Page 42 - Tallinn University

Tallinna Ülikooli üliõpilaste 2015/2016. õppeaasta PARIMAD TEADUSTÖÖD / Artiklite kogumik HARIDUSTEADUSED
within China and internationally. It was not a choice at the beginning for me: I was simply “dragged” away from my once familiar environment when my parents decided to move to our next destination. I still remember the time that I had to say farewell to my classmates, friends and relatives every three years during my elementary and secondary school years. Later, since I became an adult, I relocated on my own, out of my own wish, and so far I have lived in many di erent places on the globe.
“China” no longer equates to the notion of “home” in my understanding. “Going home” is separate from the idea of “ ying back to the airport in Nanjing, taking a bus, and consequently arriving at this building where there is home residing inside”.
Instead, “home” equates to the conceptualization of a social space and structure of activity where I feel a sense of belonging. Rather than a speci c location, home might be understood by me as a place of speci c con guration of behaviors, and of a speci c mode of talking. “Being at home”, to me person- ally, is the speci c way to understand and be understood by the individuals around me.
Appadurai (1996) argues that the importance of a “work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” should not be neglected when approaching discourse regarding the transna- tional movement of individuals on a global scale. He stated that the current epoch is bestowing indi- viduals with the online and electronic tools for the “construction of imagined self and worlds” (ibid.). I am indebted to him (ibid.) since he incisively pointed out the modern technological tool and its “timely” feature does not eliminate the distance between individuals who are geographically distant. Quite the opposite: these tools create the distance, raising the individual’s awareness of the distance: e hardships are juxtaposed by the “magical” sophistication of modern technology. erefore, the function of these convenient tools is not to “bring the individual home”, but rather to provide the indi- vidual with space for creativity and imagination. By which I mean, the potential for individual agency is guaranteed because our technology has the capacity to transport digital abstraction of life within a certain timeframe, and then it vanishes. It creates a perpetual swing between “closing” (the moment of connecting) and “detaching” (the disconnection). Almost as a coping mechanism, individual agency has to come into play by constantly (re)de ning the meaning of home and (re)constructing sel ood in order to counterbalance the chaotic mess of social positioning.
A mode of convergence between the imagined and digitalized representation of presence and the physically mobility of the people, necessarily produced an entropy of contemporary subjectivity. One prominent signi cance of this chaotic subjectivity, aside from further emancipating individual agency, would perhaps be the marginalization of the nation-state in the dialogue of social change and identity. When Cheng Liguang listens to Chinese online sport news in his residence in the city of Helsinki, the collision of a deterritorialized audience with the abstracted audio-information that transports itself freely beyond the con nement of national borders, the reinvention of the sense of (national) a liation or “belonging” begins. What would be the role of the nation- state in this new narrative? I have not yet to come to an assertion. Nevertheless, what I do intend to illustrate here is that regardless of the uncertainty of the current position of the nation-state in the modern narrative of “home” and “belong- ing”, it most certainly has lost it central role.
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