What was Foucault’s main concern? Why did he deal so much with power? Did he try to provide a definition of power or to explain the nature of power?
I think, Foucault never began his inquiry with the question concerning what the power is. Rather, he preferred to begin with the questions of “how” and “what happens” namely: How is power exercised? and What happens when individuals exert power over others? He did this, in order to let us take a critical distance towards the very existence or the metaphysics or the ontology of power. In the text ‘Power and Subject’ he writes that, “to begin the analysis with a ‘how’ is to introduce the suspicion that power as such does not exist.” Only such a critical approach can make visible how and through which mechanisms power operates, without reconstituting power as a metaphysical and essential category. Foucault’s concern, and also what is revolutionary in his inquiry, is the making visible of power relations. This approach lets how individuals are produced as subjects within power relations become visible as well. Therefore, Foucault’s analysis, which reaches towards the very roots of power relations, can let us face the contingency of claims about objectivity and rationality of truth regimes; of normalizing discourses and of mechanisms which are producing the self. Such an inquiry allows us to take a critical position against effects of power linked with knowledge. Thus, it is this inquiry which provides us the means to struggle against the privileged and uncontrolled knowledge of expertise and against any forms of subjection.
(more…)

Introduction
What is the actual relation between Orientalism and the people who live in the lands which are designated as the ‘Orient’? How do people who are the targets of Orientalism perceive, negotiate, manage and respond to the Orientalist discourse? How is the West imagined by these people? In what ways does this imagination of the West affect the formation of their subjectivities? In other words, what are the ways in which the distinction or the border between the images of the West and the East are produced and managed as power-knowledge, which subjects the subjectivities? These are the questions that this paper tries to investigate.
It is Edward Said, who argues in his groundbreaking work Orientalism that “the Orient is neither an inert fact of nature nor essentially an idea” (Said 2003: 5). On the contrary, Orientalism creates the European identity as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, by drawing a strict boundary between East and West. In response to this Orientalism, at the end of his book Said advocates putting aside the Orientalist creation of the East-West distinction in order to put an end to the essentialist antagonism between East and the West. However, despite his crucial contribution to the elaboration of the problem, Gil Eyal argues, Said doesn’t consider any hybrid entity between the East and the West and thereby ignores the fact that Orientalism is also a project of producing and managing boundaries and hybrids, namely the people in-between (Eyal 2006: 6-7). In Eyal’s words, Said’s “approach ignores the reality of the boundary itself. It basically requires us to think the boundary as a nonentity, a ‘fine line’ without any width to it…” (Eyal 2006: 7). In this sense, one has to reconsider the crucial role of the production and management of the hybrids and boundaries in the production of identities.
Maybe Said’s neglect of a discussion concerning the Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey–the country which is often defined as ‘a bridge’ between the East and the West, considered as neither developed nor underdeveloped, and regarded neither a ‘true’ colonizer nor a ‘true’ colony–depends also on the fact that he ignores the reality of boundaries and hybrids.
Regarding this gap in post-colonial theory, it would be complementary to trace the roots of the Occidentalist discourse in the Turkish context, which implies knowledge about the image or the fantasy of the West as both an idealized and a frustrated figure. The contemporary Turkish identity appears as the ‘effect’ of the Occidentalist discourse. In this sense, Occidentalism is the constant creation and management of the border between the East and the West and the mechanism of the reproduction and purification of the hybrid entities which emerge as the effects of this border regime. Whereas one can not separate knowledge and power, Occidentalist discourse, which produces a regime of truth regarding the images of the West, also marks a regime of power. The Occidentalist discourse began to be institutionalized as the motive of modernization since the Tanzimat reforms in Ottoman Empire in late 19th century and became the dominant discourse in the formation of the Turkish Republic and the new Turkish national identity. In this historical framework the hegemonic interventions of the Turkish state, bureaucrats, intellectuals, academicians, journalists and various groups of experts, through the boundary management of dividing spheres, regions, and people along the axis of East and West, becomes possible and justifiable with a constant reference to an imagined West as an ideal model. Therefore, throughout this paper I will to try to investigate the ways in which Occidentalism is exercised, institutionalized and diffused as one of the dominant discourses of the Turkish modernization.
(more…)

In this paper, I will focus on a particular debate, which was a hot topic in Turkish media in the summer of 2005. The debate was about the leisure time activities of lower class inhabitants of Istanbul, who were blamed to spoil the Istanbul panorama. Their leisure time habits, like swimming with underwear, were identified as a problem of “incivility” in accordance with the interchangeable use of “civilized” with “modern”, “Westernized” and/or “contemporary” in Turkey. Once cited as a problem to tackle, a variety of positions, propositions, classifications, and also solutions were put forward in media, through which I will interpret certain claims on the Turkish Nation, culture, poverty, and modernity. These claims, I will argue, are bound with disciplining of certain populations in line with the middle class aspirations. Throughout, certain practices, objects and bodies are considered to be a “problem”. They are put on view as to be corrected and fit the dominant representations of “proper citizen”. Hence, I will discuss that the problem about “non-modern” is a problem of governance. So, this paper is an attempt to bring objects and practices marked as “backward” and “non-civilized” back “‘into touch’ with the larger, less tangible and less coherent network of relationships” (Hebdidge, 1988).
My short discussion will not cover all the claims, and for that matter, all the parties involved. I have to exert from the beginning that the maneuvers, complicities, appropriations or rejections that lower class inhabitants of the city take on, are beyond the scope of this paper. My analysis is not about how power is assumed or subverted by lower classes; rather, I will focus on the desires and aspirations of middle classes in respect to their taste for leisure time. That is to say that although the subject matter of this paper seems as the practices of lower class people, it is actually about the normative framework of middle classes.
(more…)

Introduction
As Judith Butler suggests, it is through repetition of norms that worlds materialize, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced. (Butler, 1993: 9) Throughout this essay I will try to search how this boundaries, fixities and surfaces are produced through the repetition of emotions, emotional discourses and practices. I will especially look at the production process, perception and politics of fear. As a fact I try to compare the discourses and practices of the American and Turkish governments against the so-called terrorist acts. Therefore, I want to show that the politics of fear is not unique to US. On the contrary the detention of civil rights in the advantage of the expansion of the governmental interventions to the citizen’s everyday life is a new global trend for most of the governments around the world. At that point, Turkey is not an exception. The discourse produced after the events in Şemdinli, Diyarbakır and Hakkari are the last instances of such a politics of fear. Nowadays the amendment to the Terrorism Act in Turkey, which is inspired very much by its counterparts in US and UK, is debated, discussed and criticized (look at http://www.tmykarsiti.org/) As we see, in our contemporary world the experiencing and processing of fear is diffused and repeated dramatically.
(more…)

Introduction

“I have enough of being too busy
and the stress is dreadful, too. I wish people would not rush…
If only we walked.”

Kayhan,
Complaining in Internet chat.

This is a study about busy professionals- or as I call them, golden collars. Golden collars are the manifested model workers of the last few decades with far greater control over the product, and the process of production; they are defined as more of entrepreneurs than proletarians, responsible for their own performance. Their value addition is mostly through innovation and information generation. They are relatively autonomous, responsible, highly skilled workers with upgraded abilities in interpersonal communication, leadership, and motivation. They have outstanding analytical capabilities; they make up the brain trust of global capitalism.

Global capitalism is about speed when viewed from the perspective of golden collars. They are forced to adapt to meticulously planned time schedules both in their leisure time and also in their working time. Indeed, the two domains often overlap, as will be discussed in this research and so, an optimum life is required in all realms and at all time.

I take up this question as a problem of “effectiveness” – one of the central significations, which assumes a central role in modern capitalist society, hence in bureaucratic organization. Striving for more effective technologies, more effective production chains and more effective lives are the inviolable, undeniable truth in contemporary discourses. “Everything is actually subordinated to effectiveness –but effective for whom, in view of what, and in order to do what?”
(more…)

“The most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are”
—Michel Foucault, in ‘Subject and Power’

Throughout this paper, I will try to discuss the political role of the contemporary anthropologist while questioning how she positions herself against present problems of contemporary world and how she distinguishes her position from other kinds of occupations. Briefly, this paper is about the question concerning the characteristic, the specificity and the peculiarity of contemporary anthropologist.
In her text ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Kristen Hastrup defines contemporary anthropology (quoting Scheper-Hughes) not only as a field of knowledge, but also as a field of action (Hastrup, 13). Thus, the anthropologist has to deal with the present, with a world in motion and with a continuous flux, which she both gives shape to and is shaped by. Thus, as Hastrup and Foucault imply, the search for the present is also the search for what we are as both anthropologists and human beings.
This inextricable relation between the world, the present and the anthropologist (the writer/the being) let us rethink the questions concerning representation, translation, objectivity, reflexivity and relativity in order to reconsider the role and the very existence of anthropologist as a witness, as an agent, as an activist, as a writer and so on.
(more…)

by Saul Newman

Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought. Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the “poststructuralist” tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault’s own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigenheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault’s own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices. Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense–they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project–grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.
(more…)