Page 238 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

11 Becoming “Secular Muslims”: Yasar

Nuri Öztürk as a Super-subject on

Turkish Television

Ayse Öncü

The phenomenal expansion of transnational media markets throughout the
1990s has unleashed two contradictory tendencies in different parts of the
world. On the one hand, the visual technologies and commodity logic of popu-
lar media have ruptured the seamless totality and imagined homogeneity of na-
tional cultures by lending voice and visibility to a plurality of alternative politi-
cal visions. Television, in particular, with its ontology of “liveness” and lexicon
of plentitude and choice—“free” entertainment, “free” opinions, “free” rights—
has made it increasingly dif¤cult to harness the dispersal of cultural identities
in the public realm. The production of national subjects has become fraught
with ambiguities. It is now commonplace to argue that developments in global
media culture have eroded state hegemony in the cultural realm, making the
fragmentation and dispersal of cultural identities inevitable.
Simultaneously, however, the explosive growth of commercial media have
brought into the foreground new modes of identi¤cation with the abstract na-
tion. The nation assumes a form of paramount reality, as its icons and narrative
tropes circulate in an endless variety of commodity forms, across consumer and
media markets. Belief in “the people” is reborn in two minutes of television
time, through the remarkable achievements of individuals, be they football
players, international award winners, or ordinary people who succeed in the
face of insurmountable odds. The idea that the nation exists as a totality, and
that “we” are in it, is con¤rmed daily as news reports identify the adversaries/
enemies who threaten its integrity, who endanger its well-being, health, and
morals. This mode of linking to the abstract nation reaf¤rms “the people,”
without, however, the imagination of a collective agency. It has come under
criticism as “consumer citizenship” among social analysts, and embraced as
“positive nationalism” by the transnational advertising industry.
The unfolding of the 1990s, then, has accentuated two opposing tendencies
inherent in the current expansion of transnational media markets. How the en-
suing tensions of fragmentation and af¤rmation have been played out in differ-
ent national/cultural sites, is historically contingent and politically mediated.