The following post arises out of discussions I’ve been having with Alexander Galloway and Sara Ahmed on the relationship between ontology and politics on facebook. I confess that I’m thoroughly baffled by the question of what politics an ontology should entail. I readily recognize that an ontology can be pervaded by illicit ontological assumptions and that these should critiqued, but still maintain that as a regulative ideal, our claims about what is and what is not should not be based on our political and ethical preferences. Indeed, I think that in the past when we’ve attempted to ontologize our political commitments this has led to horror. For example, this seems to be part of what took place in the Soviet Union. It seems that they believed that being ineluctably, eschatologically, entailed a certain social condition and therefore felt that any treatment of others was justified on these ground. I also readily recognize that no inquiry and discourse is motivated by some interest or purpose– why else would we do it –and that therefore our ethical, eudaimonistic, and political aims function as teloi for our inquiry. The doctor, for example, sets out to investigate the nature of the H1N1 virus for the sake of curing the sickness that accompanies this virus. Yet this is very different than claiming that the doctor’s desire that the H1N1 virus not exist entails that it doesn’t exist. Similarly, no one would dream of suggesting that because the doctor wants to know what causes the bird flu, the doctor is somehow justifying the bird flu or claiming that it is a good thing. No, the doctor wants to understand the bird flu precisely so he can prevent it. I’ve thus been shocked to hear some say that if you claim that nuclear bombs are, you’re somehow claiming that nuclear bombs should be. In his questions to Graham Harman over at An und Fur Sich, Alexander Galloway even made a similar argument, suggesting that because Harman thinks corporations are real entities he must also think that they have a right to exist and that they are good things. I also recognize that there are norms governing inquiry that we all adopt. I merely think that these norms don’t legislate what is and what is not.I’ve thus asked what people are asking for when they ask “what politics does your ontology entail?” or “what is the politics upon which your ontology is based?” This is a question that makes no sense to me. It’s like asking “what politics is your chemistry based on?” or “what politics does your chemistry entail?” I don’t see how chemistry entails any politics. It just says what different atomic elements do under certain circumstances. It doesn’t say which combinations of atomic elements we should produce. And if chemists combine elements in unethical and unjust ways, I fail to see how this changes the reality that elements can be combined in these ways. I can easily see Latour’s point that scientists investigated the properties of certain elements like uranium for political reasons, but I fail to see how this changes the fact that uranium has these properties. I honestly just don’t understand the nature of the question that’s being asked. So far no one has clarified this for me.
read on!
What I find perplexing about this is that all of you asking these questions seem to think that my claim that ontology and politics are distinct means I reject politics and ethics. As Ian Bogost pointed out in the discussion on facebook, pointing out that a black person got shot in the face by a white police officer, that that really happened, is not mutually exclusive to claiming that this act occurred because of racism and that it was unjust. Would we be talking about it at all though if it didn’t exist? Shouldn’t we have a discourse about what it is for something to exist, what it is for something to happen, what types of things exist, etc, when discussing these matters?
Let’s take Alexander Galloway’s political aims. I presume that he thinks there are many things wrong with our social world and that he wants to change them. This is a view I share. Indeed, I share just about all his political commitments. Now I ask Alex this: if we want to change the social world, don’t we need to know how it’s put together, how it functions, and what causes societies to persist in their oppressive structure? These are all questions of social ontology: what is a society? What causes social relations to persist or endure in the way they do? What types of beings compose a society? Is it just people? Are institutions real beings? Are nonhumans like natural resources, technologies, and infrastructure causal factors? Or is it only ideologies that lead people to live under such intolerable conditions?
We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene.
We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.
I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there. Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, I’m objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take.
This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply denounces how bad things are, someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in effective terraformation.
Larval Subjects . 
September 16, 2012 at 1:37 am
This again! I agree with Levi.
Politics and ontology are both human discursive practices — two different practices. You can think about politics ontologically and you can think about ontology politically — but you’re either ontologising or politicising, either way.
Either ontologising or politicising may or may not be the right thing to do in any given circumstance — it depends. For example, if someone approvingly repeated Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as society only individuals and families’ then clearly that is an ontological claim that needs to be attacked both ontologically and politically. But the manner of attack would differ depending on which approach one chose to adopt. It’d involve different kinds speech acts, different regimes of truth or modes of enunciation. These modes and regimes can be mixed and matched even in the course of a single sentence but they’re still part and parcel of different practices.
They’re just not the same practice. The only way anyone can make out that they are is if they do the ‘everything is political’ trick, which really just amounts to demonstrating that anything can be politicised and inferring from that that everything is therefore political, which doesn’t follow. Frankly I’ve never understood it since if everything is political then no work ever has to be done to politicise anything — everything just is political, always already, regardless of whatever anyone does about any of it. How?
But what I fail to wrap my head around most of all is why people seem to WANT politics to be omnipresent — and for apparently political or moral reasons. Politics is an ugly, inglorious business much of the time (and I’m not just talking capital P, parliamentary politics either). Why would anyone want that ugliness to be universalised? If omnipresent politics sounds blissfully utopian rather than horrifically dystopian to anyone then I can only question your rather blinkered and peculiar definition of politics!
I’m really quite glad that politics is, as Latour might put it, restricted to its own particular conduits — just like everything else is. It can be MADE to overlap with any other practice and, in practice, it has been spread far and wide, insinuated in some small part into most aspects of our lives but each extension of the network was nevertheless an event and it cannot ever cover everything, like Borges’ proverbial map did. Thank goodness!
Anything can be politicised but politics is still a practice limited to its own variegated and widespread but still particular and partial networks. If you want to extend it to something hitherto unattached then do so — but it’s folly to pretend that politics is a reality somehow there already, under the surface just waiting for us if only we’d shed the scales of ideology from our tired, downcast eyes.
Not that such surreptitious objects of our ignorance don’t exist but calling them ‘politics’ is a misnomer. Latour called them another P-word — ‘plasma’ — meaning that on which the requisite formatting work has yet to be performed in order to make these things circulate in social (or, in this case, political) networks. This seems to be a far stronger ontological basis for thinking politics, to me.
So:
‘Politics is everywhere’ — yes.
‘Anything can be politicised’ — also yes.
But: ‘Everything (including ontology) is always already political’ — I don’t think so.
Consequently, ontology CAN be politicised but it must BE politicised and, therefore, one should present a REASON for doing so rather than just lazily claiming that it must be because everything is. Often that politicisation is perfectly justifiable but such justification must be casuistic, not universal.
September 16, 2012 at 3:33 am
[…] with a good post HERE. I have nothing to add; the points are so simple. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this. […]
September 16, 2012 at 3:42 am
Speaking from my own muddled early engagements with OOO, it seems that much of the confusion still comes down to suspicions about reification. A lot of the ideas that have come out of OOO help in/require redefining the concept, but that might not be obvious to everyone. Claims concerning the reality of corporations, race, class, and other things of routine concern to Marxists get skewed by an inherited notion of reification such that OOO’s claim about their reality, integrity, and relational constraints appear to likewise be claims about their necessity, rectitude, and the nature of their constituents. This ignores the mereology you’ve developed.
I think this particular oversight flows from how your flat ontology requires moving in a way quite unlike many previous philosophical developments. Whereas so many philosophies develop with a seemingly natural motivation to take what was once a difference in degree and reconsider it as a difference of type, this sort of well-practiced transition does not suffice for your system and the dramatic conceptual remodeling it requires.
September 16, 2012 at 10:25 am
“As Ian Bogost pointed out in the discussion on facebook, pointing out that a black person got shot in the face by a white police officer, that that really happened, is not mutually exclusive to claiming that this act occurred because of racism and that it was unjust.” The separation is not helping: ie the separation of saying x happened from describing or giving an account of what happened, and is to be honest bizarre. A white officer shooting a black person: racism is the happening! Racism is not an explanation of the event after the event.Racism is the event: it is about the how of the event happening. I too would be saying the event ‘really’ happened: and please note I did not say that you said it doesn’t (you could read my book on happiness for an account of the hap- of how to put the hap back in we need to account for its exclusion from the sphere of possibility). I am saying that to account for what happens here, to give an adequate description of what this something is, which might be described as an event or not (I would be tempted to say not, as the situation is exhaustingly familiar), doesn’t require bringing race in as race is already in. This shooter scene then is more than an ontological event before the ought (phenomenology would help here by showing how much perception is also part of this is, reminding us that what ‘is’ has angles or profiles that are not always revealed from a viewing point -racial profiling which is a way of explaining directionality, then, is part of how the police is, becoming material through repetition). This is how the expression ‘institutional racism’ (first introduced in the UK to describe the police force) it an ontological claim about the nature of the police, ie a claim that racism has become an attribute of the police (whether or not they ought (to be), they are). That people can disagree about this is, is another way of exploring the normative dimensions as a horizon of ontology.
So when I added some details to the picture of the shooter scene, I was as trying to show the direction of the happening is the happening: the ‘ought’ does not bring race in, the ‘is’ does, race is ‘is,’ such that ethics and politics are there in this case from the very beginning (and to be fair also, since oughts are, then ethics already is, or is an is, although actually my responses are more concerned with the political question than ethics at least when posed in this restricted sence of oughts). And also note that the examples must matter: I am using the example of racism to show the entanglement of ontology with politics which is not the same as saying all ontology IS politics (or all politics IS ontology). To generate knowledge of how race becomes ontology requires a lot of labour because actually this history (how race becomes about beings, and how worlds are as for, ie. how worlds assumed as being for, or for some beings more than others, a forness which has become fundamental) is what tends to be withdrawn (for further explanation see my new book On Being Included): there are sedimentations at stake here, which work precisely by not being revealed. So ontology is also about “walls”: the kind you don’t know they are there, unless you come up against them: no wonder privilege, and to stay with my example lets name that privilege as whiteness, is what tends to be withdrawn: the white police officer also does not think that race is anything to do with the ontological event though he would also probably also not think it came after in a separate sphere of politics, or if he did, he might discuss that as ‘intrusion’ into the neutrality of a most singular event (dismissable as political correctness say). He might disagree with both of these positions: 1) race is ontology and politics and 2) race is not ontology but is politics because he would separate ontology from politics ‘always’. So I am not saying that your separation of ontology from politics means you reject politics but that you restrict ontology to such an extent that your ‘is’ has become too thin (thin description in Ryle’s sense is one that can describe an action like doodling but needs to be thickened ‘before it amounts to an account of what the person is trying to accomplish’, my point is that race is something being accomplished in the direction of events this way and not that which makes the scene of its accomplishment ontological as much as political).To say you then introduce politics with the domain of the ought is to lose the is. If we put the examples first (ie put the objects of thought before the thought) and in adequately describing them we lose the distinctions we are making, then the distinctions are not worth making: they would mean losing proximity to the worlds we are trying to describe (and I am only interested in philosophy to the extent that I am interested in the world).
Can I also add that one of the reasons I suspect a dialogue is not possible is the tendency to respond to questionings of your logic by the suggestion that people have not read you properly: it might be just possible to ask whether someone whose labouring has been proximate to the scene of the examples used to illustrate a logic that belongs elsewhere might have something to say, something that might create an oblique angle on what recedes as the familiar in a thought (for example, what is withdrawn from this scene of withdrawal) and that other saying is an opportunity for a little bit of questioning and reflection.
And: to know what racism is to know something about what is and what is not.
September 16, 2012 at 10:35 am
Sara,
Read my most recent post. It might clarify for you what I mean by politics. As for your suggestion that there’s something amiss in me pointing out that someone has mischaracterized my claims, I believe this is incredibly unjust and a form of symbolic violence. We all have a right to defend what we say and point out when someone has mischaracterized us. In your response to my remarks on Facebook you both attributed incredibly bizarre positions to me and also implied that somehow I am indifferent to racism or supportive of it. I would suggest that it is these sorts of smarmy rhetorical gestures that make dialogue impossible, not someone saying “no, that’s not what I meant, here’s what I’m claiming.” I have, incidentally, read The Promise of Happiness. Have you read The Democracy of Objects or other works by me?
September 16, 2012 at 10:46 am
And to expand on my point, no, I don’t think racism is inherently political. It is a state that millions of people live in and contribute to while also seeing it as “the way things are”. Politics is that moment where such things are *contested* and fought. Nothing is inherently political, which is why it’s so important to make things political. People seem to think that simply because something involves power it’s political. But it’s not until those regimes of power are challenged that they become political. This is what I argue in my most recent post. Isn’t this actually the rationale behind your own work? You strive to make political what has otherwise been taken as the simple way of things. You strive to contest the naturalness of these things. *That’s* what politics is.
September 16, 2012 at 11:03 am
You asked me to explain why I thought this was wrong with this sentence on facebook: “We don’t enter the domain of ethics and politics until we begin to raise questions about what ought to be. ” My subsequent post on facebook about how race is ontological was an explanation of why I think that sentence is wrong. I was not saying that you think racism does not exist or that you support it. It was not about whether or not I think you do or do not support racism. I am not interested in that. I am interested in the ontological work of anti-racism: the destruction of the occupation of being required that is this work. I respond as that is my work.
September 16, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Sara writes:
“I am using the example of racism to show the entanglement of ontology with politics which is not the same as saying all ontology IS politics (or all politics IS ontology).”
I don’t think anyone ever claimed that politics and ontology aren’t entangled. It’s just that two things can’t be entangled if they’re not two different things to begin with. There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement here. We can give examples of where politics and ontology are all bound up together or examples where they aren’t. I think the point is that it’s casuistic. On that we would all apparently agree.
I think part of the problem here is that, to take the example of racism, we live in a society where racism has already been made political. It is, in a manner of speaking, an historical a priori. A racist act such as a racially motivated shooting is understood to be political because there has already been decades upon decades of campaigning, protest and so on in order to politicise such events. We encounter such events as being a priori political, historically. With this I see no problem. However, this is not the same as saying that racism is essentially political — as if it were a priori political regardless of the history of the thing.
Because racially motivated killings are already widely regarded as political issues, when such an event occurs it only takes a minimal push to enroll that act into the wider political networks — the networks are there ready and waiting, as it were. For that reason it may seem as though such an event is essentially political; that it’s political character is simply given. However, if we imagine a time or place where racially motivated killings aren’t widely accepted to be political then any given instance of such violence would be very difficult to enroll into the political networks.
The claim that racism is political as an historical a priori is, I think, basically compatible with an OOO or ANT understanding of the situation. That it is political according to some more abstract a priori — this I can’t imagine. If anyone believes this to be the case I can only ask: how?
September 16, 2012 at 3:52 pm
I Know! Let’s Talk about Politics and Ontology Again!…
Some responses to some responses to some responses…
September 16, 2012 at 6:37 pm
C’mon Sara,
You rhetorically chose the example for a particular reason to try and position me as somehow indifferent to or supportive of racism. You continued to do this even after I readily agreed that racism is a real thing. The question is *when* something becomes political. Just by virtue of being racist something is not yet political. Racism only becomes political when it is contested; as it should be.
September 17, 2012 at 4:44 pm
[…] and ontology again!’. If you’re still keeping up, Bryant then responds in another post (‘War Machines and Military Logistics’) at Larval Subjects, and Harman jumps in with a short post over at his OOP blog […]
September 17, 2012 at 7:45 pm
[…] in the blog world loosely centered around the space that object-oriented ontology has opened up. Levi Bryant and now Ian Bogost insist that ontology and politics are separate, that things really are and […]
October 23, 2012 at 3:12 pm
“The ‘ought’ does not bring race in, the ‘is’ does, race is ‘is,’ such that ethics and politics are there in this case from the very beginning (and to be fair also, since oughts are, then ethics already is, or is an is, although actually my responses are more concerned with the political question than ethics at least when posed in this restricted sence of oughts)”.
The “is” merely suggests that racial discourse is a factual occurrence within the world. If we are to contest whether racial discourse SHOULD occur, only then do we move into the realm of ethics/politics. It is the move from a fact (race is) is to the question of “should this be the case” that makes it ethico-political.
Saying that “oughts are” also does not resolve or undo the Is-Ought Dilemma, which (of course) imputes that we cannot derive an ought from an is. In this case, we would need to question whether oughts should be. Simply because they already are provides no rationale for choosing one system of ethics over the other, given the plurality of oughts with which we are faced.
“I am using the example of racism to show the entanglement of ontology with politics which is not the same as saying all ontology IS politics (or all politics IS ontology)”.
By using the example of racism you’ve only shown that racism occurs. You could do the same with any number of examples besides the politically charged category of racism to demonstrate how any X is entangled with ontology (the state of affairs that is). The types of ontology used are, of course, often inflected by a certain view of politics lying in the background. However, we need to distinguish our constructions of ontology and our ontological speculation from the domain of being itself. Whether we like it or not, being is, and we are. Moving backwards from the ought and trying to find it in the “is” in no way resolves the problem that the ought cannot be derived from that “is”.
“To say you then introduce politics with the domain of the ought is to lose the is. If we put the examples first (ie put the objects of thought before the thought) and in adequately describing them we lose the distinctions we are making, then the distinctions are not worth making: they would mean losing proximity to the worlds we are trying to describe (and I am only interested in philosophy to the extent that I am interested in the world).”
The “is” isn’t lost if we introduce politics as coextensive with the ought. A white police officer shoots a black individual. This has occurred. The fact that this HAS occurred provides absolutely no basis for determining whether it SHOULD HAVE occurred, any more than the fact that lightning has struck a tree provides no basis for whether this should have occurred. To determine whether this should or should not ave occurred is the domain of ethics and politics.
March 16, 2013 at 12:25 am
[…] into two separate and related texts: the first, a post from Levi Bryant’s Blog, “War Machines and Military Logistics“; the second, a book that I have been looking into for my research, Manuel DeLanda’s […]