Article

Progress in Human Geography

119
Politicizing ontology The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132516652953
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Mikko Joronen
University of Tampere, Finland

Jouni Hakli
University of Tampere, Finland

Abstract
This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between
ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to
which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential
possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent
with, but also practised upon, its own foundations. We propose a relation between the political and the
ontological as questioning that grows from the events and situations, which ontologically position us in
multiple and unexpected ways.

Keywords
event, new materialism, ontology, politics, politics of ontology, posthumanism, relational thinking

I Introduction of metaphysical principles, conceptual shifts

and onto-historical descriptions that have each
Several scholars have observed that during the
in their own way challenged us to think about
past two decades or so an ontological turn has
the constitution of the world and space anew.
become influential in human geography and
Some scholars arguing for the need to revise our
beyond. Embedded in conceptual signposts
ontological premises also make the case that
including flat ontology (Springer, 2013), pro-
this will release important new energies in polit-
cess ontology (Roberts, 2014), object-oriented
ical thought and our understanding of the polit-
ontology (Shaw and Meehan, 2013), historical
ical. Particularly vocal in this regard have been
ontology (Hacking, 2002; Elden, 2003a),
scholars working under the labels of new mate-
ethnographic ontology (Blaser, 2014), onto-
rialism, assemblage thinking or posthuman-
cartography (Bryant, 2014), ontology of our-
ism. By moving beyond what the discussion
selves (Harvey, 2007, Dean, 2010: 2), social
frames as a tired Enlightenment vision of
ontology (Escobar, 2007; Schatzki, 2003),
ontological politics (Joronen, 2013; What-
more, 2013), empirical ontology (Law and
Corresponding author:
Lien, 2012), new materialism (Kirsch, 2013)
Mikko Joronen, Space and Political Agency Research
and different ramifications of speculative rea- Group, School of Management, University of Tampere,
lism (Bryant et al., 2011), the turn to ontology Tampere 33014, Finland.
has admittedly created a significant collection Email: mikko.joronen@uta.fi

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2 Progress in Human Geography
anthropocentric politics, the scholarship ques-
tions the way political traditions map political
agency exclusively onto the human side of a
human/nature dualism and proposes a rebel-
lion against modernist dreams of human mas-
tery over passive matter (Latta, 2014: 324).
Here we wish to argue against certain uses of
ontology as being necessarily fruitful for enli-
vening political thought. There is another
branch of scholarship, we suggest, that allows
us to approach the relation between the political
and the ontological as questioning and thus
remaining true to the idea of events and situa-
tions as always emerging and constituting in
multiple ways. By following this line of
thought, particularly but not exclusively
grounded on the works of Heidegger, Foucault
and Agamben, we wish to reject at the outset all
attempts to define unequivocal ontological
stances. We do this regardless of whether they
are set to conceive the always emergent and
unpredictable assemblages (and the politics
they imply) or strive to plant ontological foun-
dations on particular conditions, such as the
mathematical exactitude or vitalist forces (e.g.
Elden, 2006; Graham and Shaw, 2010). Too
often the term ontology is employed as an
assumed mandate to speak in the name of reality
rather than to question it (Schmidt, 2013).
Ontology then ceases to mark an inquiry and
instead stands for an answer that provides a
foundation or a theoretical stance (Barnett,
2008; Lynch, 2013; McNay, 2014). We argue
that with this use of ontology the possibility to
properly understand how ontology relates to the
political is lost, and the politics of the act of
founding is concealed.
Here we propose ontological thinking not as
a way of having the last word regarding the
structure of reality, but as the questioning of the
ways in which reality happens. This, we argue,
brings forth two aspects crucial for rethinking
the relation between the political and the onto-
logical. First, only by approaching ontology as
an event, rather than a foundation, can we
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maintain the degrees of freedom for political
thought and action that guard against what
Sundberg (2014: 34) calls the ontological vio-
lence authorized by Eurocentric epistemolo-
gies that fortify universalizing claims about
the (political) world (see also Tolia-Kelly,
2006; Mitchell and Elwood, 2012). Second,
rather than deciding the ontological comport-
ment beforehand, we suggest it is more appro-
priate to inquire into the finite ways in which
ontologies take place by revealing things to us.
In the next section, we provide a more detailed
account of what this mode of thought entails by
focusing particularly on the different modes of
ontological thought. In the second section of the
paper, we discuss the problems and ambiguities
that arise from losing sight of the inherent rela-
tionship between the political and the ontologi-
cal. Politics, we argue in the third section, refers
to our response(s) to what structures the happen-
ing of the world and so positions us to its reveal-
ing. Such politics does not place human beings
exclusively at the centre of being, but rather it
sees them as participants playing a decisive role
as respondents and guardians of the openness of
revealing.
II Rethinking the ontological
in turn(s) to ontology
In her recent contribution, Annmarie Mol
(2012) expressed concern about the way new
materialists have started to proclaim a turn
towards an ontology that would focus on the
matter itself. Matter, Mol reminds, is never
by itself all by itself, but as a good Latourian
would say, it is related, interacted and dislo-
cated. New materialism, Mol continues without
mincing her words, has no way of talking about
what matter itself does, other than naively
echoing natural science textbooks and journal
articles minus the materials and methods sec-
tions (Mol, 2012: 381). Without a doubt, the
recent affinity to introduce new ideas to human
geography under the rubric of ontological turn
Joronen and Hakli
has been similarly ambiguous in all its vigour
(Blaser, 2014; Braun, 2008; van Heur et al.,
2012). Far from a uniform or straightforward
intellectual project, the ontological turn in
spatial theory has emerged as a collection of
divergent and partly contradictory positions
which range from the revaluation of philoso-
phies of immanence to the rise of assemblage/
compositional thinking and the valorization of
the vitality of material entities in the constitu-
tion of the more-than-human world (e.g. Doel,
1996; Whatmore, 2006; Anderson and McFar-
lane, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Shaw and Meehan,
2013).
Running through this diversity, however,
there are several ontologically pertinent themes
that seem to justify the idea of a turn (in sin-
gular), such as the following: the radical ques-
tioning of the central position of the human in
Western (modern) philosophical tradition
(labelled as posthumanism); the belief that
political decisions are produced by pre-
subjective and largely autonomous affects;
and the idea that agency, understood as efficacy
rather than intentional action, is always distrib-
uted across the assembled bundles of humans,
non-humans, issues and things that compose the
contingently emerging socio-material world
(e.g. Whatmore, 1997; Thrift, 2004; Castree and
Nash, 2006; Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Shaw,
2012; Squire, 2014). Many of the proponents of
the turn to ontology also share a mode of argu-
mentation that follows a familiar pattern of
paradigm creation. On these occasions, a preva-
lent conception of reality is recognized as obso-
lete and then replaced by a renewed ontology
that is more firmly attached to the elements that
previous approaches are claimed to have
downplayed, veiled, excluded or rejected.
To paraphrase Law and Lien (2012), such
paradigm-building tends to operate on the estab-
lished grounds of ordered ontology, which
remains a vestige of the long tradition of West-
ern metaphysical thinking, which itself goes
back to the early Greek philosophy and
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3
cosmology. Heidegger, like many others after
him, Derrida in particular, has aptly called this
metaphysical ambition to ontological ordering
and grounding onto-theology (Heidegger,
2002, 2003). Onto-theology, in short, is a mode
of thinking accompanied by the metaphysical
aim to define the ultimate ground, conditions,
categories, forces, causes, ideas, forms, perma-
nent structures and/or essences through which
the manifold identities, relations and differ-
ences of entities (or beings) are constituted (for
a more detailed discussion see Thomson, 2005;
Joronen, 2012). Against the notion of ordered
ontology (or onto-theology) Law and Lien
(2012) suggest a way of thinking, inaugurated
by Nietzsche and pragmatists, that focuses on
the empiric ontologies as they are enacted in
practices through which we are connected to
things.
However, we consider that Law and Lien
(2012) fall short in their critique of onto-
theology as being merely about fixing ontologi-
cal stances even though they direct the inquiry
in the right way. On the reverse side of the onto-
theological coin lies the obliteration of the ques-
tion of being, or what Heidegger calls the
oblivion of being carried in the tradition of
Western thought (Heidegger, 2003, 2012; see
Rorty, 1991: 2931; Joronen, 2012). In Heideg-
gers (1991) reading, the abandonment of being
as a Nietzschean empty vapor in favour of the
endless becoming of ontic entities eclipses how
the ontological question becomes structured in
the process (Heidegger, 1977, 2001). Onto-
theology, by celebrating the endless becoming
of entities, makes the question of being its stick-
ing point and reduces it to the essential, unchan-
ging and enduring ground of things. As
Heidegger (1991, 2003) explains, both the idea
of ordering and becoming remain within the
deep currents of Western onto-theology and as
such cannot place properly the question of their
own ontological legitimacy. While the first one
aims to pose grounding conceptions that define
beforehand the fundamental ontological
4 Progress in Human Geography
structures behind how the real really is, the
other crosses out being altogether by paradoxi-
cally making change the enduring ontological
ground of things. Crucially, both moves effec-
tively conceal the originary question concerning
how being happens as a finite way of reveal-
ing. This originary question has less to do with
what the world is in essence and more with how
being happens and takes place by revealing the
changing compositions of entities. Onto-
theologies, in turn, not only veil the finitude and
eventuality of all ontological comportments but
also block openness for (ontological) events to
come.1
It is here, we argue, that a fundamental onto-
logical difference can be drawn between being
as an ultimate onto-theological ground and
be-ing (or beyng/Seyn, as Heidegger underlines
the difference) as a concealed openness, an
ab-ground (Ab-grund), which grounds by
keeping the openness away. In this renewed
understanding of ontological difference (now
understood as a difference within being itself)
the event (das Ereignis) becomes a mediating
factor: it appropriates particular ontological
conditions of revealing from the openness of
be-ing by simultaneously concealing it (Heideg-
ger, 1972: 19, 2012, 2013; see also Strohmayer,
1998; Elden, 2003b; Schatzki, 2007; Joronen,
2013). What onto-theological thought does is a
complete oblivion of this process of concealing-
revealing. Yet, if onto-theological thought leads
to an oblivion of being, Ereignis allows the
opposite: a proper access to the ontological
questioning. The event (Ereignis) hence does
not mark another ontological scaffolding a
new ontology of the Event but something
that has been hidden within different ontologi-
cal comportments all along (Heidegger, 1972: 6,
8, 24, 2003: 846). Heideggers discussions of
early Greek notions of tekhne, phusis and won-
der, or modern enframing (Gestell) and
machination (Machenschaft) (Heidegger,
1977, 2003, 2012), should be understood as a
series of efforts to uncover and turn back
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(Kehre) to think of this forgotten history of
be-ing (Geschichte des Seyns) the veiled
structures of revealing and the legacy of obliv-
ion they produced (see Joronen, 2012).
Unlike Heidegger, our attempt here is not to
recover the un-thought history of be-ing but
simply to acknowledge that an ambiguity of
being underlies all ontological thought. What
we thus want to suggest is, firstly, an explicit
relocation of the foci of ontological thought
from answering to questioning. Accordingly,
we propose a move from building new ontolo-
gical grounds to a mode of thought that concen-
trates on questioning the ways in which events
appropriate revealing(s) (i.e. an inquiry into
what happens and becomes ontologically
revealed). Secondly, we are not interested in
ontology as a mere intellectual exercise, but
rather because all things and the assemblages
they form already contain particular modes of
revealing and coming-into-being and are thus
always already ontological in nature.
Considering the above, we welcome efforts
to comprehend multiple ontologies in terms of
the actual connections through which they
emerge. With this, we refer to different ramifi-
cations of relational thought, which consider
ontologies in relation to associations that in all
of their messiness are geographically open,
diversely connected and refuse to claim aca-
demic privilege (e.g. Abrahamsson et al.,
2015; Malpas, 2015). Ontology, however, con-
sists of more than a mere description of mani-
fold collections (or assemblages) of actual
relations. There is little sense, we think, to
equate ontology with relations. First, relations
contain modes of being that exceed these rela-
tions by defining how they were directed, struc-
tured and revealed in the first place (see Hakli,
2008; Martin and Secor, 2014; Joronen, 2016a).
Moreover, we do not subscribe to a view of
reality only as a series of negotiations between
objects, so that changes in particular relational
compositions would always enact new ontolo-
gies (cf. Shaw and Meehan, 2013: 218; Bawaka
Joronen and Hakli
Country et al., 2015). The reduction of ontology
to relations also comes close to onto-theological
grounding of being solely to ontic things, which
downplays the very idea of ontology as a mode
of questioning the differentiation of being itself.
A somewhat different approach to ontologi-
cal multiplicity has been adopted by contribu-
tions that fall under the rubric of indigenous
ontology. Here we cannot but agree with Hunt
(2014) on the importance of safeguarding the
ontological plurality against Eurocentric appro-
priations of ontology in geography. Indeed, at
times the premises of relational and more-than-
human thought seem to work well together with
indigenous ontologies (e.g. Bawaka Country
et al., 2015). However, we also see profound
problems in efforts to combine ontological
assumptions of new materialism with
ethnography-based inquiries into indigenous
world-making, as the academically pre-
ordered ontology risks colonizing rather than
valorizing the delegate effort to grasp indigen-
ous ways of being (see Cameron et al., 2014; de
Leeuw, 2014; Wright et al., 2015). As Scotts
(2007) study of the Arosi people on the Solo-
mon Islands shows, approaches that employ the-
ories of relationality cannot think of
autonomously existing entities part of the indi-
genous ontology of the Arosi as anything other
than cultural fiction or entities somehow incap-
able of accessing their inner capacity for plural
relationality.
This issue is directly related to the proposed
move beyond anthropocentrism that either
explicitly or implicitly motivates much of the
ontological thought in human geography. We
recognize the thrust towards posthumanism as
an inspiring facet in the turn to ontology, which
has important critical potential to open new vis-
tas in the study of more-than-human geogra-
phies (e.g. Whatmore, 2006; Donaldson et al.,
2013). However, we also argue that an attempt
to overcome anthropocentrism by means of fix-
ing a non-anthropocentric ontology as the
ground from which to analyse the entwinement
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5
of human and non-human entities leads to prob-
lems peculiar to all onto-theological thought.
Firstly, non-anthropocentric thought remains
in a dualistic relation to the position it seeks to
overcome, finding no way to appreciate the
trace of humanism in any form of posthuman-
ism (Rae, 2014). Secondly, as an onto-theology
new materialism cannot but qualify positions
incompatible with its foundations as flaws, his-
torical failures or intellectual fantasies (Ander-
son and Perrin, 2015). Consider the notion of
enframing (Gestell) we took up earlier. As
Heidegger (1977: 1719) underlines, enfram-
ing emerged in the course of modernity as a
mode of ordering-revealing that places human
experiences and needs as the measure of the
value of things and as such reverting everything
to orderable standing-reserve (Bestand).
While this historical modality of revealing
clearly poses a peculiar apparatus of human-
centred onto-theology (Agamben, 2009: 11
12), it can neither exhaust the question of the
human nor be qualified as mere fantasy. To
think it can, like Anderson and Perrin (2015)
argue new materialist critiques of anthropo-
centrism tend to do, ends up treating the
human as an otherworldly construction that
has been abstracted from material and worldly
immanence. Instead of dismissing human-
centred ways of revealing as mere fallacies, they
need to be studied as worldly practices that are
intertwined with peculiar ontological presump-
tions and, indeed, that contain their own politics
of ontology.
What we wish to advocate is an open under-
standing of anthropos, which departs from
Eurocentrism and the onto-theological idea of
human mastery over non-human entities, with-
out portraying humans simply as entities among
other entities and thus sacrificing the vital ele-
ment that is unique to the relation between being
and human beings; namely, the capacity to
guard, question and care about the question of
being of its openness and revealing (Heideg-
ger, 1977: 221). It is this human capacity, at
6 Progress in Human Geography
once non-privileged and embedded, upon which
we build our understanding of the politics of
ontology. This said, we want to emphasize again
that our aim is not to place human beings back at
the centre of being/revealing but rather to
remain vigilant and ontologically rigorous on
whatever unpredictable, (im)possible and sur-
prising events the revealing (Ereignis) may
bring to us. This vigilance, or responsiveness,
we call ontological thinking (Heidegger, 1976:
1689). In encounters between being (event)
and human beings, it is hence the former that
gives revealing to the latter, who in turn partic-
ipate in these events of revealing by receiving
and responding to them (Heidegger, 1972).
Such an approach is not merely about relation-
ality of how human and non-human, or
indigenous and non-indigenous entities continu-
ously re-/relate to one another (Bawaka Country
et al., 2015) but is above all about the ways in
which these relationalities are revealed and
structured. Ontological thought, then, is about
questioning and confronting the structures of
what is gathered-together and revealed to us.
We therefore think of ontologies as events of
revealing as places of questioning, to which
one finds oneself thrown in. Such events present
reality as it ontologically takes place for us and
hence calls us to think of, question and respond
to its mode(s) of revealing.
A case in point: biopolitics, as Foucault
recognized it and traced back its genealogy,
is not about fixing an academic onto-theology
or about analytics restricted to particular rela-
tional bundles. Rather, it is a questioning of a
historical form of power, which has the capac-
ity to locate and constitute life through numer-
ous, often unexpected assemblages, (cultural)
practices, subjectivities and techniques of gov-
ernment. We read biopolitics (as a concept,
thought and action) as a response to this form
of power. It is an ontological politics practised
now and here, rather than an ontological
ground fixed for the purposes of empirical
inquiries.
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So we argue that ontology cannot be reduced
to an effort to lay down an enduring foreground
conception of how things are constituted. Onto-
logical thought should rather inquire into, and
properly respond to, our existential situation
and as such politicize ontological situatedness;
that is, how things are always already revealed
to us. By saying us, we do not mean only us
as revealing(s) may consist of ontological posi-
tions of different kinds. Yet, without acknowl-
edging our ontological situatedness, there is a
chance that we may end up forgetting the crucial
point made by Heidegger, Foucault and Agam-
ben, each in their own way, about the belonging
togetherness of being and action, life and form
(Agamben, 2011: 5367, 2014; Foucault, 1997:
99100; Heidegger, 1998: 15582; see also
Abbott, 2014). It is the political consequences
of this oblivion that we turn to next.
III The ontological turn
and the political
The shift in ontological thought from question-
ing to speaking for reality, or what Barnett
(2008: 187) calls the rise of an ontological reg-
ister of theoretical argument, is also reflected in
the ways the political has been connected to
ontology in recent geographical literature.
There are three distinguishable yet often inter-
connected routes through which the question of
the political has entered the ontological scene
and vice versa. In what arguably is the most self-
evident encounter between ontology and poli-
tics, the latter signifies some pertinent and
weighty issues that characterize our times:
urban struggles, geopolitical conflicts, global
warming, irregular migration and disruptions
in socio-technological systems (Pickering,
2005; Coward, 2012; Hinchliffe and Lavau,
2013; Dittmer, 2014; Darling, 2014). Insofar
as these are approached and conceived in radi-
cally new ways, they link the ontological turn to
political issues that, practically speaking, are
already there. Secondly, in contrast to simply
Joronen and Hakli
rethinking matters generally recognized as
political, the term has been subjected to ontolo-
gical scrutiny through its intimate connection
with the idea of (human and non-human)
agency. Inasmuch as ontological thought works
to reject the notion of the human subject as
intentional, reflexive and autonomous, it cate-
gorically rejects the possibility for political phe-
nomena that are inherently anthropocentric
(Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Roberts, 2012;
Lehman, 2013; Booth and Williams, 2014; Yus-
off, 2015).
Third, in what often remains but an implicit
connection between the ontological turn and the
political, the latter is presented as the horizon of
change whereby new ways of conceiving the
world gradually make their way into everyday
knowledge and practices and thus produce
changes to our now unsustainable modes of
existence. Hence, we could imagine, as Bennett
(2010) does, that if we were to become more
attentive to the complex entanglements of
humans and nonhumans, we would probably
not continue to produce and consume in the
same violently reckless ways (Bennett, 2010:
11213; see also Braun, 2008; Lorimer, 2012;
Coole, 2013). At stake here is a (cosmo)political
pedagogy of deep-going change whereby,
departing radically from Western modernity,
humans and non-humans might learn to live
together in an environmentally sustainable and
ethically sound way (e.g. Paulson, 2001; Bing-
ham, 2006; Whatmore, 2013; Knox and Huse,
2015).
1 Thinking political issues anew
While all these encounters between ontology
and the political seem to have brought a breath
of fresh air into well-worn debates, each also
opens up questions that cannot be dismissed as
trivial matters of definition or simple changes of
perspective. This is true even for the first
encounter that entails the need to radically
rethink established political issues because of
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7
a new ontologically grounded conception of
reality. Far from a straightforward employment
of new ideas to unravel old problems, this way
of bringing the ontological turn to bear on pol-
itics is challenged by the very onto-theological
mode of reasoning that we have discussed
above. A particular difficulty in this regard is
the need to argue by rigorously following the
novel ontology, while at the same time main-
taining the argumentations pertinence in grasp-
ing existing political issues. Instead of thinking
about politics in relation to ontological ration-
alities intrinsic to these issues, ontology
becomes a theological lens through which pol-
itics is defined. Such ontological reduction, as
McNay (2014) calls it, operates by extrapolat-
ing the political more or less directly from sup-
posedly prior foundational dynamics (McNay,
2014: 206).
Take for example the way in which Roberts
(2012) discusses the consequences of a new
materialist ontology in regard to our under-
standing of the politics of contemporary con-
sumer life. Laying out the posthumanist
premises of his approach, he posits that we need
to come to terms with an ontology that privi-
leges emergent structures instead of traditional
binaries such as matter/thought, human/nonhu-
man, subject/object and agency/capacity. Thus
understood, the world is characterized by a
creative capacity immanent to matter and con-
ceivable through an ontology of turbulent non-
human relations, capable of forming lively
assemblages through the actualization of vir-
tual states (Roberts, 2012: 2515). Roberts
(2012), by offering a corrective to traditional
conceptions of reality composed of discrete and
autonomous objects, outlines an ontology of
processual becoming characterized by contin-
gent emergence and self-organisation where
objects exist but only as temporary coagula-
tions [ . . . ] of virtual capacities (Roberts,
2012: 251415).
We do not wish to explore Roberts work
merely for its own sake, but rather we see it as
8 Progress in Human Geography
an example of a broader facet in contemporary
debates on ontology. Here, we refer particularly
to the onto-theological style of theorizing that
invites scholars to posit a framework for think-
ing and which thus creates conceptual and onto-
logical lock-ins that narrow down what the
political can mean under the new ontology.
Hence, besides offering a new materialist take
on consumer life in settings like IKEA, the
approach Roberts (2012) proposes profoundly
troubles conventional views on what is relevant
in understanding political events. For him, pol-
itics is no longer about intentions but rather it
marks a concern for questioning the worlds
becoming-other [ . . . ] through subtle recompo-
sitions of affective capacities (Roberts, 2012:
2526). He wants to acknowledge matters polit-
ical capacity to ask questions on its own terms
so as to define politics essentially as the poten-
tial to change through the contingent emer-
gence of the new (Roberts, 2012: 2526).
While these propositions are well in tune
with new materialist thought, the manner of
their making rests on an onto-theological
ground that makes it difficult for Roberts
(2012) to remain open to the ways in which
ontological realities become eventfully politi-
cized and thus to work back from his position
to say something meaningful about the politics
of consumer life conceived in any other terms
(such as politics related to intentionality that he
excludes from the new materialist approach).
Hence, we are left with the alternative of, rather
than inquiring engagement with, the politics of
consumerism that IKEA embodies in issues
such as the companys ambiguous role in pro-
moting ethical consumption or in the ways in
which it has virtualized consumption by embed-
ding its products in computer games (Morsin
and Roepstorff, 2015; Zwick et al., 2008).
Locked into a new materialist onto-theology,
Roberts (2012) instead concludes that IKEAs
machinic politics is about rejecting the dis-
tinction between vitality and the inorganic to
reach a micropolitics of [ . . . ] nonhuman-
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material negotiation (Roberts, 2012: 2527). It
is hardly an exaggeration to say that the analy-
tical outcome merely reiterates what the new
materialist ontology posits at the outset.
The ways in which an onto-theological lock-
in easily turns into theoretical path depen-
dency, directing and circumscribing how the
political is taken up, is further illustrated by
Lorimers (2012) elaborate discussion on the
consequences of vitalist ontologies for the sci-
ence and practice of biodiversity conservation.
He carefully elucidates several problems that
might benefit from rethinking in a vitalist vein
and shows that the approach resonates strongly
with a number of concrete issues. However, as
Lorimer (2012) himself notes, many of these are
confined to topics that are well known and
much debated among conservationists (Lori-
mer, 2012: 600). Again, we argue that vitalist
ontologies would gain much more political
resonance from giving consideration to settings
in which biodiversity conservation meets forces
and processes unfolding in actually existing
compositions, events and political rationalities.
This is because the practices of biodiversity
conservation seldom operate autonomously, but
rather they are deeply enmeshed with fierce
political disputes related to, for example, the
excessive use of natural resources by multina-
tional corporations (e.g. Zingerli, 2005) or polit-
ical steering processes (e.g. Humalisto and
Joronen, 2013 ).
There is more at stake in theoretical path
dependency than just a pre-defined and often
narrow conception of what counts as politics.
The tendency of onto-theologically oriented
approaches to operate within their comfort
zones leaves many pressing (human and social)
problems unattended and thus seriously thwarts
the societal relevance and potential impact of
the work itself a problem that McNay (2014:
2056) calls social weightlessness of political
thought. We consider this a high price to pay for
ontological novelty operating, as Castree (2006:
169) writes, at several moves from real-world
Joronen and Hakli
scientific enterprise and its wider social and
environmental consequences.
2 Politics without the (human) subject
The second encounter between onto-theological
reasoning and the political troubles the very
idea of politics as it introduces non-human enti-
ties as political agents on a par with humans and
by distributing the subject of political agency
into contingently emerging assemblages. This
move is seen as a necessary corrective to human
exceptionalism embedded in modernitys onto-
logical homage to a Cartesian dualism that
separates humans from non-human nature and
views the former as superior in comparison to
other entities (Coole, 2005: 125; see also Braun,
2008; Lorimer, 2012). In introducing a turn
away from an anthropocentric conception of
political agency that presupposes the priority
of human intentions (Bennett, 2005: 4556),
the building of a posthumanist ontology carries
emancipatory potential by underlining the inter-
dependency between human and non-human
worlds. In addition, it shows the position of
humans as merely one among many politically
consequential events, objects and phenomena,
most of which are non-human or are at least
more-than-human (Whatmore, 2002; Hin-
chliffe, 2008; Braun and Whatmore, 2010;
Latta, 2014).
It is this potential that has received positive
responses even from those who otherwise
remain sceptical about the possibility of
expanding the political to include non-humans
in something like cosmopolitics unfolding in a
parliament of things (Latour, 1993; Stengers,
1997). While Braun (2011: 392), for instance,
critically questions the extensive political
charge that vitalist ontologies give to non-
humans like hurricanes, viruses and electrical
grids, he nevertheless notes that vitalism may
offer a valuable ethical and practical orientation
to the world with environmental problems of
catastrophic proportions (Braun, 2008: 677). In
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9
a similar vein Abrahamsson et al. (2015: 16)
note that the general claim that things have
politics has become too vague, yet they admit
that political theory should concern itself with
the material world [ . . . ] in times of pollution,
species extinction, global warming and so on
(Abrahamsson et al., 2015: 5). Arguably, it is in
rethinking human-nature relationships and the
illusion of technological mastery over the non-
human world where new ontologies, usually
under the title posthuman, operate on the least
contentious terrain. Few scholars, including us,
deny the urgency of complex environmental
problems and the need to critically question
modes of thinking that have led to their escala-
tion globally.
Nonetheless, when the notion of non-human
agency forms a steady onto-theological stance,
it risks projecting a totalizing account of the
political. Everything non-human is thought of
as having political potential because everything
can have an effect on something (Bennett, 2005;
Roberts, 2012; Shaw and Meehan, 2013; Ditt-
mer, 2014). At least two problems follow from
this. The first has to do with the idea of respon-
sibility as an aspect of political agency. Viewing
political agency as always-conjoined action
across human and non-human entities under-
lines that human agency is not, and has never
been, anything more than relative, partial and
dependent on the co-action of non-humans.
Thus, human agency is not only seen as much
less intentional and capable of producing
change than we are accustomed to thinking, but
it is also always only partially in charge of the
effects that agency brings about (Coole, 2013).
Whereas some scholars have viewed the distri-
bution of responsibility as carrying an emanci-
patory potential in that it allows humanity to
withdraw from the illusion of mastery over the
non-human world (e.g. Lorimer, 2012; What-
more, 2013), others have expressed worries
about the consequences of the idea of distribu-
ted responsibility among non-hierarchically
organized entities for our possibility of thinking
10
meaningfully about politics and power rela-
tions. For example, Krause (2011: 300) warns
about difficulties in sustaining any attributions
of personal responsibility that she considers
key in democratic citizenship. In a similar vein,
Chandler (2013: 525) notes that in distributing
agency across assemblages new materialist
ontologies deprive us of the possibility to con-
stitute our own ends and thus leave us with
merely a world of blind necessity. Schmidt
(2013: 184) goes so far as to state that this leads
new materialist ontologies to leave us merely
with the possibility of adaptation, thus making
it impossible for humans to impose meaning and
structure onto this contingency (Schmidt,
2013: 191; see also Braun, 2014; Cudworth and
Hobden, 2015). To wit, we are not suggesting
that the moves beyond human-centric thought
are unfounded. The point for us is rather that the
onto-theological exclusion of human-centrism
precludes from the political issues that in
themselves are (or happen as) human-centred.
This, we argue, not only dismisses urgent mat-
ters that are (or may become) politicized but
also paradoxically does its own politics on the
level of an ontological lock-in.
The second problem has to do with the notion
of the political itself. If all the effects that an
entity or object has upon another have a certain
politics as many arguing for distributed
agency would have it then it becomes difficult
to maintain which human or non-human acts,
events or processes are not political in a given
situation. This has the consequence, as Latour
(2007) himself puts it, that [s]ince by now
everything is political, the adjective politi-
cal suffers the same fate as the adjective
social: In being extending everywhere, they
have both become meaningless (Latour, 2007:
812). There is an important difference to be
made between the idea that anything can be
politicized and everything is political (Dean,
2000; Kallio and Hakli, 2011, 2015). While the
former rests on the idea of not fixing the
political in advance, the latter dissolves the idea
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Progress in Human Geography
of politics by equating it with any and all
change.
Consider the ways in which scholars have
recently redressed the idea of politics. For
Roberts (2012: 2514), politics begins with the
material participation of nonhuman forces in the
worlds becoming other, while for Latta (2014:
329) eventful transgressions or insurgencies of
marginalized thing-ness [ . . . mark] moments of
political becoming. The political is also
revealed as a space of questioning to include
situations that force thought or affect
(Donaldson et al., 2013: 605) and is refigured
as an eventful technogenesis where politics
amplifies the matters that come to matter polit-
ically (Whatmore, 2013: 47). As inspiring as
these formulations may be, they do skirt the
issue of politicization in favour of assuming that
change is political in itself. Their reliance on the
onto-theology of flow, we argue, not only
risks rendering the idea of the political mean-
ingless but also thwarts their capacity to reso-
nate with broader political realities (see also
Cresswell, 2006; McNay, 2014). In their desire
to transcend the present and leave it far behind,
as Castree points out (2006: 169), such
approaches easily end up too self-contained to
be applicable to actually existing issues or
events, which are simply indifferent to research-
ers desires and onto-theological views. At
worst, the political celebration of the always-
already becoming virtual (Joronen, 2013: 628)
may turn into an ontologically grounded politi-
cal agenda that forms in complete isolation from
this-worldly concerns.
3 The ontological turn as a political
pedagogy
What is arguably the most concrete, even if
often implicit, encounter between the ontologi-
cal turn and the political is the manner in which
the turn in itself proposes and demands specific
political processes and actions to unfold so as to
become influential in mobilizing change. Coole
Joronen and Hakli
(2013: 452), among those who explicitly recog-
nize the political momentum of vitalist ontol-
ogy, envisions no less than a political-ethical
intervention within the material unfolding of the
21st century, which will be animated by a
transformation of conduct towards matter
(Coole, 2013: 461). This facet of the ontological
turn contains a promise for political change that
involves a fundamental turning away from the
philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment and
more precisely from a humanism that finds
ever new ways of positing the nonhuman out
there rather than in here (Whatmore, 2013:
34, 47). Put differently, what is needed is a
move beyond an unapologetically anthropo-
centric conception of politics and citizenship
that is engendered within a political space
occupied exclusively by human subjects (Latta,
2014: 324).
This is a more radical form of politics than at
first may seem as it requires a profound change
in how humans in the Global North, South, East
and West conceive of being in a way that does
not consider agency as human or as synon-
ymous with (self-)consciousness, cognition or
rationality and that does not privilege some
kinds of entity or agency over others. Instead,
it conceives of change in terms of assemblages
and hybrids that are constantly emerging and
dissipating across a normatively and ontologi-
cally horizontal plane (Coole, 2013: 4534).
This understanding would free us from ideas
of exclusive human agency that constitutes the
rest of the world as if it were a set of mere
objects (Connolly, 2011: 31). Instead it shows
our place as co-habitants in a thoroughly inter-
dependent, emergent and socio-materially
assembled world where humans may learn to
minimize forms of oppression with the other
forms of life on the planet (Cudworth and
Hobden, 2015: 146).
Yet, with all of their emancipatory promise,
these political projects seem to employ a basic
onto-theological argumentation. This is evident
in Connollys (2011) discussion on the rewards
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11
of embracing a vitalist conception of reality as
becoming, where he portrays the political
transformation as a work to become who you
are, so that the word become now modifies
are more than the other way around (Con-
nolly, 2011: 114). It is precisely the onto-
theological requisite for a new notion of the
human being that creates a lock-in whereby the
politics it proposes is not achievable without
extensive and deep-going pedagogic transfor-
mation. According to Connolly, the formation
of new maxims, judgments, concepts, and stra-
tegies depends on the cultivation of the human
capacity to dwell in the world as a seer and to
amplify the feeling of attachment to the most
fundamental character of existence as such, as
you yourself confess those terms in a theistic or
nontheistic vein (Connolly, 2011: 165). Hence,
humans everywhere may become who they are
but only by apprehending reality as it really is
what Schmidt (2013: 181) calls bare reality.
Expanded on the level of all humanity, this
would entail an enormous political development
comparable to, and even exceeding in magni-
tude and importance, the rise of socialist
thought as a global force during the 19th and
20th centuries.
Even if we accept that the politics of vitalist
onto-theology is a legitimate utopian vision a
view that some non-Westerners may disagree
with the conditions for its realization appear
to be controversial. As Chandler (2013: 525)
notes, when the world is seen in terms of becom-
ing, and when the subject lacks coherence due to
forever negotiating, experimenting and reflect-
ing upon its imbrication within complex, fluid
and overlapping networks and assemblages,
there is little room for politics that sets its own
ends. Yet, a growing vitalist literature seems to
suggest that a profound work on the self is the
only route to changing the world (Chandler,
2013: 532). Connolly (2011: 26) sets this polit-
ical project as one of acting to cultivate new
sensitivities to human and nonhuman agents of
multiple sorts by commending work upon the
12
self and the culture to which you belong. Ben-
nett (2010: 122) echoes this sentiment in stating
that to discharge fantasies of human mastery
we need to reshape the self and its interests.
Coole (2013: 461), too, argues for the impor-
tance of cultivating agency and notes that to
succeed the political project ultimately depends
on humans who are to be held accountable for
damage to vulnerable ecosystems and must be
accorded some privileged role in tackling these
problems.
Hence, while the political promise of these
onto-theologies tends to be sketched on an
abstract level in terms of bio-/eco-centric
environmentalism (Coole, 2013: 461) or
building alliances with [ . . . ] non-human
nature (Latta, 2014: 336), the more practical
advice its protagonists offer is to a great extent,
if not a little paradoxically, reliant on human
subjects sensibilities, learning and work on the
self. It is perhaps due to this posthumanist par-
adox that also the dimension of antagonism and/
or the understanding of power structures (of
which the notion of self-government is surely
a sign) are strikingly missing from the political
repertoire of vitalist thought (McNay, 2014). In
a subject-less world of becoming, object rela-
tions and emergent causality, with the political
resting largely on the hope of a more cultivated
humanity living in harmony with the non-
human world, the idea of clashing interests,
intentions or powers seems to have little role
to play (cf. Beisel, 2010).
In all, it seems that the political ramifications
of the turn to ontology are far more complex
than many of its advocates are willing to recog-
nize. The problems we have taken up here are
related to the conceptual lock-ins and theoreti-
cal path-dependencies that follow from an onto-
theological mode of thinking. Hence, more than
definitional issues pertaining to the correct
understanding of the political, we argue that at
stake are the different ways in which the attempt
to ground a foundational ontology narrows
down what can be said about the political and
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Progress in Human Geography
which politics can be taken up in critical
inquiry. In the next section, we discuss further
the ways in which to preserve diversity as an
inalienable facet of the political.
IV Politicizing ontological
situatedness: Receiving,
responding and guarding
Given the disparities in conceptions of ontology
and its relation to politics, we want to end by
reflecting on the question we started with,
namely, how to properly connect politics with
ontology. As we argued earlier, ontology does
not refer to a ground of reality that needs to be
predefined in order to cast a proper notion of the
political. Ontology rather marks a problem
according to which our thinking of the world
already takes place within the revealing of the
world and hence needs to start by recognizing
our ontological situatedness. It is this point of
encounter, the place in which we receive and
respond to the happening of revealing, where
we think the discussion of politics should be
located.
Before taking further steps, it is pertinent
to point out a possible ontological fallacy
regarding the notion of the political. Appar-
ently, we cannot define what politics is
without undermining our own critique of
onto-theological grounding. This, however,
is precisely what we wish to argue for: that
politics is not something that grows out of pre-
defined (ontological) notions of the political;
instead politics takes place in relation to the
place where its state of affairs is ontologically
settled. Being and politics hence intertwine and
co-constitute one another in the most funda-
mental way: inasmuch as politics is situated
by the happening of being (Ereignis), the way
being happens is always a matter of proper
response politics. In the following, we aim
to articulate this co-constitution between ontol-
ogy and politics in terms of reciprocity of
reception and response.
Joronen and Hakli
To begin with, we understand politics as a
relation, capturing the ways through which real-
ity happens to us (via sites of its revealing), as
well as how we respond to this happening of
revealing. Whether we look at this happening
in terms of the ultimate giving of being, as
Heidegger (1972: 56, 1819) underlines the
ontological primacy of the events of revealing,
or focus on the side of human reception, politics
in each case relates to our actions regarding
what ontologically conditions and positions us.
With this we do not intend to support the
human-centred phenomenalism of fully autono-
mous liberal subjects or the modern anthropo-
morphic politics of isolated agency (Ash and
Simpson, 2014; cf. Elden, 2003b: 479; Joro-
nen, 2012: 3702), but rather we refer to think-
ing that is attached to looking at, and acting upon,
how that what occurs occurs (see Dastur, 2000;
Malpas, 2012). Politics, we suggest, refers to our
participation in the process of revealing: inasmuch
as we link the notion of the ontological to ques-
tioning the ways in which the world happens and
reveals itself, the key to the political lies in our
comportment towards these events of revealing.
We use the expression politics of ontology
solely in this regard; that is, in relation to the
alreadiness, situatedness and finitude of revealing.
Each of these elements raises various chal-
lenges regarding the notion of politics. Firstly, it
is our reception of revealing, which allows
proper access to politics, as it brings together
politics, being (ontology) and place (situated-
ness) and hence helps us to avoid exercising
politics inconspicuously at the level of ontol-
ogy. Politics of ontology, one could hold, refers
precisely to what is at stake in questioning.
Understood in this way, ontological questioning
is always part of our situated horizon of being,
which comes along with the entities now part of
our world and which our thinking, and political
action, should properly respond to, i.e. politi-
cize. We consider recent onto-theological takes,
for instance, on materialism as responses to the
environmental catastrophes and human-centrism
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13
of our times, rather than as discoveries of more
appropriate conception(s) of reality (see Radloff,
2007: 54). What distinguishes us from these
positions is, hence, our urgent wish to acknowl-
edge our situated alreadiness as that which
gives food for thought as well as that which is
to-be-thought of (Heidegger, 1976: 167).
As the first point indicates, our participation
in the process of revealing cannot consist of a
mere apprehension of reality (the act of recep-
tion). Inasmuch as reception underlines the
ontological situatedness of political action, our
response is concerned with making a stand in
the state of affairs so revealed (see Hakli and
Kallio, 2014). As a response to the ontological
alreadiness to the fact that we are always
already positioned by the revealing, thrown in
the midst of things ontological thought has
two options. Either to settle with some modality
of being and so take its ground of revealing for
granted (the oblivion) or to raise awareness
about the situated conditions that being holds
upon us. Yet one needs to be cautious here.
We are not reintroducing the old division
between necessity and contingency by simply
making contingency the ultimate goal of poli-
tics (Braun, 2011). In this regard, unlike Shaw
and Meehan (2013), we are not trying to formu-
late an authentic politics that poses a pure over-
coming of the prevailing situatedness for the
sake of contingency itself; in particular because
the constant state of change, instability and
exceptionality can also operate as principles of
government (see Agamben, 2011: 645; Hei-
degger, 2003). Some forms of neoliberal gov-
ernment, for instance, operate precisely by
demanding constant adaptation that governs
populations and bodies through the precarious
positions and constantly changing conditions it
moves them to (see Alt, 2015; Joronen, 2016b;
Rose, 2013). Ontological questioning, we hold,
cannot be ignorant of the ways in which
ontological principles may resonate with
structures of domination and discrimination.
Rather, such inquiry needs to take seriously the
14
interconnectedness between ontology and pol-
itics, being and (political) action.
This brings us to the third facet we want to
add to the reciprocity between reception and
responding: the idea of guarding what is own-
most to being. With this, we want to outline a
simple point about the positive and affirmative
nature of the relation between politics and
ontology. Namely, that politics should not be a
mere reception of revealing as it happens now,
but it needs to stay tuned to the ontological
openness of being in all of its plenitude and
unpredictable eventuality. The reason for this
is simple: being cannot be treated as a mere
(onto-theologically machinated) ground of real-
ity; instead it denotes an openness that makes
any grounding possible in the first place
(as a ground that stays away; ab-grund in
Heideggers vocabulary). As an openness, being
(or be-ing/Seyn) as such cannot ever be cap-
tured, defined and reasoned; only the nature of
its happening(s) can be questioned. The
response for ontological situatedness is thus
never just about reception and responding but
is also about guarding the openness hidden
within the potentiality for things not to exist as
they now exist for us. We thus see the politics of
ontology as a response to various ways in which
ontologies have been politicized in societal
(power) relations, but above all we see it as a
task of thinking as an ethical responsibility to
be aware of the dangers, and veiled politics, of
all onto-theological scaffoldings. This guard-
ing, we conclude, cannot be reduced to an ulti-
mate ontological foundation or considered as
completely hollow humanist vapour. Together
with reception and responding, to guard is to
acknowledge our situatedness that remains open
to the unpredictable ontologization(s) and mani-
fold ontologies to come.
V Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that while the
recent turn to ontology in human geography and
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Progress in Human Geography
cognate disciplines has brought novel
approaches to bear in several scholarly discus-
sions, it has a troubled relationship with the idea
of the political. In exposing some key dimen-
sions of this relationship, we have argued that
ontological thought should become enmeshed
in situated questioning rather than posing
locked-in answers that create problematic
onto-theological relationships with the question
of being (and ontology). Most of the problems
between ontology and politics result from this
onto-theological grasp, which assumes the pri-
vilege of talking on behalf of reality and renoun-
cing our outdated and false ontological
conceptions. We see such an assumption as
being problematic because it leads to the inabil-
ity to think of politics beyond its own founda-
tions. This is particularly evident in the
categorical dismissal of human-centrism in
some posthuman approaches that make bold
onto-theological claims about the empirical fal-
sity of all human-centred phenomena, but it also
characterizes approaches that, for instance,
consider change itself as political. Moreover,
onto-theological thought remains blind to the
political moves it inconspicuously makes by
claiming its own foundations as metaphysically
equivalent with the way in which the real comes
to being. As we have argued, the way things
emerge is not a process grounded beforehand
on metaphysical foundation, but instead it is a
finite happening of revealing to which we
should seek properly to respond. Instead of
positing an alternative onto-theology, we hence
suggest questioning as the mode of articulating
the limits of the ontological conditions and
structures of events their ontological poli-
tics. We are therefore not only critical of the
ontological solidification, sedimentation and
grounding of all kind, but also we find in-
depth problems in the conceptions of the polit-
ical so established.
Politics, as we see it, is an action positioned
by being; a unity of being and action. Such a
sense of politics takes seriously the ontological
Joronen and Hakli
situatedness of acting, knowing and being and
hence those limits that situations create for it.
The notion of ontological politics we have intro-
duced rests upon responsiveness to our existen-
tial relation to whatever is (and becomes)
revealed to us and the need to guard ontological
openness for events to come. Otherwise, there is
a danger that the ontological fixity, whether pre-
sented in a form of academic or indigenous
ontology, remains ignorant of the violence and
exclusion that is practised upon its own founda-
tional principles.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the Academy of Finland Centre of
Excellence in Research on the Relational and Terri-
torial politics of Bordering, Identities and Transna-
tionalization (RELATE), and the Space and Political
Agency Research Group (SPARG) at the University
of Tampere for an inspiring research environment.
We are also grateful to Sarah Elwood and the four
anonymous referees for their engaged and helpful
comments and suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The authors received
financial support for the research (grant SA272168).
Note
1. We have decided to use the expression onto-theology
instead of metaphysics. With this we want to address
the connection between onto-theology and ontological
questioning (Seinsfrage), while simultaneously empha-
sizing their fundamental difference; that is, onto-theol-
ogys metaphysical aim to supply intelligibility with a
kind of foundational justification [ . . . ] characterized as
theological (Thomson, 2005: 8). Onto-theologies,
thus, try to define how things come to being, for
instance by reflecting eternal essences, fulfilling their
telos, or by constantly becoming anew, while a study
Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at La Trobe University on June 11, 2016
15
concentrated on how this coming-to-being itself takes
place tries to question those ways in which things are
always already revealed to us. With ontological ques-
tioning we thus refer to a study of those ways through
which things come-to-being (i.e. their finite ways of
being revealed as things), while for us onto-
theologies may think ontology but are unable to go
beyond the metaphysical grounding of things in their
aim to settle how this revealing/coming-to-presence is
structured.
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Author biographies
Mikko Joronen works as a postdoctoral researcher
at the Space and Political Agency Research Group
(SPARG), University of Tampere. His research
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19
focuses on political ontology, governmentality,
power, neoliberalism and geographical theory, Hei-
deggers thinking in particular. He is currently work-
ing with techniques and logics of government and
resistance in the occupation Palestinian territories.
His recent publications deal with thanatopolitical
governmentalities (Antipode 48:2, 2016), precarity
and politics of childhood (Geopolitics 21:1, 2016),
biopolitics of neurosciences (Journal of Education
Policy 31:4, 2016), and topological theory (Geogra-
fiska Annaler B, forthcoming 2016).
Jouni Hakli is professor of regional studies and the
leader of the Space and Political Agency Research
Group (SPARG) at the University of Tampere. He is
also the vice director of the Academy of Finland Cen-
tre of Excellence on the Relational and Territorial
Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationaliza-
tion (RELATE). His research focuses on political
agency and subjectivity; transnationalization and citi-
zenship; and border studies. His recent publications
include Subject, action and polis: theorizing political
agency Progress in Human Geography 38:2, 2014,
and Childrens rights advocacy as transnational citi-
zenship Global Networks 16:3, 2016.