Microphysics of power and subjective experience in Early Republican Turkey

In this study, the methods of archaeology, genealogy and ethics developed by Michel Foucault are used to analyse the mechanism of power and constituted subjectivity in early republican Turkey. The study aims to be both a critical approach to the construction of the non-constitutive subject through the specific effects of power since it does not have an ontologically given nature and an introduction to the discovery of the artificial nature of the subject. Capillary power relations and state power, which were effective in the construction of the subject in the early republican period, followed a discontinuity based on the relationship of refusal of inheritance for the realisation of modernism, while on the other hand, they constructed the ways of perceiving and adopting the daily lives of individuals through discursive formations produced. While the study focuses on how the discourse of nationhood is internalised by individuals and how their identities are subordinated to power through subjectification, it is also based on the historicity of how boundary-attitudes are developed against power mechanisms. Looking at the 'thing' existing in a certain period within its singular contextualisations reveals the constructed nature of the subject within that period. In this context, the early republican period is a historical discontinuity that separates itself from the past, where experiences are constructed and the individual is subjectivised by regimes of truth based on discursive formations such as national identity, secularism, national education, physical health, modern motherhood and heroic masculinity. In the light of all these narratives, a Foucauldian analysis of the early republican period reveals a historical discontinuity in which the power mechanism of the period, which rejects the old by pushing it into the field of memory through oppositions such as ummah-nation, subjects-citizen, religion-secularism, madrasa-school, is compatible with biopower.