Machinic Agency and the Powers of the False in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998)

Özdamar's second novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn has been read as a coming-of-age story of its female protagonist against the backdrop of 1968. Its portrayal of Turkish ‘Gastarbeiter’ has been interpreted in classical Marxist terms of alienated labour, and the novel itself as a rallying cry for international Leftist movements. This essay argues that the novel is non-representational both in its aesthetics and its politics, articulating a critical perspective on Leftist politics and foregrounding the non-representational power of art. It attends to the novel's distribution of agency, its cinematic techniques and parodic moments that contribute to what Gilles Deleuze has called ‘the powers of the false’. Machinisms are at work on the factory floor and through the camera's lens, prefiguring the forces of capitalism that render representational aesthetics and politics obsolete, and culminating in a collective enunciation irreducible to a familiar narrative of migrant labour or political activism.