Ontological Turn

RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Ontological Designing; Ontology; Performance and Performativity; Practice;

According to Andrew Pickering (2017), citing Woolgar and Lezaun (2013, 2015) and Kelly (2014), the social-constructivist consensus has broken down in the early 21st century. In response, both anthropology and science and technology studies have taken an ontological turn. This ontological turn in science and technology studies, Pickering contends, grew out of a prior turn to practice from the 1980s onwards (Pickering 1992).

Pickering makes a distinction between studying practices in the plural and studying practice in the singular. He takes the former to mean looking in detail at particular relatively well defined ways of doing this or that, tasks and techniques, for example, in science, maths, industry and so on. The latter, in contrast, he takes to mean a generic structure of doing research.

An analogous point, Pickering suggests, can be made about ontologies and ontology. Studying ontologies in the plural begins with detailed studies of found or already existing ontologies, each ontology belonging to a specific group. In anthropology, for example, Viveiros de Castro (2004) takes Amazonian ontologies seriously as a means to reflect back critically on our own dualistic western ontology; Phillippe Descola (2014) offers a four-fold typology of ontologies, animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism, which he sees as four different organising principles for both society and nature; while Bruno Latour’s (1993) typology distinguishes simply between the moderns, who make a clean dualist split between people and things and the non-moderns, who do not. In science and technology studies, an insistence that ontologies are not simply schemes of classification and representation can be found. Harking back to the practice-turn, they acknowledge that ontologies are enacted or performed in practice (Mol 2002, Law and Lien 2013).

Much of the ontological turn, then can be seen to occupy itself with ontologies in the plural, that is, the different worlds that turn up in ethnographic studies and studies of science and technology.

Nevertheless, a question still remains as to what kind of world, in the singular, could possibly sustain a multiplicity of different ontologies, in the plural? It is here, Pickering argues, that the value of adopting a practice-oriented, performative approach to ontology becomes clear. A performative idiom, as Pickering calls it, allows him to propose an ontology of endless performative flux and becoming in a space of multiplicity, punctuated by islands of stability.

Thus, for Pickering, the modern west insists that its islands of stability are also zones of human mastery where the world performs as a predictable machine. This rids the world of any trace of emergence and unpredictability. It is this asymmetric dualism that is a hallmark of modernity for Pickering. In other times and places, the insistence on getting rid of any trace of emergence and unpredictability in nature is less obsessive. Islands of stability can therefore have a different character which can include the non-machine-like worlds that are edited and enacted out of a modern ontology.

In this way, a performative idiom aids in our understanding that a single nature might sustain many worlds by enabling an appreciation of the possibility of different stances, different ways of being in the flow, that dualise nature in different ways, respectively backgrounding or foregrounding non-human agency. What is more, it enables a recognition that islands of stability, including our own, are themselves chancy performative achievements.

Pickering refers to his ontology of endless performative flux and becoming in a space of multiplicity punctuated by islands of stability as a dance of agency: we act in the world, the world acts on us, back and forth, in a dynamic process. In this dance, all the partners are transformed in unpredictable and emergent ways. We ourselves are transformed in tuning ourselves into and responding to the emergent agency of the world. These islands of stability are thus de-centred, joint products of the human and the nonhuman. This dance differs from the humanist identification of agency with will and intention. Pickering (1995) argues that will and intention are themselves mangled in the dances of agency. They are not independent causes or privileged centres of explanation.

Pickering acknowledges that we in the west have been educated to believe in the stability of machines, instruments and knowledge. Stability and reliability are indeed the hallmark of modern technology and engineering. However, the sciences of complexity, for example, foreground emergent, unpredictable processes and help us think about the world more generally as an open-ended, unpredictable and emerging assemblage, as discussed by authors such as Gleick (1987), Waldrop (1992), Kauffman (2002) and Wolfram (2002). In this respect, we may also learn from taoism and zen, which emphasise graceful adaptation to an emergent world and real-time responses to the moment, as discussed by, for example, Lao Tzu (1963), Baynes (1967) and Watts (1957, 1975).

Design and the Ontological Turn

Considering the debate around the ontological turn may assist in our understanding design as (professional, social) practice, as (material, public) culture and as (intellectual, academic) discipline, perhaps as three ontologies. Accepting a performative idiom may lead us to acknowledge that designs, in taking part in establishing and sustaining what Pickering calls islands of stability, are themselves chancy performative achievements, not stable signs, objects, tools, machines, services or systems.

In grasping design as practice, culture and discipline in this way, following Pickering, a space may be opened that acknowledges an ontology of de-centred becoming that nevertheless allows us to take seriously multiple ontologies built around distinct islands of stability in ways that reflect back both critically and constructively, that is to say, politically, on our dominant ways of thinking, being and acting.

Designs are key elements of the islands of stability which we are constructing, such islands being de-centred, joint products of human and nonhuman agency or actantiality.

There are clear resonances here with practice-based ontological designing which recognises that ontologies are enacted socio-materially. Such an approach can sensitise designers to the multiplicity of realities in a particular place as a field of actantiality, thereby potentially offering a practical method for situating design interventions (Nold, 2018).

In this way, developments in Science and Technology Studies, where ontology is used to show how material objects enact realities in practice, can be used to understand how design can perform multiple realities as everyday practices through socio-material devices (Nold, 2018).

Ontologies are everyday practices. They are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away in common, everyday, socio-material practices that articulate material, designed devices and social processes to create realities (Mol, 2002: 6).

References

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