Political Ontology: Style, Method, Intervention, Doctrine

This paper problematizes the meta-methodological concerns that arise with a turn to political ontology. Against perspectives that understand political ontology as a competing position (amongst other theoretical approaches, such as post-foundational, materialist, or indigenous), I argue for political ontology as a practice of intervention into how political reality is disclosed, narrated, and stabilized. When considered as a practice of intervention, researchers address critiques of accessibility and theoretical density by moving the self-referential critical conversation away from metaphysical claims and towards interpretive operations. Drawing on post-structural and contemporary hermeneutic scholarship, I develop the notion of political ontology in the frame of an “ontology of actuality”: an inquiry into being that remains grounded in the historicity and temporality of the present. Initiating an ontological inquiry in this way reframes tensions between traditions as differences in ontological style rather than incommensurable worldviews. At stake in research is not a disagreement about what exists, but rather over how political reality is rendered intelligible. The conditions of appearance for political activity are secured and unsettled according to various ontological styles in research. In this view, political ontology becomes less a matter of adjudicating between conflicting ontological perspectives, and instead tasks the researcher with examining the interpretive political practices through which political worlds are disclosed and actualized. Understood as a practice of intervention, political ontology does not reinstall new foundations or secure existing ones; nor does it attempt to furnish the researcher with a more fundamental account of being; rather, it attends to the ways in which political concepts, subjects, and institutions are stabilized through inherited ontological assumptions. Further, political ontology intervenes in political actuality by identifying those moments in which these assumptions falter or collapse in shifting contemporary contexts. An ontological critique of this kind renders foundations and grounds visible as historical and contingent, a move which opens political research to new configurations. My suggestion is that this move allows political ontology to respond directly to recurring concerns about abstraction and inaccessibility, without abandoning its critical force. As political ontology emerges as an interest for political scientists, a meta-conversation about its role in research requires thinking its practices beyond more conventional methodological interventions. By shifting attention from ontological doctrines or worldviews to ontological practices, political ontology becomes legible as a mode of reflexive inquiry that cuts across methodological and disciplinary boundaries. The relevance of political ontology, on this account, concerns not its explanatory power, but in its capacity to intervene in the regimes of intelligibility that underpin and organize contemporary political research. The paper concludes by arguing for the future of political ontology as a sustained practice of intervention, rather than a consolidated theoretical position. Thought in the frame of an ontology of actuality, political ontology concerns itself with the ways in which our political traditions reconfigure themselves in the context of contemporary political actuality. The task is not to secure firmer grounds, but rather to keep open the question of how political reality comes to matter, and how it might come to matter otherwise.