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Neoliberalism and the Ontological Turn: Conflicts and Collusions

The ‘ontological turn’ comes in a number of guises: additionally, the object turn, the material turn, post-constructionism, the affective turn, the practice turn. This ‘dizziness’ of turns—to coin a collective noun—has had a major influence within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and well beyond (e.g. geography, sociology, anthropology, management, and organization studies). In contrast to the once-dominant approach of social constructionism, the basic argument is that we cannot understand the social world without taking into direct account the role of the material world. But precisely how we go about grasping this heterogeneous mix of the human and the nonhuman varies across a number of perspectives (e.g. new materialisms, compositionism, speculative realism, material semiotics) which, in their dizziness, do not always sit happily together. Even so, en masse, these approaches have posed a number of core questions, for instance: how do we access and analyze the nonhuman in ways that do not reduce either it to a ‘matter of fact’ or the outcome of social processes? If the composition or enactment of human and nonhuman entities produces different but related ‘realities’ or ontologies, how are differences practically ‘managed’? If contrasting ontologies underlie contemporary controversies, what sort of politics are implicated? Science as Culture, 2016 Vol. 25, No. 3, 361–366, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2016.1172562