Tracing the political in everyday life: an investigation on the self quest and possibilities of Islamic youth

This thesis aims to study subjectification and recognition strategies of new middle class Islamic youth, who are members of religious families from different economic, social and cultural origins, based on performative practices such as leisure time and consumption habits, being-in-the-metropolis as "state of mind" and being-in-the-metropolis as bodily, dwelling and settlement patterns, gender relations, forms of belonging and collectivization. For this purpose, beings of these young men and women in the modern urban space is studied by using participant observation and in-depth interview methods in cafes, social assistance associations and interest-oriented groupings. According to the research, young people increasingly follow lines of flights flowed or fleeded from representational structures consisting rigid segmentarities enframed by non-permeable lines. Against the molar identities that enframe them, they leave themselves to affectively-charged molecular beings provided by possibilities of everyday life and contemporary capitalism. Hence there is now a transformation from the macro-politics of representative structures to the affectively-charged micro-politics of everyday life. Here, every practice in everyday life is a performative micropolitical practice that constitutes the self. However, cares of self, investment of desire and molecular beings of young people, which fleeded from national and religious identities that subordinate them, do not lead absolute deterritorialization consisting completely disappear of rigid segmentarities of identities. State-Neoliberal-Islam resonance machine wait at the threshold for reterritorialization and enframing them within the molar lines. In fact, subjection/subjectivation is operated at the molecular level. It must be considered that molecular flows of desire which flees Islamic youth from molar lines, are already mediated by complex assemblage of State-Neoliberal-Islam resonance machine. It is possible to see this in the operations of destruction-building machine that carries out affective atmospheric engineering on the general landscape of Istanbul or in the street and new petty bourgeois enterprises that are landscaped on a more micro scale. The operational intervention of the State-Neoliberal-Islam resonance machine on the general landscape of the city, and the micro-gentrification of local municipalities and new petit bourgeois enterprises resonating with this intervention, make city landscape in such a way that Islamic faces resonate and find their reflections. This continuous, pre-emptive, bottom-up and top-down landscapification aim to govern young Islamic men ve women at the pre-personal level by organizing and guiding their affective capacities. This is the answer why desire its own suppression and why rigid segmentarities of identities consisting social formation are not disappear and are reproduced in different appearances. This shows the fact that the political is not exhaustible and encounters at the everyday life leads to political distinctions. Old distinctions are replaced by new one in unpredictable ways.