Some Notes on Ontology and Politics

[UPDATE: Jon, over at Posthegemony, offers some critiques of this position. And Graham, at Object-Oriented Philosophy supplements my post with his own thoughts. I've also posted some thoughts that expand on this issue over at Speculative Heresy.]

[UPDATE #2: Mark from K-Punk offers up some thoughts as well. As is typical of K-Punk, he articulates my own position in a much more eloquent and stark way: "[speculative realism's] role in this respect [is] simply to scorch the earth, to make uninhabitable the ontological territories which continentalists had colonised with their versions of politics."]

[UPDATE #3: Reid responds with his own Laruellean take (one which differs from mine, showing there's hardly any speculative realist consensus even within a leading figure), and Levi responds to both of us with some illuminating thoughts from the perspective of his own object-oriented philosophy. Alex has a related post up that I find myself in complete agreement with, particularly the evacuation of normativity from ontology.]

It seems to me that one of the most contentious and unremarked upon effects of speculative realism has to do with its attack on a piece of continental dogma – namely the presupposition that ontology is necessarily political. This idea is seen in any number of continental works, from Deleuze’s constructivism, to Derrida’s deconstructions of presence, to the social constructivists, gender and identity theorists, among others. The basic idea being that ontology is always constructed through a political battle, a conflict over what exists. In this regards, the contribution of continental work was to undermine the notion that what exists can be definitively determined in an essential way. The problem was that they went too far with this line of thought and tended (I say tended, because there are almost always exceptions) to deny the independence of ontology from politics. In many cases, ontology even became passé, a mere relic of classical philosophy. These ideas, unsurprisingly, came along necessarily with the general acceptance of correlationism – if we can’t speak or know of anything independent of its manifestation to us, then every thing is necessarily already wrapped up in our political relations.

With speculative realism, however, this situation changes. The turn towards objects, towards the absolute, and towards the real as indifferent, all imply that ontology must be independent of politics. We can see this most clearly in Brassier’s work, I believe (although it is implicit in all of them). The relative absence of politics in Nihil Unbound stems partly from the belief that we can study ontology without having to be concerned about its political effects. The results of such a study, as in Brassier’s work, can be rather disconcerting for politics – what if there is no such thing as agency? – but this alone fails to discredit the arguments for such a position. So what does the separation of politics and ontology entail? A few hesitant and suggestive remarks might begin to make clear what precisely is at stake for any speculative realist politics...

The separation entails, first of all, that an ontology cannot be validated in terms of its political effects. Part of Badiou’s greatness is undoubtedly to have rejuvenated the concept of the subject, but when judging his ontology, we have to do so while bracketing these political effects. Similarly, when studying the results of neuroscience and their political implications, we must be careful not to reject them simply because they don't accord with our fundamental beliefs about ourselves. If it turns out that we are no more than patterns of neurons firing, this is a reality whose effective truth holds sway regardless of our political desires. (As an aside, I think that such an idea needs to reject Levi's 'Principle of Irreduction', as there are scientific examples of entities being reduced to other entities. The basic argument against such a principle being that we can be mistaken about how the difference an entity makes, makes that difference.)

The second effect is that we can no longer construct an ontology in order to achieve some political goal. We may wish to privilege difference as a counter to constricting identity formations, but we can not justify this privileging with political arguments. Rather, properly philosophical arguments need to be marshaled in support of these ideas. (This raises the important question of whether philosophy can ever be distinguished from politics completely, but the linguistic intermingling of the two need not entail their necessary correlation outside of language.)

A third and similar point is that an ontology cannot dictate a political program. Difference may be privileged, for example, but this can be taken in the direction of a capitalist individualism or the direction of undermining traditional power relations - a realist ontology will allow for a multitude of political projects to be spawned from it, without necessarily being liberating or progressive (or constraining or conservative).

The fourth effect is a little more radical, I think. This is a renunciation of the tendency among continental theorists to place their political arguments in terms of ontology – I’m thinking here of things like Badiou and the uncounted, Rancière and the people, Deleuze and the minor, etc. The common thread being that the collective agency for political change is always determined in terms of its ontological status – what is inexistent, or uncounted, or unactualized. But political change need not require that something fundamentally new come into being. There can be real political progress made without having to generate ontological novelty. (I’ll also mention too that the faith in the New tends to be another continental political dogma. As though the New was necessarily progressive. While the New may be considered an ontological category, its political content is entirely underdetermined by ontological reasoning.)

The fifth effect is a question of action. It’s the question of the relation between political thought and political action. If ontology is independent of our political projects, at the most basic level there needs to be some account of how one gets effectively translated into the other – how, in other words, does a political program get implemented? Here, what might end up being of crucial use, is Levi’s recent ruminations on what he has called ‘Latour’s principle’ – that there is no transportation without translation. The key here might be in outlining how specifically political projects get translated into specifically political acts with real effects. (Keeping in mind, as Graham has recently emphasized, that the divide between these two is not some paradigmatic relation, but rather only one relation among many. What is required is to underscore the singular relation at any time between a political idea and its concrete implementation - hence the need for continental political theory to be highly knowledgeable about empirical politics.)

Building on that idea, the sixth and last point to make is that the usefulness of ontology for politics would be to come to an understanding of how to leverage effective power. How, that is, to grasp the operations of the independent ontological machine in order to then implement a political project. The study of ontology can show us how causality functions, how ideas are transmitted, how collectivities emerge, etc. - but these in and of themselves have no political leanings. If it turns out that neurology is determining of thought, then political action must be focused on the neurological mechanisms, and not the derivative ideational mechanisms.

Anyways, I’m well aware that these are all pretty underdeveloped thoughts at the moment, but my hope is that they might provide a useful guide for beginning to think through the future of political theory.