Trivialized Content, Elevated From: Aesthetics of Secrecy in Turkish Politics in the 2000s

This essay will first provide a brief history of the Islamist party's coming to power by means of its effective use of a populist imagery. The paper will then focus on the emergence of a new regime of secrecy in Turkish politics by looking at two high-profile legal cases, Ergenekon and the “Cosmic Room,” in which one can observe the blueprints of a struggle between different factions for taking over the state. During the investigations, secret documents about the wrongdoings of the secular establishment were leaked to and widely covered by the media. Sober debates on the contents of such documents were dwarfed by the tendency to scandalize, stigmatize, and foster fascination for the purported clandestine organizations within the state in line with conspiracist aesthetics. In later sections of the paper, the elements of entertainment and seriousness of this conspiracist aesthetics are analyzed.