Speculative Matters: The Pasts and Presents of Oil in Turkey

Oil has acquired an elusive materiality in Turkey, situated between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, abundance and lack, loss and desire. This chapter explores the profound political effects of oil’s absent presence in the oil-poor Republic of Turkey. Oil’s intangible yet elusive presence, and the modes of expectation and anticipation that surround it, have become a characteristic feature of a tumultuous period in Turkey during 2016 and 2020. Prospects for oil discovery not only helped grant legitimacy to the increasingly authoritarian and nationalist government trying to re-consolidate its power in the aftermath of the coup attempt and decreasing popular support, but also exposed many of the fault lines upon which state power and national politics were built in Turkey. The absent presence of oil becomes a precisely productive vantage point from which to explore the social and political worlds it has nevertheless composed and continues to bring about. In this material-political space that oil occupies, the chapter argues, national pasts and presents are reconfigured, repressed histories of violence and resistance are conjured up, and state power is both reproduced and exposed as highly fragile and fragmented.