From the truthful man to the artist, the chain of forgers is long. This is obviously why it is so difficult to define âtheâ forger, because we do not take into account his multiplicity, his ubiquity, and because we are content to refer to a historical and ultimately chronological time.1
All historiography depends in part on the problematic it adopts and in part on the documents it has at its disposal. And if a historiography is blocked, it will be due now to the lack of documents, now to a sclerosed problematic. Now experience shows that the sclerosis of the problematic always occurs much earlier than the exhaustion of documents. Even when documentation is poor, there are always problems which it does not occur to us to pose. This is also the case, a fortiori, when documentation is rich.2
In 1769, author, engineer, and inventor Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen designed a chess-playing automaton of a very special kind. The mannequinâcarefully turbaned, dressed in a fur-lined caftan, and holding the de rigueur chibouk in its right handâwas obviously modelled on servants of the Ottoman sultan. It moved the chess pieces without any outside interventionâor at least seemed to, for an invisible puppeteer was at work in the chest beneath the board.
Over the following decades, the âMechanical Turkâ became a famous object of curiosity throughout Europe, eventually acquiring an idiomatic value of its own. The slang word türken, which in present-day German means âto falsifyâ or âto rig,â can be traced back to this particular Ottoman figure. Apparently oblivious to such semantic contiguities, the executives of an American multinational technology company chose its name for the âglobal, on-demand, 24â¯Ãâ¯7 workforceâ offered by its microworking crowdsourcing systems. The Mechanical Turk thus denotes not only a historical phenomenon characterized by singular features, but also connotes a more structural figure of thought.
This is how it came to appear on the cover of this book.
It is also why the title of the book is Ottoman Fake rather than (as the editors kindly suggested) Ottoman Fakes. The latter certainly provides a more accurate description of the diversity of fakes under study; the former, however, invites a broader view, one that without fully encompassing the idea of fakery, nevertheless remains open to related semantics.
âµ
What you are going to read is dilatory. Its remarks shy away from synthetic, affirmative, or declaratory exposition. Apart from the odd introductory pointer here and there, its exploration will nevertheless be shaped by a composition based on leaps and bounds.
We will be dealing with fakes, but will make do with a very broad-spectrum definition: this encompasses the not-true and the counterfeit, the inauthentic, the dishonest, and the falsified. The topic has inspired countless studies across all fields: despite (or because of) this, no comprehensive literature review will be provided. Nor will there be any chronologically unfolding history. As for any ultimate purpose embracing the whole in some grand theoretical gesture, I shall refrain.
So, if readers accept the task of reading along these lines and allow themselves to be carried along, they should relinquish any idea of finding in this essay a reasoned account of forgery, its history, and its use in the administration of the Ottoman Empire. If the following work can be a guide for them (without it being required to be an Ottoman historian), it is rather by questioning and demonstrating what a forgery is in action.
Such an approach may seem erratic, hazardous, shocking even. It requires justification.
âµ
My idea is that the text be closely built around documents. Most are texts or textual in nature. Most come from the Ottoman Archives held by the Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic (formerly known as the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministerial Office, BaÅbakanlık Osmanlı ArÅivi), in Istanbul. It has been possible to track them down thanks to the digital indexing systems developed by the Directorate of State Archives over the course of the past three decades. Unlike the linear consultation of catalogues, these make it possible to explore holdings by keywords. Admittedly, this sampling method bypasses any prior reflection on the presence of forgeries in Ottoman documentation of the period: the question of whether the conservation institutions themselves made an initial selection before indexing and digitizing the catalogued documents remains beyond our scope. Equally clear is the fact that no ârepresentativityâ (strictly speaking) can emerge from such a selection technique. I sought not to assemble a corpus (combining all items complying to a genre or specific criteria), but to work with a miscellaneous collection. Besides, as my archival research was carried out mainly between 2008 and 2014, documentary series that have become available for consultation in the meantime will not, unsurprisingly, be represented in my documentary sample. Still, this archival infrastructure makes it possible to build up a research topic tracing the dominant lines in one or several semantic fields. Such an approach comes with two consequences: one has to run the risk of dispersal, and to defer the issue of periodization.
Two major criteria presided over my choice of documents: that they deal with concerns about fakes, and that they all do so in different fashion. So the fakes involved will be of many kinds: coins, notes, fats, oils, soda waters, teas and wines, dyes and medicines, diplomas, certificates, patents and titles, etc. (Interestingly enough, no mention could be found of forgeries linked to fictional texts, hence their absence in the present study.) Rather than a pre-determined terminology, I took as my starting point the vagaries and ambiguities of the language employed in the archives, which forces us to heuristically suspend the question of its veracity. It then becomes a matter of exploring how each utterance is being performed, the gestures that accompany it, and the situations in which it occurs.3 This does not entail opting for an aesthetics of the fragment: on the contrary, transliterating then translating runs counter to the excerpting habit governing our practices of academic quotation. Each document is apprehended in its entirety, with as much philological and interpretive care as possible. The rhapsodic drive towards documents is thus closely regulated: translations first, scholia second. Taken as a whole, it doubtless forms a sort of narrative arc: both the afterword and the analytical table inserted at the end of the volume provide some indication of this. All in all, the two parts of the work look in turn at what generates a fake (its apprehension by the authorities) and what a fake generates (ambivalence in categorization). But because each reading entails working on a given document as a whole, this inevitably directs our attention away from generalization towards circumstances.
Chronologically speaking, the selected documents run from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. These boundaries coincide with those of âlateâ Ottoman history, reproducing a structural division familiar to many academics and students, for it is widely acknowledged that the turn of the nineteenth century ushered in a change of era. Yet in this case it was the indexed catalogue database that authoritatively fixed this terminus a quo from the outset. It did not initially stem from choice: I did not set out to periodize. But it took hold as a sort of emergent phenomenon: I thus needed to find a way of working within this constraint while transposing it, so that it went from being automatic to being part of a self-conscious way of tackling the issue.
Indeed, the library of Ottoman studies presents readers with a curious contrast. Study of the early centuries of empire and of its âclassical ageâ has fueled a fervent tradition of critical publishing, to the point that concerns have been raised about a bent for âdocument fetishism.â Yet for the centuries examined here, what we may deplore is rather documentary elision. If we turn to Mübahat KütükoÄluâs handbook in Ottoman diplomatics, an indispensable tool for anyone working on the Ottoman chancery writings of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, it touches but incidentally on documents from later periods.4 The âlateâ Ottoman history written over recent decades confirms this dearth of interest in documents as concrete sites of investigation. Historical criticism accords primacy to key variables in a meta-narrative, exploring the advent of one or several âmodernities,â or examining the âtransition from the Empire to nation-states.â But it is exceptional for documents to be presented for reading or perusing in their entirety, even though the practitioners of this history are assuredly avid readers of archives. Perhaps this documentary elision is also due to publishing houses being more concerned with profit and loss than with hefty tomes. Be it as it may, the result is that documentation has been reduced to scaffolding. It is swept out of sight, as if the requirement to âexhibitâ oneâs sources no longer or scarcely applied. One cannot but wish that âinstead of covering blanket concepts on entire eras, Ottoman historiography [acquire] a paradigmatic repository derived from an accurate, closer, and, most importantly, micro-historical reading and researching of Ottoman (and foreign) archival documents, individual stories and networks, and institutional continuities and refractions.â5 This book is an attempt to do just that.
âµ
My idea is that the architecture of the book be based on documents. I want my readersâ attention to be trained primarily on them. Hence in particular my decision to grant intertitles solely to documents. Hence too my technique of âsequence shots,â selected as a way of encouraging repeated reading. I hope to thereby signal that documents are not ornaments: reading after reading, they are essential for categorizing our fields of study and for apprehending the empirical material composing them. Or at least ought to be. Apprehension and categorizationâit is in the intersection between these two that lies what could be termed the philological-political economy of our academic writing.
Why speak of philology? In what sense? Is it a matter of reasserting the ancillary status of an auxiliary science of history? Far from it. Let us espouse the warning issued by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos: âthe word âPhilologieâ [â¦] has acquired a restricted meaning, that we do not attribute to it here.â6 It is not a matter of reproducing the automatisms of a discipline or school, but of making room once again for the reading subject. In this respect philology is an act of criticism, in two ways: it establishes our sourcesâ veracity, while viewing their reading as problematic. The âconflictual nature of philologyâ itself, âdepending on whether it privileges [â¦] the general (the code) or the particular (the expressive will),â ensures that our disciplines are not seen as mere purveyors of knowledge, that they work perpetually on themselves.7 They thereby serve to train a self, enabling a subject to address another subject, and to learn to apprehend the world without ever holding it to be known. Philology is thus not solely an act of criticism: it may also be regarded as a political act.8
Does it not suffice to speak of reflexivity? The problem with this term is that it divides thought against itself: it draws its aura from a presumed separation between the empirical moment and theoretical scruples. That is not how we set about reading in this book. Concepts are not held at armsâ length from documents, no more than they are âappliedâ to them as form to material. Philology offers neither model nor narrative, and often loses itself in conjecture. But it does not rely on the hazards of collection: it methodically works for us to experience the documentsâ asperity.
Being artefacts conceived to exchange hands yet which are reworked as they (fail to) circulate, documents are a form of currency. Each is the site of work on âgood practice,â while at the same time signaling the apportioning of fields of action. Hence not everything is âtextâ: there is an interweaving of lexicon and utterance, on the one hand, and of the effects brought about by codification and anchoring in practical schema, on the other. But we will rarely dispense with the mediation provided, in concert, by utterance and enunciation. That is why no exemplary cases, ideal-types, or clues opening out onto some âexceptional normalâ will be deduced from the documents. Documentary occurrences are precisely that: occurrences, that is, they presume no theory of meaning conceived in terms of truth and falsehood. Each instance lends itself to analysis, not interpretation. We may hence declare that philological work resembles âpragmatic semantics independent of any idea of truth.â9
This precarity signals the power relationship perpetually stemming from a concern for fakes. Because the forgersâ work (however rudimentary it may be) affects the link between judgement and perception, and challenges the applicable schema of veridiction, it is a political art that permanently challenges the methods by which authorized utterances are produced, bodies of knowledge elaborated, and consensuses forged. In short, fakes impose categorizations, while remaining anti-categorical themselves. Or rather, they revert categories to their principial definition, that of the Aristotelian Organon: as terms âsaid without combination,â they always precede the establishment of any link of attribution or predication.
Of things said without any combination, [none] is said just by itself in any affirmation, but by the combination of these with one another an affirmation is produced. For every affirmation, it seems, is either true or false; but of things said without any combination none is either true or false (e.g. âman,â âwhite,â âruns,â âwinsâ). [â¦] Nothing, in fact, that is said without combination is either true or false.10
One may thus better understand why fakes may not be so easily domesticated: it is because they act directly on the assertory dimension of language. Hence logically speaking, fakes precede the position of the truth principle. They form one with their contrary. And so, in all rigor, they may not support any thesis.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 146.
Paul Veyne, âThe Inventory of Differences,â trans. Elizabeth Kingdom, Economy and Society 11, no. 2 (1982 [1976]): 176.
See Ulrike Krampl, Les Secrets des faux sorciers. Police, magie et escroquerie à Paris au xviiie siècle (Paris: Ãditions de lâEHESS, 2011), 20â22, paraphrased from the French: âau lieu de partir dâune terminologie préétablie, je prendrai comme point de départ les ambiguïtés du langage des archives [â¦] Pour cela, il importe de donner du crédit aux propos rapportés par les uns et par les autres, en mettant en suspens, de façon heuristique, la question de leur véracité. [â¦] Câest dans un double sens de familiarité et dâétrangeté que lâétude sâorganise à partir de mots structurants relevés dans les archives, mots qui constituent le fil rouge de la réflexion. Il sâagit dâen explorer la performance dans le contexte des gestes qui les accompagnent et des situations dans lesquelles ils sont énoncés.â
Mübahat S. KütükoÄlu, Osmanlı Belgelerinin Dili (Diplomatik) (Istanbul: Kubbealtı Akademisi Kültür ve Sanâat Vakfı, 1994).
Yasir Yılmaz, âNebulous Ottomans vs. Good Old Habsburgs: A Historiographical Comparison,â Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017), 174.
Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1898), 39 fn. 3: âLe mot âPhilologieâ a pris en français un sens restreint, que nous ne lui attribuons pas ici.â This footnote has been omitted in the English-language translation of the book, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G.G. Berry (London: Duckworth & Co, 1898).
Pierre Judet de la Combe, âSur les conflits en philologie,â Texto!, XIII/1â2 (2008), 6: âle caractère conflictuel de la philologie, [â¦] selon quâelle privilégie dans la lecture le général (le code) ou le particulier (la volonté expressive).â Cf. Heinz Wismann, âLe métier de philologue,â Critique 276 and 279â290 (1970); Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 [1989]); James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
See Michael Herzfeld, âPolitical Philology: Everyday Consequences of Grandiose Grammars,â Anthropological Linguistics 39, no. 3 (1997): 351â375; Victoria Rowe Holbrook, âPhilology Went down to the Crossroads of Modernity to Meet Orientalism, Nationalism, and⦠Ottoman Poetry,â New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (1994): 19â41; Alfred Hiatt, âDiplomatic Arts: Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters,â Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 3 (2009): 351â373; Sheldon I. Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, eds., World Philology (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2015); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, âTahqÄ«q vs. TaqlÄ«d in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity,â Philological Encounters 3, no. 1â2 (2018): 193â249; Henning Trüper, Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
Oswald Ducrot, âLa pragmatique et lâétude sémantique de la langue,â in Une Ãcole pour les sciences sociales. De la VIe Section à lâÃcole des Hautes Ãtudes en Sciences Sociales, ed. Jacques Revel and Nathan Wachtel (Paris: Ãditions du Cerf / Ãditions de lâEhess, 1996), 345: âune sémantique pragmatique indépendante de la notion de vérité.â
Aristotle, Categories, 1b 25 and 2a 5â10, then 13b 10, trans. J.L. Ackrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). I also used Michel Crubellier, Catherine Dalimier, and Pierre Pellegrinâs French translation of the same text, which offers a gloss on the notion of âcombinationâ (sumplokè): CatégoriesâSur lâinterprétation (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 216, fn. 1. In their introduction to the text the latter editors also state: âLike no other, this treatise has, since antiquity, been surrounded by serious doubts concerning its authenticity, status and functionâ (ibid., 52).