Idealising 'the political'

References to ontology have increased across the social sciences and humanities in the last twenty years. Much like researchers in the 1980s might have been dutifully expected to clarify their epistemology or subject position, it has become a more common expectation - at least in some contexts - that people have something to say about 'their ontology'. This tendency has been notable in the field of critical political theory. The concept of ontology has acquired a set of expansive meanings that go beyond its traditional usage in philosophy as a prompt for inventory-style answers to the question of 'what is being?'.¹ The reimagining of ontology as a category for talking about the political constitution of society has been a source of productive theoretical inquiry, and generated an intellectual excitement that marked my own introduction to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their insistence that politics needed to be conceptualised in ontological terms imbued a sense that grappling with ontological questions was a mark of my own theoretical seriousness, in contrast to those who cannot see beyond the common sense assumptions of everyday political discourse. At the same time, with no training in philosophy (or, for that matter, political theory), I sometimes wondered if I knew what I was talking about when I talked about ontology, a feeling that can still be triggered today when I encounter an abstruse, knowing, or simply waffly use of the term.

The influence of the so-called 'ontological turn' (p18) informs Lois McNay's rich critical assessment of a strand of poststructuralist radical democratic theory that has privileged abstract interpretations of politics. Mouffe is one of her targets, though she extends the argument to Wendy Brown, Linda Zerilli and William Connolly, and even Jacques Rancière and James Tully despite their shared disavowal of the discourse of ontology. McNay argues that the preoccupation with developing an abstract philosophical account of the political cultivates a 'one-sided' (p21) mode of theorising, which becomes detached from an analysis of the social conditions that impede the emergence of a radical left politics. This 'transcendental mode of reflection' (p11) is schematised in conceptual distinctions that replicate Heidegger's demarcation of the ontological and the ontic. The ontological-level category of 'the political' is consecrated as the site of theoretical distinction, while the ontic-level horizon of the given social order is situated as a largely dull realm of 'inert positivity' (p22). McNay cautions that her argument is 'not an argument against abstraction per se' (p11); she recognises that 'to some degree or another, ontological reflection is an unavoidable aspect of political thinking' (p19). Nor is she dismissive of a theoretical approach to thinking about politics that has 'breathed new life into democratic theory' (p11). However, she questions whether the 'turn to ontology is the most conducive way of thinking about transformative agency and change' (p11), because of the concept's tendency to assume a particular understanding of the political that elides the heterogeneity of existing political practices. Accordingly, despite their aversion to the 'ideal theory' (p12) of Rawls and others, she criticises radical democrats for producing their own version of an idealised theory that fails to satisfactorily bridge the gap between the ontological and empirical.

McNay draws primarily on Bourdieu to interrogate what she characterises as the 'social weightlessness' (p11) of radical democratic theory, and prescribes a form of immanent and disclosive critique that emerges out of the work of Axel Honneth. The use of Bourdieu as a theoretical counter allows her to highlight the arid view of sociology presupposed in the work she critiques, emblematic of a scholastic tendency that finds general theoretical expression 'in a persistent downgrading of social experience as the merely empirical' (p29). McNay argues Bourdieu brings attention to a situated phenomenological world that is largely invisible to radical democrats, because of their focus on developing generalised theories of political agency that are uninterested in understanding the social conditions that delimit people's political capacities, and miss...