Missing the (question) mark? What is a turn to ontology?

Thanks to our critics for providing the occasion to clarify and develop the arguments we put forward in our introductory essay (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013) to this journal’s Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies (STS). In this short reply, we first consider the key points our interlocutors raise and then suggest how a distinction between two different ways of invoking ontology might illuminate alternative paths forward.

In his response to our essay, Aspers (2015) sees ‘no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and what we know as constructivism’. Considering that most of the papers in the Special Issue were dedicated to showing how much work is involved in making things the same (or not the same), we found it amusing to be confronted right off the bat by the claim ‘ontology is the same as X!’ The ‘is’ word cries out for disassembly!

To try to prove his point, Aspers offers us an experiment in lexicological counterfactualism, replacing the term ‘ontology’ with ‘constructivism’ in chosen sections of some of the papers and claiming no loss or change of meaning. Yet this substitution exercise is moot, since at no point does Aspers define what he means by constructivism. Not wishing to revisit here the large body of scholarship on this question, we will simply underscore that constructivism can mean many different things – a point nicely made by Sismondo (2015) in his commentary. There is, however, an important difference between the notion of ‘social construction’ and the references to ‘enactment’ that can be found in much of the STS literature on ontology: the former describes social processes that result in durable realities, while the latter describes practices in the here and now that produce ephemeral effects – effects essentially coextensive with the practices that create them. As we argued in our essay, this has important implications for what we are willing to accept as a sufficient description of how realities come to be. The adoption of the term ‘enactment’, with its overtones of performativity and situationism, can in fact be seen as a way of resisting the ostensive connotations that quickly attached themselves to the language of ‘social construction’.

Aspers also complains that (what he calls) empirical ontological research closes the door to philosophy and its several thousand years of thinking on ontology, and in doing so ignores one source of critical reflection on the methods and assumptions of the social sciences. We are all in favour of critical reflection, of course, but see no merit in the division of labour he proposes – that philosophy should monopolize ‘questions about the nature of what exists’ while sociology busies itself with how reality is ‘socially constructed’. Critical reflection is kept on a very short leash indeed if we are forced to start by accepting the determination (made by someone else) that certain things exist or do not exist at all.

So whereas Aspers seems intent on fixing meanings – of ‘ontology’, ‘construction’ and everything in-between – it should have been clear from the contributions to the Special Issue that ontology is a deliberately unstable term or category in STS. This is not only because it lacks a precise meaning or definitive qualifier but because the term itself is introduced with the intention of destabilizing seemingly robust designations of reality. The point of a turn to ontology in STS is to sharpen a contrast between alternative strategies of description. The point is not, as Aspers seems to believe, to pose a terminological quarrel ready to be adjudicated by a verdict of semantic similarity or difference.

Sismondo (2015) comes closer to our position when he identifies ‘a very long and gentle’ turn to ontological questions in STS, tracing some of the preoccupations that animated the contributions in the Special Issue all the way back to the field’s forebears. He cautions, however, against generic usage of the term. ‘Ontologies’, he argues, ‘are entirely derivative’. Our attention should always be directed to the webs of practices that enact a particular reality. To the extent that abstract talk of ontology detracts from this task, a ‘turn to ontology’ would represent an unwelcome inflationary move (in this vein, see also Lynch, 2013).

Sismondo is right to insist on attention to ontologies in practice. But exactly what kinds of attention are appropriate is still to be worked out. The papers contained in the Special Issue suggested a variety of possible approaches. But they shared the intuition that we are inescapably embroiled in practices of enactment in our own use of discourse. This is why the turn to ontology needs to explore ways of interrogating such seemingly innocuous yet omnipresent usages of terms such as ‘is’. ¹

Is there an ontological turn in STS? Is there? Is there really? We were, of course, raising the question in a deliberately playful way. Our intention was never straightforwardly to champion the cause of a new programme. When we suggested, as Vasileva reminds us, that it would be terrible to be stuck in the next turn 2 years from now – a claim that, to our dismay, we made 7 years ago (Woolgar et al., 2008) – do readers really imagine that we worry or care that it would be terrible? No! The comment was meant to parody those with such earnest intentions. Maybe the irony would have been more obvious if we had announced the launch of a new movement, Empirical Studies of Ontological Practices (ESOPS), dedicated to generating fables about ontological practice.

To emphasize the point, note that for the purposes of attending to ontological matters, playfulness is not merely a matter of whimsy or stylistic preference. It is instead a deliberate choice aimed at interrogating ontological practice while recognizing and acknowledging the in-principle impossibility of establishing analytic distance from that practice. It is a form of ‘serious playfulness’ (Ashmore, 1989), the same kind of playfulness that Vasileva (2015) echoes in her commentary and turns (?) against our own presuppositions and metaphorical leanings.

We share Vasileva’s concern with the constraints that the language of ‘turns’ imposes on the richness and diversity of STS, but we think that she misses an interesting effect of the discussion so far – an effect, moreover, that her own critique exemplifies. Declaring a turn to anything is a sure way to draw out critical responses and reactions. The first victim of that cascade of claims and counter-claims is any notion of the field as a coherent entity able to move or rotate in relation to an agreed-upon goal. At the same time, and provided we can agree on the terms of disagreement, we find ourselves in a position to contrast different analytical sensibilities, perhaps even hone new modes of inquiry. ‘Ontology’ has certainly had that effect in STS and neighbouring fields. Aside from those who deny the existence or desirability of any turn to (or through) it, the term has been invoked positively in at least two contrasting ways. It is useful to tease out these strands more precisely.

In some cases, the turn to ontology in STS – and here the overlapping discussions in anthropology offer perhaps more salient examples – has to do with preserving (or creating) a ‘strong’ notion of alterity. Whereas in the past our analyses would have identified different sets of ‘beliefs’, ‘cultures’ or ‘representations’, we now describe those as ‘ontologies’ and imply by that a higher form of reality but also of difference. This understanding of the ontological turn is evident in descriptions that posit the existence of ‘indigenous ontologies’, ‘perspectival ontologies’, ‘Amerindian ontologies’, ‘Euro-American ontologies’ and so on. In these cases, the desire to affirm alternative forms of being results in an ontological commitment, typically in the form of a ‘meta-ontology’ (Heywood, 2012). The implication of this move is the opposite of what we were arguing in our essay since it effectively operates as a strategy of reification. This particular ontological turn represents a kind of invigorated realism: reality is more real than you thought! ²

However, there is an alternative understanding of the turn to ontology. In this reading, the purpose of the ontological turn is ‘to interrogate the whatness of things’, as we put it in our essay. We do not discover ontologies, nor do we necessarily identify ‘being’ as the primary mode of existence, but instead we probe the manner in which ontological realms come into being. This probing is necessarily playful, as we have said, because it often relies on the counterintuitive – even, in some cases, on a dose of absurdism – in order to challenge seemingly robust or commonsensical configurations of the real. Significantly, it seeks or produces no greater certainty about the reality of reality (cf. Boltanski, 2011). ³

These two ways of invoking ontology have much in common. Both share an orientation towards a pluriverse and approach the world as no more (and no less!) than a ‘reservoir of differences’ (Hennion, 2007). But they diverge in how they understand the actualization of these differences and in the role they attribute to empirical (or experimental) inquiry in fixing particular configurations of being and alterity. There is a subtle but important difference between the STS slogan ‘It could be otherwise’ and the multinaturalist motto ‘It actually is otherwise!’ The former aspires to keep the analytic question mark firmly in view; the latter tends to drop it in favour of a definitive depiction of difference.

Of course the difficulty of keeping the question mark in view, rather than just letting it drop, should not be underestimated. ‘Ontology’ currently has useful provocative value in this regard, but it might well be that this project of interrogation will in due course be better off without a term as weighty as ‘ontology’ or without the serious sense of deliberate orientation that is implied by the idea of a ‘turn to’. In their recent discussion of ‘practice-specific’ alterities, for example, Van de Port and Mol (2015) compare ‘two modes of engaging with fruits’ in Brazil, one of which (comer) translates as ‘to eat’ and the other (chupar) ‘to suck’. Having described the two different practices in detail, they comment,

One might say that the ontologies involved are different, but that is not quite strong enough, as the relevant alterities also include activities and normativities, while the boundaries between the worlds of comer and chupar are markedly fluid and shot through with partial connections. (Van de Port and Mol, 2015: 165)

That is, ‘ontology’ might be too weighty yet not strong enough to capture the radical form of difference manifested in the contrasting activities of comer and chupar. Not only because alterity is here interspersed with many partial, post-plural connections but also, and perhaps more significantly, because with its insistence on ‘being’ as ‘the primus inter pares of the activities relevant to reality’ (Van de Port and Mol, 2015: 167) ‘ontology’ reduces the diversity and dimensionality of the practical undertakings that create our worlds. It offers a totalizing answer to the question of the whatness of things – things are (or are not) – before the question has been fully parsed.

In conclusion, the turn to ontology has taken at least two forms in recent discussions in STS and adjoining fields. The point of bifurcation can be identified by reference to what Sismondo calls the ‘reification of inquiry’: the degree to which a term like ‘ontology’, which originally describes a particular mode of investigation, comes to designate and demarcate a domain of reality to be explored. This bifurcation does not necessarily imply two increasingly diverging agendas, but rather describes a tension built into our analytical sensibilities. ⁴

For us, the turn to ontology implies a widening of scope – a looking around rather than towards – and a degree of circumspection about our ability to make objective determinations of reality. A turn to ontology should press difficulty, hindering reification by raising the bar in terms of how quickly or easily we make assumptions about reality. Raising the bar, in other words, in terms of how easily we are willing to leave out the question mark.