I’m in the middle of grading, so my remarks here will be brief. I wanted, however, to draw attention to Christian Thorne’s recent post “To the Political Ontologists“. Thorne raises an important set of questions, but I worry that he’s confusing distinct issues. At the beginning of his post he writes:
The political ontologists have their work cut out for them. Let’s say you believe that the entire world is made out of fire: Your elms and alders are fed by the sky’s titanic cinder; your belly is a metabolic furnace; your lungs draw in the pyric aether; the air that hugs the earth is a slow flame—a blanket of chafing-dish Sterno—shirring exposed bumpers and cast iron fences; water itself is a mingling of fire air with burning air. The cosmos is ablaze. The question is: How are you going to derive a political program from this insight, and in what sense could that program be a politics of fire? How, that is, are you going to get from your ontology to your political proposals?
It is unclear to me why we should expect an ontology should make political proposals, or why we should believe that political proposals should derive from an ontology. An ontology is a discourse about what is or is not, how beings are related to one another, how they become and change, etc. It is not a theory of whether these beings are good or bad, just or unjust, emancipatory or oppressive, etc. Consider an analogy. A marine biologist discusses the biological make up of sharks, their behaviors, their habitats, their diets, and points out that sometimes sharks attack people. We can imagine Thorne coming along and saying “how does the marine biologist derive a politics from her claims about sharks and why is he advocating sharks attacking people?” But the marine biologist was never trying to derive a politics from her observations of sharks nor, in pointing out that sharks attack people, was she advocating sharks attacking people. Rather, she was trying to understand sharks. So it is with ontology. An ontology is attempting to understand the being of beings, not make judgments about whether those beings are just or unjust, right or wrong.
read on!
This is not to say that there is no relation between politics and ontology. Every political theory presupposes an ontology. A political theory makes assumptions about what entities compose a society, what their properties are, what the mechanisms of power and oppression are, and so on. Chances are that if we get our social ontology wrong our political engagements and attempts to change oppressive assemblages will come to naught. If we target the wrong mechanisms that organize social configuration we’ll leave that social configuration unchanged and will needlessly be wasting our own energies and resources. I take it that this is what theorists such as Bennett and DeLanda are up to. While I readily recognize that their weak on the normative questions that sometimes animate political theory, I think the value of their contributions like in drawing our attention to largely ignored organizing forces and mechanisms in social configurations, thereby helping us to better strategize action.
I also readily recognize that just as happens in the sciences, ontologies can be pervaded by destructive political assumptions of an unconscious nature. Critique of veiled politics within discourses such as we find among certain science and technology theorists, Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man, or Foucault and Butler are not practices that should be abandoned. If a theorist makes the claim that every entity has a withdrawn essence or identity and proposes that we reject Said’s critique of orientalism on the grounds that there really is an essence of say, the Chinese people, these are claims with rife political implications, supporting all sorts of racist and misogynist doctrines– not to mention classist doctrines (given that the ruling classes repeatedly try to argue that the working class is essentially or biologically inferior). One of the ways we address these positions is by raising the question of whether these claims are ontologically true of human beings and social systems (cf. here, here, and here). When thinkers like Foucault and Butler challenge these sorts of essentialist claims about particular identities (“the mad”, “the “criminal”), genders, and forms of sexual desire, they are challenging certain ontological claims. They are challenging the idea that hominids have a fixed and given essence. When Developmental Systems Theorists challenge evolutionary psychologists and sociologists, they are challenging an ontology of genes that holds that genes are a blueprint that determine behavior and identities tout court. When DeLanda presents a morphogenetic account of all beings or individuals, he is challenging this sort of essentialism. These are all ontological claims– ontological claims with profound normative and political implications –but as ontological claims they have to be evaluated in terms of their truth and falsity.
And this gets us to my final point. When we ask “how does one derive a politics from an ontology”, one central worry is that we’re allowing our normative and political commitments to legislate what is. We risk saying something like “I’m going to reject x because it doesn’t agree with my politics!” Here we might recall Stalinist regime rejections of evolutionary theory and certain linguistic phenomena. As Badiou observes, it is a disaster whenever Truth in the four domains of truth (politics, science, art, and love) is sutured to only one condition. Such a suture of ontology to politics– that gesture where we allow our political commitments to legislate our ontological commitments –undermines our ability to effectively respond to situations as we render ourselves blind to what is there in those situations, and undermines our rhetorical power in persuading others as we come to be seen as dogmatically blind and dishonest. We end up cutting off the very limb we’re sitting on. Rather than dismissing ontology because it doesn’t tell us which politics to derive, I would instead prefer a more generous approach that makes room for ontological meditations, that recognizes that not all questions are questions about politics, and that makes room for normative meditations and considerations as to how to respond to oppressive situations in the world and promote emancipation.
Larval Subjects . 
May 11, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Once again my response follows the lines of “by and large I agree, but”…. I’m not sure that I, personally, could really separate out my politics from my metaphysics. I can’t speak to anyone else’s thought processes, but for me, there is a dynamic interplay between these modes of thinking and questioning. They constantly inform and transform one another. My politics is fueled by a disalignment with dominant ontologies, and my ontologizing is constantly responsive to and tied up with my politics. I agree that perhaps ontology shouldn’t be subordinated to strict and unbending political commitments that precede any engagement with ontological thought (and vice versa.) For me, and perhaps in general, they always play against and alongside one another, each transforming the possibilities for the other. I don’t see them as separable.
But then I suppose I’m also guilty of having little interest in ontological questions that don’t relate back to politics. Or, in the very least, I am suspicious of and uninterested in ontologies that would sacrafice decades worth of valuable and powerful political for what feels, to me, like a poor payoff. (i.e. I am NOT giving up constructivism for withdrawn essenses, thank you very much. It’s just not worth it. But then, I don’t think it’s necessary to make such a sacrafice – we can play with both.) I suspect we are very much aligned in our thinking here, the only difference being that politics is my first priority, and my commitments there are always simulatenously firm but plastic.
May 11, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Jennifer,
I don’t disagree. I think our politics is going to inform the ontological issues we take up and that our ontologies will inform how we see politics. Also, as I said in the post, all sorts of political assumptions pervade our inquiries into the world and we can be blind to those assumptions (I’m looking at you evolutionary psychology and your ignorance of ethnography). That said, I don’t think questions of truth can be reduced to politics any more than I think questions of justice can be reduced to questions of what is.
May 11, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Fair enough. We do seem to be in more or less complete agreement. I guess I just want the option of choosing ontologies for their political salience/relevance/efficacy to be or to remain legitimate. There are plenty of questions worth asking that aren’t directly political, and really no category of inquiry is reducible to any other. I do (sort of) subordinate ontology to how it might enable or open toward social and ecological justice but that itself is a negotiation and I have had to reframe my political thinking to better reflect shifts in my ontological thinking a number of times. I think that both ontology and politics constantly pose challenges to one another that MUST be addressed. I don’t think this is necessarily a matter of reducing one to the other but, rather, recognizing how tightly these things relate and how much they press each other.
I’m probably a little bit touchy about prioritizing politics, as there is a longstanding philosophical tradition of belittling political concerns as trifling wordly ephemera compared to real, serious philosophical problems like the nature of BEING. (Heidegger screwed me up about this for a long time.) If the trend has reversed in recent years, this is exceptional. As much as politics and ontology ought not ever be reduced to the other, I really think they ought to always remain messily imbricated.
May 12, 2012 at 2:45 am
Jennifer,
That’s interesting. My theoretical framework– coming out of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought –was one where politics trumped everything and where questions of ontology were looked at with deep suspicion. I’m curious, are you really selecting ontologies based on political commitments, or because you think these ontologies are true. For example, I’m a constructivist about many things because I think it’s true and I think the alternative position, essentialism, is false. I base this position on what I know of human development, biology, ethnography, and history, where again and again it’s shown that essentialist claims about gender, race, kinship structure, modes of production and exchange, etc, are false. I didn’t first come at these ontologies as a result of political commitments, but rather my growing understanding of the plasticity of humans and society changed my political commitments over time… Which isn’t to say I was some racist or sexist when I was younger, just that the more I studied ethnography, linguistics, sociology, history, and development the more I saw how these positions couldn’t possibly be true. That opened up the possibility of abandoning other prejudices.
I’m never sure where to place myself among the disciplines. I’m in a philosophy department, of course, but I draw on material from a boatload of disciplines without distinguishing them by discipline. In the intro to The Democracy of Objects I describe my work as a kind of theoretical bricolage. I draw from those places where I’ve found compelling arguments and concepts without bothering much over whether they come from “philosophy”. I just don’t think things can be distinguished in that way if we’re really to understand the world.
May 12, 2012 at 3:13 am
I do like the idea of messy imbrication. I suspect there have been countless times where I had a political intuition that “x cannot possibly be right” and threw myself headlong into reflection, observation, research, and concept building to figure out how or why. That’s probably part of how I ended up moving in a more realist direction despite having been such a hardcore constructivist in the past. Increasingly I found that I couldn’t mesh my ecological intuitions with the particular form of constructivism I advocated and felt I had to broaden my framework to make room for both.
May 12, 2012 at 4:16 pm
I’ve found myself, throughout my recent immersion in SR/OOO, realizing that I’ve long held fairly similar or compatible views, if not so quite so rigorous: that the insights of post-structuralism are by and large true and valuable, but that of course, things are real in and of themselves without human intervention or interpretation of any sort (although I think the problem of human access remains an irresolvable epistemological problem even if we ought not let it be the source of ontological claims.) And I’ve found it strange that this is a problem at all because I’ve taken it for granted as obvious for a long time and I can’t really remember how I got there because I probably did a lot of that conceptual work as a child.
Reading your response last night it occurred to me that at least a part of my sense that this ought to be obvious probably relates to my having been born in the early-mid 80s, having grown up in the middle of the so called “science wars” and the peak of poststructuralism’s dominance. I came into the world in a moment in which these were the problems on everyone’s minds. Even if my immersion in it was through popular culture, it primed my mode of thinking. Relativism was hot, but we lived in a world in which environmental crises abounded and we had to face a real world filled with non-human actants (which is why I really feel like Latour nailed it when he pointed to enviro problems as forcing a big re-think.) But by the time I made it to university, the post-everythings had already more or less maxed out their potential and had already offered up about all the stunning surprises they had to reveal. The political left, too, was at a low point after the swell of identity and single issue based left activism had hit a wall by the early 2000s. There was a general feeling a malaise and a sense of “well, what’s next” and “yes, this critique is all well and good but what do we DO with it?” All this to say, when I learned about post-philosophies, the air around them had already settled a little. The crazy energy around it was already gone. The prevailing attitude was that we ought to roll up our sleeves and apply these insights but not get too carried away in overinterpreting them. There is probably something very Anglo-American, or really, very Anglo-Canadian about how I came to it.
All this life-history just to say, I’ve never really had a moment where I was able to take for granted that postructuralism answered every problem. At best it has always seemed to me to just be a really helpful, really punchy body of critiques because essentialism is just ridiculous and the source of any number of terrible political ideas and realities, but that there’s a whole world of material things and material problems that aren’t explained away by symbolic structures or language or whatever. That we aren’t the only actors in the world. That climate change is anthropogenic, but that’s because we are in a complex set of relations with atmospheres, petroleum and forests that we think we control but we don’t. Our actions, by and large, might set this cascading failure in motion, but resolving it is a matter of taking those actants seriously in and of themselves. It seems to me that this sense has been in the air for a long time. I might have steered way off track here, but I think all this adds to the discussion?
Oh, and I’d just like to say, I really appreciate your theoretical-bricolage approach. It seems the only way to really come up with anything interesting these days is to break down disciplinary boundaries and combine insights across a number of fields. It’s really the only way to truly tackle the actual problems we face.
May 16, 2012 at 6:22 pm
[…] is actually Levi Bryant who forced me to write this. His response to Christian Thorne’s post “To the Political Ontologists” forced me to sit down […]
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August 4, 2012 at 8:31 pm
[…] “It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing: it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.” Bennett is interested in what matter does or, more specifically, what matter does politically without human over-coding. Bennett is more open and more cautious than many other new materialists. Partially because she describes her approach as a kind of strategic anthropomorphism. But, as I argued in my paper at the Nonhuman Turn, this can push agency on top of responsibility – the connectivity of the world and its ontological flatness can leave one in the middle, but a middle where thought creeps everywhere and there is no force-of-thought in Laruelle’s phrasing, there is no push from the real as thinking and the real flow in a flood plan of ‘politics’ which becomes nothing more than asserting a relevance to everything if only to say it is relevant. Christian Thorne pointed out many of these issue here. To which Levi responded here. […]