“Earthquake Will Pass, and the Life Will Go On”: a Critical Reading of Public Spots of Dask

Abstract

Neoliberal governmentality encourages individuals to value their life as a proper(ty). The neoliberal valuation of life embraces ‘self-responsible’ and ‘competitive’ individuals. Drawing on the contingency of life, neoliberal governmentality intervenes in affects to govern individuals. For instance, individuals are made anxious by the insecurity, vulnerability and ambiguity about the unintended consequences of what may happen to them. In this study, we address how Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool/‘Natural Disaster Insurance Institution’ (Doğal Afet Sigortaları Kurumu—hereafter, DASK) intervenes in affects for neoliberal valuation of life as proper(ty). With an interpretive, a post-structuralist and a critical management approach, we examine and analyze the content of the public spots of DASK through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Accordingly, these public spots portray the victims of Van earthquake as ‘compulsory guests’ and problematise being a compulsory guest. We remark that the compulsory guests do not feel at home at their relatives’ homes. Within the neoliberal precarization process to foster responsible subjects, DASK portrays the uneasiness—or properness—of compulsory guests through hopes, anxieties and fears so that individuals are encouraged to get their compulsory earthquake insurance to avoid being a compulsory guest.

Analysing power and control in work organizations: Assimilating a critical socio-psychodynamic perspective

“…The combined use of appeals of freedom, activating optimistic hopes and desires, and threats to controllability, evoking negative expectations, uncertainty, and fear of constrained autonomy, would trigger subjects to assume responsibility and engage in identifying, persistent pursuit of predetermined organizational goals to restore their sense of control (Pyysiäinen, Halpin and Guilfoyle, 2017). Diagnosing a new quality of self-control, Foucault's conceptualizations of biopower and biopolitics elaborate on such shifts from coercive power toward self-disciplinary colonial regimes, pervading and shaping the most intimate domains of modern life by the dominating politicaleconomic interests of the state and capital (e.g., Aslan and Özeren, 2018;Berman, 2010;Haskaj, 2018;Moisander, Groß and Eräranta, 2018). Accordingly, biopolitics focus on vital aspects of human beings, providing intervention strategies to control groups and individuals through self-discipline regimes.…”