However, we do not think ontology can or should be bracketed in the name of simply developing pragmatic concepts with which to investigate and intervene in politics and society. Instead, an ontological inquiry for us, focuses attention on the underlying presuppositions for any analysis of politics; it focuses on the ‘basic concepts’ mobilized by a discipline in any empirical and normative investigation.
An ontical inquiry focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or ‘region’ of phenomena, whereas an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation …
… a political scientist might investigate the construction of national identiy in a variety of contexts, or she might examine the changing role of teachers and university lecturures in societies that are increasingly marked by new audit regimes and markets. If the researcher takes for granted the notions of ‘national identity’, ‘audit regime’ or the ‘market’, which are given in the practices themselves … then her research operates at the ontical level. If … the research inquires into the underlying presuppositions that determine what is to count as an identity or role, how these phenomena are to be studied, and that they exist at all, then the research incorporates an ontological dimension … the more the inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential preconditions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded (108-9).
… for Heidegger, the ontological is the a priori or transcendentally constitutive features — what Heidegger calls ‘existential’ — that can be discerned from socially instituted, ontic or a posteriori life … But … Heidegger does speak … of Dasein as a unity of the ontological and ontic … I therefore worry about the seeming ease with which Laclau distinguishes the ethic-ontological level from the normative ontic level, as if one could somehow expunge or slough off the ontic from the ontological in ethical. Once cannot and, in my view, one should not. (Critchley in Laclau A Critical Reader, 2004: 120)
For G&H the importance of ontology cannont be underestimated.
Elster’s atomistic ontology leads him to falling back on a causal law necessity, and it is the lack of a robust ontological framework that hampers the self-interpretive hermeneutic analysis of Taylor, Winch and Bevir and Rhodes.
GH’s critical practice involves 3 intertwining logics, social, political and fantasmatic. Their ontological conditions:
1) All practices and regimes are discursive entities: an object’s identity is conferred by the particular discourses or systems of meaning within which it is constituted. In short social practices can coalesce into constellations or systems of practices which we call regimes, and both practices and regimes are located within a field of discursive social relations 109.
2) radical contingency: objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’,
contingency, historicity and precariousness and the constructed and political character of all social objectivity 11.
the constitutive failure of any objectivity to attain a full identity … (makes impossible the) fully consituted essence of a practice, regime or object, in the name of an irreducible negativity that cannot be reabsorbed 110.
… the more an inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential precondtions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded 109.
All practices and regimes are discursive entities
… As this investigation requires an analysis of the entities and relationships that constitute the phenomena investigated, our ontical inquiry necessarily involves an ontological dimension: an ontical inquiry will therefore always involve the redescription of phenomena in terms of our presupposed ontology. And for us this task requires the employment of social, political, and fantasmatic logics 230.