DECOLONIAL POLITICS OFMATTER

ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS

The rise of technoscience in its contemporary configuration since the 1960s and 1970s resonates with a cultural imaginary marked by the idea that social transformation is primarily driven by material transformation. Technoscience creates new ontologies; it is world-making and history-making. The simultaneous production of society and ontology is often described as ontological politics: there exist multiple ontologies rather than just one, and these different ontologies are enacted by the actors involved in them. As I discuss later in the book (especially in chapters 7 and 8), this is not an epistemological question, it is a practical one. Depending on the specific actors involved, ontologies are practiced differently and thus are materially different as such. This is a "multinatural" world. And it is ultimately a political question which ontologies a certain actor participates in, and how. Politics here means that by performing ontology in a single concrete way rather than any other, we change the very constitution of being and its material organization in a specific direction. Ontology is not a description of the state of things, but of ways of being that include alternative possibilities of world-making.

What absences and what silences are produced when we conceive our engagement with and within technoscience as ontological politics? And what ways of being and acting, what voices does this understanding of technoscientific politics privilege? Along with Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2001) I am interested in the study of absences. Rather than exploring what ontological politics is or how it is theorized, I aim to discuss what ontological politics actively produces as absent and nonexistent. Is the politics of (more-than-social) social movements that I mentioned in the introduction a form of ontological politics? If not, what are the alternatives? As de Sousa Santos (2004, p. 178) writes, "There is no single, univocal way of not existing. The logic and process through which hegemonic criteria of rationality and efficiency produce the non-existence of what does not fit them are various. Non-existence is produced whenever a certain entity is disqualified or rendered invisible, unintelligible, or irreversibly discardable. What unites the different logics of production of non-existence is that they are all manifestations of the same rational monoculture." With Susan Leigh Star (1991) we can think of the production of the nonexistent as an accumulation of residuals created in the process of making the world: residuals produced though work that has been invisibilized. What are the absences, the residues, the invisibilized labors that cannot be considered in ontological politics? What is rendered silent in the process of performing ontological politics?

THE FRONTIER OF MATTER

In ontological politics, matter is not just raw material for other social or political ends; rather, matter itself is opened up as a space of expansion. Matter in all its expressions and formations is not a substance with fixed qualities and given potentials; matter is active and creative, complex and enlivened. The shift to the ontological denotes an interest in immersing into this process of self-ordering and in co-acting within it — to let other possible ontologies emerge.

Consider, for example, the nascent field of epigenetics. Over the past decade, a new set of theories and experiments exploring the unpredictable dynamics of gene expression has begun to take center stage in genetics research. The epigenome describes the overall state of a cell in flux, each point in time yielding multiple cascading possibilities for divergence of individual phenotypes. The inert genome is thereby supplemented by a softer, more adaptable, epigenome, incorporating mechanisms capable of responding to the environment, sensing "time" and retaining "memories" that regulate subsequent development. Within myriad microscopic epigenomes, the effects of the wider social and physical environment are translated via biochemical interactions to become an integral part of a fluctuating landscape of gene expression.

I discuss epigenetics in chapter 6 (for an extensive discussion, see the work with my collaborators on this project, Emma Chung, John Cromby, Chris Talbot, and Cristina Tufarelli) but for now I want to highlight that the epigenome as an emerging object of study as well as a theoretical framework (epigenetics) could be described as a set of alternate ontologies that are made by a multiplicity of actors who contribute to the field from many different and often conflicting perspectives and positions. Their specific ways to do research are not primarily shaped by their commitment to some external politics to the field (such as left or right, liberal or emancipatory, or conservative or progressive), not least because many of the actors involved are nonhuman others and do not have such politics. The politics that one can find are intrinsic to epigenetic research, yet their connections go far beyond the field of epigenetics and address broader questions of politics and justice.

I wonder what the ontologies of the epigenome will look like in the next decade when this nascent field will start to take a more definite shape. Which ontologies of the epigenome will develop further, and what will they look like? Which will disappear? How and why? Ontological politics captures this process. Performing ontological politics means to open up matter as a field of exploration, experimentation, and, ultimately, appropriation. Ontological politics conceives matter as a frontier. In every frontier, expansion takes place as inclusion of new territories and entities in a process of continuous creation of new worlds.

COLONIALITY AND PRODUCTIONISM

Every frontier has a promise: to liberate the one who moves into the open space from the limitations that preoccupy life before the frontier opens. The promise of the new frontier of matter is to liberate material action from being dominated solely by social imperatives — class, sexuality, race, power, religion, culture, inequality — and to develop a radical commitment to matter (and to its multiple expressions). But simultaneously every frontier has a secret: in order to expand and include new spaces, entities, and actors, it needs to exercise power over them and silence or oppress some of them in order to make them fit. Ontological politics on the one hand expresses this liberating move — that is, the openness of ontology to co-action of all actors involved and to the multiple possibilities within it — and on the other hand administers its secrets: How many actors can be included? How? What is going to happen with the rest of them?

Every moving frontier is contemporaneous with a form of liberation, and...