Political Ontology
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From Mario Blaser biography:
My general area of research until recently has been the politics of colonization/decolonization through the lens of conflicts over development and/or conservation projects mainly involving Indigenous communities in Canada Paraguay and Labrador. In this line of enquiry, I began to develop ‘political ontology,’ an analytical framework that interrogates whether conflicts around things defined as resources (be these natural or artifactual), are only about that. The paradigmatic example would be a conflict over a hunting ban of caribou to which local Indigenous peoples might be opposed because it interferes with their relations with a ‘spirit owner’ while the state only see there an animal, a natural resource that must be managed and protected. The usual characterization of this kind of conflict in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives over an ‘animal’ appears utterly insufficient from a political ontology’s standpoint, for it opens the door to establish a hierarchy between ‘cultural perspectives,’ a hierarchy which often makes local perspectives ‘more cultural’ than those backed by science, the state and corporations. Political ontology sustains that in these kinds of conflicts there is clash of realities that are often resolved by colonial imposition. How to address these conflicts without colonial impositions is the key question political ontology asks.
Designs for the Pluriverse Index:
- 65–69;
- Blaser on, 66;
- de la Cadena on, 238n14;
- definition of, 65–66;
- epistemologies and, 67–69, 216;
- of ethnoterritorial struggles, 69–76, 186–88, 187;
- pluriverse and, 66–70, 86, 94–95, 216–18
[[Elements for a Cultural Studies of Design]] p.52
Finally, the third part discusses the scholarly transformation, known as the ontological turn, that ensued from the encounter between the field of political ecology and the evolving concerns with ontology (objects, things, matter, the real, immanence, process) in ==postconstructivist social theory==. Arising out of this intersection, the nascent field of political ontology, this chapter suggests, constitutes a constructive space for rethinking design ontologically.
[[Designs_for_the_Pluriverse_Radical_Inter.pdf#page=75&selection=4,0,26,75|Designs_for_the_Pluriverse_Radical_Inter, page 75]]
[[Elements for a Cultural Studies of Design]], pp. 65-67
Along with decolonial FPE, political ontology (PO) examines political strategies to defend or re-create those worlds that retain important relational and communal dimensions, particularly from the perspective of today’s multiple territorial struggles. The term political ontology was coined by anthropologist Mario Blaser (2009, 2010, 2014) and continues to be developed by him along with de la Cadena and myself (de la Cadena 2010, 2015; Escobar 2014; Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar 2014)==, as well as by others (e.g., Jackson 2014). ==The emphasis is on worlds and ways of worlding in two senses: on the one hand, PO refers to the power-laden practices involved in bringing into being a particular world or ontology; on the other hand, it refers to a field of study that focuses on the interrelations among worlds, including the conflicts that ensue as different ontologies strive to sustain their own existence in their interaction with other worlds.== It should be emphasized that PO is situated as much within critical trends in the academy as within ongoing struggles for the defense of territories and worlds. It is this active and profound commitment to thinking from the space of struggles involving ecological-ontological conflicts that gives PO its specificity at present. In addition, ==PO is intended to make visible the ontological dimension of the accumulation by dispossession that is going on today in many parts of the world through extractivist development models, principally large-scale mining, agrofuels, and land grabbing linked to commercial agriculture (McMichael 2013). Against the will to render the world one, PO asserts the importance of enhancing the pluriverse, and to this end it also studies the conditions for the flourishing of the pluriverse. While PO is very much influenced by the more-than-human trend of late (de la Cadena 2015; Tsing 2015), it also seeks to scrutinize human-centered assemblages. By placing PO deeply (ethnographically and politically) within worlds that are not constructed solely on the basis of the nature/culture divide==, even if partially connected with the OWW and hence also making themselves in terms of the divide, PO scholars and intellectual-activists hope to render visible those heterogeneous assemblages of life that enact nondualist, relational worlds. Also, PO has a decided ==decolonial orientation in that it rearticulates the colonial difference (the hierarchical classification of differences created historically by the OWW’s domineering ontology) into a vision of multiple onto-epistemic formations, ineluctably co-constituted within power relations. This rearticulation exposes anew the OWW’s epistemic inability to recognize that which exceeds it, and renovates our understanding of the human. The historicity of PO at the present moment, finally, is given by the utter necessity, as gleaned from mobilizations in Latin America, of defending relational territories and worlds against the ravages of large-scale extractivist operations, such as mining and agrofuel production (but one could mention as well the Sioux struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline and surely other indigenous struggles in North America). Against the ontological occupation and destruction of worlds effected by the globalization project, PO emphasizes the importance of thinking from, and within, those configurations of life that, while partially connected with the globalizing worlds, are not fully occupied by them (Escobar 2014; de la Cadena 2015).
[[Elements for a Cultural Studies of Design]] pp.69-
Design under Ontological Occupation: The PO of Territorial Struggles From a PO perspective, it can be argued that globalization has taken place at the expense of relational and nondualist worlds worldwide. Today, economically, culturally, and militarily we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything relational and collective. Indeed, the twin forces of expulsion (Sassen 2014) and occupation can be said to constitute the chief logic of the current pattern of global domination.19 The occupation of people’s territories by capital, the State, and at times armed actors implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often military aspects, but its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories is a particular ontology, that of individuals, expert knowledge, markets, and the economy. This is the merciless world of the 1 percent (or, say, 10 percent) denounced by the Occupy and Spain’s indignados movements, foisted on the 90 percent and the natural world with ever-increasing virulence, cynicism, and illegality, since more than ever legal signals only a self-serving set of rules that imperialize the desires of the powerful (from the World Trade Organization and the invasion of countries with the acquiescence of the so-called international community of occupiers, to the legal ongoing police occupation of poor ethnic neighborhoods, as the case of Ferguson and others finally made clear to many people in the United States). […] By resisting the neoliberal globalizing project, many marginalized communities are advancing ontological struggles for the perseverance and enhancement of the pluriverse.
Mainstream social science identifies capitalism as an economic system based in markets organized by free competition and spurred by the profit motive. But where is ==the power to make and destroy worlds== in this formulation, to draw everything into its orbit, to permeate and transform every physical and psychic cell of earthly life? Wendy Brown, foreword to Capital (Marx)