics of this interchange, but never brought openly into the discourse, was the question of whether the project of ıslahat had already run its course. Were that to be so, however, then what would be the status of this parliamentary discourse itself?

The only response that Emmanouilidis received to his disconcerting question was from Talat himself, who tersely confirmed, “Do not doubt it.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Subjected to Discourse

The historical account that Emmanouilidis narrated in 1918—his history of clamor, as I have been terming it—was not especially long, even though he attempted to deliver some version of this account a number of times. His narrative efforts were rather limited, largely because he continued to be interrupted by his colleagues in the chamber. His own disrupted effort to give account of this history emblematized the very noise whose historicity he was attempting to describe. Rather than consider Emmanouilidis as the speaking subject of a political discourse, I want to think more about the extent to which he had been compelled to listen to the noise in the chamber—subjected to, rather than subject of, verbal enunciation.

In the parliamentary sessions following the armistice in 1918, Emmanouilidis referred to the episode from four years earlier. Rather than centering his discussion of that prior moment on legal or policy issues, he gave an account of the speech situation, describing the effects of the noise on his own spoken voice. Indicating that the political leaders who had reinstated the constitution in 1908 had by 1914 come to act contrary to the principles of constitutionalism, he went on to make the claim about the frailty of his voice with which I began this essay: “[M]y influence, my voice, was rather weak, it wasn’t heard, and today I am saddened to see that my words from that time [in 1914] have come to be completely realized.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The debate on 11 December 1918 centered on the expulsion of the Rum from Anatolia. Emmanouilidis again found himself struggling to be heard over the clamor of the chamber, and he took the opportunity to point back to 1914: “One time at this podium while speaking about the [Rum] migration, Karasu Efendi interrupted me, and today Hasan Fehmi Efendi is cutting me off.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The discussion prior to this moment was heated, filled with disruptions in which deputies challenged basic facts about the causes and consequences of the migration of the Rum. One can understand why Emmanouilidis might have interpreted the clamor as bearing a likeness to the earlier event from 1914, where his efforts to speak about the expulsion of the Rum were persistently rebuked by others in the chamber. He was recalling the crowing of the audience in 1914 and his inability to speak over the gathering noise.

This effort to view the rising clamor as an index of a historical pattern, in which he pointed back to 1914 to understand what was unfolding in parliament in 1918, is worth taking seriously as a social act in its own right. It was a way of asserting that the inability to make himself heard was an abiding feature of parliamentary speech, and that it was, in fact, what contextually anchored the parliamentary dialogues of the present in a shared political past. Far from invoking a discourse of crisis that cleaved the present from a morally degraded past, he was offering a history of parliamentary speech centered on its repeated foreclosure, where the persistence of disruption was the notable historical occurrence.

Emmanouilidis continued his efforts to identify in the unfolding event of his present in 1918 something of the lingering traces of 1914. He began to describe again his encounter with Talat:

Emmanouilidis’ purpose was not simply to describe the content of what was discussed in that moment—that, for instance, Talat was unwilling to grant to the Ottoman Rum some of the basic legal guarantees that come with being a recognized Ottoman subject. He sketched out the encounter in this manner in order to then turn his attention again to the history of noise in the chamber: “When I went and looked up the minutes of that discussion, I saw a [stenographic] indication next to the Minister’s statement: Continuous applause. This applause was not mine nor the applause of my Rum colleagues.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He was speaking here of applause rather than disruptive interjection, but it should not surprise us that he continued to be preoccupied with the sound of the chamber, or what we can imagine to be the sensory experience of listening to his colleagues celebrate Talat’s account of the expulsion of the Rum. Emmanouilidis went on, then, to describe the effect of this experience on his own speech, returning to the fact that he spoke mildly.

Emmanouilidis, along with many other Rum and Armenian deputies, found himself in a bind: he was frequently castigated for not speaking on behalf of all Ottomans, only those from his own religious community, but at the same time he continually noted that he was unable to express rights-claims on behalf of that same constituency. Here, again, he was attempting to disclose in speech the limits of his position as a speaking subject: “I said that we were no longer in a position to speak about political rights.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He then repeated that when those in the chamber look up the minutes in the official gazette, they will see the phrase “continuous applause,” and they should know that this was not the applause of the Rum and Armenian deputies.Footnote ⁷¹ “Why speak more,” Emmanouilidis concluded. “My aim is not to speak with bitter words or to hear bitter words, nor to exchange them with one another.”Footnote ⁷²

Rather than seeing the question of sensibility, for instance the frailty or mildness of his spoken voice and his reluctance to persist with bitterness, as a secondary effect of the ideological content of the debate about the expulsions, I want to shift the analytical weighting to the material quality of the noise in these exchanges. It was indexical of the fraught or, indeed surreal, character of verbal interaction itself. Emmanouilidis himself was keenly attentive to this set of issues, drawing connections between the noise of the chamber—whether disruptions of his own speech or the enthusiastic applause for the deportations of his own people—and the increasingly weary expression of his efforts to address the chamber.

Emmanouilidis’ efforts to historicize the clamor in the chamber was offered in the same months that he delivered his rebuke of ıslahat. I have contended that his history of clamor, in fact, posed a disquieting contrast to the punctuated eventfulness of those paradigmatic speech events—the Sultanic proclamations—that have conventionally defined the linear and progressive arc of ıslahat. Instead, the sense of history that Emmanouilidis sought to evoke manifested in the repeated disruption of his own speech, the cumulative experience of which eventuated in the dampening of his own tone and volume.

I have already indicated that to claim to be at the end of ıslahat was to put into question the modernist telos of Ottoman reform, including the very context of parliamentary politics that had defined Emmanouilidis’ own professional career. Declaring the end of reform as a parliamentary intervention situated the speaking subject in an infelicitous relationship to the context of their own speech. Emmanouilidis described the earlier disruption of his own speech but, in a moment of uncanny repetition, his own act of description was itself interrupted. Taken as a historically emergent form in its own right, the infelicitous character of his speech had become a condition of possibility for his participation in the freedom of parliamentary politics. The history of ıslahat—a history of the very promise of political modernity—became, in Emmanouildis’ reflections on his discursive practice, the history of its persistent and ongoing occlusion.