Description
Lacanian approaches to ontological security have introduced questions of subjectivity and the affective dimensions that drive a subject’s endless ontological security pursuit. However, this emerging scholarship still narrowly focuses on the state and its elites, overlooking the more diffuse psychic forces that produce subjectivity. To address this gap, this paper argues that subject production occurs across multiple political sites, including the media. Broadening the focus from the state to alternative political sites enables the expansion of methodological tools that help to identify subject production and the pursuit for ontological security, incorporating the visual alongside oral and written discourses. By conducting a semiotic analysis of videos published from February 2016 to date, the paper articulates TRT World as a political site producing ‘Türkiye’ through its visual reporting of Türkiye’s geopolitics in Syria. TRT World’s reporting crafts multiple fantasy narratives to communicate ‘Türkiye’s wholeness. However, such narratives undergo significant evolution and ultimately fail as the dynamic Syrian conflict cannot be utilised as a resource to produce a whole ‘Türkiye’.
