Theory of Relational Ontology

Here in my second post, I thought I’d explain a significant underpinning of my philosophy of how things “be.”  That is: how do we look at things, and describe how they exist in the world?  This study of the existence of things is called Ontology.  This discussion will necessarily be far more philosophical and conceptual than likely anything else I post here, but I feel it is necessary to explain in order to avoid needing to go over it multiple times when a related issue emerges in the future.  It will also be considerably longer than to what you may be accustomed.  This is necessary because I need to first set out the principles and history of four different ideas in order to get mine to make any sense within context.  And as context and nuance is a huge part of my own philosophy, this is something that I feel is necessary.  Fair warning, I will reference books you've likely never heard of and that are beasts to read… but very worthwhile.  I will attempt to give you as much cliffsnotes-style information about their content as I can, but a lot will be lost in the shortening… so I would urge anyone who is interested in these topics to go out and read them.

So in order to first explain what a Theory of Relational Ontology is (would that be considered technically a pun or a tautology?) we need to look at what other ideas exist out there that this may both deconstruct and be informed by.  Three significant ideas have been widely accepted in the mainstream over the last century:  Modernism, Postmodernism, and Actor-Network Theory.  My own theory is most closely related to actor-network theory, but differs in a significant way.  But first, let me give you a rundown of the history and precepts of the first two ideas; modernism and postmodernism.

Modernism was a philosophy that grew out of the enlightenment, coming to the fore in the mid to late 19^th century after some serious, large-scale conflicts threw into stark contrast the ideals of those in the Enlightenment period with what was beginning to be the reality of an increasingly fractured world, modernism began to try and separate Nature from Culture, seeking to reduce that which was “natural” to a single objective (quantitative, rather than qualitative) view, and what was “cultural” to being a hierarchical, linear, series of (again, quantitative) steps from the barbaric to the civilized.  This philosophy was tied deeply into the colonial practices of Western Europe, and contributed greatly to advanced in the physical sciences… while at the same time creating a cultural separation between the civilized colonizers, and the "ignorant" and "savage" colonized tribes.  It created a hierarchy of cultural value, as one would create a hierarchy of property value.  Ironically, though this was intended to give “savage” cultures a path to “civilization” (as opposed to the static nature of culture from the romantic period), this instead created an “Us vs. Them”, “We vs. Other” dichotomy that only harmed other cultures’ evolution.  There are books and books and papers and papers about the effects of this on cultures around the world (most notably in Africa where national lines and tribal areas are in conflict and have likely been the cause of much of the area's instability over the last 200 years), so I can’t get too far into it.  But the point is that Modernism tried to separate, to purify, things into their constituent parts.  This was definably an English cultural trait; that was definably an African cultural trait.  This was definably a natural fruit; that was definably a cultural juice.  Kant, Locke, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg, Picasso and Nietzche are staple examples of Modernist philosophers and artists: all of whom extol a fundamental structure, an objective truth, for everything, including music, morality and consciousness.

But the problems arose when we began to realize that in order to purify, in order to rigidly define the nature of a thing, we then needed to use some tricky translations to put everything back together.  If fruit was natural, but juice was a cultural creation (after all, we don’t see cran-raspberry juice hanging from trees in the wild!), then how do we get from one to the other?  Post-modernism came in to save the day.  It basically tried to de-construct all of these established paradigms of what is what, and basically said that everything that modernism said to be true was all really just language games, made to satisfy human curiosity and the necessity of our brains to classify.  It put forth the idea that everything is semantics, and that only an individual can truly ever understand what it is he or she sees, and that perspective was the driving force behind reality.  Basically the tenet of postmodern philosophy is summed up, oddly enough, by Descartes’ famous Cogito Ergo Sum thought experiment, where he found that the only thing that he could not doubt existed was his own doubt, and that following from that, he must also think, and that in order to think, he must exist.  Beyond that, everything could be illusion.  This movement away from objective truth into subjective truth led to abstraction and minimalism in art and music, and to a sort of cultural relativism that sought to establish all cultures as equal.  Michel Foucault, Philip Glass, John Cage, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemmingway are some influential figures in the realm of post-modern philosophy and art.

The problem there, as it might be evident, is that when everything is relative to the observer, how can we reach any consensus on, well… anything?  How can we conclude that empiricism, the foundation of scientific discovery, is reliable?  Not only that, but it doesn't solve the problem of the hierarchical nature of modernism, other than painting it in a new light of semantics.  So we are left with nature and culture as semantic arguments instead of material arguments… but we still need to do all of the work necessary to separate and put back together all of the things in the world that are blends of nature and culture.  So, how do we effectively describe an object’s complex reality?  Enter actor-network theory.

As a quick aside, both of these movements are obviously FAR larger and far more complex than the brief paragraphs I have given them here, and include a wealth of context and knowledge into the… epistemology (the study of the growth of knowledge) of the social theories over the last 200 years.  I am still not anything close to an expert on any of these movements, so any issues with over-generalization or missing possible critical points can be attributed both to lack of space and possible lack of information by me.  However, on to the meat of my point, rather than just the background.

Starting in 1979, a French scientist and philosopher by the name of Bruno Latour (a student of Michel Foucault, whose name you may recognize from earlier), began to look at the work of science as a social construction.  A couple of his most seminal works include Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern.  In Science in Action, he introduces the concept of studying scientific endeavor as a social object, that has to be studied, as it were, in action.  To merely take the final result would be to miss a lot of the important contextual factors that bring about the answer.  He uses the example of the discovery of the double helix as evidence that social and political forces are instrumental in how a scientific discovery is brought into being.  Without Francis Crick’s political maneuverings, without the constant fight for funds, without a face in the political arena that gathers support, scientific discovery is nearly impossible to do.  This is the first blending of the natural and the social, of bringing context back into the equation of empirical, objective reality and letting the methodology color the result.  In We Have Never Been Modern, he breaks down the modernist (and post-modernist) nature/society dichotomy by introducing the concept of hybrid objects.  Objects that blend the social and the natural, and uses the idea of networks to hold up the construction of things in a way that bypasses the need for purification and translation.

The main idea behind actor-network theory is that every “thing” is a hybrid of the social and the natural.  And we can consider the ideas of nature and society as opposite poles of a scale.   Where religion may be strongly on the social end of the scale, a rock in the wilderness no one has ever seen may be heavily to the natural end of the scale.  And these objects, both human and non-human are held together by specific networks that, without any one part of it, could not exist.  The only real difference between any two objects (be they something as small as a campfire, or as large as a nuclear reactor, or as complex as a society) is the length of the network necessary to hold it up.  For example, if we compare a cooking fire and a nuclear reactor, we can see that effectively they do the same thing: provide heat and light to people.  However, in order for the fire to exist we need very few human and non-human actors to make it possible; the wood, the spark, the person who made the spark and gathered the wood, and the teachings that let the person know how to build a fire… aaaand that’s about it.  For the Nuclear reactor, you need hundreds of construction workers, instruments and machines, and thousands of hours of schooling and infrastructure, etc, etc… much, much larger network necessary to make it possible.  Two objects, which do similar things… whose only difference is the scale of the networks necessary to bring them into being.  We can look at cultures the same way.  Instead of the modernist hierarchy of societies, we can see that the size of the networks that a small, tribal, “savage” society needs to exist are simply much, much smaller than the networks necessary for a “civilized” society such as that of Europe or the US.

There is one more author whose work I need to reference before we come to the end, and that is Annemarie Mol.  You may remember I referenced her work last week.  In her book The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, she puts forth the idea that, basically, context determines reality.  Only through interaction can anything be shown to exist.  She uses the example of arthrosclerosis (and let me tell you when you have a class that is a 3-hour discussion and you need to say arthrosclerosis dozens of times a day… eeeesh) to show that no thing is only ever one thing.  To a patient prior to diagnosis, arthrosclerosis is pain in the legs, inability to walk and swelling in the extremities.  To the doctor who diagnoses the condition, it is a weakening of the pulse through a stethoscope.  To the surgeon it is crunchy veins and the plaque he just used a tool to scrape out of those veins.  To the guy doing the necropsy on amputated limbs, it is a thickening of the arterial wall under a microscope.  The idea is that in each of these contexts, arthrosclerosis is a different object… because how it is being enacted is different.  To the person in the lab looking at slices of sclerotic veins under a microscope… without the microscope, the amputated leg and all of the tools relevant, that thickening of the arterial wall doesn’t exist.  Depending on who is enacting an object and with what, an object has a different ontological reality.  There is no practical single objective reality to anything.  It all necessitates interaction.  Things literally cannot exist in a vacuum.

My own philosophy is sort of a blending of Mol and Latour’s ideas.  Latour’s networks are too static, they assume a network for each object and that if any part in the network breaks down, the object it holds up will fail to come to be.  If we look at Mol’s theory in comparison, we see that everything is in constant interaction, it must be continually upheld by enacting other things and being enacted by them.  This gives us a much more dynamic, shifting environment than Latour.  But Latour is still correct in that the network is necessary for an object to exist.  Without the concrete, we could never build the nuclear reactor.  So how do we get through this stalemate?  With one, very simple, change:  There is only one network, the only difference between objects is not how long their network is, it is how many first-order enactments are necessary to uphold it.  So what do I mean by all of that?  Well, if we follow the networks that are required to hold up any object in Latour’s model, we can eventually follow them to include, well... everything.  For instance, I mentioned the comparison between the fire and the reactor earlier, and I said that there was very little necessary to make that fire possible:  wood, spark, person, culture that taught fire-making.  Well, that was a bit of a lie.  In order to get wood, you need trees, which need an ecosystem in order to grow, mature, and then die in order to provide wood.  In order for there to be a society that can teach fire-making there needs to be several people, all who do many things, including hunt, gather, farm and trade with other societies, which expands their network to include many other societies, which can then expand into more societies, and then the entire world.  But if we can connect a simple cooking fire with the entire world, then how is that different with the reactor which must be able to do so as well?  Well, that’s where the first-order connections come in to play.  My original list of network connections for the fire was only kind of a lie… all of the things I mentioned are necessary first-order connections, they are the things immediately necessary for an object to exist in a specific time.  All of the other parts, the greater society and the connections with a large ecosystem and trade with other societies, are only necessary to uphold the objects that are the first order connections.  They take two or more steps to reach from the “fire” object.  But how does this improve over Latour and Mol?

Well, when connections break, things don’t magically disappear; they are merely re-shuffled into the network and bring about a new reality.  If a concrete truck breaks down and cannot deliver a necessary load to the construction site, the construction site doesn’t go poof, the contractor shifts his network to include a new truck and schedule repairs.  If a person cannot get enough funding for a project, he may instead join a team doing similar work in order to become better established (and do related work that could improve his intended project) and find that funding in the future.  If a trade agreement with another tribe breaks down, that does not immediately effect the ability of the fire-making tribe to make fire now… but it may shift the balance of power and eventually drive the society to a place where it disperses and then cannot make fire (by virtue of not existing any more).  Through enactment and a shifting network, the realities and contexts become much more dynamic, much more stable and much closer to the reality we see every day than a stripped-down stylized approximation.  Mol’s theory of enactment also falls a little short as in her estimation, human actors are required to enact objects and determine their reality, heading a little close to perspectivalism and the pitfalls of postmodernism and subjective relativism.  If we allow non-human objects, through the networks, to enact each-other via the rules of the universe, we can expect a systematic understanding, and empirical consistency that neither theory allows for, without sacrificing the dynamics and variability that we see in the world.  We still get context-sensitive reality while maintaining a foundation in reproducibility, logic, and reason.

The study of science as a social endeavor (usually called Science and Technology Studies, or STS), I tend to think of more in terms of anthropology: the study of human behavior and culture.  It grounds the study in an empiricism that a sociological approach can skirt in favor of a certain level of relativism.  In Anthropology, when you study a culture, you must necessarily produce artificial bounds on what you study, because if you tried to study a culture including all of the ways that they interacted with other cultures, then you would also have to study those other cultures in order to understand the dynamics, and then it’s turtles all the way down.  The same is true here:  We need to realize that context for anything we look at is, in truth, infinite.  We must, if we want to fully understand, include all aspects of the world in regards to everything.  This is, naturally, impossible… so we must artificially end our study at some point.  My attempt with my own relational theory is to better understand where the limits of effective study actually are.  If we can find significant tangential effects of a discovery or of a scientific practice we should explore them.  If we can enumerate all of the first-order connections that make a thing be, then we can better trace lines of effect throughout the greater society, and I think that will give us a greater understanding of science and technology as it relates to society.

Thank you to all those who finished all 3000 words of that monster, and discussion as usual is welcomed below.  If there are any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to ask.