Politics as Ontology: International Relations, OOO and Terraism
"...the affects that characterize composition are those of joy, sympathy, generosity, and fraternity. It is the gregarious activity of building new collectives with others and with allowing one’s self to become-other in working with others."
- Levi R. Bryant, Terraism
"When will we be ready for an experience of equality that would be a respectful test of... friendship, and that would at last be just, just beyond justice as law, that is, measure up to its immeasure?"
- Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship
At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology. What the world is and is not is the basic domain of the ontological enterprise; yet, the ethical implications of what exists in ontological terms defines the political ramifications among competing ideologies, or world-views and these ideological concerns underpin the ethical dimensions of what the social world is and should be. One will admit that all those interested in the subject of political interactions with a global scope are engaged in the same enterprise. We all seek to explain the phenomena that interest us. Where we differ is in how we define our basic units of analysis and what we think the most important causal processes are.1 The idea that every political ideology or world-view is deeply embedded within often conflicting ontologies is at the heart of understanding the theory and practice of political and social interactions.
Agent-structure theory is at the core of most International Relations debates, and within these debates two positions seem to organize the concerns, methodology, and solutions: IR studies, or the studies of International Relations, have been dominated by competing philosophies of neorealism and world-system theory. These differing approaches, - as Wendt states it, solves the agent-structure problem by making either state agents or system structures ontologically primitive units.2 The neorealist and world-systems theories embody the methodological individualist and structuralist solutions, respectively. As Wendt states it these two approaches, despite important differences between them, solves the agent-structure problem by making either state agents or system structures ontologically primitive units. The resulting effect on neorealism and world-system theory is an inability to explain the properties and causal powers of their primary units of analysis, a weakness which seriously undermines their potential explanations of state action.
Colin Wight tells us that the debates within International Relations theory and practice are centered on three interrelated issues. First, he sees, that the epistemological differences that structure theoretical debate within the discipline are deeply embedded within, and dependent upon, prior ontological positions. Second, since what divides competing theoretical positions are conflicting views of the elements and causal processes that constitute international relations, we need a sustained inquiry into the social ontologies embedded within the dominant theories. So what is needed is to uncover the ‘basic ontological assumptions’ that underpin the core concepts of structure and agency which are central to the various theoretical positions within the discipline.
An idea began to shape itself in my mind concerning the weaknesses of these two theoretical positions and their specific approaches and underlying ontological assumptions, so I began asking myself if Object-Oriented Ontology might offer a better solution than either of these two philosophical branches of what might be termed the scientific realist traditions.
As I began thinking through these issues I realized that Levi R. Bryant was already way ahead of the game, that he affirms that Ontologies do and can have political implications.3 Against all "necessitarian accounts of being" that are given in Leibniz or Hegel, Levi argues instead for an ontology based on contingency, following such thinkers as as Lucretius, Hume, Badiou, and Meillassoux:
"If it is true that everything is contingent, then it’s also true that every social order is contingent. There is no reason that societies have to be organized in this particular way. If it is true that there is no reason that societies have to be in this particular way, then we are free to envision and fight for other types of social formations."
Levi tells us that there are political implications for ontology. First, he tells us, that a flat ontology "rejects the existence of any sovereign terms that stand above all other beings and legislate and organize those beings (God, kings, fathers, etc) without themselves being impacted and limited by those beings, and [that it also] rejects the existence of any eternal and unchanging essences." Second he holds that all "beings or objects are the result of a becoming and themselves become. Objects come into being out of other objects, become over the course of their existence, and pass out of existence. There’s no entity that did not arise out of other beings, that isn’t subject to change or becoming, and that won’t eventually pass out of existence.". These are problems of ontology not epistemology.
Levi himself steers clear of the idea philosophical speculation the purports to speak on behalf of struggling people, instead he affirms the idea that "political articulation should arise immanently from within collectives themselves. Intellectuals should not play the role of a “vanguard voice” telling the people what they “really” should be concerned about (The Power of Things, 7/11/2012)." Yet, he tells us, that what OOO can do is "problematize our current political thought and open new avenues of political engagement and theorization". Against all those that say OOO is a conservative philosophy, and that it ignores both the politics of ecology, and the social dimensions of networks, nodes, and spheres, etc., Levi offers matter-of-factly that "power is constituted and functions (Worries About OOO and Politics, 5/29/2012)". Against those who believe that a flat ontology banishes all hierarchies, Levi reiterates the basic thesis of flat ontology stipulated by Ian Bogost that “all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally.” Levi continues by emphasizing what he is trying to explore is the idea of expanding the sites of political intervention as well as the possibilities for acting within the social assemblages within which we are enmeshed. As he states it "we cannot effectively act and change things if we don’t know how the assemblages within which we are enmeshed are put together, what actors are present in those assemblages, and how we might intervene on these actors to change our social possibilities".
To do this Levi proposes that along with his onticology he has developed a praxis termed "terraism" as a new form of political practice. He explains this, and i quote at length:
"Terraism has three dimensions to it: cartography, deconstruction, and construction. Cartography is a mapping of social assemblages that discerns what actors or entities are present in the assemblage (signifiers, ideologies, people, groups, bubonic plague bacteria, toilets, rice, etc.), how they are linked together, and how these assemblages are organized or what power or gravity they generate in perpetuating certain ongoing patterns of relation. Deconstruction is the practice of strategic intervention designed to target those various entities that exercise power or gravity in particular ways so as to produce social change. ... Construction, finally, consists in building new assemblages through the introduction of new discourses (as OWS has done in the American situation), introducing plumbing and irrigation in impoverished parts of the world, building alternative ways of living in fossil fuel economies, and so on." (ibid, Worries)
In alliance with this exploration of Terraism I discovered An Atlas of Radical Cartography, a site that explores the critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. The maps and essays in this book provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places. As one person described the project: "This map is a slightly insane, almost psychedelic organization of ideas showing links between market forces, the destabalization of social infrastructure, social death and the rise of stateless societies; between disintegrating communities and refugees, prisoners and migration; between capital flight and the flight of the state and people; between the formation of empire and free trade zones, ghettos, prisons, and disaster zones." They designers of the project explain the Atlas and its essays as follows:
"The simplest of radical cartographies, the “upside-down” world map, appears on the cover of this book. More than a neat trick, this picture of the world has a historical basis in medieval world maps that were sometimes oriented with East or South at top. The modern north-oriented map continually reproduces the idea of the global North and the global South. The “inverted” map calls into question our ingrained acceptance of this particular “global order.” The maps and texts in this book also serve this purpose-to unhinge our beliefs about the world, and to provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages, associations and representations of places, people and power. ... Such new understandings of the world are the prerequisites of change. We define radical cartography as the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change. The object of critique in An Atlas of Radical Cartography is not cartography per se (as is generally meant by the overlapping term critical cartography), but rather social relations. Our criteria for selecting these ten maps emphasized radical inquiry and activist engagement."
So here in this political practice between "terraism" and the radical/critical cartographies we can already see the tentative steps toward a political theory and practice of an Object-Oriented approach.
I have yet to touch base with how OOO can apply its praxis toward the IR debates surrounding the agent-structure dilemma, but will explore more of this in future blog posts..
1. Wight (2007-01-05). Agents, Structures and International Relations (Cambridge Studies in International Relations) (p. 4). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Wendt, Alexander E. The agent-structure problem in international relations theory. International Organization 41, 3, Summer 1987 © 1987 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Bryant, Levi R. On the Relationship Between Politics and Ontology (August 6, 2012)