September 17, 2025 3:41 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite
So, I’ve been interested in the debate circulating around the #ooo blogosphere and its potential connections to the controversy surrounding the MLA job list. For the ooo-ers, the controversy started with Levi Bryant’s post “On Ontology,” and suggested that:
A person shooting another person is also, at the ontological level, simply an event that takes place. We don’t enter the domain of ethics and politics until we begin to raise questions about what ought to be. While ethics and politics will be intertwined with ontological issues– insofar as every discourse makes ontological assumptions –ethics and politics are distinct from ontology in that ethics and politics select what ought to be, they are premised on a partiality that is futural in the sense that they aim at arrangements of being where certain types of being would exist and others would not, where certain types of events would take place and others would not, where certain types of relations would arise and others would not, while ontology does not make such selections.
Ian Bogost’s post charts the development of the argument, including the Facebook conversation begun by Alexander Galloway and the following statement by Sarah Ahmed:
Racism once it exists (and once racism exists racism is a mechanism for the reproduction of an existence) is ontological: it is a question of attributes and qualities of bodies/objects/worlds. Racism isn’t about what the police should do, its about what the police do do, and thus about what the police are. It has become an attribute of that thing we call police.
But it seems that there are two ontologies being discussed here. First, is the ontology of the physical objects directly involved in the shooting. A hand, a gun, a bullet, a body. Cold, realist ontology. Could one call the bullet racist? Maybe, but that would seem to denote a very different discussion than the one happening here. Levi’s point is simply that, on one level of ontology, objects collide and bodies interact. That’s it.
Ahmed’s point is very important as well, however. There’s a second level of ontology, that of a social ontology. Here racism is an ontological fact inextricable from the shooting. Racism causes the gun and the bullet to be in a specific proximity to the body in order to interact. Racism is what causes the police officer to stop one person and not another. Racist assumptions influence norepinefrin levels in the brain to stimulate anxiety, which in turn makes it easier for the officer to act and stop a perceived threat. And Levi has argued that, even apart from its physiological effects, racism has an ontological reality.
I do take issue with Ahmed’s comment that racism “has become an attribute of that thing we call police.” I feel this is an extremely reductive reading of a complex and socially varied institution - and it underscores an issue that I feel all-too-many academics do not understand about social ontologies: the fact that they are made up of bodies (not just discourses) and that these bodies have particularities that are not reducible to being a single, easily readable (or changeable) thing. But, admitting that social objects are also ontological has a powerful effect - it shows us that we can create new forms of politics that are more equitable. The question is: to what degree do we have control over social ontology, and what is the character of that control? And what “we” are we talking about?
I say this with reference to another institution that I feel is being misread by some academics: the MLA. The job list came out last week, and several scholars have criticized the fact that the online version is still under a paywall. This is despite the fact that Rosemary Feal has mentioned that a .pdf version of the list is available for free, and is updated as the print version of the job list is updated. Of course, the Academic Job Market wiki has been around for years, along with (as Cheryl Ball mentioned in the FB conversation) free listings on Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Finally, this year an anonymous group has posted the full job list on a blog.
While I absolutely agree that the job list should be publicly available, and that the MLA should spearhead this effort, it seems to me that my digitally-minded colleagues don’t understand 1) just how much change has occurred in the MLA since Brian Croxall gave his talk about “The Absent Presence” in 2007 and; 2) the way huge bureaucracies composed of many different thinkers with different agendas actually work. As Bruno Latour has argued about our scapegoating of politicians, we often scoff at the very idea of bureaucracies. But this scoffing acts to displace the reality that political change is simply difficult and time-consuming. Of course, this account of political change runs against the messianic tone of much political recent theory (I’m thinking of Badiou’s Event, the quote by Elizabeth Grosz cited above, and the emphasis on rupture and apocalypse in Zizek’s work). It will take time for the job list to be offered for free. This is for a simple ontological reason: many, many different people (some of whom are skeptical, and who have other things to do rather than just debate this issue) have to review and debate and decide and debate yet again before anything like that will happen.
I think the misconception many scholars have about social ontology boils down to their own work environment. Humanities scholars generally spend the majority of their lives teaching courses that they have a good amount of control over and engaging in scholarly projects that are a product of their own individual interests and research. Collaboration, if it happens at all, occurs in short faculty or committee meetings. There is a huge dearth of experience when it comes to working in groups and operating under interests that are decided by other people. While obviously there are many exceptions - I’d be a hypocrite if I tried to make universal claims about “academics” - the fact remains that the structure of our work environment doesn’t often lend itself to collaborative thinking.
This is all to say that in order to understand the social character of ontology, we should be doing less fantasizing about the Event and more participation in the mechanisms that make our work possible: administration, collaborative research, and community outreach.
