Kavita’s comments about my previous attempt to grasp at “distributed ontology” has pushed me to try again. I’m finding what I want to say quite elusive, so I’ll try starting with some things I don’t think I want to mean by the term:
Distributed ontology is NOT simply multiple things at once (I think this is a general feature of ontology — that becoming is by necessity a bit of a mess). I very much like the way Kavita brought up “Hauntology” –that existence is haunted by other overlapping modes of becoming. And while this goes some way, I still think I want to think/say/apprehend something else besides this grappling overlapping becoming that converges to constituted a haunted materialization of being.
distributed ontology is NOT simple entanglement. It is not just that things are connected, meaningfully or arbitrarily (like a wikipedia entry).
Okay, so, now for an attempt at something more productive. I want is to think of becoming as distributive among multiple political economies/modes. Not as the effect of those converging modes, but as extending into, or maybe as extensive in, as a filigree presence in political economies. Unlike my above two NOTs (that becoming is multiple, haunted, grappling, entangled) that could be claimed for just about any object or entity, I’m interested in the idea of distributed ontology because I am also interested in taking as my “objects of inquiry” processes (not objects, in fact) that are materialized as extensive — reproduction and production.
Production is not locatable in any singular site in space, but instead is only brought into being in the accummulated and dispersed instances of enactment over time. Production, in this sense, has a distributed ontology, it is not cohered as a circumscribable thing with boundaries traceable in space and limited time. If production has a distributed ontology, then certain questions become politicizable — where is it? at what scales? what is brought into imminence? (as in subsumption), and so on). Entanglements in a distributed ontology become vectors of subsumption, where practices, places, objects, technologies, forms of life, even assemblages become not just connected, but ewterritorialized (even if incompletely and partially) as part of production. In this way, distributed ontology is part of the logic of capital (though not only).
Likewise, I want to resist the contemporary impulse — profoundly shaped by liberal investments– to site reproduction in bodies, or even in species, as a biological capacity open to technical alteration. Instead, since there is a larger genealogy of reproduction that goes back to the 18th century which is about ongoing processes of bringing what is outside in, as well as generating continutities, and since later in the 19th century reproduction becomes a conjuration of difference (a living difference engine of life), then what is poliitcally at stake in:
a) the relegation of reproduction to bodies
b) the relegation of reproduction to living-being, sans capital and political economy
c) tracking a distributed ontology of repro in which sex’s becoming is imminent in uneven distributed, discrepent political economies?
I think that distributed ontology of repro might be a way of naming some of the complex and interconnecting generative capacities of life that does not fall into the romanticism of some of the new vitalism scholarship, but still shares partially in a certain impetus to not be satisfied with relegating ontology to coherently demarcated thingness.
A metaphor might help here– any suggestions?
