Ontological Turn Research Articles

The Cognitive Order of Society: Radicalizing the Ontological Turn in Critical Theory

Investigating Habermas’s radicalization of the ontological turn in the philosophy of language that eventuated in his universal or formal pragmatics, this article finds that he has not pursued his avowed radicalization far enough. By contrast with his claim that due to its conceptual thrust his type of formal pragmatics is required over and above the empiricist approach to sharpen social analysis, it emerges that his three world-concepts are social-theoretically underspecified. The direction in which the proposed radicalization beyond Habermas is pursued is determined by the core assumption that the ontological properties at issue are of a cognitive nature. The central argument is therefore that the ontological turn in Critical Theory represented by Habermas needs to be cognitive-sociologically radicalized, the result of which is the introduction of the concept of the cognitive order of society. The unique ontological status of the cognitive order thus also needs explication. Finally, that the lack of this concept systematically leaves a conspicuous theoretical gap in contemporary Critical Theory is briefly indicated with reference to some recent key publications by Honneth and Forst and Günther.

The spatial ontologies of interstitial spaces: Insights from Belfast’s “interfaces” and the spatialization of the in-betweenness

ABSTRACT Cities are composed of a varied array of interstices that are often observed as a network of undeveloped, vacant, or leftover spaces and infrastructures. Such conditions, however, little speak on the multifaceted nature of interstitial spaces as in-between domains that can be morphologically heterogeneous, functionally active, and socially constructed; something that expands on the multiple ontologies of interstitiality beyond being vacant, empty, or inert. While acknowledged around their development potentials or as elements of segregation, the physicality of interstices obscures their evolving spatiality between conflict and divide, relationality, and acceptance. This spatiality becomes plausible in post-conflict cities—such as Belfast—where interstitiality takes the form of “interfaces”: complex in-between areas that articulate divided Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist communities throughout peacebuilding politics. By taking a phenomenological approach, the spatiality and meanings of Belfast interfaces are scrutinised to find that Belfast interfaces speak on multiple ontologies linked to (i) their evolving spatiality, (ii) their constructed meanings, and (iii) their naturalisation as daily-life transitions that draw on emerging forms of safety, identity, memory, integration, segregation and futurity. Belfast interfaces take the ontological turn of the in-betweenness towards suggesting that the staging of spaces as promoting togetherness can be more illusionary than concrete.

CINEMA, ARTE E VIRADAS ONTOLÓGICAS

In this essay, we will explore the interrelationship between cinema, art and ontological turns, going through the concept of ontology, ontological turns, the importance of cinema and art as language builders and influence in relation to the fundamental understanding of existence, as we also seek illustrate the complexity and interdependence of these elements in the human experience. The methodology used is based on bibliographical research, bringing together information gathering through books and articles. In view of this, putting on the agenda the importance of the relationship between cinema, art and the ontological turn as a reflection on the nature of being and reality.

CINEMA, ARTE E VIRADAS ONTOLÓGICAS CINEMA, ART AND ONTOLOGICAL TURNINGS

In this essay, we will explore the interrelationship between cinema, art and ontological turns, going through the concept of ontology, ontological turns, the importance of cinema and art as language builders and influence in relation to the fundamental understanding of existence, as we also seek illustrate the complexity and interdependence of these elements in the human experience. The methodology used is based on bibliographical research, bringing together information gathering through books and articles. In view of this, putting on the agenda the importance of the relationship between cinema, art and the ontological turn as a reflection on the nature of being and reality.

A Difficult Beginning: Commencement and Birth in the Analysis of an Adolescent

The author distinguishes between two kinds of beginning, conceptually tied to two ways of approaching the psychoanalytic situation described as epistemological and ontological. Through a clinical case, the author shows how her work with a troubled adolescent had two beginnings that corresponded to these types. In this way, she tries to expand on the literature about the ontological turn, focusing on what beginning means in this context. For treatment to succeed, a birth must emerge, a transformative moment with the potential for significant change. The combined ability to transform the most primitive, somatopsychic pain can be more effective if shared by analysts and patients in a predominantly aesthetic form.

Consistency of Youth Identity Construction in Media Texts: Development and Adaptation of Actor-Network Theory for Empirical Media Research (Сase Study)

The formation of youth identity in communication is on the agenda of many areas of humanitarian knowledge. We analyzed communication within the framework of an educational media project, which resulted in the construction of the expected identity. In the course of the analysis, we used a conceptual model of communication that combines the stages of identity construction in interaction with the environment and the actions of actors from the standpoint of the methodology of actor-network theory. A three-dimensional model of communication is presented for the first time, where actors and actants change the communicative process by their affordances and resistance. The obtained results allow to delineate the necessary actions of human and non-human actors at each stage of communication and identity integration, giving the opportunity to justify a new theoretical direction in the study of the problems of identity construction through media communication. The methodology requires further testing, but there are already positive results. The tendency of actualization of urban identity of young people depending on the focus on interaction with the heritage of the city and according to the stages of communication, according to the conceptual model, has been established. The article is intended for specialists in mass communication and journalism, and will also be useful for those interested in the ontological turn in humanitarian knowledge, actor-network theory, discourse and media text analysis.

Undoing the knots. A gender-historical perspective on debates about kindergarten in German-speaking Switzerland (1950–1980)

ABSTRACT This article discusses how a gender-historical perspective may still be productive in today’s historiography of education. In doing so, it relies on theoretical approaches developed in feminist and gender-historical debates and in debates about the ontological turn in historiography. Categories are thus understood as “world-giving” and changing entities which cannot just be analysed in their varying historical contexts but must be examined and historicised themselves in order to capture their fuzziness and fluidity. Against this theoretical background and on the basis of professional journals of kindergarten teachers and published speeches of seminar teachers, this article analyses debates about kindergarten in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, focusing on the years 1950–1980. In these debates, it examines what “productive work” (Scott) the categories “child” and “mother” did with regard to social and gender order and how they emerged from various knowledges becoming entangled in specific places and times. The allegedly clear “inside-outside boundaries” and “dichotomies” (Haraway) between the categories are questioned by turning to conflicts, to the unresolved, to the paradoxical. Furthermore, the paper reflects on the tasks assigned to kindergarten and the arguments which were put forward to legitimise it within the category-related “meshwork” (Ingold) of knowledges and power. Finally, it is shown how powerfully the categories “child” and “mother” acted in the debates about kindergarten in German-speaking Switzerland when stabilising and perpetuating a strongly gendered social order.

Attempting an Ontology of Participatory Film

In this video-essay, participatory filmmaker, Paul Cooke, and social anthropologist, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, discuss in detail images from two activist-focussed, participatory video projects Cooke has run with young people in South Africa and Lebanon. They ask whether participatory film can communicate their creators’ activist intentions to audiences often far removed from the original context of production. They challenge themselves to answer this question by deliberately juxtaposing their respective disciplines’ distinct philosophical approaches to ontology. Bazin’s foundational discussion of the ontology of the photographic image (as a universally relatable ‘essence’ encapsulated in the image) is juxtaposed with anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’ (a radical cultural-relativist focus on people and contextually situated meaning). The video-essay reflects on whether the young participant filmmakers’ aesthetic choices generate images which speak for themselves or, alternatively, whether the transfigurations these images undergo through different registers of representation and curation – as the films move from community showcasing event to international film festival or academic setting – change their originally-intended meanings. In identifying tensions between proximity and distance, intimacy and exploitation, the potentials and limitations of mediating local activists’ voices to remote audiences through film is left up to the spectator for final arbitration.

Encountering of Climate Crisis and Ecological Theology - An Essay for the Ontological Turn of Theology Beyond New Materialism -

Encountering of Climate Crisis and Ecological Theology - An Essay for the Ontological Turn of Theology Beyond New Materialism -

Talking across worlds: The ontological turn and communication in natural resource co-management with Indigenous communities

The ontological turn in critical social theory provokes emerging calls for new approaches to natural resource management where Indigenous perspectives, worldview, knowledges, and values are prioritized in the stewardship of Indigenous lands. Yet, scant literature focuses on the ontological implications for communication within environmental decision-making, where Habermas’ communicative action theory, with its norms of privileging argumentation, formality, expertise, institutional authority, rationality, and language, continues to shape spaces of public participation since the communicative turn in the 1990s. Growing calls for participatory decision-making, as well as the mounting failures of scientific management approaches espoused by conventional natural resource management, have fuelled the rise of co-management since the 1980s. The emerging emphasis in co-management approaches on community collaboration and meaningful communication was strengthened with the emergence of adaptive co-management and adaptive governance in the early 2000s. Yet, the ontological turn unveils communicative tensions which continue to persist, rooted in ontological difference and onto-epistemic violence. Rethinking communication under the ontological turn in co-management with Indigenous communities, this paper reviews the literature and further proposes the idea of ethical equivocation as a communicative tool and starting point toward learning to talk across worlds.

ONTOLOGY OF DIGITAL OBJECTS AND TECHNOLOGICAL NORMATIVITY: NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR DIGITAL ETHICS

Purpose: Development of conceptual approaches to the understanding of ethical aspects of digital technologies, based on the ontological turn in the understanding of technological normativity.Design / Method / Approach: The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophy of technology, ethics, social philosophy, science and technology research, computer science and cognitive psychology. Methods of conceptual analysis, phenomenological description, critical discourse analysis and comparative analysis are used.Findings: The ontological status of digital objects and their role in the formation of ethical experience is analyzed. The forms of normativity of digital technologies are revealed: interface, algorithmic and infrastructural.Theoretical implications: The research contributes to the development of conceptual approaches to the ethical aspects of digital technologies, creating a basis for the integration of various philosophical traditions and expanding the possibilities of ethical analysis in the digital era.Practical implications: The proposed approach can be used to develop strategies for ethical design and management of digital technologies, including creating ethical guidelines, conducting ethical audits, designing interfaces, and developing educational programs on digital ethics.Originality / Value: A comprehensive approach to the consideration of the ethics of digital technologies is proposed, taking into account the ontological turn in the understanding of technological normativity. The novelty lies in the integration of the ideas of postphenomenology, object-oriented ontology and philosophy of information for the analysis of the ontology of digital objects and their normative force.Research limitations / Future research: Prospects include empirical studies of various forms of technological normativity, in-depth study of the ontological status of specific types of digital objects, and analysis of the relationship between the ontology of digital objects and their normative force in various contexts. The limitations are related to the theoretical nature of the study, which requires further empirical verification.Paper type: Theoretical.

Paraontological Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT Here is a condensed transcript of a presentation given for Parapraxis x The Psychosocial Foundation’s Seminar Three: The Wish on, from, with, Thomas Ogden’s paper “Ontological Psychoanalysis or ‘What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?’” The presentation proposes that the ontological turn in psychoanalysis hasn’t gone far enough or has gone too far while getting close, that ontological psychoanalysis shares with epistemological psychoanalysis what Fred Moten, in comments on Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, called the brutalities of ontological thinking, the commitment to individuation and separability. But in ontological psychoanalysis, paraontological (Moten, Nahum Chandler) psychoanalysis, what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls difference without separability, can be experienced together. We don’t need separability, and we couldn’t have it if we wanted it, because it doesn’t exist.

Complexity in the perspective of the ontological turn in modern anthropology

The article examines the forms of representation of the idea of the diversity of being that have developed outside Western European philosophy and science. The paper presents an analysis of the proposed F. Descola, E. Cohn and E. V. de Castro reconstructions of “Indian” ontologies, which are positioned as an alternative to the West «metaphysics». The models constructed within the framework of anthropological reconstructions are based on a number of ontological assumptions (multi-naturalism, reinspectivism, multimodality), which are considered as forms of representation of diversity. The author examines the boundaries of the decentered ontology of diversity, the peculiarities of the relationship between objective and subjective complexity in the mythology of Indian collectives. In the context of the described theoretical models, complexity is considered as a relational, transversal category relevant for describing the processuality of existence, the diversity of human experience, the relationship between man, society and culture. The article also presents a comparative analysis of the ideas of diversity that have developed in “Indian” metaphysics and in the directions of modern philosophy (“new ontologies”) and science (synergetics).

Rationalism without Representationalism: Deleuze, Whitehead, and the Decolonization of Philosophy, with Lessons from Anthropology’s Ontological Turn

ABSTRACT One way of characterizing the ontological turn in anthropology is the effort to transform philosophical anthropology into anthropological philosophy—or anthropology into philosophy. This effort proceeds upon the premise that to critique philosophical representationalism is to critique the entire rationalist enterprise. It is as a result of this coupling that some OTers suggest that a permanently decolonized philosophy becomes indistinguishable from post-representationalist anthropology. Curiously, it is by thinking with Gilles Deleuze that they conclude, on the one hand, that to decolonize anthropology is to de-representationalize it, and, on the other, that to decolonize philosophy is therefore to anthropologize it (since, on their logic, de-representationalizing means de-philosophizing). To turn to ontology means “thinking immanence” not, pace Deleuze, as philosophy, but beyond philosophy. This article argues that the supersessionist claim is incoherent precisely insofar as this coupling is unwarranted. To provide a counterinstance, the article suggests how thinking with Alfred North Whitehead decouples the critique of representationalism from the critique of rationalism. One implication of this work is to model a speculative philosophy that can be responsive to postcolonial concerns about representationalism without thereby becoming functionally indistinct from anthropological method.

The emergence of the non-Indigenous people: Confronting colonialism in the translation of Indigenous myths

What, to echo Walter Benjamin, is the task of the translator in interpreting an Indigenous myth? The author faced thorny issues of translation and colonial violence working with an Indigenous population in a Venezuelan rainforest. Renowned healer, storyteller, and political leader Santiago Rivera performed the myth of “The emergence of the non-Indigenous people”, framing it as not only addressed to the author but as being about him. The analysis begins with work by Indigenous scholars Chris Teuton, Cutcha Risling Baldy and Gerald Vizenor in interpreting an ironic section about how Indigenous people came to be poor and non-Indigenous people wealthy, interpreted by a missionary as evidence of an Indigenous inferiority complex. Rivera brilliantly posed fundamental questions for translating Indigenous myths, questioning who gets to determine what constitutes a myth and what a decolonial translation entails, by tying the myth’s action to struggles to confront non-Indigenous exploitation of their lands, coastal water, labour and women’s sexuality. Just as the performance challenged the author to participate in Indigenous struggles, it raises questions for the rich mythic analyses and decolonial ambitions of ‘ontological turn’ scholars Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, extending questions posed by Descola’s Araweté interlocutors. A synopsis of this article can be found here.

Philosophical hermeneutics and scientific and pedagogical activities

Importance. Maintaining a continuous, equal dialogue between teachers and philosophers is one of the conditions for achieving the main humanitarian and educational goal – the upbringing of a spiritual and moral, comprehensively developed, socially responsible personality. Scientific and pedagogical activity is based on a certain system of philosophical and ideological ideas, principles and ideals that enrich and stimulate the development of educational thought and practice. Currently, the experience of philosophical hermeneutics, one of the directions of Western thought, is in great demand in educational practice. Hermeneutical theories influence the formation and formation of a special science – pedagogical hermeneutics. The principles of hermeneutics are increasingly being used as a theoretical and methodological basis for discussing and critically comprehending traditional pedagogical problems, such as methods of teaching and upbringing in the field of social sciences and humanities, assessment of the quality of education, the content and meaning of pedagogical activity. The ideas and positions of hermeneutics resonate in discussions about qualitative research. Hermeneutics helps to comprehend the genuine difficulties of interpretation that each individual faces in everyday life and professional activities. The purpose of the research is to reveal the possibilities of applying the experience of philosophical hermeneutics in the structure of scientific and pedagogical activity. To achieve this goal, the characteristic features and principles of hermeneutics as a philosophical tradition are considered, the cognitive potential of the hermeneutical approach in scientific and pedagogical practice is clarified.Materials and Methods. The following methods and approaches are used: 1) using the comparative historical method, the process of formation and development of philosophical hermeneutics is revealed, its conceptual evolution is analyzed; 2) the fundamental method of interpretation is used to work with texts of prominent representatives of philosophical hermeneutics; 3) the application of an interdisciplinary approach is due to the combination in the study of various fields of knowledge: philosophy, pedagogy, linguistics, psychology; 4) on the basis of a systematic approach, an analytical description of the applied aspect of philosophical hermeneutics for pedagogy is provided. The historical and philosophical reconstruction of the ideas and principles of hermeneutics was carried out on the basis of the works of F. Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, M. Heidegger, G.-G. Gadamer. The specificity of the hermeneutical methodology is comprehended against the background of the positivist methodology opposite to it.Results and Discussion. The cognitive potential of the hermeneutical approach in scientific and pedagogical practice is considered. It is noted that this approach provides the teacher with an understanding of the meaning of key educational terms, which helps to avoid situations of conceptual confusion in pedagogical communication. Understanding and interpretation can cause certain difficulties for students themselves when they relate to the content of various texts. In such cases, the teacher should find out the causes of the difficulties that arise, and help the students overcome them. It is emphasized that hermeneutics forms a specific style of thinking with a clearly pronounced anti-positivist orientation. The widespread opinion about the teacher as a subject of educational activity and the bearer of genuine knowledge, which he must “put into the heads” of students, in hermeneutics gives way to the idea of learning as a process of mutual creativity, cooperation between the teacher and the student. The role of the teacher is reduced to creating conditions that ensure the “merging of horizons” of participants in pedagogical activity. Hermeneutics stimulates the formulation of questions aimed at understanding the meaning of educational activity, it clarifies the degree of involvement of the teacher in the realization of this meaning. Starting from the idea of ontological inclusion of a person in a cultural and historical tradition, hermeneutics makes it possible to understand to what extent prejudices determine our behavior and thinking, and how this circumstance affects interpersonal relationships. The hermeneutical approach makes it possible to interpret educational activities based on the idea of the uniqueness of pedagogical experience. The use of the hermeneutical method assumes that the teacher-researcher associates himself not with an impartial observer, but with a full participant in the dialogical search. Thanks to the joint efforts of the researcher and other participants in the hermeneutical conversation, meaning and understanding merge.Conclusion. It is shown that the problem of interpretation, considered in the framework of educational activities, is of a practical nature. Modern philosophical hermeneutics, having made an ontological turn, overcomes the Cartesian view of the abstract opposition of subject and object, tradition and reason, which prevails in “modernist” pedagogy. Teachers can benefit from the analysis and development of the most important ideas and provisions of hermeneutics for their application in scientific and pedagogical activities, as it helps to realize their own prejudices, questions initial interpretations, strengthens the position of self-reflection regarding the educational process.

Thinking like a feminist and reading with love

In this paper, we expand the Foucauldian question of what is thinking doing? We approach the question in the context of reading as an entirely ontological enterprise. Aligned with the special issue theme of reading as a “long preparation,” and prompted by Deleuze’s discussion of “reading with love,” we link the two to present how reading with love has been enacted in our work, both collective and individual, as transformative and intensive. The feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, and her own readings of Deleuze and Foucault, prompts us to envisage what it is to think like a feminist and read with love after the ontological turn. As ontological, reading is neither consumption nor the acquisition of knowledge but an act of creation, an act of freedom, an act of love.

Dam the river: Ontological exclusion in global and Brazilian Integrated Water Resources Management

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has been widely adopted as a norm that promises to increase equality and sustainability of water governance through participatory decision-making. After decades of policy implementation, however, inequalities in outcomes and large-scale water-related disasters raise questions about the ability of IWRM to deliver on its promises. This article explores these questions by putting the history of IWRM at the global scale in conversation with the national scale of water governance in Brazil and the local scale of the Rio Doce, the site of the largest single environmental disaster in Brazilian history. This conversation highlights truncated practices of inclusion in which participation of diverse actors is possible only within an account of water as a resource system. Mobilizing recent debates about the Ontological Turn in social sciences and humanities, we argue that the appeal to inclusion in IWRM masks ontological exclusion in which participation is dependent on an ontology of water as a resource system. The case of the Rio Doce shows how promises of equality and sustainability through inclusion fail in the light of rendering local ontologies invisible or illegitimate for governance. In framing IWRM as a site of ontological inequality, groundwork is laid for a renewed promise of participation.

Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn

Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn

Indigenous Knowledge and Ontological Difference? Ontological Pluralism, Secular Public Reason, and Knowledge between Indigenous Amazonia and the West

AbstractReal knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working within the tradition of secular political philosophy so that indigenous knowledge, too, can be a basis for public policy and collective action in secular societies? Via a reframing Amazonian multinaturalist perspectivism–which has so inspired post-dualist civilizational critiques–as a social theory of health and illness that informs contemporary Western epidemiology’s struggles to theorize the distribution of health and illness in mass society, this article advances a general approach to recognizing knowledge that has been developed on the other side of boundaries of ontological difference. It argues that the accuracy or efficacy of any particular indigenous knowledge-practice implies the generative potential as theory of the ontological presuppositions that facilitated the knowledge-practice’s evolution. Combining the ontological turn’s interest in the innovativeness of indigenous concepts with a proposal for superseding its incommensurable worlds and abandonment of the aspiration to more-than-local knowledge, the article shows that indigenous ideas and their underlying ontologies are more than generic alternatives to inspire Western civilizational renewal, and opens a path to their legitimization as actionable knowledge in the terms of secular public reason.