ontical – objet (a)

ontic ontological

Marchart, Oliver. “The absence at the heart of presence: radical democracy and the ‘ontology of lack”. Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005.

Tada: Ontology was originally the study of being-qua-being starting with Aristotle. Then with Descartes and culminating in the work of Berkeley and Kant and heirs it turned increasingly to epistemology shifting from being-qua-being to questions of being-qua-understanding. Thus starting to look for the ‘grounds and conditions of of understanding and bypassing all the stuff about the nature of being. Then comes Heidegger but prepped by Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche, there is a return to ontology.

However, ontology did not re-emerge in full glory, as a return to the pre-critical ‘pre-modern’ stable ground of being. By the time of its return, the ccategory of being had turned into something intrinsically precarious, something haunted by the spectre of its own absent ground. For this reason, today’s ontology must not be understood in terms of, to use Derrida’s words, traditional onto-theology, in which the role of being was to provide us with a stable ground, rather it must be conceived of as hauntology, where being is always out-of-joint, never fully present (18).

Heidegger work points out … He pointed out that metaphysical thought

whenever the traditional difference between the general (that is, ONTOLOGICAL) realm of being-qua-being and the particular (that is, ONTIC) realm of beings was established
has always taken this ontological difference for granted and never inquired into the difference as différance.
Hence being in the most radical Heideggerian sense does not reside on the ontological level, nor does it reside on the ontic plane.

Rather it is the play which simultaneously unites AND separates the ONTIC and the ONTOLOGICAL, thus introducing an irresolvable difference into being that amounts to a constitutive deferral of every stable ground of being — a move later taken up by Derrida with his concept of différance …

immanence antagonism

Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics. 31:4. 2001. pp. 3-10.

What is important, however, in reference to these theological debates are the alternatives that remain in case the immanent route is not followed. For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying and explaining it but a brute and irreducible fact. As the chasm separating good and evil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanent development the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity which cannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzschean assertiveness (5).

In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theological concept and became fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, with the modern turn, the kernel of what we can call “social antagonism.” What the latter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture — radical in the sense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity which would reduce the terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement — for example, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence. Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonism — and its corollary, which is radical social division — that we are confronted with forms of social action that can truly be called political (5).

In the words of Marx: “By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” To put it in terms close to Hardt and Negri’s: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within an objective social order which is entirely the product of capitalism—which is, in turn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces. But, precisely for that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subject entails the end of politics—that is, the beginning of the withering away of the State and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted by Marxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.

As for the second revolution—the political one—its distinctive feature is, for Marx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and the particularism of the agent carrying it out. Marx describes this asymmetry in nonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and that allows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to present itself as a universal liberator — universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.

Here we find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either we assert the possibility of a universality which is not politically constructed and mediated, or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on a historical construction out of heterogeneous elements. Hardt and Negri accept the first alternative without hesitation. If, conversely, we accept the second, we are on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony. (Gramsci is another thinker for whom—understandably, given their premises—Hardt and Negri show little sympathy.) (5)

Laclau, Ernesto.”The Future of Radical Democracy.” Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005. pp. 256-262).

… antagonism is irreducible, in which case social objectivity cannot be fully constituted. This explains why antagonisms cannot be conceived as dialectical contradictions. For the latter, negativity is only present to be superseded by a higher form of objectivity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and Marx’s classless society are the names of a fullness which makes it possible to detect the ultimate meaning of all previous stages and thus, to transform negativity in the apparential form of a deeper objectivity. What happens if, instead, we avoid this reductionist operation and take antagonisms at face value. In that case … what cannot be fully constituted is objectivity as such (257).

Every identity is a threatened identity … If an identity was not threatened by an antagonistic relation, it would be what it is as a pure objective datum. Between what it ontically is and the ontological fact that it is, there would be no distance. It would be mere positivity, closed in itself. Antagonism is what creates a gap between these two dimensions.

This distance between fullness of being and actual being is what we call lack. Representation of that distance, however, requires not only the discursive presence of actual being but also of the fullness of being.

But this creates an immediate problem, for fullness of being is that which is constitutively absent. The difficulty can be summarised in the following terms: the distance between full and actual being needs to be represented — which involves the two poles being somehow present in such representation — but one of the two cannot have a DIRECT representation because it operates through its very absence. Actual beings are the only means of representation. In such conditions, representation of the fullness of being can only take place if there is an essential unevenness among actual beings — that is, if an ontic particularity becomes the body through which an incommensurable fullness ‘positivises’ itself. This means that one element assumes an ontolgical function, which far exceeds, its ontic content. This is the moment of EXCESS. As we see, we are not dealing with an excess which is opposed to lack, but with one which directly results from the latter.

ontologically incomplete structures

So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ’thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. an immersion that both shapes their identity and structures their practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ’space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Moreover, as these identifications are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses – some of which are excluded or repressed – and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise

In sum, social structures and forms of life are not only composed of relations of hierarchy and domination; even more pertinently, they are marked by gaps and fissures, and forged by political exclusions. And the making visible of these gaps in the structures through dislocatory experiences makes it possible for subjects to identify anew, and thus to act differently (79).

free decisions and actions are likened to miracles, which are characterized as an ability ‘to begin something new’, that is, to set in motion events and practices that cannot be controlled and whose consequences cannot be foretold. Indeed, echoing her once-mentor Heidegger, freedom involves the ‘abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed than cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality’ (Arendt cited in Zizek 2001:113) (79).

In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.

ontology of Lack

Influenced principally by Heidegger, Lacan, and Laclau and Mouffe, but also drawing on Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, we put forward an ‘ontology of lack’, which is a negative ontology premised on the radical contingency of social relations. Stated simply, we take this axiom to imply that any system or structure of social relations is constitutively incomplete or lacking for a subject. … every social identity is always-already dislocated. On the one hand we take this to be a strictly ontological understanding of dislocation, in which each and every symbolic order is penetrated by an impossibility that has to be filled or covered-over for it to constitute itself. The category of dislocation can also be understood, however, in more ontical terms: moments in which the subject’s mode of being is disrupted by an experience that cannot be symbolized within and by the pre-existing means of discursive representation. From this perspective, practices are governed by a dialectic defined by incomplete structures on the one hand, and the collective acts of subjective identification that sustain or change those incomplete structures on the other. (14)

dislocation normative ethical aspects

…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices. The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new. Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation. Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be. The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)

dimensions of social reality

Our fundamental ontological premise is then used to redescribe social relations by stipulating different dimensions of social reality. The social dimension captures those situations in which the radical contingency of social relations has not been registered in the mode of public contestation whereas the political dimension refers to those situations in which subjects responding to dislocatory events re-activate the contingent foundations of a practice by publicly contesting and defending the norms of that practice. On the other hand, the ideological and ethical dimensions of social reality capture the way subjects are either complicit in concealing the radical contingency of social relations (the ideological), or are attentive to its constitutive character (the ethical). (14)

In articulating this basic ontological standpoint, we take our principal objects of investigation to be practices or regimes of practices, where our aim is to critically explain their transformation, stabilization, and maintenance. Drawing on Heidegger, we claim that such an inquire will always have an ontical and ontological impulse. (15)

Ontology Ontical

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.