Towards a Politics of Clearing: Political Ontology and Research Methodology

This paper takes up recent methodological and analytic difficulties commonly associated with political ontology by developing a concept first introduced by the authors at a previous ECPR conference: a politics of clearing. In recent years, a turn to ontology across political theory and political science has raised persistent questions about applicability and practicality. What relevance does political ontology have for specific political disciplines and research programs? Does addressing politics at the level of ontology yield tangible results for political actors? And to what extent might ontological critique risk limiting —or even suppressing— political agency by reinstalling new forms of theoretical closure? We approach these questions by surveying a range of recent contributions to political ontology and identifying a shared methodological orientation that cuts across otherwise divergent projects. We call this orientation a politics of clearing. A politics of clearing understands political action and agency not primarily in terms of grounding politics on stable foundations, but through the ongoing disclosure and destabilization of the grounds upon which political claims are made. In this view, political foundations are neither simply rejected nor replaced once and for all; rather, they are cleared away provisionally in a continuous manner, and similarly provisionally installed, leaving them susceptible to further clearing in response to political actuality. Utilizing this framework permits us to address a central tension in the contemporary turn to political ontology: while many political disciplines already operate with implicit ontological commitments, the methodologies used to challenge these commitments often end up reifying them. Ontological critique becomes a means of reinstalling the discipline itself as a fixed and self-identical political field. We argue that many approaches to political ontology inadvertently fall into this ontological trap, where attempts to contest foundational assumptions ultimately reproduce them at a different level. Against this tendency, the politics of clearing names a different way of doing research, and a different way of writing theory, one that refuses to secure political analysis by inserting a privileged human, institutional, or epistemic ground. Instead, it attends to the continual clearing of grounds themselves, leaving assumptions about politics, agency, and subjectivity open to reconfiguration by changing political conditions. This orientation proves especially productive in relation to ontological ruptures — such as citizen/non-citizen or human/non-human — that cannot be resolved through epistemological reconfiguration alone. With our emphasis of clearing rather than grounding, we intend to propose a cross-disciplinary methodological intervention with crucial ethical and political stakes. We suggest that the value of political ontology lies not in the furnishing of new foundations for political research, but in a sustained critical practice of openness that makes possible political activity by keeping its grounds in question.