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POLITICAL ONTOLOGY
Mario Blaser
To cite this Article Blaser, Mario(2009) 'POLITICAL ONTOLOGY', Cultural Studies, 23: 5, 873 — 896
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09502380903208023
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380903208023
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Mario Blaser
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY
In this article I seek to put into conversation two different but convergent
intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg’s ‘radically contextualist
cultural studies’ and ‘political ontology’, an emergent analytical framework
being developed by a loosely connected network of scholars. Central to both projects
is the question of modernity, but while Grossberg’s cultural studies focuses on the
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One might, confronted with the claim of other modernities, ask why they
are called modern? Why do I want to credit them, at the very least, as
statements about modernity? Why engage in a struggle over the
possibilities of being modern? Why agree to call such other social
formations modern? Why not something else, perhaps alternatives to modernity
(such alternatives most certainly do exist as well)? The answer is partly given by
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The desire to attend to diverse claims of modernity and the search for clearer
criteria to define the modern are somehow in tension. The search for clearer
criteria necessarily implies tracing a boundary between the modern and the
non-modern that will not necessarily coincide with claims of modernity that
might rather tend toward ceaseless expansion. However, this tension is
supposedly resolved by a ‘diagram of being modern’ in which multiple actual
and virtual modernities may get actualized, but only as particular articulations
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 877
These kinds of events are usually made to ‘make sense’ through familiar
notions such as ‘displays of ethnic symbolism’ and different ‘social construc-
tions’ of the animal whale, all of which help to situate ‘differences’ within the
matrix of a common ‘modern present’ i.e. they are manifestations of the
diverse modernities that exist nowadays. In effect, for reasons that I will
discuss in more detail later, nowadays all differences have come to be
conceived as being played out within a single ontological domain, which, as the
following quotations illustrate, is that of modernity.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
(Marx & Engels 1848/1992, p. 219)
Now, if one sets these quotations along other ‘claims’ of historicity, the
contours of the problem that political ontology is trying to address becomes
apparent. For instance, consider the following assertion extracted from the
Mandate from the Original [Indigenous] Peoples and Nations to the World States,
drafted in Cochabamba, Bolivia, on 12 October 2007,
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 879
rather than being simply eliminated, the original dichotomy between modern
and traditional was replaced by another dichotomy, that between ‘unreal
traditions’ and ‘real and all-encompassing modernity.’ In effect, it seems that the
conclusion derived from the critiques has been that, if there have not been really
existing traditional societies, then, we are all modern in one way or another. But
this is profoundly problematic, not the least because it opens the door to an
insidious Euro-centrism that permeates the dominant tropes of multiple
modernities. Indeed, the only clear thread across diverse understandings of
what modernity is, in one way or another, connects the term to Europe. In other
words, it seems that if all contemporary social formations are modern it is
because they have had transformative interactions with Europe. The problem is
that this assumes that the encounter with Europeans is the single most important
constitutive factor in the historical trajectory of any given social formation. In
effect, if we agree that any given social formation is always the historical product
of transformative interactions with other social formations, the question arises as
to why we should call the present state of diverse social formations modern. The
‘moderness’ that underlies the different contemporary social formations needs
to be proved rather than axiomatically asserted, but in order to do so one would
need some criteria of what does it mean to be modern.
In part because the existing literature does not provide clear criteria to
define it, the dominant notions of multiple modernities remain diffuse and/or
ultimately lead us to Euro-modernity, which is the problem that Grossberg
seeks to avoid by providing his ‘diagram of ways of being modern,’ a point to
which we will return soon. Nowadays, the assumption that all differences are
encompassed within modernity is reinforced by the self-proclaimed ‘moder-
ness’ of some of those who were previously defined as pre-modern and suffered
all the associated consequences of this status in terms of subordination to the
modern. In principle for Grossberg these claims, rather than the putative
content of a given social formation, do warrant the treatment of much
882 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
to the 500 years of interaction and mingling between them, he denied that such
cosmologies could be radically different from the dominant modern one: ‘En el
fondo todos quieren ser modernos’ [‘Deep inside, everyone wants to be modern’]
(Garcia Linera, 2007, pp. 156157). Notice how the same certainty about the
desirability of modernity that Gyekye (1997) attributes in Grossberg’s quote to
all societies ‘without exception’ is used here to silence and sideline a potentially
different agenda. The transmutation of the inherent hybridity of cultures into
barely veiled denials of differences is common and partakes of the strong
tendency among scholars, commentators and policy makers (from Left and
Right) to minimize or disregard the fact that the hasty unification of radical
differences under the banner of modernity betrays the original aim of the
critique of culture which was to foreground the problematic simultaneity of
different ways of being (Fabian, 1983, p. 146) against the then dominant
tendency to conceive these differences along an evolutionary and hierarchical
matrix. The result has been that differences have been diluted to the point that
they do not cut too deep before they find a common ground in a (hi)story that is
supposed to involve everyone, that of modernity.
I am very much aware that claims of non-modernity are not very visible and
remain relatively circumscribed when compared with the more visible claims of
‘different moderness.’ This leads some analysts to consider the ‘terminological
battle’ already settled; as a prominent Bolivian intellectual told me in a
conversation, ‘the modern now stands for the good, whatever this is, so we
[social movements] have to introduce our notion of the good into the definition
of the modern.’ But expanding the meaning of the word modern is not
necessarily the best strategy or the only one; affirming the value (and presence)
of the non-modern in a similar fashion that Black peoples re-affirmed blackness
in the motto ‘black is beautiful’ might be another quite valid (and perhaps
better suited) strategy. Ultimately, the suitability of these strategies has to be
determined in relation to specific contexts, which in the present conjuncture are
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 883
not fully accounted for by the seemingly minoritarian character of the claims for
alternatives to modernity.5 Moreover, I believe that disregarding alternatives to
modernity (either by not fully accounting for them or by denying its existence)
does not help to a good diagnosis of the current conjuncture, precisely because
it contributes to make invisible ontological discrepancies and conflicts.
Now, recognizing that some sectors of the Indigenous movement either
reclaim a difference that explicitly presents itself as not amenable to be
contained within the bounds of modernity, or are so removed from these
concerns that do not even have a stake on the contest over or with modernity,
does not imply a denial that other sectors do frame their claims in terms of
modernity. And yet one must consider that, even when explicit, claims of
modernity are not transparent statements. Indeed, claims of being modern
might actually constitute a site of what Viveiros de Castro (2004, p. 8) calls
uncontrolled equivocation, ‘a type of communicative disjuncture where the
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interlocutors are not talking about the same thing, and do not know this.’
Uncontrolled equivocation refers to a communicative disjuncture that takes
place not between those who share a common world but rather those whose
worlds or ontologies are different. In other words, these misunderstandings
happen not because there are different perspectives on the world but rather
because the interlocutors are unaware that different worlds are being enacted
(and assumed) by each of them. These equivocations are prone to go unnoticed
where, as it is the case of the relation between the modern and the non-modern,
asymmetries permeate the discursive field.
In the context of the encounters between diverse social formations and
Euro-modernity, which is the historical milieu from which most contemporary
claims of modernity arise, ‘modernity’ implied, first and foremost, a language
of exclusion and, only then, a promise of inclusion of course, always
demanding that non-moderns reform themselves to be modern. In other words,
the alternatives offered to the non-modern were in many cases, ‘convert and we
will not only give you the carrot (of modernity) but also will stop using the
stick’, or ‘if you don’t pursue the carrot we will entice you to it with the stick.’
At least in the case of indigenous peoples in the Americas, this form of
‘inclusion’ has been historically very clear and makes me cautious about
assuming that I understand what some of their public claims of modernity entail.
In fact, these processes have contributed to make the non-modern part of what
James Scott (1990) called the ‘hidden transcript.’6 One way in which this works
is by dressing the values of the subordinated with the discursive garments of the
dominant. A case in point is the conversion of aboriginal deities into Catholic
saints to the point that even the original name of the deity is lost. Yet, it would
constitute an equivocation to assume that a name shared by Catholics and
Indigenous peoples refer to the same entity. The phrase from Lefebvre quoted
by Grossberg above is somehow illuminating in this sense, if the ‘‘‘modern’’ is
a prestigious word, a talisman, an open sesame’ it is precisely because the
884 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
discursive field has made the word ‘non-modern’ unprestigious, a heavy drag,
and an incantation that closes doors. Hence, it is not unreasonable to expect that
at least some of what previously was referenced by the latter word is now
mobilized through the former word by making the latter plural. Not fully
attending to this dynamic in claims of modernity easily leads to the trap of
making modernity anything contemporary in general and nothing in particular.
In other words, claims of modernity are not sufficient in themselves to help us
trace the line between what falls within the domain of modernity (or
modernities) and that which falls beyond it. This leads us back to the need
for clearer criteria to define the modern as distinct from the non-modern and
how Grossberg’s diagram of being modern fares on this account.
A concern that Grossberg had in building his diagram of the modern was to
‘be careful not to allow the move to ontology to simply reproduce the
Eurocentrism of our understandings of the modern,’ and thus, the four
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categories that articulate with each other to give emergence to a variety of ways
of being modern (i.e. ‘Now/Event,’ ‘Change/Chronos,’ ‘Everyday Life,’ and
‘Institutional Space’) must remain somehow under-specified so as to allow for
this virtual multiplicity to become actualized. And the diagram certainly works
well in this account as it is open enough to allow a great deal of variation on what
it might mean to be modern. Yet, the diagram does not work as well in
containing the modern so that it does not come to engulf all ways of being. In
effect, because the four categories according to which the modern gets
articulated in its multiplicity remain underspecified, it is hard to see how the
diagram excludes, and therefore recognizes in its own terms, the non-modern.
In fact, in the only passage in which the difference with the non-modern is
considered in relation to these categories, Euro-modernity, rather than the
virtual multiplicity of the modern, emerges as the foil that helps to trace the
boundary. Indeed speaking of the dynamic tension that exists in modern
formations between ‘institutional spaces’ and the space of ‘everyday life,’
Grossberg says: ‘the tension between these two spaces makes change not only
structurally possible, but also even normal and perhaps necessary . . . In non-
modern societies, only the institutional space exists although we cannot
properly even call it that. Change comes primarily either from the outside or via
an explosive revolution’ (n.d.). Now, unless one takes Euro-modern instantia-
tions of both ‘institutional spaces’ and ‘everyday life’ as referents, it is hard to
see how these can be said to be lacking in the non-modern. In other words, could
it not be the case that the non-modern expresses other forms of ‘institutional
spaces’ and ‘everyday life’ and relations between them? In addition, the idea that
non-modern societies only change when moved from the outside or through
revolutions reinstates the Euro-centric tendency to define the non-modern as
the inverse image of the modern rather than by its own properties. In short, if
we were to totally relinquish Euro-modern instantiations of the articulation
between the four categories, we would have a hard time to trace the boundary
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 885
between the modern and the non-modern in Grossberg’s diagram. And once
pulled by Euro-modernity and its ways of tracing boundaries the non-modern
ends up being defined as a lack or, in other words, simply as that which is . . .
well, non-(Euro-)modern. One of the lines of inquiry of the political ontology
framework might help with this problem, that is, as long as we remain aware of
the traps of the concept of Culture.
many ethnographers. I will just briefly present a snapshot from a recent work
by Philippe Descola (2005), which is to my knowledge the first one to try a
systematic overview of this diversity. In this work he identifies four large kinds
of ontologies, which I present schematically in figure 1.
The sketch does not pretend to be an exhaustive representation of these
ontologies; it just seeks to highlight how each of them distributes ‘what exists,’
the Internal Great Divide [between Nature and Culture] accounts for the
External Great Divide [between Us and Them]: we [moderns] are the only
ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture whereas in
our eyes all the others whether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande
or Barouya cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is
society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is
from what their cultures require.
(Latour 1993, p. 99)
access to a domain which is not clouded by culture, and this access is premised
precisely on recognizing the difference between what is Culture and what is
Nature; a distinction other ‘cultures’ do not have. This difference constit-
utes the external Great Divide between modern and non-modern. Now, what is
particularly Euro-modern is that between the sixteenth and the eighteenth
centuries the two great divides were increasingly understood (by Europeans
first, and by all kinds of Euro-moderns later) against the background of linear
time, thus making (Euro-)modernity not only different but also a superior way
of being, the spearhead of the evolving history of humanity (see Fabian 1983).7
In any case, what is missing from Latour’s (1993) picture is the extent to
which the divide between Nature and Culture and the divide between modern
and non-modern are historically co-emergent in Euro-modernity. This is
precisely what the modernity/coloniality group foregrounds by indicating that
this particular ontological armature emerged progressively in a series of
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specific locations in Western Europe along with the unfolding of the colonial
experience inaugurated by the Spanish conquest of the New World (see Dussel
1492/1995; Mignolo 2000). But in Euro-modernity, internal and external
divides are not only co-emerging, they are also co-sustaining. Thus, the
performance of a modern world in which the distinction between Nature and
Culture constitutes the ontological bedrock of a system of hierarchies between
the modern and the non-modern necessarily involves keeping at bay the threat
posed to it by the existence of worlds that operate on different ontological
premises, and this has been done by denying these worlds any real existence in
their own terms. Insofar as their radical difference can be tamed through the
concept of culture, for Euro-moderns these worlds just exist as ‘cultural
perspectives’ based on errors, mere believes, or romantic yearnings. With the
visual help of Figure 2, let me briefly discuss how the concept of culture tames
radically different worlds.
In figure 2 we have side by side the sketches of the Euro-modern version
of a naturalist ontology and that of a relational ontology. As we can see, in
comparison to the sketch that depicted the naturalist ontology among the other
ontologies of Descola, there are a series of modification here. First, there is no
domain of the supra-human/supernatural, as in Euro-modernity this domain
was progressively evacuated from the ontological armature. Second, the realm
of Culture and the realm of Nature are not side by side but rather the former
domain is positioned above the latter, depicting a hierarchical relation. Third,
the domain of Culture has been further sub-divided into several ‘cultures.’ In
effect, in Euro-modernity, the concept of culture has two related yet different
meanings, which I underscore by capitalizing one of them. As I have been
arguing, ‘Culture’ (with a capital C) is an ontological category that gains its
meaning by its contrast to Nature, and together both constitute the central
categories in the ontological armature of modernity (in its plurality). In
contrast, ‘culture’ is a sub-category subsumed within Culture and emerges
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 889
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from the differences among human groups, that is, different human groups
have different cultures. Now, if you imagine the sketch of the relational
ontology being shrunk or reduced to a small square, then labeled ‘culture,’ and
then re-positioned in the left side of the figure (i.e. in the sketch of Euro-
modern ontology) alongside the other squares with the label culture, you get a
sense of how in this ontological armature Culture tames radical differences by
converting other ontologies into just another cultural perspective on Nature.
Nevertheless, we must remain attentive to capture how different performances
are still bounded within the confines of this ontological armature. For instance,
although relativism and universalism are opposite to each other, they share the
same ontological assumptions. In effect, in more or less explicit terms,
relativism would claim that Nature (or reality out there) cannot be more than a
sort of mirror in which ‘cultures’ see themselves. Universalism would on the
contrary claim that, in spite of the difficulties, Nature does provide a common
ground (a truth) that transcends ‘cultures.’ What is not contested by either
position is the initial assumption that there is Nature and there is ‘Culture.’
The universalism of (Euro-)modernity, that is, the notion that modernity can
produce the most accurate, or perhaps only accurate, representation of the
truth (provided by Nature) has shifted from being explicit to being implicit via
the taming work that Culture accomplishes. In its most recent incarnation this
operation is accomplished via the notion of social construction whereby it is
assumed that the representations of the world are all equally socially
constructed. Yet the very distinction between the world (Nature) and its
representation (Culture) continues to be affirmed as a universal.
890 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
Conclusions
Without necessarily agreeing with his particular taxonomy of ontologies,
Descola’s (2005) work helps to give content to the idea that other ontologies
or worlds have their own positivity that is not over-determined by modernity
in any of its possible forms. Now, although I cannot fully develop this point
here (but see Blaser in press), I want to advance the argument that the
conflictive relations between Euro-modernity and other ontologies have
become particularly relevant nowadays in the context of three inter-related
processes.
relations are diverse rather than assume that the notion of property can
encompass those relations. This is what is manifested when, for example,
indigenous peoples press the point that even if they have to fight for legal
ownership of the land, the proper way of understanding the relation is
their belonging to the land rather than the other way around.
2 A looming environmental crisis (intensified in part by the first set of
processes) has pushed ‘civil society’ and governments to design schemes
for environmental protection of areas considered ‘pristine,’ which again
are also complex webs of interrelated entities within which indigenous and
land-based peoples are enmeshed.
3 Evolving national and international frameworks increasingly recognize
‘indigenous rights,’ thus creating some conditions for indigenous peoples
to defend the existing relations that constitute their worlds against the
claims of property laid upon them by other parties. Yet the rights are
conceived from within the modern ontology as rights to their cultures
and/or ‘beliefs’ (as in claims of religious or spiritual value of specific
geographical areas, or the desire to continue with certain ways of life such
as hunting). Thus, as I hinted at with the example of the legal ownership of
the land, these rights have limitations insofar as the world being defended
has to be reduced to a culture; that is, it is forced to fit into the modern
world.
roles do the modern and the non-modern play nowadays in our imaginings of
possible futures?
The crises of the modernity we know (that is, Euro-modernity) its
progressive loss of hegemonic power (although not of dominance), leads many
of us who have been trained and raised within its ontological armature to
consider that there are no ‘modern solutions for modern problems’ (Santos
2002, p. 13) and therefore that we must seek a solution outside of it. In some
cases, but not always, this leads to a re-edition of the myth of the noble savage:
in our desperation to find a way out we take whatever we consider ‘Other’ as
the panacea. But recognizing that this is a problematic move should not blind
us to what is ‘Other’ and interpellates us demanding that, beyond and above
our own search for solutions to our dilemmas with modernity, we relate to
them in non hierarchical ways. In general terms this means avoiding forcing
them into the ontological armature of modernity either by omission or
commission; in particular, this means not taming them with our category of
Culture. Now, Grossberg’s project reminds us that this might be possible
within modernity, if we allow for the possibility of its multiplicity. More
importantly for those of us concerned with the place and survival of radically
different worlds is that, given its dominance, the emergence of a different kind
of modernity (one concerned with translating rather than proselytizing) is
more likely than simply its total demise along with Euro-modernity.
Conversely, for those concerned with the actualization of other, more just,
non-Euro-centered modernities, addressing the question of how to relate to
radical difference without taming it might provide an indirect route to achieve
their goal; after all, as the Levantine example indicates, a modernity that does
not tame radical difference will indeed be something else than Euro-
modernity.
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 893
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Lawrence Grossberg, Arturo Escobar, and John Pickles for
inviting me to present some of these ideas in their graduate course at University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am especially indebted to the first of them for
allowing me to discuss and use in this paper his unpublished work. He has
informed me that a revised version of this paper will appear in his forthcoming
book, For Cultural Studies (Duke University Press, 2010). Elena Yehia provided
insightful comments and critiques of an earlier version of this paper. Marisol de la
Cadena and Arturo Escobar have been very close ‘accomplices’ in the
formulation of some of these ideas but I am responsible for the weaknesses in
this presentation.
Notes
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rather it appears in the ‘hidden transcript,’ the space where the subordinated
groups are secluded from the gaze of the dominant group.
7 The arrow of time was mainly understood as a progression, although it could
be understood as a sort of regression as well, as the Romantics did. Not
surprise then that any contestation to dominant notions of progress are still
labeled ‘romantic’ and often equated to a desire for the past. It is important to
highlight, however, that the groups that self-defined as modern (and therefore
superior) have been historically variable albeit not arbitrary, the invariable
element has been that the story of modernity (in its Euro-modern version) is
enacted through those human groups’ practices and institutions. Thus, Euro-
modernity is not restricted to Europeans but rather exists/extends as far as
one can trace that its version of the story of modernity is being enacted.
8 Of course, the ‘ontological turn’ is itself a symptom of certain occurrences
that are key to understand the current conjuncture. I will expand on this
point in the Conclusions.
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