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Khôra as the condition of possibility of the ontological without ontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

BADREDINE ARFI
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Is social theory possible without a positive ontology? Do we need ontology as the very first step toward/of theorisation? Is or isn't ontology a consequence of the theorisation process? Is a meta-theory/theory delineation nothing more than a rhetorical/discursive artifice? If that were the case, why should we give priority to one assumption/consequence (for example, ontology) over others? What are the conditions of possibility and/or limitations for giving priority to any ontological assumption? It is almost unthinkable among social scientists nowadays to envision a formulation of social theory that does not posit an ontological beginning point, that is, by making explicit/implicit assumptions on the most basic entities – subjects, objects, agents, structures, and/or processes – that one takes to be the foundations of the (world-) view being explored or posited. This is usually considered a theoretical necessity of, as much as a desire for, soundness driven by our conception of what theorising means, or should mean. The issue is even put at the heart of what politics is, or is about. ‘Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’, says Wight. He, and, well before him, Walker, and Wendt, as well as most of today's social scientists, all assert that theories necessarily presuppose a basic positive ontology upon which all other considerations are built and that there is no social theory without ontology.

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Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 191 - 207
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Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012

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References

1 Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 82Google Scholar.

3 Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The logic of ‘without’ functions through the expression ‘without without without’ which is a translation of the Derrida pseudo-concepts of ‘pas sans pas’ and ‘sans sans sans’. Derrida, Jacques, Parages (Paris: Éditions de Galilée, 1986)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations.

6 Bhaskar, Roy, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993)Google Scholar.

7 Bhaskar does not reject his previous work since, as summarised by Patomäki, ‘in Dialectic (or Plato etc.) there is no systematic reassessment of earlier concepts and arguments but rather an indication that dialectical CR is simply a new and fully consistent layer added on top of the foundation of CR (i.e. Realist Theory and Naturalism).’ I thank the reviewer for alerting me to this aspect of Bhaskar's oeuvre. Patomäki, Heikki, ‘After Critical Realism? The Relevance of Contemporary Science’, Journal of Critical Realism, 9:1 (2010), pp. 59–88, 62, fn. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 My task is in some ways similar to Patomäki who states that ‘the point is not to replace CR with another philosophical position, or to launch an overall attack against the arguments of Realist Theory and Naturalism, but to show important ambiguities and limitations of CR and indicate a non-sectarian and future-oriented way forward’. Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’, p. 62. Although I sense the importance of his critique, I do not think that he is going far enough from the ‘Bhaskarian’ spirit or path since he seeks to re-place all Bhaskarian adoptions of ‘science’ with more contemporary ones. I think that this is overdue but yet still doesn't go far enough to raise the questions that I pose in this article, questions that, for example, some physicists are raised nowadays (see, for example, d'Espagnat, Bernard, On Physics and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

9 Bhaskar, Roy, The Possibility of Naturalism (Sussex: Harvester, 1979)Google Scholar.

10 I think it worthwhile mentioning Patomäki's recent work in which he quite persuasively uses a Bhaskarian scheme (so to speak) to refute Bhaskar's lack of attention to contemporary science, thereby shaking the ground beneath Bhaskar's approach to the possibility of naturalism in social sciences by raising fatal questions about Bhaskar's intransitives. Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’.

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12 Ontological monovalence is based on the premise that ‘any instance of real negation can be analyzed in purely positive terms’, Bhaskar, Dialectic, p. 7.

13 Ibid., p. 46.

14 Ibid., p. 39, emphasis in original.

15 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

16 Ibid., p. 47.

17 As pointed out by Patomäki, who is by no means an enemy of Critical Realism (CR), ‘many of those students who become interested in CR do not apply CR ideas to doing better substantive research but, rather, are content to iterate Bhaskar's criticisms of positivist and post-positivist approaches, in spite of contrary advice’, and that ‘to a significant degree, the foundational, texts of CR – Realist Theory and Naturalism – have indeed, been beyond philosophical and scientific criticism within the critical realist, camp.’ It is remarkable that Patomäki is presenting one of the strongest ‘internal’ critiques of Bhaskar's Critical Realism in this article (Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’, pp. 60–1). This is to be contrasted with his 2002 book which falls more squarely within more conventional readings of Critical Realism (although one should mention that Patomäki does bring in elements from Habermasian and Foucauldian thinkings in an attempt to go beyond certain Bhaskarian strictures). Patomäki, Heikki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (re)Construction of World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Bhaskar, Dialectic, p. 152.

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24 Ibid.

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26 Ibid., p. 103.

27 Derrida, On the Name, pp. 59–60.

28 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. 43.

29 Bradley, Arthur, ‘Thinking the Outside: Foucault, Derrida and Negative Theology’, Textual Practice, 16:1 (2002), pp. 57–74, 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Derrida, On the Name, p. 68.

31 Ibid., p. 85.

32 Derrida, Jacques, Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Volume II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 143–95, 148Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., p. 148.

34 Ibid., pp. 178–9.

35 Ibid., pp. 178–9.

36 Bradley, Arthur, ‘Without Negative Theology: Deconstruction and the Politics of Negative Theology’, HeyJ, XLII (2001), pp. 133–47, 136Google Scholar.

37 Derrida, Parages, p. 90.

38 Bradley, ‘Without Negative Theology’, pp. 136–7.

39 Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Volume II, p. 158.

40 Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 401Google Scholar.

41 Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 129Google Scholar.

42 Derrida, On the Name, p. 76.

43 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. 6.

44 Ibid., p. 11.

45 Demiurge – joining together demos (people) and ergos (worker) – is in Platonism what shaped the material world.

46 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. 35.

47 Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 105.

48 Derrida, On the Name, p. 95.

49 Ibid.

50 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, pp. 35–6.

51 Derrida, On the Name, p. 56.

52 Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 105.

53 Derrida, On the Name, p. 57.

54 Ibid., p. 109.

55 Ibid., pp. 124–5.

56 Ibid., p. 126.

57 Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 107.

58 Caputo, John D., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 94Google Scholar.

59 Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, p. 107.

60 Derrida, On the Name, pp. 99–100.

61 Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 94.

62 Derrida, On the Name, p. 113.

63 Ibid., p. 117.

64 Ibid., p. 89.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., p. 126.

67 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. 54.

68 Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 96.

69 As pointed out by the reviewer, Bhaskar's book ‘From East to West’ addresses the topic of God and related metaphysical issues. I think that this work deserves more than just a mention in a footnote. Indeed, in this work Bhaskar engages Bhaskar against Bhaskar for another more or less different Bhaskar; a call for a work of deconstruction. Bhaskar, Roy, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (New York: Routldge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Without pretending to be able to explain herein the full play of logic, grammar, rhetoric, and concepts that Bhaskar is struggling to clarify, it seems to me that he is both stuck within a hyper-essentiality mode of speaking of man and God and, at the same time, seeking to go beyond (see, for example, p. x and p. 47). Yet Bhaskar (p. ix) had nonetheless already retreated and circumscribed his task by declaring upfront in this book that ‘the essential thesis of this book is that man is essentially God (and therefore also essentially one, but also essentially unique); and that, as such, he is essentially free and already en-lightened, a freedom and enlightenment which is overlain by extraneous, heteronomous determinations which (a) occlude and (b) qualify this essential fact. To reclaim and realise his essential freedom, man has to shed both the illusion that he is not essentially Godlike and free and the constraining heteronomous determinations (constituting an objective world of illusion, duality and alienation) which that illusion grounds. To become free or realize his freedom man must thus shed both the illusions that he is not (essentially) and that he is (already, only and completely) free!’ I think that Bhaskar is trying to reach closure too soon too fast and thereby falling back into the metaphysics of presence (or absence for that matter). It seems that in this book Bhaskar is a hyper-Hegelian, more Hegelian than Hegel or any of his disciples. I think that ultimately many of these tensions in Bhaskar's thinking, as it has always been the case, are in part related to the fact that he has not developed a philosophy or theory of ‘sign’, ‘language’, and semiotics' (ironically, despite his opposition to what he terms as ‘linguistic fallacy’, (pp. 25, 26)). As put by Nellhaus, ‘the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar has not provided an adequate account of signs. Indeed, in two of his recent books (1993, 1994) Bhaskar devotes merely a diagram and two pages of sketchy text toward analysing the sign structure, even though without signs, meanings are literally unthinkable. The undertheorisation of signs results in theoretical and political difficulties. For example, the exact ontological status of signs and meanings is unclear, which casts a shadow over Bhaskar's larger ontological framework, especially since he holds that society is ‘concept-dependent.’ Nellhaus, Tobin, ‘Signs, Social Ontology, and Critical Realism’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 28 (1998), pp. 1–24, 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moreover, Bhaskar makes ‘categorial realism’ (pp. 33–9) an indispensable element of Transcendental Dialectic Critical Realism. Yet he never engaged in a sustained analysis/deconstruction of the very concept of ‘category’, or, more precisely, ‘the category of category’ or ‘categoriality’. In this respect Bhaskar remains very Aristotelian in his approach to language, despite the fact that his philosophy is a sustained practice of continuous linguistic/categorial bifurcation upon bifurcation, even when augmented with borrowings from East Asian languages/systems of belief and thoughts (for a deconstruction of ‘categoriality’ see: Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’, in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 175–205Google Scholar.

70 Bhaskar, Dialectic, p. 46, emphasis in original.

71 Ibid.

72 Derrida, On the Name, pp. 124–5.

73 There are some similarities and differences with Žižek's interpretation of Schelling's notion of beginning. Space limitations do not allow for more than this brief comment. Žižek, Slavoj, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 91, fn. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 As put by the reviewer, ‘I am doubtful whether the Derridean pseudo-logic of “neither-nor” and “both-and” can lead to anything but self-reflexively critical dead-end (deconstructionism provides an important moment for critical thinking, but without a wider system such as CR it is hard to see how this kind of a perspective might enable concrete research on international relations or political economy).’ I thank the reviewers for raising this issue.

75 Patomäki, Heikki and Wight, Colin, ‘After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44:2 (2000), pp. 213–37, 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’, p. 85.

77 However, even if one were to accept such a view, it does not diminish the importance of the question on the logic of such an approach. That is: this article can be understood as proposing another logic, a logic different from customarily adopted Aristotelian or even Hegelian logics. It would, for example, be worthwhile pursuing Patomäki's exploration to new possibilities that an adoption of quantum logic (more than just quantum physics as a science) would open up for/against/beyond Critical Realism. Such a venture (drawing, for example, on Plotnitsky's work in this regard) would go far in emphasising the issues that I raise in this article. Plotnitsky, Arkady, Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993)Google Scholar; Plotnitsky, Arkady, Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

78 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 197–8Google Scholar.

79 Although Jackson refuses to call it a ‘framework’, the vocabulary that he develops is indeed an enframing of what he believes is ordinarily tacit in the conduct of IR inquiry.

80 Patomäki, ‘After Critical Realism?’, p. 62.

81 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 45.

82 Ibid., p. 54.

83 Ibid., p. 9.

84 Ibid., p. 56.

85 Ibid., p. 61.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid., pp. 80–1.

89 Différance, explains Derrida, ‘is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be “present”, appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.’ This means that différance is a differing and a deferral relationship between ‘terms’ which turns these ‘terms’ into a concatenation of presence and absence. Each term contains within itself both the mark of a past element and the mark of the relation with a future element. This is the effect of the trace, which, according to Derrida, ‘relates no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present.’ Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 142–3Google Scholar.

90 Harvey, Irene E., ‘Derrida, Kant, and the Performance of Parergonality’, in Silverman, Hugh J. (ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 59–76, 71–2Google Scholar.

91 Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry, p. 34.

92 Harvey, ‘Derrida, Kant, and the Performance of Parergonality’, p. 65.

93 Ibid., p. 71.

94 Ibid., p. 73.

95 Ibid., p. 74.