Ontology,relationality and an alternative reading of ‘difference’

Critical social and political thought is centrally focused on operations of power, the complex of practices, both discursive and institutional, that shape subjectivity and lived experience, that point to the conditions of possibility for these very operations and for the potential and realisation of resistance. This intellectual backdrop is a rich tapestry of debate and contestation, on matters relating to ontology and epistemology, on the paradoxes of modernity, on the colonial legacy and ultimately on the relationship between critique and emancipation. Both these latter concepts assume the possibility of political discourse and political institutions that both recognise and transcend difference; that signifying and material bordering practices do not fully capture the subject; that there is an imaginary where the subject of politics is at the same time a desiring subject, with a capacity for a critique of the present and investment in alternative futures to come. This understanding of emancipatory politics comes up against the charge of being in hoc to western modernity and its discourses, that it is universalising and dominating. The question of difference is hence core to debate relating to emancipatory politics and to ethical discourses in International Relations. How is difference conceptualised, and how does its conceptualisation enable and foreclose this debate?

Maggie Fitzgerald invites us to reflect on ethical and political considerations in a world of difference, where identities, precarities and vulnerabilities are subject to operations of power globally. In keeping with recent calls for the ‘provincialisation’ of IR’s discourses, postcolonial, decolonial, global, the call is for a ‘pluriversal’ understanding of ethics and politics, where the former in particular is conceived in terms of care ethics, championed in our discipline through feminist voices (see, e.g. Robinson, 2011). Maggie Fitzgerald draws on care ethics and on decolonial discourses from Latin America in particular, to argue the case for a relational understanding of global ethics, one that champions care as its central trope.

The call for care ethics in the context of a pluriversal understanding of the ‘global’ does not, at first hand, seem controversial, particularly in a contemporary disciplinary context where postcolonial, decolonial, feminist and critical perspectives have provided an effective critique of Eurocentric domination in the discipline. At the same time, ethical perspectives in International Relations remain wedded variously to a cosmopolitan/communitarian divide conventionally presented in somewhat misleading oppositional terms and are so formulaic in their rendition that they appear abstracted from the actualities of politics, and specifically how we might analytically, ethically and politically conceptualise difference (see Hutchings, 2018 for a critical overview).

The question of the conceptualisation of difference reappears in critical perspectives where oppositions such as rationality and emotion, the universal and the concrete, perform a discursive reversal where the second term is conferred primacy; respectively, the emotional and the concrete in the oppositions mentioned here. In this discursive milieu, and writing in the disciplinary domain of developmental psychology, enters the discourse of care ethics, attributed primarily to feminist psychologist Gilligan (1993), in her critique of what she saw as the universalisation of a distinctly gendered theory of moral development. The rich debate that ensued is not for this piece, but what is worth a mention in our immediate context is that (gender) difference is suggested to impact on articulations of moral agency, conceived in terms of ‘care’ for the ‘concrete’ other as distinct from abstract calculations of duty to universally applicable rules. This emphasis on the ‘concrete’ of course has a genealogy that far precedes feminist discourse, appearing in virtue and communitarian ethics and also in critical attempts that seek to reconcile the concrete with the universal (see Benhabib, 1992).

Pluriversal perspectives seek to move beyond what are seen as western, rationalist, liberal, universalist, dominating discourses that variously preclude frameworks of knowledge that are local, indigenous and culturally or historically distinctive (Mignolo, 2000). Any decolonising discourse on global ethics would similarly seek to locate moral agency within the contingencies of what are interpreted to be ontological differences. The core question of concern to this forum contribution, therefore, relates to how ‘difference’ is understood and how this understanding then comes to be the basis of a theory of global ethics. Is difference being understood as constructed and produced in the contingencies of discursive and institutional practices, as we might find in, for example, Michel Foucault’s lectures on the ‘abnormal’ (Foucault, [1999] 2004), and relatedly, in Butler’s (1993) conceptualisation of sex and gender, or on the other hand, whether we attribute ontological weight to difference, to the extent that knowledge and moral agency, come to be seen as a product of that ontology? Maggie Fitzgerald seeks to ground her global ethics of care in this latter ‘onto-epistemological’ understanding, where difference is understood in terms of a ‘deep ontology’ underscored by a pluriversal vision of the global. The element that Fitzgerald seeks to incorporate in this metaphysics of difference is an ethic of care, challenged as it is interpreted to be by a ‘world of many worlds’. Any reference to universality is critiqued as a product of ‘modernity’, and any suggestion of ‘human rights’ as the basis of a global ethics is dismissed as a universalising product of a modernist, rationalist ontology. Fitzgerald enters the terrain of ontology so that she can engage with the question of how it is that we can extend care to those who are not ‘like us’. Where ‘modernity’ is seen to have produced a universalism of domination, the onto-epistemological bases of difference suggest a pluriversal world that is concrete and relational rather than dominating or obliterating of difference. The core question for Fitzgerald is: ‘how might we care for worlds that are not our own, and that are, therefore, to some degree, unknowable to us.’ (italics Fitzgerald p.9).

As can be discerned from the above, there are a number of contentious claims relating to difference that call for particular attention and raise questions relating to the possibility of politics, judgement and even critique in a world clearly constituted by plural positionalities. The lens in this discussion falls on three inter-related areas that emerge from Maggie Fitzgerald’s book: the conceptualisation of ‘difference’; the assumed dichotomy between the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’; and the political implications of the turn to ‘deep ontology’ and the seeming rejection of ‘dialogue’ and the possibility of conversation, with particular reference to struggles for rights. Core to each of these points, as will be shown, is the problematic conception of the onto-epistemological understanding of difference on offer and the suggestion that this form the ground upon which a global ethic of care can be based. The critique provided is not a rejection of ontological inquiry as such, in that the intention is to provide an alternative, distinctly relational understanding of difference, one that does not render difference immutable and static, but a product of practices. Core to the critique provided here is firstly, that difference is a construct and not a ‘property’; for Fitzgerald and aspects of the literature she uses, difference is indisputably read in terms of the latter. Secondly, and relatedly, I aim to question the dichotomous representation of the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’, suggesting instead an understanding of both as political declarations, in a way that might, for instance, be found in Balibar’s (2006) writings. Viewed as declarations, each concept can be appreciated as strategic and political, thereby allowing a strategic universality to economic, political and social rights, while constitutively recognising the right to recognition as one such right.

Conceptualising difference

There is no singular world as such, but multiple worlds of experiences and positionalities, historically and in the present, where the colonial legacy and its associated violence and dispossession, continue to bear their imprint on the life chances of populations across the world, their access to goods and services, their experience of the postcolonial state and its capacities or lack thereof. Difference can be conceived in multiple ways, evidently so in relation to structurated positionalities relating to this colonial landscape, but also, in a late modern socio-political and socio-economic context, to positionalities relating to structures that are both symbolic and material, relating as they do to symbolic, material and normative power (Jabri, 2013). Far from reducing difference to the category of culture, this understanding points to the complexities of subjectivity and the form that its articulation might take. Differences of positionality in relation to structures of domination are constituted by a complex topography of access to resources, proximity and vulnerability to harmful practices, the absence, presence or adequacy of public infrastructure and public institutions, and access to the public sphere and political institutions. There is a tendency in IR to reduce difference to ‘culture’, but such differences generative of different vulnerabilities are apparent in any neighbourhood of cities across the world, just as they are across different communities and their lived experiences in multiple sites of exploitation, displacement, discrimination and dispossession (Wacquant, 2016).

Difference cannot simply be assumed as given ontologically, in some sense pre-defined, but is articulated, by the subject, but also by a wider milieu of discourses and institutional practices that, to use an Althusserian term, interpellate the subject, as Butler has shown, thereby creating or producing a landscape of difference that is at once both strategic and political. Articulation and interpellation are both dynamic, changing processes, so that we all come to inhabit different worlds at different times and spaces, though such movement is itself imbued with inequalities and is therefore unpredictable. The subject, as can be found in Foucault, and relatedly, Butler, negotiates the contingencies of symbolic, normative and material constellations of power, of inherited narratives, traces of memory and a normative order that differentially enables and constrains. Another conceptualisation of subjectivity also suggests a ‘world of many worlds’ within the subject as such, emergent as the subject articulates and negotiates the contingencies of life; the subject ‘in process’ to draw on Kristeva (1991 and cf Jabri, 1998).

Conceived in global terms, this understanding of a relational ontology of the subject raises a number of questions relating both to the form and content of relationalities and their associated differential vulnerabilities, just as it does in epistemological and ethico-political terms. Let us take, as example, the deforestation of the Amazon. This, by overwhelming global consensus, is a set of practices that have and continue to produce harm, to local communities in the form of displacement and dispossession and to the world as a whole in terms of its monumental and irreversible contribution to the climate crisis. If we were to map the assemblage, to use a Deleuzian term, implicated in the production of such harms, the lines of flow between the elements of the assemblage would indicate a complex cartography of complicity, complacency, but also of solidarity. Knowledge systems held by the local communities in relation to the protection of the forest would be paramount and would, indeed do, form the basis of the conversations constitutive of the politics of solidarity that exist across the world. As indicated in Fierke and Jabri (2019), ‘a conversation is an exchange between multiple parties that changes all who are involved. It is an ‘intra-action’, to use Barad’s (2007) term, that transforms the boundaries of difference and the world.’ The concept of ‘intra-action’ challenges the idea of immovable identities and markers of difference, just as it reveals the power dynamics that are implicated in the violence of non-recognition of difference.

Taking the example of the assemblage drawn out above, all involved know that the local communities of the Amazon are immediately impacted in a number of ways that threaten their lives and livelihoods, their relation to the materiality of their lived spaces. Their articulations of harm are paramount in the generation of the frameworks of knowledge constitutive of the epistemic element of the assemblage. Such articulations, along with others, come to be the basis of the socio-political and socio-legal conversations that come to form the grounds upon which global solidarities emerge and come to be instituted, regionally in the countries involved and globally in the challenges presented to our global institutions. This conceptualisation suggests not so much a ‘pluriverse’ of interconnected singularities, each with their own truth claims or confined cultural horizons, each with their assumed properties, but a complex and unpredictable world of relations, where ‘relationality’ is conceived as being productive and as such generative of new potentialities in the form of epistemological and political horizons that are neither unidirectional nor dominating, but mutually reinforcing and transformative. The onto-epistemology suggested in this conceptualisation of relationality points to the importance of both the recognition and exploration of how practices of knowledge production relate to differential structures of power, but also the dynamics of encounter; the epistemologically productive space that conversation enables.

This alternative understanding of relationality is political through and through, in that it understands difference as construct; a product of practices that generate the divisions of social and political life, divisions that can be deconstructed and hence challenged. Such deconstruction is not simply a product of an intellectual exercise, but is revealed in every instance of resistance and conflict within ascribed boundaries. Consider the women of Iran protesting the violent imposition of the veil as the marker of culture. Every instance of such protest and resistance reveals the uses of culture as a technology of control and in doing so enacts a deconstruction of ascribed boundaries. At the same time, articulations of difference can also be emancipatory, challenging practices that seek to diminish modes of articulation seeking recognition. Anti-colonial struggles of past and present are precisely based on such articulations of distinctiveness, the right to history and political subjectivity. The crucial term here is ‘right’, as expressed in all such struggles. The right has come to historically be recognised universally, and is hence subject to political contestation and indeed conflict. We are witnessing such resistance and conflict in our time in relation to Ukraine, the Palestinian territories, the calls for indigenous rights to self-determination, and also calls for women’s rights to their own bodies and against discriminatory and exclusionist practices. What is the ground on which we politically recognise such right and distinctly, the articulation it is given in such struggles and the solidarities that emerge globally? In asking these questions, my aim is to show that the assumed dichotomy between the ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’ is itself subject to critique. The next section provides such a critique by turning to Balibar’s (2012) understanding of difference and the politics of ‘equaliberty’, while the final section takes us back to the question of ‘right’ or rights in the plural, distinctly, the right to political subjectivity where invocations of the ‘universal’ must remain the basis upon which global claims to rights in the face of state and non-state violence, are both recognised and acted upon in the name of a global politics of solidarity.

The ‘pluriversal’ and the ‘universal’

There is an acknowledgement in the above discussion that the ‘world’ we inhabit is in fact a ‘world of many worlds’. For Mignolo and others, there is no singular articulation of the ‘universal’, but multiple such articulations that, in ‘modernity/coloniality’ have been rendered variously invisible or inferior to western epistemological schema. The modern rationality of the latter, with its ‘Christian’, ‘liberal’ and ‘Marxist’, narratives is viewed as constituting an ontological commitment to a singular world, whereas ‘pluriversality’ aims to both reveal the colonial implications of universalist discourses while conferring ontological status to different worlds. Where modernity’s ontological commitment is to a singular world, external to the subject, that comes to be known to the subject through scientific discovery and ultimately control, the pluriversal is a domain of different worlds, each with their own world-making capacities, including a pluriverse of epistemologies. This understanding of the pluriversal is taken further by other authors drawn upon in Maggie Fitzgerald’s understanding, where ‘difference’ comes to be understood in terms of ‘deep ontology’.

A number of questions emerge from this understanding of the pluriverse. The first and most consequential ethically and politically relates to the ontology of being that informs Maggie Fitzgerald’s justification of a global ethic of care. What does it mean to refer to a ‘deep ontology’? How is such a ‘deep ontology’ recognised epistemologically without the internal contradiction that so obviously emerges from a reference to it as if it derives from an epistemologically different and external vantage point? The point of these questions is to suggest that the assumed ‘deep ontology’ forecloses the very possibility of a relational understanding of subjectivity, one that accounts both phenomenologically and structurally for the inequalities that must remain the ultimate focus point for a politics of solidarity and indeed care for a world shared across difference. Do we really need a turn to ‘deep ontology’ to know that indigenous knowledge is as vital to care for this world as is ongoing scientific knowledge relating to the climate crisis? What is the reach of a ‘deep ontology’ and how does it account for differences within, of hierarchies based on gender, sexual orientation or the mere desire to escape? The internal contradictions are multiple and, once considered, begin to challenge oppositional representations of the pluriversal and the universal. The point of such political considerations is to ask how difference is constructed strategically in the legitimisation of exclusionist and discriminatory practices or in the mobilisation of resistance.

The alternative relational ontology proposed in the first section suggests different positionalities in relation to symbolic, normative and material continuities that differentially enable and constrain, that generate inequalities in life chances, in discriminatory practices and so on. These are different worlds and yet they are also of one world where all within that world are impacted, but not equally so, and where the subject is also implicated in the production and reproduction of the one and the many. The point of this relational ontology is that it is not static but recursively moveable and moving, where one framework of knowledge is or can be available to others through conversations that change all involved. There is no suggestion of a reification or even naturalisation of pre-given cultural identities in that these as well as other positionalities are not static, clearly bordered lines of difference, but are products of construction. As such, they can also be products of deconstruction, as highlighted by Balibar (2006) and Mercier (2019), both drawing on Jacque Derrida. Mercier in particular provides a devastating critique of what he refers to as the ‘ontological turn’ in ‘pluriversality’, particularly where difference is conferred a Schmittian translation to ‘political ontology’.

I also want to also elaborate on excess and negativity in conceptualising political and indeed ethical subjectivity. Maggie Fitzgerald recognises the ‘excessiveness’ of worlds and their ‘worldmaking’ capacities. At the same time, to invoke ‘excess’ seems to contradict the positive iteration of identity/difference that underpins her suggested ‘deep ontology’. Balibar (2020) makes the point in the distinction he suggests between ‘anthropological difference’ and ‘ontological difference’. As is evident from the understanding of a relational ontology I provide above, the subjectivity that emerges is universally applicable, pointing to the ‘fact’ that we are all differently positioned in relation to structures of domination and legitimisation, and hence differentially vulnerable to the ways in which difference comes to be historically ‘naturalised’ and hence taken for granted. This dynamic, as Balibar (2020) states, ‘confers upon universality itself an antinomic character’ (p. 10–11). Overcoming this antinomy, as Balibar (2020) and before him Fanon have highlighted, through political efforts at challenging discrimination and power relations produced through the naturalisation of difference may itself ‘reproduce the roots of domination indefinitely.’ (p. 11). More saliently still, ‘there is, or can be, as much violence in the project of neutralising anthropological differences as there is in the project of deciding forever and for all what constitutes the difference, which marks of difference are to be upheld, and which are to become silent or suppressed.’ (Balibar, 2020: 14). Balibar suggests there are no ‘generic terms’ that can capture or assign properties to categories of population, invoking ‘stable identities’ or ‘clear boundaries’. There remains a negativity to anthropological differenc; that which exceeds capture through signifying practices and structures of domination. As Balibar (2020) states in elaborating on ‘ontological difference’, this means moving away from assigning properties to subjects, but turning to ‘an ontology in which it is the relation itself that has to be endowed with a certain modality of being – or perhaps better, a certain modality of changing, becoming and oscillating.’ (p. 18). This understanding places the lens on the indeterminacy of the relation or ‘relating to’ as to its generativity. What does a relation produce and what are its conditions of possibility?

The negativity through which the subject of politics is here defined (and, constitutively, of ethics) is clearly present in Frantz Fanon’s (1967) evocation of the subject in anti-colonial struggle. Fanon provides us with a way of escaping the dualism that Immanuel Kant recognises as a challenge to our conceptualisation of the subject; between the ‘autonomy’ of self-legislation and the ‘heteronomy’ of external forces; for Balibar the ‘dialectical relation that has no synthesis’ (see discussion in Jabri, 2013: 69). Thus, in making the claim to politics, the subject of colonial domination is herself transformed, emerging, as Homi Bhabha suggests in reading Fanon, in ‘another time and another space, the ‘no longer and not yet’, a time and place of ‘negativity’ (Bhabha, 1994, quoted in Jabri, 2013).

It seems that an emancipatory politics and ethics has to be driven by Fanon’s negativity, where the subject of politics emerges despite the odds, but in so becoming generates another time and another place, both having the promise of the new, yet that which is created, indeed founded, remains cruelly indeterminate. In this conceptual schema, there is no room for a conceptualisation of difference that confers metaphysical status to boundaries of difference. As Balibar (2020) highlights, Derrida’s ‘quasi-transcendental concept of differance’, with an ‘a’, refers to the indeterminacy of ‘becoming’, a ‘suspension of the determination of differences’. And perhaps in keeping with our present deliberation, Derrida’s differance suggests ‘a difference that is always already affected by another difference.’ (Balibar, 2020) Perhaps this is the relationality that we can point to as constitutive of an emancipatory politics, one that understands rights in terms of the claim to politics, or the right to politics. We have witnessed the claim to such a right across the world manifest, to name just two examples, with the women of Iran or the democracy movement in Myanmar.