Page 258 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

time (¤rst one, then the other) but was politically de¤ned and interactive. There
existed (already) a range of controversies surrounding the centralized Director-
ate of Religious Affairs in the political conjuncture of the late nineties. I risked
the crudities of an abbreviated account in order to emphasize the preexistence
of strategic interests (both dominant and subordinate) whose political agendas
were at odds with the of¤cial policies of the Directorate. Within this politically
charged context, the television persona Yasar Nuri Öztürk proved to be a readily
accessible signpost, lending concrete form to ongoing debates. His public ad-
dresses provided a repertoire of statements likely to prove “controversial,” which
were immediately picked up, abridged in the journalistic catchphrases of the
moment, and reproduced as the latest installment in an ongoing drama—Yasar
Nuri Öztürk versus the Directorate of Religious Affairs. I termed this a “public
text,” because it provided a popular idiom of “circulation,” one that allowed for
multiple, divergent interpretations of what the Directorate stood for and whose
interests it served.
Returning to the notion of a “televisual moment,” there is a tension between
two opposing tendencies of fragmentation and af¤rmation that are embedded
within the “televisual moment.” How this tension unfolds, however, is “open-
ended” in the sense that it is bound with prevailing power con¤gurations, con-
tingent events, and emergent resistances. Television is obviously not some sort
of trans-historical agency, capable of lending direction to events. But it is far
more than décor or wallpaper against which players enact their rehearsed parts.
The claim of television to “reach everybody” opens up new discursive spaces
and maps out new constituencies, augmenting some political voices and choices
while muf®ing others. Thus any attempt to move beyond the generalities of a
“televisual moment,” to trace and unpack its unfolding in speci¤c contexts,
necessitates particularizing, or what William Sewell has named an “eventful”
history.

Epilogue

As I was trying to knit together various strands of my research into a
narrative conclusion, the incumbent coalition government fell apart, and new
elections came on the political agenda. Yasar Nuri Öztürk succumbed to the
lure of publicity (very predictably) and announced his political candidacy on
the ranks of the CHP (Republican People’s Party) amid a media blitz. He was
elected to parliament, on November 3, 2002, to be precise. He is currently seated
(presumably) on the back benches of the national assembly, suffering the com-
mon fate of all deputies from opposition parties, namely, oblivion. He is unlikely
to be heard of again unless he becomes involved in corruption or a sex scandal.
So outworking of political events have relegated Yasar Nuri Öztürk, the person,
into obscurity. He is now part of the very recent history of the present.
The landslide victory in the November 3 polls belonged to the AK (Justice
and Development Party), which was de¤ned by its critics as “Islamist.” Having
won a comfortable two-thirds majority in parliament, the newly inaugurated

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