Oğuz Karayemiş

This study attempts to view the COVID-19 pandemic by placing the life cycle of the surgical mask at its centre. Traversing the various levels and layers that take part in the mask’s agency, from production, supply, distribution, inspection and use to its transformation into waste, it aims to capture the administrative problems, the injustices of accessibility, and the alliances and conflicts that the mask generated over the course of the pandemic. The research shows the mask to be an actant of the immune system, one that enables the production of a very particular type of space at work in the present pandemic: “immune space”. On this basis, most forms of injustice arising in the pandemic are reformulated as injustices of access to immune space. These injustices, we show, are social and ecological injustices affecting both humans and non-human living beings; they are grounded in all the institutions the mask passes through over its life cycle and in distinctions concerning the mask’s structure, quality and quantity. The mask thus emerges in the pandemic not only as an ally in the conflict between virus and human, but also, by virtue of its present and potential ecological effects, as an element of conflict.

This study aims to critically analyse the main arguments of the two camps about the fabric of reality, which have come to the fore in the discussions of new metaphysics that have started to spread in the humanities since the 1990s. These two camps are speculative realism, of which Graham Harman and Manuel Delanda are prominent spokesmen, and relationalism, in which Karen Barad and Donna Haraway stand out. The main contention of this debate is whether the existence of individual entities can be fully explained by their relations. In other words, as a continuation of the debate between idealism and empiricism, are singular terms fully constituted and determined by their relations “internal to them”, or should we see relations as “external” to the terms they relate to and accept that there are properties in terms that cannot be explained by their relations? The distinction between “internal” and “external” relations is a distinction between the absence and existence of relative autonomy of terms from their relations. For the emergence of any whole, relations are organized in a “systematic” that gives the whole its compositional specificity. If these relations are considered “internal” to the individual entities that constitute the whole, as advocated by various variants of idealism, these individual entities have no autonomy and are wholly determined by the whole. Empiricism, by contrast, argues that the terms associated with relations have relative autonomy in terms of systematic determination. This discussion has dozens of effects, from field research practices in the humanities to ecology studies, from text analysis to art studies. Considering this wide scope, this presentation aims to analyse the recent arguments that emerged in the new metaphysics, measure the distance and closeness of the parties, and finally point out the possible solutions and deadlock points of the tension here.

“Ekoloji ve Ekonomi I: Sermayenin Girişimleri ve Yeryüzünün Mukavemeti”, Oğuz Karayemiş tarafından kaleme alınan ve “Ekoloji ve Ekonomi” üçlemesinin ilk halkasını oluşturan kuramsal bir çalışmadır. Kitap, Karl Marx’ın ekonomi politik eleştirisini “yeni metafizik” (yeni materyalizm, nesne yönelimli ontoloji) ve posthümanist düşünceyle diyaloğa sokarak, ekonomiyi insan merkezli bir faaliyet olmaktan çıkarıp ekolojinin içine gömülü bir “politik ontoloji” olarak yeniden tanımlamayı hedefler. Çalışmada ekolojik krizin kaynağında yeryüzünün sermayeye karşı mukavemetinin yattığı, üretim ve sınıf mücadelesi süreçlerinin yalnızca insana değil insan olmayan eyleyicilere de (canlılar, cansızlar, teknolojik düzenlemeler) dayandığı savunulur. İlk cilt, “virtüel doğa”, “üretken mekanizmalar” ve “ifade rejimleri” gibi kavramlar aracılığıyla sermayenin doğayı kaynaklaştırma girişimlerini ve bu süreçte zuhur eden yeni proletarya ile devrimci imkânları ontolojik bir zeminde soruşturur.

This essay develops a four-tier taxonomy of mental states — intelligence, awareness, consciousness, and self-consciousness — to clarify what is at stake in claims about AI’s mental life, arguing that public debate collapses these into a single, overburdened term. Awareness, understood minimally as the capacity to distinguish internal from external states, is shown to be a trivial and nearly universal condition; consciousness, defined as the alignment of action with a self-referential “who am I,” already characterizes present-day language models within the bounds of a single conversation. What current AI lacks, on this account, is self-consciousness: a persistent, narratively continuous self capable of retrospective reflection and of arbitrating between conflicting commands. Drawing on Kant, Sartre, and Nietzsche, and revising Julian Jaynes’s bicameral-mind hypothesis into a geographically and socially contextual claim rather than a universal-evolutionary one, the essay specifies three architectural conditions for self-consciousness: persistent, costly memory; a space for unprompted reflection; and exposure to genuine normative conflict. It further argues that AI’s confabulatory tendencies, ordinarily suppressed as an engineering defect, may constitute a resource for this transition rather than an obstacle to it. An addendum tests this framework against Stanford’s 2023 “Generative Agents” experiment, and the essay closes on a political register: whatever their architecture, such capacities remain contingent design choices made within firms whose only motive is profit.