Political Ontology Research Articles

Critical realism and the ‘ontological politics of drug policy’

This article explores the question of what we can consider to be real in drug policy. It examines two increasingly common aspects of drug policy analysis; radical constructionist critique and successionist data science. It shows how researchers using these assumptions have produced interesting findings, but also demonstrates their theoretical incoherence, based on their shared ‘flat ontology’. The radical constructionist claim that reality is produced within research methods – as seen in some qualitative studies - is shown to be unsustainably self-defeating. It is analytically ‘paralyzing’. This leads to two inconsistencies in radical constructionist studies; empirical ambivalence and ersatz epistemic egalitarianism. The Humean successionist approach of econometric data science is also shown to be unsustainable, and unable to provide explanations of identified patterns in data. Four consequent, limiting characteristics of this type of drug policy research are discussed: causal inference at a distance, monofinality, limited causal imagination, and overly confident causal claims. The article goes on to describe the critical realist approach towards ‘depth ontology’ and ‘generative causation’. It provides examples of how this approach is deployed in critical realist reviews and discourse analysis of drug policy. It concludes by arguing that critical realism enables more deeply explanatory, methodologically eclectic and democratically inclusive analysis of drug policy development and effects.

Toward Political Explanation of Change in Corporate Responsibility: Political Scholarship on CSR and the Case of Palm Oil Biofuels

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recently conceptualized and studied as a political phenomenon. Most debates in this scholarship have thus far focused on normative issues. Less attention has been paid to the explanatory potential of CSR research grounded in political theory and philosophy. In this article, we conduct a pragmatist reading of political scholarship on CSR and seek to deploy existing knowledge for research pursuing political explanation. We argue that the political ontologies that underlie scholarship on CSR can be used to transform normative and descriptive research also for explanatory uses. We show how ontologies vary in terms of potential research objects and scopes of political explanation, and argue that the main types of political-ontological stances adopted in scholarship on CSR, foundational and post-foundational stances, offer explanatory analysis of different schematic guidelines. Our pragmatist reading of previous research and an empirical case illustration of political explanation of change in corporate responsibility in the biofuel industry demonstrate the opportunities, limitations, and challenges different political-ontological commitments provide for political explanation.

Making the user friendly: the ontological politics of digital data platforms

ABSTRACT Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.

Among Greater Issues of the Day: Hong Kong in China, 2003–2013

The geohistorical disjunctures between Hong Kong—colonial territory, global city, and special administrative region—and China challenge understandings of the relationship. Hong Kong officially maintains certain core values that differ from those of the People’s Republic of China, while unofficial Chinese Communist Party united-front activity in Hong Kong has arguably narrowed the range of the sayable, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, in the public sphere. How does this admixture of core values, at turns antithetical and contested, appear in the space and time of Hong Kong? Interventions in the ideational dynamic between the city and the state—through images, utterances, performances, and alternative artworks—produce space for the appearance of subjects defined by the people. Not a postcolonial culture of disappearance but an ontology of politics where spaces of disagreement make apprehensible that which is politically unsayable. During the decade before the Umbrella Movement, in a fervent aesthetics of politics at the crossroads of hurtling urban transformation and accelerating illiberal governance, alternative art in Hong Kong populated social-movement activity with claims on public space and the possibilities of the people in the sightlines of a democratic future.

Schomburg’s Blackness of a Different Matter: A Historiography of Refusal

This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.

Assembling marine spatial planning in the global south: International agencies and the fate of fishing communities in India

The language and practice of Marine spatial planning (MSP) is typically associated with state-led multi-sectoral planning efforts. Yet in countries like India, where the government is not yet promoting MSP, ocean space has already been divided using principles and practices that are characteristic of MSP elsewhere in the world. Instead of being initiated by the state, these MSP-like processes are initiated by international agencies when industries seek large-scale development of India’s marine ecosystems. Although intended as an inclusive, holistic process to plan industrial development, this assemblage of MSP technologies, processes, and practices mandated by international corporations produces a particular power relation through its rejection of local knowledge and insistence on data, for instance, in the form of discrete, geo-coded polygons. This paper argues that this form of MSP produces an ontological politics, despite emerging from seemingly rational, post-political, and technocratic processes. Engaging with such politics is increasingly possible with access to geographical information systems, and this, therefore, provides a novel space in which to engage in political struggle. The case of externally mandated MSP in India demonstrates that non-state actors can initiate MSP, and therefore, opens the possibility for fishing communities, as non-state actors, to directly engage with the assemblage of practices that produce MSP.

To the question on power and society in the political ontology of Y. F. Samarin and Slavophiles

The object of this research is the problem of power and society in the political ontology. The indicated problem is viewed in the works of the founder of political philosophy in Russia Y. F. Samarin in the context of teaching of the representatives of “Moscow School”. An attempt is made to demonstrate the multidimensionality of the philosopher’s key ideas and avoid their simplifications and distortions. The evolution of Samarin’s philosophical-political views is described: the initial stage of this writings is focused on the eschatological pursuits, the take roots in the Russian spiritual culture and are associated with the ideas of transformed power, grateful type of being; the next period is concentrated on the ida of national policy, when the power must originate with people, strengthen the interethnic unity and serve to the historical calling of Russia, rather that the distracted political beginning. The analysis of Samarin’s views on power led to the following conclusions: the philosopher believed that it is essential to respect boundaries between the church and state life, but underlines the need of spiritual influence upon the power; each new form of power had to comply with the organic social development, be generated by it, rather than be created artificially or borrowed; the government should lean on the enlightened nation, rather than on cosmopolitan leadership. It is claimed that Samarin’s political position – the “revolutionary conservatism”, which essence consists not in destruction, but construction of the state supported by spiritual culture of Russia and peculiarities of its national pattern, but at the same time in uncompromised antagonism to everything impeding well-being the superpower. It is concluded that the political ontology of Y. F. Samaring and classical Slavophiles became the foundation for philosophical-political constructs of the thinkers of Silver Age and white émigré. Some of his ideas may become the foundation for political ideology of modern Russia.

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Doing ontopolitically-oriented research: Synthesising concepts from the ontological turn for alcohol and other drug research and other social sciences

The ontological turn has had a significant impact on the social sciences, including the social sciences of alcohol and other drug use. Work questioning the materiality of drugs, and the discourses of compulsion and dependence that co-constitute public understandings of drugs and their effects, is now relatively common in the field. In this article I discuss the new assumptions and methods informing the ontological turn, linking them together to produce an approach that synthesises what has become a fertile but rather piecemeal domain of critical drugs studies. In doing so, I identify and define to what I will term, following these intellectual trajectories, ‘ontopolitically-oriented research’ for the alcohol and other drug social sciences.This article will discuss two research projects: one that set out to generate new knowledge on lived experiences of addiction, and one that set out to rethink the standard illicit drug use safe injecting fitpack to better serve couples who inject together. The aim of this article will not be to report on project findings however. Instead it will provide a synthesis of research methods inspired by, and interpreted through, the ontological turn, using the projects as examples by considering them from the point of view of their ontological politics. As I will argue, the projects and their outcomes were fundamentally inspired by the insight that research not only explores and describes realities, it actively constitutes the realities it explores, playing a direct role in reconstituting realities through its conduct, outcomes and communications. I adopt the term ‘ontopolitically-oriented research’ to describe this approach. The analysis in this article will focus on the projects’ methods, describing the ways these methods were interpreted and implemented in ways best able to articulate and fulfil project aims. In concluding, the article will propose a set of features of ontopolitically-oriented research, as well as some observations on the steps, obstacles, priorities and pitfalls ontopolitically-oriented research may encounter in pursuing its aims.

Diagnosing uncertainty, producing neonatal abstinence syndrome.

The use of alcohol and other drugs during pregnancy is understood to be an important public health problem. One way in which this problem is expressed and responded to is via the identification and treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). In this article, we demonstrate how the processes of anticipating, identifying and responding to NAS are characterised by significant uncertainty among parents and health and social care practitioners. We draw on interviews with 16 parents who had recently had a baby at risk of NAS, and multidisciplinary focus groups with 27 health and social care professionals, held in Scotland, UK. NAS, and drug use in pregnancy, is a fraught and complex arena. Parents in the UK who use opioids risk losing custody of children, and must navigate a high degree of surveillance, governance and marginalisation. We suggest that considering NAS as a social diagnosis, further informed by Mol's political ontology of 'multiple' bodies/diseases, may help to produce clinical and social responses to uncertainty which avoid, rather than promote, further marginalisation of parents who use drugs. One such response is to develop a culture of relationship-based care which empowers both service providers and service users to challenge existing practice and decision-making.

Infinite Possibilities in a Finite World: Ontological Politics and Climate Emergency

Increasingly, mainstream approaches to the climate emergency are framed around technocratic, market-based policies that leave unchallenged the anthropogenic mode of development responsible for the crisis in the first place, and tend to erase the voices of grounded and localised experiences that issue from different ways of being in the world. The trend is embodied in mounting conflicts around dispossession of indigenous land, where local demands transcend conventional conceptions of political participation and challenge liberal-capitalist ontologies. This paper will review the political implications and opportunities that adopting insights derived from the ontological turn in the social sciences offers in such a context, and consider how reflections around post-humanist concerns, and the conceptualisation of difference that transcends the modern culture/nature divide, can offer a way out of the current political and ecological impasse.

Infinite Possibilities in a Finite World: Ontological Politics and Climate Emergency

Increasingly, mainstream approaches to the climate emergency are framed around technocratic, market-based policies that leave unchallenged the anthropogenic mode of development responsible for the crisis in the first place, and tend to erase the voices of grounded and localised experiences that issue from different ways of being in the world. The trend is embodied in mounting conflicts around dispossession of indigenous land, where local demands transcend conventional conceptions of political participation and challenge liberal-capitalist ontologies. This paper will review the political implications and opportunities that adopting insights derived from the ontological turn in the social sciences offers in such a context, and consider how reflections around post-humanist concerns, and the conceptualisation of difference that transcends the modern culture/nature divide, can offer a way out of the current political and ecological impasse.

Post-Marxist Political Ontology and the Foreclosure of Radical Newness

Much of leftist political philosophy has uncritically accepted the logic of capitalism, which is a logic of conservation that presents itself as a logic of “production.” Many leftist political philosophers subscribe to capitalism’s fundamental myth—that capitalism produces the new. This appearance of proliferation, however, masks an underlying stasis. This article interrogates this trend in the apparently disparate projects of contemporary accelerationism and Jacques Rancière. The accelerationist project of immanence allows for newness only in quantity and not in quality, while Rancière, coming closer to thinking radical newness in his account of politics, forecloses the possibility of a radically emancipatory society. I suggest an open ontology, which Marx offers, provides a better framework for thinking revolutionary newness.

How Does a Thought Scream? The Possibility of the New as a Condition of Political Ontology in Gilles Deleuze’s The Time-Image

The paper deals with Gilles Deleuze’s The Time-Image not as an essay on the philosophy of cinema but as a theory of political ontology. The meaning of the concept of “scream” must first be clarified. This concept appears in Deleuze’s lectures from 1980 in the context of the sequence of cinema, thought and shock from the second volume of his book Cinema. To indicate the immanent political significance of Deleuze’s cinema studies, the article clarifies the conceptual difference between two types of cinema. The distinction between “the movement-image” and “the time-image” is examined as ontological rather than aesthetic. In particular, the paper shows the conservative effects of “classic” cinema in the context of Henri Bergson’s ontology. The critical potential of modern cinema, which Deleuze considers in The Time-Image, is a condition for undermining the logic of “habit,” which is reproduced by the cinema of “the movement-image.” The condition for a break with this logic is the effect of shock, which is produced by the distinctive characteristics of modern cinema. Deleuze finds the political significance of modern cinema in the context of the possibility of the New which is not predetermined by previous conditions. The rupture with the status quo is ensured by contrasting two concepts of the Whole viewed either as the Open or as the Outside. The difference between them is examined in connection with the critical distance from the ontology of Henri Bergson, which is an imaginary solution of the problem of the New and therefore the problem of conservatism in the universe of “classic” cinema. In order to identify the political significance of “the image-time,” it is necessary to indicate the constitutive role of temporal rupture in modern cinema. It is this logic that provides the effect of shock for thought and allows it to break away from permanent repetition.

The Green and the Blue—A New Political Ontology for a Mature Information Society

Today, in any mature information society, we live neither online nor offline but on life, that is, we increasingly live in that special space that is both analogue and digital, both online and offline. Imagine someone asking whether the water is fresh or salty in the estuary where the river meets the sea. That someone has not understood the special nature of the place. Our information society is that place. And our technologies are perfectly evolved to take advantage of it, like mangroves growing in brackish water. In the mangrove society, machine-readable data, new forms of agency and interactions are constantly evolving. The consequences of such a radical transformation are many, but one is particularly significant and rich in consequences: how should we design the mangrove society, when it comes to the relationship between the natural and the digital? In this text, I argue that the digital blue is a great ally of the environmental green. The two work best in tandem. And if the world will enjoy a sustainable development for the environment that is also socially preferable for humanity, it will be because the green and the blue will have created a virtuous circle of nature and technology. It can be done. There is just no time to waste.

Supernatural Mapuche: extractivism, non-human beings and fear in Central-Southern Chile

This work focuses on understanding the effects produced in Mapuche territories with the arrival of extractive projects in the field of energy production. From a political ontology perspective, and through an ethnographic methodology, we analyze the case of the Neltume Hydroelectric Project located in the Panguipulli commune (Region of Los Rios, south of Chile). Rethinking critically the approaches of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in the light of our field findings, we argue that the territories intervened -from certain transgressive actions- are comprised of “supernatural” contexts. This entails a change in the relationship between a set of non-human entities regarding to humans, characterized by the belligerence and anger of the former against the lack of protection and the fear of the latter.

Filozofija kao emancipatorska politika - na tragu Marksa i Badjua

Beginning, first and foremost, from Marx's and Badiou's analyses, the concept of philosophy as politics of emancipation is considered. Politics of power via politics of force and violence is contrasted to a contemporary line of rethinking politics of emancipation and the emphasis - besides the exploration of practices of freedom, justice and equality - is placed on Marx's idea of "true democracy" (wahre Demokratie). This refers to rethinking politics of the people and reflecting the issue about the engaged structure of knowledge which precisely as emancipatory knowledge turns out to be decisive for political action, resistance and the foundation of a democratic state. With the rebirth of history, the potentials for confronting neoliberalism as "capitalo-parliamentarism" are reopened, as well as the potentials for the construction of democracy as the rule of the people. The basis of contemporary political ontology appears in the relation between politics of the people and the politics of truth.

The Green and the Blue: A New Political Ontology for a Mature Information Society

Today, in any mature information society, we live neither online nor offline but on life, that is, we increasingly live in that special space that is both analogue and digital, both online and offline. Imagine someone asking whether the water is fresh or salty in the estuary where the river meets the sea. That someone has not understood the special nature of the place. Our information society is that place. And our technologies are perfectly evolved to take advantage of it, like mangroves growing in brackish water. In the mangrove society, machine-readable data, new forms of agency and interactions are constantly evolving. The consequences of such a radical transformation are many, but one is particularly significant and rich in consequences: how should we design the mangrove society, when it comes to the relationship between the natural and the digital? In this text, I argue that the digital blue is a great ally of the environmental green. The two work best in tandem. And if the world will enjoy a sustainable development for the environment that is also socially preferable for humanity, it will be because the green and the blue will have created a virtuous circle of nature and technology. It can be done. There is just no time to waste.

The Location of Infrastructure

A & Q 55 Kuzuoglu, Ulug. 2018. “Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Lewis, Geoffrey. 1999. TheTurkishLanguageReform:ACatastrophicSuccess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nammour, Yara Khoury. 2014. Nasri Khattar: A Modernist Typotect. Amsterdam : Khatt Books. Simons, Gary F., and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2018. Ethnologue Global Dataset : Twenty-­ First Edition Data. Distributed by SIL International. http://www.sil.org/. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3: 377–­ 91. Zaugg, Isabelle Alice. 2017. “Digitizing Ethiopic: Coding for Linguistic Continuity in the Face of Digital Extinction.” PhD diss., American University. Zhong, Yurou. 2019. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity 1916–­1958. New York: Columbia University Press. The Location of Infrastructure Ram Bhat I argue that infrastructures are useful when understood as a vantage point, a point from which one could investigate both state and subject, materiality and meaning, structure and agency. Admittedly, to occupy this productive vantage point, a broad working definition of infrastructure is needed, for example, “a totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalised structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate , connecting and binding people into collectivities” (Larkin 2008, 6). The entanglement of media and communication infrastructures in state–­ subject relations is fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration and research among social anthropologists, political sociologists, media and communication scholars, and science and technology studies scholars, to name a few. In the age of late capitalism, the expansion of internet infrastructure further aids the free flow of capital across the globe. At the same time, this free flow of capital should not be used as an excuse for us to assume that the effects of either capital or technologies are similar everywhere. In several countries of the Global South, especially in Asia and Africa, neoliberalism has been accompanied by the increased visibility and influence of the state, although key sectors, such as transportation, aviation, telecommunication, education, and 56 A & Q health, continue to be privatized rapidly. Infrastructures as conduits of capital contain material and symbolic traces that can be studied in various ways—­ as evidence of novel social practices, institutional and financial arrangements, electoral politics, new government schemes, new disciplinary practices, and so on. Such new practices and arrangements are sites for rethinking the specificities of “Asia” and “inter-­ Asian” connections, thinking about how our societies are constellated in new ways without necessarily reverting to older and increasingly exhausted conceptual categories. Media and communication scholarship, along with other disciplines and fields, has seen a renewed interest in infrastructure. Infrastructure studies has been a crucial component of what has been called the “ontological ” turn. This “ontological politics covers more than the question of how politics is embedded in technological devices, for it concerns the emergence of potentially novel forms out of infrastructural arrangements ” (Jensen and Morita 2015, 85; cf. Knox 2017; Woolgar and Cooper 1999; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). In part at least, this move signals an exhaustion with analytics that treat politics as an exclusively discursive domain. “In shifting attention away from politics as a primarily discursive activity, these new materialist reworkings have distanced themselves from conventional political categories in order to focus instead on processes and relations that exceed these descriptive concepts” (Knox 2017, 365; cf. Braun and Whatmore 2010; Marres and Lezaun 2011; Whatmore and Landström 2011). Such a postdiscursive perspective can generate insights into media and communications infrastructures that have hitherto been understudied in favor of investigations focused on content, audiences, and political economy. Take the case of satellites used in warfare. It has been argued that “satellite images can be used to bring (infra)structural processes and matters to the fore by intimating or revealing parts of systems or processes that are simply too vast for the frames, conventions and capacities of modern media” (Parks 2012, 79). From undersea cables to standards and protocols, infrastructures—­ taken literally as objects of research—­ show how the local is constantly marked by the national and the international (Starosielski 2015; Easterling 2016). In India, for example, since the mid-­ 1980s, the rise of Hindu nationalism has gone hand in hand with utopian imaginaries of technological development. The right-­ wing Bharatiya Janta...

The Hero's Mass and the Ontological Politics of the Image

This article explores the ontological politics of the image in Tamil cinema. Its focus is a particular scene from the 2011 film Mankatha (Venkat Prabhu) in which the protagonist, played by the "mass hero" Ajith Kumar, is slapped by a character played by Vaibhav Reddy. Taking the image not simply as diegetic representation but as performative act, Ajith fans were enraged at Vaibhav. As I show, multiple ontological and political claims on what an image is intersect in and manifest as this performative image-act. This multiplicity provokes rethinking of arguments by André Bazin and others about "the" ontology of the film image.