Subjectivity and Spaces of Interaction

Authors : Şule OKUROĞLU ÖZÜN

Pages : 175-196

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Publication Date : 2015-10-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Political, national, and cultural subjectivities are constructed through experiencing, living in, and trading in time and space; therefore, time and space are the most important ingredients in the formation of the self as well as in the evocation of diasporas as spaces of interaction. Although originally the term diaspora was used to define the Hellenic and Jewish communities living in exile, over the years, with its implications and applications, the employment of the word has been stretched to voluntary or forced migration, or to people dislocated from their homeland for reasons of slavery, genocide, political conflicts, exile or education. Diaspora is now a controversial term, including here and there, now and then, deterritorialization from and reterritorialization into a space; thus, it is difficult to define the term only through its classical association with a forced displacement in relation to nostalgic exile from the native homeland, a pride of a place and a longing for the past. Diaspora, like Foucault’s heterotopia, refers to a liminal space between difference and sameness, an ambiguous break which enables new possibilities. In this space, foreignness, rather than being an inscrutable otherness and rather than approaching from a distance, can breathe a new dialogic life into the Enlightenment concepts like superiority of time over space and being over becoming. Instead of regarding space merely as conventional, passive, geographical or physical forms of place, or as a dead backdrop, in this article it is treated as a heterotopia which encapsulates not only physical location but also abstract conceptual space offering multiplicity and fluidity and time is considered to be non linear but heterotemporal. By focusing on Foucault’s heterotopia, self and power technologies, this article, instead of concentrating on a traditional homeland-centred definition of diasporic identity, aims at discussing diasporic subjectivity as dynamic, deconstructed and reconstructed negotiations.
Keywords : Foucault, Özneleşme, heterotopya, güç teknolojileri, benlik teknolojileri