Reasoning Russian Nation-ness for Transnational Audiences : Extending self, alienating other, constituting order

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DISSERTATIONS | TEEMU OIVO | REASONING RUSSIAN NATION-NESS FOR TRANSNATIONAL AUDIENCES | No 262

Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies

PUBLICATIONS OF

THE UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND

TEEMU OIVO

Reasoning Russian Nation-ness for

Transnational

Audiences

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Reasoning Russian Nation-ness for Transnational Audiences

Extending self, alienating other, constituting order

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PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND DISSERTATIONS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND BUSINESS STUDIES

N:o 262

Teemu Oivo

REASONING RUSSIAN NATION-NESS FOR TRANSNATIONAL AUDIENCES

EXTENDING SELF, ALIENATING OTHER, CONSTITUTING ORDER

ACADEMIC DISSERTATION

To be presented by the permission of the Faculty of Science and Forestry for public examination in the AU100 in Aurora building at the

University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, on December, 17, 2021, at 12 o’clock.

University of Eastern Finland

Department of Geographical and Historical Studies

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PunaMusta Oy Joensuu, 2021

Editor in-Chief / Editor: Markus Mättö Sales: University of Eastern Finland Library

ISBN: 978-952-61-4410-8 (print) ISBN: 978-952-61-4411-5 (PDF)

ISSNL: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

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Author’s address: Department of Geographical and Historical Studies University of Eastern Finland

JOENSUU FINLAND

Doctoral programme: Social and Cultural Encounters

Supervisors: Adjunct Professor Paul Fryer, Ph.D.

Department of Geographical and Historical Studies University of Eastern Finland

JOENSUU FINLAND

Professor Olga Davydova-Minguet, Ph.D.

Karelian Institute

University of Eastern Finland JOENSUU

FINLAND

Reviewers: Professor Tiit Tammaru, Ph.D.

Urban and Population Geography Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences University of Tartu

TARTU ESTONIA

Adjunct Professor Katja Lehtisaari, D.Soc.Sc.

Journalism

Helsinki University &

Information Technology and Communication Studies Tampere University

TAMPERE FINLAND

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Opponent: Professor Tiit Tammaru, Ph.D.

Urban and Population Geography Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences University of Tartu

TARTU ESTONIA

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Oivo, Teemu

Reasoning Russian Nation-ness for Transnational Audiences: Extending self, alienating other, constituting order

Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland, 2021 Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies; 262 ISBN: 978-952-61-4410-8 (print)

ISBN: 978-952-61-4411-5 (PDF) ISSNL: 1798-5749

ISSN: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

ABSTRACT

Russianness means contextually varying significance of something being Russian. It can be banal, but notions of Russianness are also often actively rationalised and problematised. The main purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to shed light on how novel technologies and social developments engender new spaces for people to be influenced through and engage in social production of Russianness and the subjectivities related to it in (trans-) national media spaces. I explore the ways of constructing Russianness in four different case studies from Finnish and Russian language media platforms in the 2010s. These cases include 1) presentation of Western media in Russian television, 2) perception of fear of Russianness in a Finnish border region (North Karelia) newspaper and online forums, 3) notions of Karelianness in popular Russian language online forums and 4) discourses of citizenship- membership in an online forum of Finland’s Russian speakers.

In my approach I have applied critical discourse analysis to examine effectively productive and limiting power of Russianness and supplemented it with online research methods to understand the social contexts in the internet’s social environment. The discursive knowledge of Russianness entailed identification norms for desirable nation-ness and media usership

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security policy guidelines for Russia’s neighbouring countries and everyday life possibilities for people residing close to its border. Russianness was, albeit problematised, a powerful and even self-evident discursive otherness for Westernness, Karelianness and Finnishness. Whereas national subjectification often produced the default points of reference, my research shows how practices of transnational knowledge flows and hybrid self-identification functioned as countering, albeit still territorialising forces to it.

Expectations of the relations and responsiveness of imagined audiences to claims about Russianness reflected on the formation of representations of Russia and Russians in the media. Since these representations were understood to have a tendency to be biased, reserved and critical media literacy related to Russianness was generally encouraged in media discourses.

Through various positionalities provided by media discourses, the Russianness of a state and people was reasoned to be a contextually contingent matter of emotions and politics. Simultaneously, however, Russianness was implied to be imposingly essential and ‘true’ in terms of historical, legal administrative, geopolitical, banal common knowledge and first-hand experiences that order the state of the world through national differentiation.

Keywords: Russianness, nation-ness, transnationalism, media discourse, online research

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Oivo, Teemu

Venäläisyydellä selittäminen kansainvälisille yleisöille: Jatkuva minuus, vie- raannuttava toiseus ja perustava järjestys

Joensuu: Itä-Suomen yliopisto, 2021

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Social Sciences and Business Studies; 262 ISBN: 978-952-61-4410-8 (print)

ISBN: 978-952-61-4411-5 (PDF) ISSNL: 1798-5749

ISSN: 1798-5749 ISSN: 1798-5757 (PDF)

TIIVISTELMÄ

Venäläisyyden käsite on voimakkaasti asiayhteyhteysriippuvainen asioiden sosiaalisen merkityksellistämisen väline. Venäläisyys on yhtä aikaa näkyvästi keskusteltu ja poliittiseen käyttöön valjastettu käsite sekä toisaalta tietoon huomaamattomasti kytkeytynyttä valtaa. Tämän väitöskirjan tarkoitus on sel- vittää neljän tapaustutkimuksen kautta kuinka sosiaalisesti rakentuva venä- läisyys aktiivisesti vaikutti suomen- ja venäjänkielisissä (yli-)rajaisissa mediati- loissa 2010-luvulla. Artikkeleista ensimmäinen käsittelee länsimaisen median esitystä Venäjän televisiossa, toinen Venäjä-pelon käsitystä Pohjois-Karjalan maakuntalehdessä ja verkkofoorumilla, kolmas karjalaisuuskeskusteluita Venäjän suosituilla verkkosivustoilla ja neljäs kansalaisuuteen kytkeytyvää jäsenyyttä Suomen venäjänkielisten verkkofoorumilla.

Tutkimusmenetelmissäni sovelsin kriittistä diskurssianalyysiä selvittääk- seni venäläisyyteen liittyvää toimintamalleja tuottavaa ja rajoittavaa tieto- valtaa. Lisäksi hahmotin internetissä muodostuvia sosiaalisia konteksteja verkkotutkimukseen tarkoitettujen tukimenetelmien avulla. Diskurssiivinen tieto venäläisyydestä vaikutti käsityksiin kansakunnan ideaalijäsenyydestä, uutislukutaidosta, Venäjän naapurimaiden turvallisuuspolitiikan linjauksista sekä Venäjän raja-alueiden asukkaiden jokapäiväisestä elämästä. Monimerki-

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venäläisyyttä, venäjänmaalaisuutta että (diasporista) venäjänkielisyyttä. Siitä huolimatta että venäläisyyden olemuksesta käytiin paljon keskustelua, ilmeni se jopa itsestään selvänä pidettynä toiseutena länsimaalaisuudelle, karjalai- suudelle ja suomalaisuudelle. Vaikka tutkimissani viestinnässä kansallisuuk- sien käsitteet toimivat vakiinnuttavina yhteisinä viittauskohteina, ilmeni niille ylirajaisten tietovirtojen ja ihmisten hybridisten itseidentifikaatioiden kautta myös vastavoimia. Toisaalta myös nämä vastavoimat toisintivat kansojen mukaan järjestyvää territorialisaatiota.

Oletukset mediayleisöistä ja vuorovaikutuksesta heidän kanssaan heijas- tuivat venäläisyyden representaatioiden muodostumiseen eri foorumeilla.

Tutkimissani keskusteluissa nämä representaatiot käsitettiin olevan taipu- vaisia vääristymille, minkä vuoksi kyseenalaistavaa medialukutaitoa paino- tettiin usein. Useiden mediadiskurssien luomien positioiden tahoilta valtion ja ihmisten venäläisyyttä järkeisteltiin kontekstisidonnaisena tunteiden ja po- litiikan asiana. Toisaalta venäläisyyden kuitenkin viitattiin olevan pakottavan perusluonteista ja ’totta’ siinä, kuinka osana kansakuntien maailmaa se jäse- nöittää kansakuntien maailmaa; historiaa, juridista hallintoa, geopolitiikkaa, yleistietoa sekä ihmisten omakohtaisia kokemuksia.

Avainsanat: venäläisyys, mediadiskurssi, kansakunta, ylirajaisuus, internet- tutkimus

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Getting this doctoral dissertation done has been a long journey that has strongly affected my life and the way that I see the world. Gratefully, I have met and learned to know several helpful, interesting, and brilliant people along the way, many of whom deserve acknowledgement in this work. First, I want to thank my supervisors Paul Fryer and Olga Davydova-Minguet for believing in me and providing a great deal of irreplaceable support to get through all the challenges along the way. Secondly, I thank my dissertation pre-examiners Tiit Rammaru and Katja Lehtisaari for their valuable comments and helpful insights on my work.

There are two institutions that have been my workplaces and provided all the necessary resources for my journey to complete this Ph.D.: the Karelian Institute and Aleksanteri Institute. Members of both communities have made me glad to come to the office, taught me a lot, inspired, and supported me. I thank the great people of the University of Eastern Finland and the Karelian Institute as well as the colleagues and funders of the related research projects Flexible Ethnicities, Finland’s Russian-speakers as media users, PREMIC, and GLASE. Special mention goes to Pekka Suutari, Petri Kahila, Ilkka Liikanen, James Scott, Jeremy Smith, Jussi Laine, Nora Huurinainen, Lea Kervinen, Merja Ikonen, Driss Habti, Tiina Sotkasiira, Janne Riiheläinen, Gleb Yarovoy, Ilja Moshnikov, Pauliina Lukinmaa, Karli Storm-Närväinen, Chloe Wells, Evgeny Manzhurin, Joni Virkkunen and Minna Piipponen. Extra special thanks to Pirjo Pöllänen, Ismo Björn, Stan Domaniewski and Alicja Fajfer.

Moreover, I am thankful for the people of the Aleksanteri Institute for adopting me after I moved to Helsinki. Special mention goes to Markku Kangaspuro, Judith Pallot, Sirke Mäkinen, Kaarina Aitamurto, Sari Autio- Sarasmo, Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, Daria Gritsenko, Margarita Zavadskaya, Jussi Lassila, Hanna Peltonen, Tapani Kaakkuniemi, Emilia Pyykönen, Marko Tiainen, Niina Into, Markku Kivinen, Elina Kahla, Saara Ratilainen, Jukka Pietiläinen, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, and Mariëlle Wijermars. I am also grateful to all the people with whom I was involved in the FRRESH/INREES network for

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Of the many people outside these two institutions, I want to thank Nooa Nykänen, Polina Kopylova, Eilina Gusatinsky, Kristiina Silvan, Veera Laine, Aappo Kähönen, Adam Stepien and the inventor of coffee. Thanks to Lassi Heininen and Valentina Katainen for getting me started on this path already back at the University of Lapland and Rupert Moreton for his excellent proofreading of and editorial work with the original synthesis of this dissertation. Any subsequent errors in this dissertation are my own. I thank my friends – especially jamming with my bandmates has been the best recovery after hard days of work. My parents and sister deserve credit for being major indirect influences on my achievements. Moreover, my mother and sister also used their teacher superpowers to proofread my Finnish papers. Lastly, and most importantly, my greatest gratitude goes to my incredible sputnitsa zhizni Masha, who proofread numerous drafts of mine, helped me overcome many obstacles and helped me to sort my thoughts and to see the brighter side of things.

Helsinki, 3 November 2021 Teemu Oivo

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PROLOGUE

“I’m going to give you the same advice my father got from his father when he was heading to Russia: ‘just try to stay alive’.” My own father said this to me when I was embarking on a student exchange in Russia in 2010. This imagined bridge to 1942 refers not only to the later mythicised and romanticised real horrors of the war my grandparents’ generation had to survive, but also to the idea that Russia continues to differ so greatly from Finland that Finns struggle to survive there. This did not stop me going to Russia. That fatherly advice is now humorous, because my family and I did not really believe in a fatalist difference between contemporary Finland and Russia, even if the stereotypical “as-if” story to which I refer was so familiar that it required no further explanation. I was still nervous going “into a whole other world”, and it affected how I made sense of my experiences during the exchange and beyond.

The residents of my hometown Rovaniemi often travel across the Finnish border to the town of Haparanda in Sweden, where they so often remind themselves “it is not so different here from Finland”. Finland’s eastern border is less than 40 kilometres further from Rovaniemi than Haparanda. It represents a much more distant and mythical national other than the distance to the border implies, the definitive beginning and end of the Finnish nation.

Statistically, it was not unusual that somebody like me did not personally know any Russians in my hometown, since it took until 2007 for the number of Russian speakers living in Rovaniemi to exceed 1,000, despite a relatively high growth rate since 1990 (Tanttu 2008:9). Since my exchange studies in Petrozavodsk, I have lived in Russia on three more occasions, travelled there many times, been enriched by several great friendships both in Russia and in Finland, and found myself marrying into a wonderful Russian family. Now my personal experiences support the social constructivist idea that we as people and our institutions make national differences very real in some moments and places.

In 2008 my original quest to learn Russian was inspired by my desire

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would at least partially explain the alienating structures, the differences in understanding and connecting with each other, not only between Russians and Finns, but more generally between Russians and Westerners. Like some of my Russian friends on the other side of this imagined demarcation, I have had frustrating struggles with the difference, finding myself giving voice to the self-actualising thought that the difference of our national backgrounds prevent us from truly understanding each other. While we can draw the same conclusion about ultimate understanding at the level of each person who is not identical to ourselves, many tend to repeat these fatalistic chains of thought on a generalising national basis. Some people want to diminish national difference, others celebrate or belittle it, and some even knowingly seek to cultivate it to consolidate alienation. The questions my dissertation asks do not seek to describe what “Russian” is and compare it with other national ideas, but to shed light on how various contextual perceptions of

“Russianness” in transnational media produce difference in making sense of the world of politics and identities. I have done this within a framework of four academic research projects that have spawned four individual articles examining this issue.

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1 INTRODUCTION

What identifies people, environments, products, and ways of doing things as Russian, Finnish, Western, Karelian, native, or foreign can be personal, mundane, and seemingly trivial, but it has inspired National Romanticism, sacrifices, and cost human lives. Similarly, as health-restricted mobility emerged simultaneously with the call to construe the modern nation state (Paasi 2011:27) in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, national boundary making emerged in defining priorities of who should save whom, and who are therefore inside – and outside – the privileges of support and decision making. Between the times of crises, pandemics, and wars when nations are called into being, the idea of people’s nationhood is kept relevant in politics, popular culture, and everyday practices that can be normalised and digested into becoming unnoticeable. “Nation”, “the people”, and “the majority” belong to a powerful vocabulary that legitimises the order of socio-spatial relations, reflected in state institutions to parents selecting a school for their children, and expectations of common ground in communications (see e.g. Fox &

Miller-Idriss 2008). The global scale of these issues deservedly has attracted attention in almost every field of social research. They are relevant to topics such as migration, social policies, human rights, xenophobia, geopolitics, and the like. Related to these broad topics, this doctoral dissertation examines

“Russianness”.

A dignitary of studies of nations and nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1983) suggests examining nations as lingually and socially constructed “nation- ness”. Anderson connects nation-ness strongly with imagination and efforts to establish nation as a limited, solidary and sovereign community. Later nationalism studies have broadened this perspective on nations, notably their more casual manifestations (Billig 1995; Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008). This dissertation is a study of “Russianness”, which is not only a socio-spatially constructed nation-ness, but also productive, in other words, discursive force in social relations.

Nation-ness discourses simplify vast heterogenic groups of people under

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debunked, but human cognitive limitations and social conditioning nonetheless make them a socially constructed reality. The relevance of nation- ness is socially constructed as something with which people can identify, and to which they anchor their sense of a stable and ontologically secured ground of being and belonging. It is also used to reason about the world through the interpretative lenses of nationally ordered sameness and difference. This conceptualisation provides a limited but relevantly inclusive and grounded perspective for a scrutiny of Russianness. While there are many different and competing ideas concerning what is and should constitute Russianness, some overlap and are recognised as common ground, socialised expectations of shared ideas, according to which people orient themselves in the given social and political order.

When and where national order, identities, and normality are questioned is meaningful, and they are strongly influenced by the transnationalising spaces of media flows and cultural globalisation. Alongside with public education, media can provide common point of reference or an alienating point of exclusion for those who do not identify with its content (e.g. Madianou 2005:134–135; Davydova-Minguet et al. 2016). Katrin Becker (2008:126–127) points out that while the increasingly transnational circulation of media content has problematised the previous relationship between geography and identity, their interpretation remains anchored in far less mobile semiotic settings. My doctoral dissertation contributes to the study of these dynamics from the perspective of discursive Russianness in the Finnish-Russian transnational media space. In my four-article doctoral dissertation, I have studied these discursive knowledge-power relations of Russianness through the following research questions, represented in hierarchical order:

1. How did the transnational media space produce Russianness during the 2010s?

2. How was Russianness represented and challenged through different positionalities in the transnational media discourse?

3. How was Russianness represented unquestionably?

4. What kind of media use did the transnational media discourse of Rus- sianness produce?

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5. How were discourses of Russianness co-constitutive in the production of other related socio-spatially imagined identities?

Here the first research question (RQ) encapsulates the main question, which is first expanded and elaborated in the second RQ. The problematised object of analysis here is the mediated representations of Russianness that function in mediated and hence socio-spatially indirect communication relationships.

This provides a perspective that is more empirical than phenomenological.

Asking how questions emphasises the scrutiny of how some things in socio- spatial and temporal contexts are, and others are not, signified as meaningful Russianness. This highlights a discursive Russianness, instead of experienced or descriptive Russianness or the canon of its idea. The third and fourth questions draw on the second RQ in their critical assessment and acceptance of certain kinds of knowledge and representations of Russianness. Whereas the first three questions examine how the socio-spatial environment produces Russianness, the last two view how Russianness engenders its own sideproduct subjectivities: media user and other socio-spatial (nation-ness) identities. Answering these questions helps to understand the differences in understanding inter- and transnationally interrelated Russianness.

I have chosen to examine these RQs through four case studies that mix various contextual elements. Table 1 shows that in each article the variable elements consist of the location and language of the expected media audience, media platform, event focus, and geopolitical production. While some representations of Russianness are more repetitive than others, following poststructivist epistemology, I do not see these elements as forming replicable formulas about certain conditions leading to predictable outcomes.

Instead, through the variety of conditions in the four research cases, I seek to better understand the various possibilities of Russianness. While I am interested in the challenges of the dominant discourses of Russianness, I have selected cases where “Russianness” is not evidently the central topic but its constitutive element to identify its unproblematised and hence powerful manifestations.

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Table 1. Article perspectives on Russianness Article 1:

Unreliable West

Article 2:

Fear of Russianness

A3:

Karelianness and

nationalism

A4:

Citizen ship- membership Location of

the expected audience

national

Russia regional

Finland regional

Russia national Finland Addressee

language Russian Finnish Russian Russian

Platform:

legacy (LM) or social (SM) media

legacy

media legacy media (supplementary SM)

social

media social media (supplementary LM)

Focused event (FE) or several topics (ST)

event focus several topics several topics event focus

Produced and productive spaces

national and

international border

region(s) (ethnic) republic, border region

national and transnational

1.1 Choice of research terminology

As I have already highlighted in the previous sub-section, Russianness relates to several topics that are studied especially in Russia’s neighbouring countries.

Marlène Laruelle (2019, 6) has expressed a concern that the tense state of international affairs is reflected in biases in Russian studies in Western states. However, there is a great volume of competent research touching the subject of Russianness. Relevant studies range from Vladimir Putin’s speeches (Laine 2020); the post-Soviet space (Zhurzhenko 2014; Skulte- Ouaiss 2015); everyday patriotism in Russia (Goode 2017; Kalinina 2017);

linguo-cultural imaginations (Makarychev 2012; Ryazanova-Clarke 2017);

immigration (Pöllänen 2014; Krivonos 2019); memory politics (Davydova- Minguet 2018; Wijermars 2019); elites (Müller 2012; Hudson 2012); and so on. However, unlike in many of these previous studies, the main attention in current research is not on the Russian idea but its discursive power. My initial idea and approach of examining discursive Russianness was inspired

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in particular by Iver B. Neumann’s (1996; 1999; 2010) work on uses of the other: Russia vis-à-vis Europe and a normalising (international) social order.

Some conceptual choices need to be addressed briefly at this point before discussing them in more detail in the later sections.

As my research shows, people often find nationalist stigma aversive, even though it can be understood as a nation’s chief constructor and sustainer (Hirschi 2011:22): a finite, solidary, and sovereign imagined community (Anderson [1983] 2007) that the same people praise. For ethical reasons I have interpreted acts, not people, as nationalist. I seek to cover discursive nationalism and nationhood in the less evident contexts of people’s everyday lives. This approach should remedy the previously ignored dynamics and practices of dominant groups outside formal institutions (Billig 1995; Madianou 2005; Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008; Goode & Stroup 2015). Scholars have also encouraged the examination of counterforces of everyday nationalism using concepts such as ethnoscape (Appadurai 1996), everyday cosmopolitanism (Beck 2002), and transnationalism (Vertovec 2009). However, on the internet, for example, these forces do not always oppose but accumulate one another (Szulc 2017).

Through the prism of transnationality, that is, the active social interaction and bonds of non-state actors across state borders (Vertovec 2009:2), I wish to highlight the complexity of the counterforces facing, interacting, and challenging perceptions of nation-ness. Studies of transnationalism have faced the criticism that they are unable to depart from the nation as their basic unit of analysis (ibid., 20). The current research does not intend to provide a new

“real” or “nation-independent” discursive model to replace the national social order. Instead, it scrutinises the national and state territoriality of identities in contexts where the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) fundamentally transforms the knowledge and experience of socio-spatiality. Some of the media content in this research is produced in Russia, some in Finland or other states, but their cross-border transmission and consumption happen within the discursive transnational media space.

In this research I view discourses as socioculturally ordered and functional information (organised bodies of knowledge-power) resources that people

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& Agnew 1992; Keller 2012). The epistemology of discourse entails that meanings are not immediate but mediated (Laclau & Mouffe 200: xi). Media discourse refers to the ordering of socio-spatial norms in communication mediated by technological broadcast platforms with non-present audiences.

These norms regulate subject relations for the presentation, distribution, filtering, selection, assessment, and reuse of media content.

In vernacular speech and even academic research, media is an easily overlooked concept. A plural of medium, media can be defined simply as a multiplicity of channels through which communication is mediated. This definition can become too inclusive for the social constructivist view that reality is not immediate but already socially mediated. In addition, ICTs are embedding in our social life in a historical accelerating process (Couldry &

Hepp 2016). Media can be categorised as press, television, radio, and online media or dichotomies like journalistic-non-journalistic, traditional/legacy- new/digital/online, public-private, and so on. Since newer and older methods of media communication are interconnected and mixed, media scholars have characterised contemporary media as “hybrid”, implying flux, in-betweenness, and their interstitial and liminal nature (Chadwick 2017:10). A decreasing amount of media operates strictly offline, whereas TV programmes can incorporate Twitter feeds to engage the audience, for example (Yagodin 2014; Floridi 2015a; Oivo 2021). In this thesis I distinguish between media platforms as discursive spaces, not according to the people who are involved in them. I refer to the televised programmes, newspapers, and web content of news agencies as “legacy media”. In “social media” I include blogs, discussion forums, and more established social networking sites such as Facebook and VKontakte. They all enable a low-threshold means of content production, sharing, and social interaction.

There are several cases in which the Finnish-Russian transnational media space presents instances of problematic ignorance concerning what Edward Said (1994) refers to as “contrapuntal reading”, that is, a multiplicity of positions and horizons from which a mediated reading may start. For example, in 2018 a Helsingin Sanomat article depicted a Russian passport next to a Finnish one in the lead-in picture for a report about an initiative enabling the denaturalisation of Finnish dual citizens who had committed a

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felony (Luukka 2018). This led Finland’s Russian speakers to initiate a petition demanding that the publisher apologise and change the image, which they were concerned would stigmatise them in the eyes of Finnish media users.

This was characterised as part of a long-term trend (adressit.fi 2018; see also Kopylova 2018). In this dissertation, I seek to give more attention to the transnational multiplicity of user and producer positions in the contemporary Finnish-Russian media space. The following background section reviews the related regional and geopolitical contexts for this research.

1.2 Background: Russian-Finnish (trans-)national borderlands

My dissertation presents how several collective identities are bound by diverse transnationally spatial processes around one and the same geopolitical border. The Finnish-Russian border has several overlapping formal and informal meanings. My case studies between 2010 and 2018 display the border’s meaning-making, both as a boundary in its own right and as a small element of a larger scale. While it is defined as a national border in international and national perspectives, for people in North Karelia it is also a border with the most familiar Russia, which they differentiate from the Russia in bilateral and international contexts (Article 2). In discussions of regional identity on the eastern side of the border in the Republic of Karelia, the border can for some be a less highlighted signifier of identity than its borders with other subjects of the Russian Federation (Article 3). For Finnish-Russian dual citizens it is a border between two homelands (Article 4).

However, several contexts highlight it as a border between Russia and what is perceived as the “Western” world (Articles 1 to 4). In this chapter I briefly review the apparently classical geopolitical boundary and the complexities of its frontier, transnational, and borderland features as my dissertation’s contextual background.

When the Empire of Russia annexed most of what became known as Finland from the Swedish Empire in 1812, the bounds of this territory did

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awakenings in the nineteenth century preceded the establishment of the modern state border which separated them in 1917 (Paasi 1996:83–85, 137–156). While their shared history before this separation has several remaining marks, particularly visible in the urban landscapes of St Petersburg and Helsinki, this common period is relatively little present in media and public commemoration in Finland (Lounasmeri 2011; Article 2) and in Russia (Davydova-Minguet 2019; Izotov 2018). In the late 1910s, before the establishment of what became strictly closed formal state borders, there was a brief period when the frontiers witnessed informal trade, and armed conflicts took place between the recently established Finnish state and a Soviet Russia riven by civil war (Roselius & Silvennoinen 2019).

The meaning of the Finnish-Russian border differs notably between national identity canons. The border was drawn in its current place as a result of the Second World War, and it became a key objectifying visualiser of the Finnish and Russian historical Selves. However, the Finnish national canon emphasises the Winter War (1939–1940), which is an almost forgotten skirmish in the Russian canon, which emphasises “the Great Patriotic War” (1941–

1945) (Kangaspuro 2011; Davydova-Minguet 2018; Wells 2020). Throughout the history of the Soviet Union the border was securitised, allowing low cross- border mobility. However, it is notable that all Soviet external (and to a degree even internal) borders were under a similar regime. Although its location remained unchanged, the meaning of this border changed significantly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it became more open (see e.g. Paasi 1996;

Moisio 1998; Kähönen & Laine 2019).

Karelia has been a vaguely located, imagined, and mythicised land for centuries, with great natural, cultural, and historical significance in both Finland and Russia (Suutari & Davydova-Minguet 2019:5–6). In the history of boundary relations the vagueness of Karelianness has functioned as both a source of connection and conflict. When the Russian Empire fell, there was no administrative region of Karelia. In 1920 most of the former Olonets Governorate was reformed as the Karelian Labour Commune, and again as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923. On the Finnish side of the border the province of North Karelia was formed in 1945 in the regions of the former province of Kuopio, and the province of South Karelia in the former

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province of Kymi (the remaining parts of the ceded province of Vyborg 1812–

1945) in 1997. “Karelia” became a site of the political imaginaries of “Greater Finland” and the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic during the Second World War before the post-war order consolidated its geopolitical borders (Paasi 1996; Liikanen 2013). Their administrative significance changed first in 1956 with the establishment of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then with the establishment of the federal subject of the Republic of Karelia in 1992, and then with the centralisation of its administrative power to Moscow in the 2000s (ibid.; Goode 2011). Most recently, in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of the border with Finland.

Since inner borders in Russia are discussed as a concern for corruption, criminality, and ethnic tensions, their quality and legitimacy have been a politically sensitive topic, particularly regarding ethnic federal subjects (Kähönen & Laine 2019). Within the Republic of Karelia, ethnicity is historically formed in formal and informal institutions and relations between Russianness, Finnishness and Karelianness. In practice these representations are characteristically flexible, political and transnational (Davydova-Minguet 2019; Sotkasiira 2019).

Bordering Russianness from Finnishness and vice versa goes well beyond territorial delineation. Paasi (2011, 23) calls the Finnish-Russian border an example of an “emotional landscape of control” in its labelling as a division between East and West. The geopolitical or “civilisational” boundary between

“the West” and Russia is much scrutinised due to the flexibility of this informal demarcation. This is arguably influenced by the popularisation of Samuel Huntington’s (1996) book The Clash of Civilizations title rather than its content.

While the civilisational division is widely criticised in the scientific discourse, the political myth is not false by default, because at times it refers to empirically real conflicts and has a self-realising function in producing identities (Bottici

& Challand 2010, 2; Eide 2008; Laruelle 2016).

“Westernness” manifests frontier functions of cultural, economic, and political exchange, among others things by the distribution and consumption of transnational media flows enabled by the increased mobility of people, goods, and information. If the EU, Schengen, and NATO borders are defined

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new member state. This border definition has famously been incorporated in the encircled Russia narrative and discourse, affecting the geopolitical modalities of Russian situatedness. Whereas the states between the EU and Russian geopolitical ambitions have been referred to as “borderlands”

(Zhurzhenko 2014), EU-Finland is a little more ambiguously a borderland between Russia and NATO. However, in recent years Finland has increased cooperation with the transatlantic alliance.

For transnational subjects like Finnish-Russian dual citizens the Finno- Russian border reflects their everyday security and vulnerability. In the European context there are two major groups of discourse concerning Russians abroad: the diaspora due to the “emigrated” borders after the fall of the Soviet Union; and the people who have themselves emigrated.

Russian borders embed constitutionally different meanings for these two groups. Finland’s Russian speakers by and large moved to Finland voluntarily after 1991 from the former Soviet states, particularly from Northwest Russia, Estonia, and Ukraine. The border therefore differs for people who emigrated from Russia to Finland and the Russian-speaking minorities in the Soviet breakaway states. However, the geo-historical place of the eastern border contributes to the simplifying stereotype that all Finland’s Russian speakers are from Russia, which is a social reality for people of this group who have moved from other countries or were even born in Finland (Kananen, Ronkainen, & Saari 2018). The people who are bound by both sides of the Finno-Russian border have been securitised in cases like the extension of restrictions in real estate and land ownership for foreign nationals (Kolossov 2011:188; Oivo & Davydova-Minguet 2019). Further, the Russian state has instrumentalised Russian speakers “abroad” as an identity-political project to produce extraterritorial “Russianness” (Zhurzhenko 2014; Lähteenmäki 2015; Suslov 2017).

Making national or ethnic definitions has a global tendency to be ambiguous and controversial, which also applies to defining “Russians” in Finland. Russian legal status was strongly highlighted in the dual citizenship discussions in 2014 and 2017. Although the statistics exist, there is no legal obligation to register citizenship in Finland. According to the 2016 statistics, of 104,997 Finnish dual (multi-)citizens living in Finland, 27,456 had Russian

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citizenship, outnumbering by roughly four times the next largest group of Swedish dual citizens. The 30,970 Russian citizens residing in Finland are the second largest nationality group after Estonians, some of whom are Russian speakers. Furthermore, 11,356 (2016) people born in Finland have either a mother or both parents from Russia or the Soviet Union, and while there is no census data on bilinguals, Russian speakers are the country’s largest non-official language group¹.In 1990 the share of Russian speakers of Finland’s population was 0.5 per cent (3,884). By 2010 the number had grown to 54,559, and by 2017, at the time of the discussions in Article 4, to 75,444.

During the 1990s 60–70 percent of immigrants moved to Finland through a repatriation programme aimed at Finnic groups emigrating from the former Soviet Union. Geographically, Russian speakers reside largely in the eastern parts of Finland, with the largest numbers in the capital region (Varjonen, Zamiatin, & Rinas, 2017: 9–12, 16, 30).

Overall, a scrutiny of the statistics reveals how ambiguous and even misleading Russian identification can be. Official categorisation by language is an oft-used identification criterion that I have also used in referring to my informants, even though its point of reference is inaccurate. While some of Finland’s Russia speakers happily highlight their Russianness to other people, there are others who want to distance themselves from this identification, either because they do not identify themselves as Russian or wish to avoid negative reactions. Many of Finland’s Russian speakers have experienced prejudice based on the historically negative otherness discourse of Russianness in Finland (Klinge 1972; Paasi 1996). Several studies have exposed experiences of discrimination and prejudice against Russian speakers (Pöllänen 2014, Varjonen, Arnold & Jasinskaja-Lahti 2013). A Russian association has even been considered to undermine people’s social status (Ronkainen 2009:213; Krivonos 2019). Within a wider context, the discussion of the inclusivity of Finnish nation-ness emerged as a major politicised topic in the 2010s. Focusing as it has mostly on people from the Middle East and North Africa and issues of Islam, the relationship of Russianness to Finnishness has

1 By the end of the decade their number had reached almost 82,000

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faded into the background of this discussion (Article 2; Davydova-Minguet &

Pöllänen 2017; Oivo 2021). In the Finnish media the long-term cultural and media production of Russian otherness has been recognised, less in the form of direct prejudice but in a negative overall picture (e.g. Raittila 2004; Ojajärvi

& Valtonen 2011; Laine 2015).

1.3 Outline of the thesis

This paper continues with theory sections, staring with an introduction to identities, subjectification, and my scientific-philosophical position concerning knowledge. This includes the notions of space and place that are problematised by virtual experiences in the media and other factors that challenge national identity paradigms. From these abstract themes I move towards more concrete aspects in the third chapter, which I open with a review of relevant theory of socio-spatially imagined (produced and bounded) identities, (banal) nationalism, and post/transnationalism. In the final part of the third chapter I relate these perspectives to Russian studies. In the fourth chapter I present the transnational media discourse as a key concept of this research. Here I review the theoretical discussion of how legacy and social media provide speaker positions and conditions for imagining national and transnational communities through ICT mediation; how media discourse produces critical media use, and the national and transnational media space.

Having presented how theory helps in empirical interpretation, I continue with the data and methods section, where I present systematic and technical aspects of the current research. The structure of this section follows Gordon Waitt’s and Nikolas Rose’s instructions for conducting Foucauldian discourse analysis, including my choices of coding and netnography as supplementary methods. I also review discourse studies for the background context of this methodology. In latter parts of this section, I reflect on my ethical and applicative approaches. The sixth and seventh chapters comprise article summaries and a concluding discussion.

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2 KNOWING AND RULING SPACE

Understanding knowledge as discursive – spatially, temporally and culturally constructed, productive and constraining – fundamentally shapes research questions, methodological capacities, and the limitations of current research.

What is the knowledge that discourse analysis explores in Russianness?

What kind of identities and spatiality does such knowledge produce and vice versa? How are notions of space, place, and virtuality challenging classical geopolitical paradigms of nation-ness? In this relation, Allan Luke instructs:

“The next generation of CDA research must contend with blended and hynrid forms of representation and identity, and new spatial and temporal relations generated by the technologically enhanced ‘flows’ of bodies, capital, and discourse that characterize economic and cultural globalization. These are likely to require new, hybrid blends of analytic techniques and social theories.” (Luke 2002, 98)

This chapter elaborates the scientific philosophical basis of my dissertation and affords an introduction to the following sections that apply these philosophical settings. First, I scrutinise the social constructivist understanding of knowledge, truth, structures, and agency. I then present and discuss the Foucauldian key concepts through which I have interpreted and problematised the power-knowledge relations of social constructs.

Section 2.2.1. reflects a critical approach to notions of belonging, flexible identities, and the essential Self. Finally, Section 2.2.2. further scrutinises how information and communication technologies (ICT) function as knowledge- power resources with spatiality, temporality, and identities.

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2.1 Social construction

Understanding human communities like Russian nation-ness, with more general questions concerning how we can understand humanity and nature, revolves around the paradigm of modernity. The (late) modern subject is characterised as a fundamentally rational, self-reflexive, and expressive individual, whereas premodern identification signifiers are more related to tradition, spirituality, and collectivism. The enlightenment ideal at the core of modernist thought entails knowledge’s empowerment and emancipation of people, whereas the enlightened truth emphasises critically reasoned and empirically tested verification by educated expert authorities. These ideals were celebrated in discussions of the truth about MH17 (Article 1), the historical validity of fearing Russia (Article 2), the statistical data of the population census in the Republic of Karelia (Article 3), and Finland (Article 4).

However, in contrast with the empowering of truthful knowledge, these cases splice social divisions, alienation², tensions and conflicts. As an influential system of thought, modernity has a strong influence across contemporary social relations, but the critique of it is well established in academic research (Soja 1989; Haraway 1991; Giddens 1991; Latour 1993; Appadurai 1996;

Floridi 2015a).

The idea that identities like Russianness are socially constructed dates to the 1960s, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic Social Construction of Reality (1966). Accordingly, language functions as a “conversation machinery”

for constructing a shared social reality, and most importantly, a knowledge based on “common sense”. Social structures pre-exist individuals and groups.

However, they have a certain freedom and agency to dialectically orient, challenge, and transform structures within the limits of the sociocultural resources and practices at their disposal (Keller 2012, 55–61). Geographers have since examined how meanings of social experiences, positionalities, and space and place construct one another (e.g. Buttimer 1974; Soja 1989;

Paasi 1996).

2 Alienation is a feeling of unrelatedness – that engagement is useless (Rauste- von Wright, von Wright, & Soini 2003, 33)

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There are varying views concerning the scale of the freedom of agency within the socially constructed reality. According to poststructuralist epistemology, regardless of discursive resources in their positionalities, individuals cannot gain complete autonomy from structural constraints. From the perspective of practices and statements, the discursive affiliation of structurally imposed and contextually effective identities such as Russianness does not require self-recognition from the identified people. The postcolonial and feminist critique underlines that such an approach can essentialise, simplify, and subjectify people under external labels imposed from above (see e.g. Butler 1990; Brah 1998, 99). I have adopted the poststructuralist epistemological position that there is nothing objectively observable that can be completely separated from the structures of subjective social knowledge, because even understanding the unknown is subject to structures that are pre-existing, though flexible and fluid. Changes in positional discursive resources can limit or empower the space of agency within structures. In this respect Marshal McLuhan (e.g. McLuhan, Fiore & Agel 2001) even emphasises the primacy of the medium through which the message is transmitted over its content in communications. Although prone to technological determinism, in the contemporary context social media research has resonated with this thesis (Bordunova, Litvinenko, & Nigmatullina 2020; Szulc 2017).

2.2 Discourse, knowledge, and power

While the word “discourse” is often referred to as a taken-for-granted concept in research, it can refer to several different meanings from intertextuality to the language in use, among others. In a critical sociolinguistic approach, discourse is about the use and subjectivity of language especially as a form of social practice that covers speech, text, images, gestures, and audio-visual content. Language is both a societal product and its producer. Language use can both create and maintain practices and ordered knowledge networks such as socio-spatial identities. Discursive positions can seek to maintain and strengthen the structures of the prevalent discursive order, or challenge

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communication according to their contextual rational meaning-making order – for example, professional, private, or media discourses.

Social scientists have adopted discourse from linguistics. Michel Foucault (e.g. 1986a; 1995; 2005) developed an interpretative approach to discourse analysis, focusing on the development and functions of scientific discourse that shape what it is to be human into an imaginable and manageable form.

In my research I have adopted a perspective on discourses that is especially inspired by Foucault. “Foucauldian discourse” is often defined as particular networks of effective knowledge (i.e. devices, ideas, beliefs, and perceptions with the authority of truth), manifested in formations of interrelated and rule-based statements about socially constructed entities such as nation- ness. Discourses are networked, because they are always interconnected, and it is difficult to distinguish their beginnings and ends. Discursive practice is an entity of nameless, historical, and always temporally and spatially defined rules about the conditions for the function of a statement in each era, and social, economic geographic, and lingual field (ibid., 155). Goswami characterises the Foucauldian view of discourse as follows:

Mad speech is outside discourse, neither true nor false within any accepted discourse, but inhabiting a void. That helps to show the rules of exclusion that govern discourses and do not/cannot recognize a whole range of speech that do not conform in terms of objects, ritual, or right to speak. (Goswami 2014, 13)

This discourse is a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular historical moment. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and use to regulate the conduct of others. (ibid., 14)

Foucauldian analysis includes problematisation, turning a thought from a given familiarity to an uncertain question. As ad hoc responses to problematisations, productive formations of common networks of knowledge technology may form that Foucault called an “apparatus”, or

“dispositif”. It may later be forgotten or reappear as an applicable technology

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(Rabinow & Rose 2003, 7–14). Using the archaeology of knowledge, one can describe conditions constituting the occurrence, constraints, dispersion, and disappearance of discursive formations (see Chapter 5.2.). However, Foucault (2005) emphasises that these “monuments” cannot be fully reconstructed in their objective originality, because they can only be interpreted from the temporal perspective of presence. He highlights the role of media as one of the few privileged, albeit not exclusive, technologies or apparatuses producing and disseminating knowledge. In this regard Foucault (e.g. 1995, 27) suggests that struggles of power and knowledge should not be examined

“in favour” of truth or its liberation from power, but the economic and political efficiency of its use.

Dominant or hegemonic discursive formations are rarely problematised.

In such cases, Foucault spoke of a “regime of truth”, and within it the “games of truth and error”. What is socially accepted in the essence of “truth” forces people to submit to it. The truth is therefore not external to power, social ordering, and struggle. Each society has its own regime of truth, its criteria, political ecosystem, and more field-specific games of truth. In relation to this, ideas and language as discourse constitute only a limited part of the Foucauldian investigation of games of truth, where techniques of knowledge, institutions, and practices with truth authority enable and constrain people’s ways of being (Rabinow & Rose 2003, 15–16; see also Lorenzini 2015). Among others, this has inspired a critical approach to essentialising bodily, and hence spatially, productive gender normativity discourses of who defines knowledge and who is not represented (Butler 1990). Critical geography, on the other hand, challenges the subjugation of human agency to visualised representations of geographical power-knowledge about material conditions, scrutinising the social constitution of global space and subjectivity (Ó Tuathail

& Agnew 1992; Gregory 1994). For example, Paasi notes that national borders are “expressions of territoriality – normally crucial to what can be called the discursive landscape of social power” (Paasi 2011, 22).

On the basis of the most recognised theories of power presented by Weber, Habermas, Parsons, and others, Castells calls attention to the legitimisation and relativeness of, and the distinction between, its coercive, persuasive, and

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is not always straightforward. Power is not an attribute but an asymmetrical relationship. For example, the state’s monopoly of violence and the sovereign right to decide on its exception are based on a social contract between the state and its subjects (Castells 2009 13, 31–34). Power is also a constant theme in Foucault’s work, famously going beyond the classical definition of A’s ability to convince B to do something against their will (Hänninen 2010). Governmentality (Fr. La gouvernementalité) is Foucault’s (1986b, 338) conceptualisation of a liberal power technology, indirect techniques of governing that arose in early modern times against the backdrop of sovereign and disciplinary power.

In liberal discourse, power needs to constantly legitimise itself for society, that is, the “We” who are subjected to it. The acknowledging, reflexive, and productive relationship of the self to the self and selves of a certain kind refers to subjectification (Rabinow & Rose 2003, 5, 14). The institutionalisation of “society” between subjects as individuals and the sovereign state enables the formation of normative techniques by which subjects self-sufficiently govern themselves. Iver Neumann notes that the de-territorialised power of governmentality plays a growing role in the emergence of the global society, although it is in contention with the national sovereign power. In the mutually complementary dynamics of power relations, the object of knowledge for the (national) sovereign power is territory, whereas for pastoral (liberal) power it is citizens or the population. Similarly, while in liberalism the subject is individual, in nationalism it is the nation (Neumann 2010, 27, 30, 41–42, 45). National subjectification usually entails a spatial socialisation in which

“individual actors and collectivities are socialized as members of specific territorially bounded spatial entities and through which they more or less actively internalize collective territorial identities and shared traditions” (Paasi 1996, 8).

2.3 Belonging, identities, and the self

It is strongly implied that Russianness, with the other socio-spatial identities current research connects with it, belongs to collectives and places. Belonging

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often entails a strong spatial dimension and themes such as migration, transnationality, displacement, sense of place, mobility, and neighbourhoods of peoples in precarious or problematic contexts. The strength of the belonging concept (like transnationalism, Vertovec 2009, 6) lies in its ability to include the multiplicity and nuanced subjective contexts of social ties and affections (Lähdesmäki et al. 2016). For example, Levitt and Schiller (2004, 12) distinguish between transnational being, in which transborder relations play a role in people’s essential lives, and transnational belonging, in which people recognise these relations as something essential to who they are.

In social studies, subjectification, spatial socialisation, and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2008) are often examined through positionalities in the intersectional divisions of power, not in psychological identities as such.

However, the social science perspective is connected with a psychological conceptualisation of belonging, identity, and the self. Accordingly, identities are contextually negotiated qualities and roles with which people identify themselves and others, whereas The self is a less conscious essence, an individual’s continuous effort to coherently maintain their own identities, dynamic roles, and experiences (Gullestad 1996, 1–2). The psychological need for belonging to places and communities is crystallised in the yearning to feel related and secure “at home” (Agnew 2005, 89; Yuval-Davis 2006, 202; Kinnvall & Lindén 2010; Giddens 1991, 37). Religion and nationalism are acknowledged producers of ontological security as providers of a “true home”, and ordered and solid existential answers. Ontological security is a metaphysically essentialising power that intersubjectively defines our holistic relations with nature, other human beings, and the self as solidly good and

“true” (Huysmans 1998; Kinnvall 2004). Ontological security juxtaposes existential anxiety, in relation to which politics of belonging instrumentalises and securitises nationhood, consequently subjectifying its most distant selves, peripheral communities, ethnic minorities, and immigrant groups as threats (ibid.; 2018).

The existential anxiety of “homelessness” among immigrants often leads to “homesteading”, that is, the formation of exile communities (Kinnvall 2004, 763, 747) and promotion of national communities that are not limited by state

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of diaspora embodies the desire of the “home” (a discourse of fixed origin) left behind in certain circumstances, but which can exist in a multi-locality with the “displaced” people’s desire and feeling of belonging to their new homeland (Brah 1998, 180). The ideas of origin, beginnings, and home have a strong implication that things are at their most valuable or divine state in the moment of their birth. Along with making sense of the environments of their new residence, migrants may simultaneously reinscribe their own identities and relatedness to their native-born nation and region, opening a transnational frontier or “diaspora space” for both themselves and the

“indigenous” people (Brah 1998, 210; van Houtum & van Naerssen 2002, 132–133, Levitt & Schiller 2004; Vertovec 2009). For example, people who have moved from Russia to Finland have perceived “immigration” as a phase of insecurity before finding their own place in the new home country (Heino 2018).

Whereas the time-traversing and essential self serves the psychological need to secure a solid existential ground, the identification of sameness and the politics of belonging are subjects of contextual negotiation and subjectification. In their reflexive awareness and relational mode of being, modern subjects seek to claim agency from the recognition of others. Here, Neumann (1999, 212–218) notes that the reference to the context-traversing self as a sufficiently recognisable “as-if narrative” is necessary, especially in effective engagement with political interaction. While the modernist perspective of subjectification highlights the consciously rational, ideological, and reflexive sides of the self, it needs to be noted that the self is also to a degree and contextually unconscious and emotional (Giddens 1991; Kinnvall 2004; Yuval-Davis 2006; Bakardjieva 2009; Hall 2011). Paasi (1996, 43) states that while the subject’s identification can be politically manipulated, it requires some correspondence with the individual’s personally experienced reality.

Here, phenomenological experience can be defined as an interpretable process of meaning-making and subjectification in a socially constructed reality (Buttimer 1974; Brah 1998, 116).

Poststructuralists especially have been critical of the unconscious identification and time-traversing essence of the self and origins discourses.

Hall (2011) and Mouffe (1994) for example, consider identities and belonging

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always multiple, in a never-ending process of becoming, hybridisation, and nomadisation in relationship to their unstable “constitutive outside”. Inspired by William Connolly’s thought, Mouffe (1994, 109–110) recommends liberal democracies embrace hybrid identities to eliminate the self/other antagonism and replace it with an agonistic pluralism of difference and multiple allegiances. The constant agonistic state of becoming allows difference while avoiding attempts to achieve a permanent state of equilibrium in a complete separation or fusion of identities.

2.4 Spatial, temporal, and technological identities

Media discourse is regulated by technological capacities and imaginaries. While the production of nation-ness is territorially bounded (discussed further in Chapter 3), the imagination of national communities is constantly dispatched from the physical ground and conducted through mass communications.

Mediated representations of the spatial world’s subjects enable the imagination of the sameness and simultaneity of their national communities (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). Due to the proliferation of ICTs, the relations and resources of production, circulation, and consumption of media flows have increasingly dispersed and engendered hybrid media (Chadwick 2017) and a (transnational) network society (Castells 2009; Vertovec 2009). I will discuss further the productivity of media discourses in Chapter 4, but to conclude the current section on knowing and ruling space, it is important to scrutinise the metaphysical spatiality and temporality of media.

Like the press and analogue electronic media, the venues of online communication require a certain imagining of the addressed audience, highlighting the concept of virtuality regarding what is real and possible. The virtuality of space and reality implies artificiality, simulation, and difference from the “real” world. Gilles Deleuze (1988, 43, 96–98) discussed the ontology of Henri Bergson’s notion of virtuality of memory as early as the 1960s, stating that the virtual is nowhere in actuality but is nonetheless real and interactable.

Even in the act of remembrance, virtuality has the potential of becoming and

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discussion of the separability of virtuality from reality continued in the 2010s, although several scholars favour the characterisation of their relationship as

“hybrid” (Floridi 2015a). The social constructivist approach claims that spaces need to be produced through use. Accordingly, digital technologies produce knowledge that actualises people’s mobilities, practices, and embodied experiences in the physical realm. Experiences in virtual space are themselves inherently embodied and hence spatial (Farman 2012; Leszczynski 2015; Floridi 2015a), constituting real-and-imagined “thirdspace” knowledge (Soja 1999).

Blurring the lines between physical, imagined, and third spaces, Couldry and McCarthy (2004, 2) conceptualise the “MediaSpace” as discursive practices in which communication apparatuses and social space mutually produce one another. Through increasing omnipresence of media, these spaces become increasingly banal sites for conducting social life (Couldry & Hepp 2016, 50).

While often used synonymously, geography scholars have distinguished the rather abstract imagination of open “space” from the locally embodied and practised “place” here and now. The notion of space can be distinguished as embedding and enabling the heterogeneity of simultaneously coexisting trajectories that are in a constant process of historical becoming. John Agnew (2005) highlights the benefits of examining place and space as interrelated and interdependent, despite their competitive and polarising dynamics.

This intertwines the dimensions of time and space ontologically, meaning that the ability to capture time in a statement also applies to space. Based on philosophical discussions of Bergson, Laclau, and de Certeau, Doreen Massey concludes that a statement is an attempt to suppress, fix, and hegemonise temporal and dislocated time in a spatial representation of history, that is, a “real” world. This temporal-spatial relation is connected, for example, with the statements about where “We are” and where “We belong to”, connecting a past arrival and the awaiting future with a place. Here, the poststructuralist approach seeks to liberate the dynamics, dislocation, temporality, and imaginative creativity of life from the limits of “frozen”

structuralist representations and unquestioned hegemonies (Massey 2008, 20–30, 42–44; see also Soja 1989; Gregory 1994).

In social theory, power relationships and their shifts are seen as defined by the social construction of time and space. For the social construction of

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simultaneity, time subjugates space for its material support. The development of ICT has enabled a space of flows and timeless temporality in what Castells has called the network society, in which the past-future sequence of events is disordered, and time-sharing practices do not require contiguity. This reverses the industrial society emphasis on becoming-structured being with ephemerality. In the space of flows, the meaningfulness of places, the locations of ICTs, and social practices are defined by their modal position in the specific networks to which they belong, consequently subjugating them to territorialisation. Moreover, spaces of flows are produced in articulation with places of activities that are coupled with the content and geometry of the information flows (Castells 2009, 59–62; see also Longo 2018). In the contemporary network society Castells sees people and social power relations as divided between global spaces of flows and the local spaces of places:

Because space in the network society is configured around the opposi- tion between the space of flows (global) and the space of places (local), the spatial structure of our society is a major source of the structuration of power relationships (Castells 2009, 79).

Between these particular local and universal global network identities, what Mouffe (1994) refers to as “hybrid identities”, and Roland Robertson (1995) refers to as “glocalisation”, also form. This movement from an emphasis on distance and scale to connectivity characterises the relational turn in geography, as ICT development produces a sense of temporal immediacy and spatial “placelessness”. In practice, alongside the assimilation of urban landscapes, easily available information about places and the unification of their spatial opportunities have made familiarisation with places faster (“nomadic knowledge-power”) and less valuable, and have therefore decreased people’s relatedness with places (Ek 2006, 51–53, 57; Relph 1976).

In this chapter I have reviewed approaches to and interpretations of discursive knowledge, and their relationship with socio-spatial identities.

ICT development is marginalising the simultaneity of territorially imagined communities in spaces of places with senses of “placelessness” and the