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“Serbest meslek sahibi”: Neoliberal subjectivity among İstanbul's popular sectors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Cihan Tuğal
Cihan Tuğal*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, CA 94720, USA, ctugal@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

Some of the literature on neoliberal subjectivity tends to attribute omnipotence and impeccable consistency to neoliberalism. Other recent literature, by contrast, has emphasized how actually existing neoliberal subjectivity combines liberal and non-liberal elements, some of the latter emanating from local culture. However, even this revisionist scholarship holds that the non-liberal elements only lead to a smoother functioning of neoliberalism. A focus on informal workers and small merchants in a squatter district in İstanbul reveals that neoliberal subjectivity harbors contradictory orientations that might actually undermine some aspects of neoliberalism. The mixture of self-reliance, individual responsibility (condensed in an emphasis on hard work and pious patience), and entrepreneurial spirit with extra-market survival techniques, as well as non-liberal orientations toward legal property, land and money, and desire of redistribution (as well as state protection against big capital) all exhibit how marketization is restricted, twisted, and perhaps endangered, even within the process of neoliberalization.

Keywords

NeoliberalismsubjectivityIslamentrepreneurialismworkers
Type
Dossier on Urban Classes and Politics in the Neoliberal Era: Turkey in Comparison
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 46 , Spring 2012 , pp. 65 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2012

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