Suggestions for a different reading of Foucault
SANEM GÜVENÇ SALGIRLI - SİBEL YARDIMCI
As the title of this article depicts, our main concern is to offer the basics of a reading of Foucault different than the dominant reading in the Turkish context. Our concern lies in questioning his concept of power. We think that the version of his theory he developed prior to the mid-1970s stressed the repressive aspect of power more, duly conceptualizing the subject as internalizing that very oppression and resistance as mere negation of power. This was the reading of Foucault, which also resonated in Turkish academic circles. We argue however that this understanding shrinks the margins of the political sphere and limits our imagination and resourcefulness as social scientists. We suggest that concepts of “governing” and “governmentality”, which Foucault developed and used frequently after the mid-1970s, needs to be stressed more profusely. We believe that this new conceptualization that symmetrically constructs the relationships between power and subject on the one hand, and power and resistance on the other, enables us to view both concretely and dynamically as it focuses on practical applications.
Keywords: Foucault in Turkey, power, resistance, knowledge, governmentality
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‘Life’ as an issue of security: The consolidation
of the empire of security across the global
bio-political horizon
ASLI ÇALKIVİK
In January 2006, flying birds were the major concern for the chief of the checkpoint at Zakho, a small town located at the Turkey-Iraq border. Having served throughout history as a major market and a significant node in the circulation of goods, the town was now being recast as an important fortress in the unveiling global battle against a different form of circulation -that of a virus commonly known as the avian flu. Starting with a discussion of the ensuing global war against this viral circulation, this paper argues that this episode is not marginal but symptomatic of a broader transformation: the consolidation of the empire of security across the global bio-political horizon. This thesis is developed through an exegesis of Foucault’s works on bio-politics and an exploration of the implications of his insights for understanding the contemporary nature of politics of security.
Keywords: Biopolitics, geopolitics, security, development, global liberal governance, human security, politics of humanitarianism
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New means of biopolitics: The biometric electronic
ID card system in Turkey
ALANUR ÇAVLİN BOZBEYOĞLU
Since the launch of the citizen identification number in 2000, the population data gathering system in Turkey has undergone dramatic changes. We have witnessed the last phase of an important differentiation in the country’s identification system. Turkey’s mandatory ID card system, in place since the foundation of the Republic, is an integral part of everyday day life for Turkish citizens. The country is currently experiencing a shift from paper-based national ID cards to electronic ID cards, which now incorporate a chip to carry identifying information including personal identity numbers, photographs and PIN numbers. Two fingerprints and two finger vein patterns are also included as biometric indicators.
Electronic ID cards have some unique characteristics. Firstly, they are generally networked with other personal information systems and therefore, they can serve as multi-purpose cards within the framework of e-government and e-commerce. Secondly, they allow different levels of social sorting, thanks to their searchable databases. And finally, they have strong authentication capacities due to the use of biometric verification features such as fingerprint records, facial recognition capability and iris scans.
This paper discusses Turkey’s new biometric ID card system with regards to its relationship with the general differentiation in the population data gathering system of the country over the last decade, with a special focus on the concepts of biopolitics and biopower. The introduction of biometrics in any identity card system can be interpreted as a transformation of the physical body into a digital password. The new system, based on Turkey’s intensified surveillance and verification features, deepens the strength of biopower and stands as an example of a social transformation from a society of discipline, such as that conceptualized by Foucault, to a society of control, such as that described by Deleuze.
Keywords: Electronic ID card, biopolitics, society of discipline, society of control
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Refugees, biopolitics and cattle theft: Ottoman governmentality and nineteenth-century Vidin
M. SAFA SARAÇOĞLU
Problematization of refugee settlement processes in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century provides a good example of how biopolitics was used as a technology of government. In his discussion of biopolitics, Foucault argues that it is not possible to understand biopolitics unless we discuss it in the broader framework of liberalism—understood as principles and methods of the rationalization of the exercise of government. As such, liberalism imposes limits on governmental intervention in political economy, defining governmental practice as the attempt to protect civil society and the economic realm that it operates within from dangers that would hinder the proper functioning of markets. I argue that the settlement process of the refugees posed a challenge for the Ottoman governmental practices in the nineteenth century and by focusing on how the state responded to this challenge in the case study of Vidin we can observe how liberalism operated in the Ottoman Empire. Because biopolitics operates in the context of governmentality, this analysis allows us to observe how the problematization of “danger” posed by theft and other disturbances attributed to the refugees created issues around which participants of Ottoman governmentality pursued their strategies.
Keywords: Biopolitics, cattle theft, Circassians, governmentality, liberalism, Michel Foucault, nineteenth century, Ottoman Empire, problematization, provincial administration, refugee settlement, Vidin
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From Islamic novels to pious women’s literature: Body, space and subjectivity
ELİFHAN KÖSE
Literature provides a way of tracking the reflections of Turkish Islamism in everyday life. In the public sphere Islamism has been extensively discussed with regard to the veiling issue since the seventies. However, the daily manifestations of Islamism within women’s Islamic literature indicates the birth of the new Muslim female subject. Islamic novels written in the late seventies have emerged in the context of conflicts between characters and presented a fixed Muslim female identity in relation to essentialist contrasts such as Eastern/Western, open/veiled and moral/immoral. At the same time, this fixed identity defined the nature of veiling women as housewives. Following this period, pious women’s literature was introduced in the eighties. An educated group of veiled women became both the writers and the heroes of their stories and the essentialist contrasts were re-evaluated to create a new identity based on the sanctification of body, space and time. This sanctification in pious literature has been performed with an awareness of biological differences like gender and especially the idea of “fıtrat” (created biology). The process of female subjectivity in pious women’s literature creates a break in the continuity within religious novels, in terms of internal tensions of the subject and multiplicity of experiences. However, they simultaneously fix the plurality of experiences and tensions in favor of a stabile Muslim women’s identity in continuity with other Islamist novels. In this study, selected literature from Cihan Aktas, Yildiz Ramazanoglu, and Fatma Karabiyik Barbarosoglu and the theoretical comments of Nazife Sisman will be analyzed.
Keywords: Gender, body, subjectivity, Islam, piety, literature, Turkey
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The ontological conceptualisation of poverty:
Poverty as a totality of material-symbolic
processes and lifting the curtain of technique
in poverty studies
ZAFER YILMAZ
This article argues against the way poverty is seen as a pure quantitative problem in social sciences. The first part of the article asserts that the application of methodologies departing from quantitative analysis in poverty studies play two substantial roles in the current comprehension of poverty: Constitutive and concealing. While participating in the process of bringing the poor into existence for production and control, these analyses also conceal the political aspect of the problem by delegating the problem of inequality in the social, political and economic fields to the field of policy. The second part of the article asserts that poverty should been seen as a problem consisting of material and symbolic processes of inequalization. Hence, rather than a simple epistemological and policy problem, the solution of which lies in the sphere of numbers and public policy, poverty needs to be understood as an ontological and political problem, which produces direct effects in subjectification processes. In this context, in the last part of the article, poverty has been reconceptualised as a totality of relational material-symbolic processes, registered with lacks and producing surplus appropriated by certain segments of society.
Keywords: Poverty, relational processes, technique and inequality
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Construction of a governmental sphere:
Socially responsible investment and
sustainability indices
AHMET BEKMEN
Neoliberalism -as a governmental current- is about giving new governmental forms to the social class relations in the current phase of capitalism. In that sense, neoliberal regulation is the regovernmentalization of the social spheres through new specific institutions and mechanisms, where the governing apparatuses of the nation-states are rendered impotent. This process is realized through the intervention of expert-knowledge and it means the transformation of the relations between social subjects into technical reconfigurations, namely the transformation of the political into the technical. This paper aims to analyze a new governmental mechanism, namely the sustainability indices, which emerged thanks to the encounter of financial investment practices with the “social problem”, with reference to Foucauldian conceptions.
Keywords: Neoliberal regulation, governmentality, social responsibility, socially responsible investment, sustainability indices, capitalism and ethics
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What is neoliberal property or “urgent xpropriation”?
ALP YÜCEL KAYA
Based on the decision of the Council of Ministers of Turkish Republic, dated the 3rd of January 2008, 35 parcels of private landed property in Efemçukuru village (Izmir) was subject to “urgent expropriation” in order to be allocated to a private corporation for its exploitation of a gold mine found near the village. In fact this decision is not an exception; the Turkish council of ministers has had more and more recourse to “urgent expropriation” since the 1980s: there are 6 cases in 1980s; 4 cases in 1990s; 105 cases in 2000s. According to the Law no 2942 on Expropriation, a decision of “urgent expropriation” can be be taken in “urgent situations for which council of ministers will decide”. This paper argues that neoliberal rationality interprets “urgent situations for which council of ministers will decide” as the situations in which market actors do not supply and demand goods and services in a competitive environment in such a way that efficient market transaction and allocation cannot take place. As Michel Foucault’s analysis on liberal and neoliberal rationality suggests, the council of ministers as an executive administrative body became in this context an intermediary market actor who had to expand and deepen the market and the competition without limits by replacing the liberal criterion of expropriation, that is “public utility” meaning general interest, by a neoliberal one, that is “public utility” meaning competitive market. This radical shift in the principle of expropriation is the reflection of the neoliberal transformation -that we are living through since the last years of the 1970s- of public law into “public” sector and infrastructural “public” investments have become more and more “privatized”. In other words, it means nothing but the transformation of the liberal understanding of property into a neoliberal one and of expropriation into marketization. However, as resistances in “urgent expropriation” cases show, the momentum of actual transformation reposes in the struggle between general interest and competitive market in particular, in the political struggle on the meaning of “public utility” in general.
Keywords: Efemçukuru, urgent expropriation, marketization, monopolization, privatization, property, public utility, competition, liberal government, neoliberal government, Michel Foucault
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Understanding the public deficit problem in Turkey: The neoliberal belief system and the
science of economics
ÇAĞLA DİNER
In the 1990s, the Turkish economy has entered into a process of financialization and its costs have been considerable for the public. The period has been marked by looming public deficits due to high interest rates and the high burden of interest payments on the public sector. This has meant a transfer of public resources to the financial sector; those who had money to lend to the government made considerable gains just by lending to the government. To understand better how this vicious cycle of high public deficits and high interest rates developed, this article will direct attention to a particular policy; the switch from monetization of public deficits to their securitization, which started with the establishment of a government bonds market. By directing attention to this policy, this article aims to make a contribution to the literature on Turkish economy, which analyzes the financialization process that developed in the 1990s. The second aim of this article is to draw attention to the worldwide dissemination of neoliberal ideas to better understand the adoption of policies such as securitization of public deficits and financial liberalization, the issues that the paper takes in hand. Looming public deficits and the aforementioned vicious cycle was an unintended consequence of a series of policies adopted for the pursuit of constructing a “proper market economy”. Bureaucrats and politicians who were educated in the United States and who learned about the financial system of the country that has the most developed financial markets, implemented what they learned there in Turkey and this created an economic reality which did not necessarily lead to consequences that would benefit the people. The unfolding of the events that developed as a consequence of policies adopted in the 1980s demonstrates that economics is not only a science that observes and explains economic reality but it constructs that reality. What constitutes this reality is not only the bureaucrats and politicians who study it in foreign countries, but the monetarist theory, the interbank money market, the software and the infrastructure which construct that market and the government bonds are all devices and techniques that have made the science of economics performative.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, public deficits, performative science, ideology, financialization, capital market liberalization
