10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17212
The “ontological turn” in social theory is a major intellectual wave of recent years. Focusing on feminist new materialism, the paper outlines elements for a research programme on this topic. It elaborates first on the conceptual exchange between scholarships in social theory and biophysical sciences, dwelling on the constitutive role of metaphors. Then it considers the role of a profound socio-cultural transition that has begun in the 1970s and reached a full-fledged expression at the turn of the millennium. This transition has triggered a “problematization” (in Foucault’s sense) that, pivoting on the notion of indeterminacy, associates social theory, cutting-edge biophysical science and neoliberal rule.
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Luigi Pellizzoni
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
indeterminacy
Metaphors and Problematizations. Notes for a Research Programme on New Materialism
Text.Serial.Journal
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Scenarios
2015-01-29
2023-06-14
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
73-91
TS
Luigi Pellizzoni
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17212
73
University of Trieste
2038-3460
2
indeterminacy
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91
Metaphors and Problematizations. Notes for a Research Programme on New Materialism
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5
                                                                         Scenarios

Metaphors and Problematizations
Notes for a Research Programme on New Materialism
                                           !
Luigi Pellizzoni                           !
University of Trieste



     Abstract The “ontological turn” in social theory is a major intellectual
     wave of recent years. Focusing on feminist new materialism, the paper out-
     lines elements for a research programme on this topic. It elaborates first
     on the conceptual exchange between scholarships in social theory and bio-
     physical sciences, dwelling on the constitutive role of metaphors. Then it
     considers the role of a profound socio-cultural transition that has begun in
     the 1970s and reached a full-fledged expression at the turn of the millenni-
     um. This transition has triggered a “problematization” (in Foucault’s sense)
     that, pivoting on the notion of indeterminacy, associates social theory, cut-
     ting-edge biophysical science and neoliberal rule.

     Keywords: New materialism; ontological turn; neoliberalism; metaphors;
     indeterminacy.

     Corresponding author: Luigi Pellizzoni, Department of Political and
     Social Sciences, University of Trieste. Piazza Europa 1, 34127 Trieste –
     Email: pellizzonil@sp.units.it




1. Introduction

    Feminist new materialism is an intellectual movement belonging to the
broader wave of the so-called “ontological turn” in social theory (e.g. Es-
cobar 2007; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). We can talk of a wave –
emerging in the late 1990s to gain growing prominence in recent years –
because a similar trend is detectable in a number of disciplines: geogra-
phy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political theory, science and
technology studies (STS), humanities and so on. In general terms, and
drawing on Michael Burawoy’s (2005) typology of social science labour,
two coordinates help identify the ontological turn: first, an “academic”
concern for the limits of post-modern approaches, with special reference
to linguistic deconstruction and culturalist readings, in accounting for the
biophysical world and human agency; second, a “public” concern for the

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Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
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74                                                              Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

inadequacy of these approaches in triggering social change. In both re-
spects the case is made for “bring[ing] the material back in” (Hekman
2010, 3), according to post-representational epistemologies and “flat” and
relational ontologies. Scholars and approaches like Gilles Deleuze (e.g.
1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1987), Alfred North Whitehead (e.g. 1978),
Bruno Latour and Actor-network theory (e.g. Latour 2005), and practice
theory (e.g. Schatzki et al. 2001) feature prominently as inspirational
sources, providing support to an attack on the reality/language and on-
tology/epistemology dualisms – with all the implied dichotomies (nature/
culture, mind/body, subject/object, organic/inorganic, animate/in-
animate, reality/representation, matter/information etc.) – in favour of
accounts of the world as populated by fluid, contingent entities (net-
works, assemblages, hybrids and so on). According to this view, as An-
nemarie Mol and John Law (2006, 19) nicely put it: “knowing, the words
of knowing, and texts do not describe a pre-existing world [but] are part
of a practice of handling, intervening in, the world and thereby of enact-
ing one of its versions – up to bringing it into being”.
     Feminist theory is at the forefront of this intellectual movement, and
one of its distinctive traits is that it builds to a significant extent on scien-
tific advancements. In the following, I address in two ways the pivotal
role of science in these theoretical elaborations. First, I deal with the con-
ceptual exchange between scholarships in social theory and biophysical
sciences, dwelling on the constitutive role of metaphors. Second, I ex-
pand my outlook beyond scholarly dynamics to consider a broader milieu
– namely, the profound socio-cultural transition begun in the 1970s and
come to a full-fledged expression at the turn of the millennium.
     This contribution has no aspiration to be more than a preliminary
note for a research programme on the underpinnings and implications of
a broad convergence on a particular way to account for the biophysical
world and human agency. This programme should be akin to what Fou-
cault called an “ontology of the present” (Foucault, 2007), that is, a study
of the problematization of our time. With the term “problematization”
Foucault refers to the conditions by which “certain things (behaviour,
phenomena, processes) become a problem” (Foucault 2001, 171, empha-
sis in original) and certain answers to these problems become conceiva-
ble; conditions instigated by social, economic and political processes that
“can exist and perform their action for a very long time before there is ef-
fective problematization by thought” (Foucault 1997, 117-118). Moreo-
ver, if one wishes to remain faithful to Foucault’s genealogical method,
analysing the problematization in which we live does not mean to argue,
building on some transcendental vantage point, that something is good or
bad, right or wrong, true or false, but rather to show, from within the im-
manence of the situation, “that practices are problematic, dangerous, fraught,
and in need of additional attention” (Koopman 2013, 92).
Pellizzoni                                                                  75
2. Feminist New Materialism

    Introducing a collection of essays devoted to feminist new materialists,
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost remark that: “everywhere we look […]
we are witnessing scattered but insistent demands for more materialist
modes of analysis and for new ways of thinking about matter and pro-
cesses of materialization” (Coole and Frost 2010, 3). These demands are
urged first and foremost by current advancements in technoscience.
“New physics and biology make it impossible to understand matter any
longer in ways that were inspired by classical science” (Coole and Frost
2010, 5), overwhelming “the ability of cultural theorists to critically digest
and engage them” (Kirby 2008, 7). Actually, in physics, life sciences, bi-
omedicine and elsewhere, material phenomena are increasingly conceptu-
alized in terms of porous boundaries. Distinctions between physical and
biological, natural and technological systems, ontology and epistemology,
blur. For example, epigenetics challenges the gene/environment and
brain/body dichotomies (Papadopoulos 2011). The inorganic realm is in-
creasingly depicted as having vitalistic connotations, while life is simulta-
neously infused with dematerialized characterizations – textuality, infor-
mation, codification (Keller 2007; 2011). Also, mining and processing of
huge amounts of data generate unforeseen insights where knowledge and
production of reality, discovery (of interesting relationships within the da-
ta) and invention (of meaningful associations among data), can hardly be
distinguished (Calvert and Fujimura 2011; Cambrosio et al. 2014). Ac-
cordingly, new materialists depict matter as anything but “inert, stable,
concrete, unchangeable and resistant to socio-historical change” (Hird
2004, 224). Matter exhibits agency, inventive capacities, generative pow-
ers. It is “not a thing but a doing” (Barad 2003, 822); an incessant process
of becoming. Texts and signs can also be reconfigured as “substantively
or ontologically material. […] ‘Life itself’ is creative encryption” (Kirby
2008, 9); a continuous rewriting of itself. The ontological divide between
machine and organism is also to be reformulated, according to the “pene-
tration of computational processes not only into every aspect of biologi-
cal, social, economic, and political realms but also into the construction
of reality itself” (Hayles 2006, 161).
    Karen Barad’s “agential realism” is exemplary of this view. She re-
gards phenomena as “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-
acting components. That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive rela-
tions – relations without preexisting relata” (Barad 2003, 815). Phenome-
na, in other words, are not representations of things but things as such.
Entities are continually reconstituted through material-discursive “intra-
actions”, where neither the material nor the cultural aspect takes prece-
dence. For example, the material set up of foetal imaging simultaneously
supports and is influenced by a politics of individual autonomy and sub-
jectivity. The foetus that the scientists can see as an object is also the foe-
tus that law defines as an independent subject. Hence, “the foetus is not a
76                                                           Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

pre-existing object of investigation with inherent properties. Rather the
foetus is a phenomenon that is constituted and reconstituted out of his-
torically and culturally specific iterative intra-actions of material-
discursive apparatuses of bodily production” (Barad 2007, 217).
     All that, according to new materialists, poses ethical and political
questions in front of which “the dominant constructivist orientation to
social analysis is inadequate” (Coole and Frost 2010, 6). Social change
cannot be based on “reconstructing subjectivities, discourses, ethics, and
identities […] [because] the material realm is irreducible to culture or
discourse and cultural artefacts are not arbitrary vis-à-vis nature” (Coole
and Frost 2010 25, 27). If feminism has successfully challenged all sorts of
appeals to the facticity and prescriptiveness of nature, the latter is not
necessarily “a repository of conservative political investments” (Kirby
2008, 8). Once nature is seen as dynamic, active, and unpredictably open,
it is no longer an obstacle but rather opens the way to “a liberating anti-
humanism” (Colebrook 2008, 74), in light of which human agency results
disempowered and defective, distributed and limited, hence also modest,
careful, responsible and opposed to the dominative hubris (Bennett
2010). Oppression (of women and anyone or anything else) can be fought
only if recognized as an actual reality that cannot be effectively addressed
through discursive deconstructions and indeed often stems precisely from
the unwarranted separation of matter and language. Therefore, the ap-
proach to critique inherited by the philosophical and sociological tradi-
tion, with its ultimately ineffective focus on argumentative “errors and
points of contention” (Grosz 2005, 27), is to be replaced with affirmative
standpoints that build on thingness and corporeality as sites of resistance,
creativity and hope, ethically relevant in their being the result of choices
that materialize particular states of reality.
     Feminist new materialism is not isolated in making this case. As hint-
ed, similar arguments are advanced in a number of fields, from post-
development theory to geography, from sociology to STS. According to
these arguments, the greater analytical strength of ontological approaches
goes hand in hand with its capacity to support a new season of emancipa-
tory politics. Arturo Escobar (2010), for example, talks of “ontological
struggles” with reference to counter-hegemonic processes in Latin Amer-
ica, which build on indigenous ontologies where human and non-human
entities are enacted together in mobilizations against dams, drilling, min-
ing, deforestation, transgenic agriculture. Amin and Thrift (2005) similar-
ly talk of flat ontologies as the basis of new emancipatory politics, focused
on an “ecology of hope” and an immanent, affective and decentred ac-
count of the world. Latour’s (2004a; 2004b) plea for a “new constitu-
tion”, aimed at overcoming the nature/society and science/politics divide
and at replacing a constructionist critique eventually “run out of steam”,
can also be enrolled in this intellectual movement.
     To sum up, new materialists account for their commitment to “bring-
ing the material back in” by pointing to both “academic” and “public”
Pellizzoni                                                                77
elements of dissatisfaction about the way feminism, and the social scienc-
es in general, have addressed the biophysical world and human agency.
Science advancements, as we have seen, feature prominently in this con-
text, as both a challenge and a source of inspiration.


3. From “As” to “Is”: Metaphors and the Conceptual Ex-
change between Biophysical and Social Sciences

    As widely known, it is not the first time that the biophysical sciences
influence the social sciences and philosophy. Comte and Marx took the
notions of organism and metabolism from biology. Ecological thinking
has affected significantly the Chicago school of Burgess and Park, as well
as a variety of socio-systemic approaches. As for Darwin, one needs not
insist on the multifarious influence of the notions of adaptation and selec-
tion on social theorizing and inquiry. Biology is important in Deleuze’s
philosophy while Whitehead’s one draws to a significant extent on his
background in mathematics.
    Similar examples could take books. What may be worth recalling is
that influences work also in reverse. Ernst Haeckel, the “father” of ecolo-
gy, borrowed heavily from social imaginary for his account of organisms.
He equated cells to individual citizens in an organized social community,
and described the animal body as a “monarchy of cells” compared to the
“republic of cells” of the vegetal body. Darwin acknowledged the influ-
ence of Malthus on his reflections on the asymmetry between the dimen-
sion of the offspring generated and the number of adults that reach the
reproductive age – hence the influence of environmental factors in limit-
ing what otherwise would be an unlimited expansion of life. Similarly, he
acknowledged his indebtedness to Herbert Spencer for the definition of
the concept of “survival of the fittest”. For Stephen Jay Gould (2002), in
his formulation of the natural selection principle Darwin was also influ-
enced by the invisible hand of Adam Smith (in his turn, according to Al-
exandre Koyré (1965), inspired by Newtonian physics).
    As for today, a number of studies account for the conceptual cross-
fertilization of the social and the biophysical sciences: from evolutionary
biology (Keller 2002) to cybernetics (Hayles 1999); from nanosciences
(Dupuy and Grinbaum 2004) to chemistry (Lehn 2004) and immunology
(Tauber 1997). The latter possibly offers the most striking evidence of
conceptual exchange. Immunology has borrowed heavily from military
imaginary (attack, enemy, recognition, borders etc.) and from philosophi-
cal speculations about the self, while in its turn increasingly affecting the
way in which security issues are accounted for in the social and political
realm (Esposito 2011).
    In this framework, the role of metaphors can hardly be overestimated.
In a seminal study, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown that
78                                                               Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

metaphors are crucial to conceptualization and reasoning. We use infer-
ence patterns from one conceptual domain to reason about another do-
main. Even fundamental ideas, like time, causation, morality, the self, are
“almost entirely structured by elaborate systems of conceptual metaphor”
(Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 249). Metaphors help give coherence to expe-
rience. They allow us to understand one kind of thing in terms of another.
Moreover, as Lakoff and Johnson note, new metaphors create new reali-
ties because thanks to them we start to comprehend our experience dif-
ferently, acting and producing consequences accordingly. They stress also
that the truth-value assigned to new metaphors depends on the extent to
which our understanding of a metaphorical sentence fits our understand-
ing of a situation. Of course, in the concepts we use to understand the
situation other, already established, metaphors are at work.
     This is important because it shows how metaphors open a space not
only for cross-disciplinary migration but also for views and beliefs bor-
rowed from the broader socio-cultural milieu. Sensemaking depends, at
least in part, on metaphors that make sense. And they make sense because
they fit into broader landscapes of meaning. Ludwik Fleck (1979) has no-
toriously insisted on this point. “Thought collectives” develop at the in-
tersection of scientific and broader social circles, and “proto-ideas”, that
is general notions or images drawn from religion, philosophy or other
sources, help structure new fields of research. Moreover, as Isabelle Sten-
gers (1987) has remarked, notions initially borrowed as metaphors tend –
in their nomadic journey through problem-fields – to morph into con-
cepts provided with literal truth-content, around which theories are built
that bear no memory of their origin1. Also, the way in which the story of
the transfer is told depends on its eventual success or failure. In case of
success, the story tends to be one of “propagation”, as a spontaneous
process. The reason for the successful adoption of a concept seems to be
its intrinsic adequacy to phenomena; its intellectual productivity. In case
of failure, the story tends to be one of “propaganda”, that is of mistakes,
ideological drifts, seduction of mere verbal analogies2.
     Some criticisms addressed to new materialism and the ontological
turn point precisely to the transformation from “as” to “is” that concepts
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
  Also Lakoff and Johnson seem to incur in this drift when they argue, on the
ground of evidence from brain imaging, that metaphorical mapping is realized
physically as neural maps. As far as I know, the causal connection between
concomitant physical processes in brains and psychic processes in mind has not
been proven. To say but one of the many disturbing questions related to the issue:
blood takes some seconds to flood a brain area, whereas thought is obviously
much quicker, so what happens in the meantime? Hence, saying that “metaphor
is a neural phenomenon” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 256, my emphasis) is a
statement provided with metaphorical, rather than literal, truth-content.
2
   The example suggested by Stengers is 18th-century chemists’ use of the
Newtonian concept of interaction forces, which has been subsequently blamed,
from the vantage point of quantum mechanics, as a case of intellectual laziness.
Pellizzoni                                                                 79
undergo in their metaphorical journey. For example, Nicholas Rose re-
marks that social theory’s increasing borrowing from the biological leads
to “a strange form of conceptual gerrymandering: […] biology is translat-
ed into ontology, ontology is transmuted into politics. […] Biological
claims evade critical interrogation where they seem to give support to a
pre-given philosophical ethopolitics” (Rose 2013, 11-12). Judith Butler
makes a similar case in regard to Vicky Kirby’s attribution of textuality to
things and ontology to signs. Kirby says that, in so doing, she has in mind
“the code-cracking and encryption capacities of bacteria as they decipher
the chemistry of antibiotic data and reinvent themselves accordingly. Are
these not language skills? Is this not a very interesting case of epistemolo-
gy as ontology?” (Kirby 2008, 9). Butler, however, warns against taking
explanatory models as inherent to the phenomena being explained: “I am
sure that encryption can be used as a metaphor or model by which to un-
derstand biological processes, especially cell reproduction, but do we
then make the move to render what is useful as an explanatory model into
the ontology of biology itself? […] What of life exceeds the model?
When does the discourse claim to become the very life it purports to ex-
plain?” (Butler, quoted in Kirby 2008, 10).
    Of course it is the very notion of biology that, as notes Maureen
McNeil, has a “slippery double valence, designat[ing] both the operations
and features of the human body itself, and the study of its functioning”
(McNeil 2010, 435-436). Yet the problem is not limited to biology. An-
other example comes from Trevor Pinch’s review of Karen Barad’s major
work (Barad 2007), which builds on Niels Bohr’s physics. For Pinch,
“Barad, like Karl Popper, seems to assume the very grounds that much
science studies has contested. How is it that scientists can agree that phe-
nomena are the same or agree on what makes an experiment repeatable?
Once it is realized that repeatable experiments themselves come from a
culture of trust, a shared form of life and shared practices […], then the
orientation is focused once more on humans. […] I find it deeply puz-
zling that Barad can call for a more situated account of science and at the
same time fail to situate the very part of science she is talking about, while
drawing in a realist mode upon experiments to support her position”
(Pinch 2011, 439).
    Similarly, in his review of N. Katherine Hayles’s (1999) book on post-
humanism and cybernetics, Dennis Weiss (2000, 10) remarks that: “while
criticizing Wiener and Maturana for adhering too closely to the realist,
objectivist discourse of the sciences, Hayles seems to fall victim to the
same problem”. Latest research in evolutionary psychology and biology
allegedly provides incontrovertible evidence of the decentred, distribut-
ed, emergent character of the self against the untenable assumptions of a
unified self that were central to Wiener’s and, to some extent, Maturana
and Varela’s accounts – assumptions that, according to Hayles (1999, 5),
are aligned with a liberal model of possessive individualism “entwined
with projects of domination and oppression”. The problem, then, is that
80                                                            Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

Hayles’s “key distinction between the true awareness of the distributed
self and the false unified self seems hard to maintain in light of the reflex-
ive epistemology she adopts” (Weiss 2000, 11).
    In all these examples, as we can see, objections point to the veridical
status granted to scientific evidence. What is found problematic in the ac-
counts of Kirby, Barad, Hayles and others is that on one side, as regards
the approaches they criticize, scientific truth appears – borrowing Fou-
cault – “a thing of this world, produced only by virtue of multiple forms
of constraint” (Foucault 1980, 131), while on the other, as regards cut-
ting-edge research, their critical detachment disappears and their outlook
becomes more akin to an “analytic of truth”: an account of how old con-
cepts are replaced by new ones, as provided with greater closeness to
truth. To give another example, Mark Hansen criticizes Deleuze for his
reliance on an account of organisms that “is alien to the conceptual ter-
rain of current biology” (Hansen 2000, 18). In other words, the useful-
ness of Deleuze’s theory would be limited by its drawing on biological
models that are no longer valid. Then one might ask why current biology
should be granted greater ontological validity; why we should not treat it
with the same caution, given that there is no reason to think that current
views on matter and life will not be superseded by other ones, perhaps
completely different.


4. Broadening the Outlook: Indeterminacy and the Socio-
cultural Transition

    According to the criticisms above, the dynamics of travel (of concepts)
and forgetting (of their metaphorical aspects) puts new materialism and
comparable positions in the ontological turn at odds with their own post-
representational premises. Older accounts of the biophysical world and
human agency are deemed incorrect, while new accounts of the ontologi-
cally fluid state of reality allegedly depict the world as it is.
    To come to terms with this contradiction, I think one has to go be-
yond scholarly issues (the movement of the intellectual pendulum to and
fro the culture/matter, or realism/constructivism, polarities; the back-
ground in biophysical disciplines of many scholars engaged in STS and
neighbouring fields), to address the broader socio-cultural milieu, as a
source of meaning that facilitates the convergence of different disciplinary
perspectives and the transition of concepts from “as” to “is”. This is no
doubt a risky and tricky move, yet, I believe, a necessary one for a geneal-
ogy of the ontological turn.
    A possible point of entry into this issue is the question of indetermi-
nacy. As we have seen, in new materialist approaches ontological inde-
terminacy, ambivalence or contingency are not only stressed but take pos-
itive, emancipatory connotations: as enabling non-determination rather
Pellizzoni                                                                  81
than constraining non-determinability; as opportunity rather than prob-
lem. In tracing the genealogy of this outlook, then, we should distinguish
between the growing relevance of indeterminacy, which is a story dating
back at least to the beginning of 20th century, and the changing outlook
on indeterminacy, which is a more recent trend. In physics, chemistry, bi-
ology, economics, computer science and elsewhere, growing acknowl-
edgment of the import of indeterminacy has for long been complemented
with strategies for coping with it, claiming capacities of handling in spite
of incomplete characterizations of the state of affairs3. At some point,
however, things have started to change. Today, indeterminacy no longer
is a problem, but rather becomes a resource. Ecology, for example, has
traditionally built on the idea that ecosystems tend to balance after per-
turbations. From the 1970s onwards, however, the thinking of Eugene
Odum’s generation, with its assumptions of order and predictability, has
gradually been replaced by a new view, according to which there is no
spontaneous tendency to equilibrium in nature: no progressive biomass
stabilization; no diversification of species or movement towards greater
cohesiveness in plant and animal communities. Change goes on forever,
with no direction or tendency to stability; no cooperation, consistence
and holistic organization but rather competition, patchiness, fragmenta-
tion, individualistic association. Disturbance or perturbation is argued to
be not extrinsic but intrinsic to ecosystems. Hence contingency and dis-
order are not against life, but what life depends on. “Populations rise and
populations fall, like stock market prices, auto sales, and hemlines. We
live […] in a non-equilibrium world” (Worster 1990, 11).
    Similarly, in chemistry and physics, attention has increasingly focused
in the last decades on dissipative structures. Thermodynamically open
systems, where the spontaneous formation of dissymmetry and bifurca-
tions leads to unpredictable reorganizations of matter, have been concep-
tualized as the rule rather than the exception. Again, this is not regarded
as a problem, but as a crucial “enabling” feature. For Ilya Prigogine,
whose work has gained decisive momentum from the 1970s onwards,
both Boltzmann and Darwin replaced the study of “individuals” (organ-
isms or particles) with the study of populations, showing that slight varia-
tions over a long period of time produce evolution at a collective level.
Yet, while Boltzmann described an evolution towards uniformity and
equilibrium, Darwin accounted for the appearance of new species. “Sig-
nificantly, these two theories had very different fortunes. Darwin’s theory
of evolution […] remains the basis for our understanding of life. […]
Boltzmann’s interpretation of irreversibility succumbed to its critics”
(Prigogine 1997, 21).
    Another example comes from cybernetics. According to Hayles
(1999), the first wave of cybernetics (1945-1960), whose central figures
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
  Quantum mechanics and Keynes’s account of subjective estimates as triggers of
rational decisions are good examples coming from completely different fields.
82                                                              Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

are Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, takes homeostasis as its
crucial notion. The central problem, for machines as well as living organ-
isms, is to ensure control over their operations and integrity in a chaotic
environment. The second wave (1960-1980) builds on the concept of
feedback, which introduces a loop between observer and observed sys-
tems, hence the notion of reflexivity on which Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela develop their theory of autopoietic systems, physically
open yet informationally closed. The third wave of cybernetics begins in
the 1980s and stretches to the present. Hayles identifies it with artificial
life. The crucial conceptual shift, here, is from self-organizing systems to
emergent systems. The contingent, disordered character of a world where
the natural and the artificial are increasingly indistinguishable becomes a
vital resource rather than a troublesome feature that systems have to han-
dle.
     In short, a generalized turn from order to disorder – simultaneously
descriptive and normative – seems to begin in the 1970s, gaining growing
momentum in the following decades. It is then sensible to explore the
link between this broad intellectual shift and the contemporaneous,
equally encompassing social change. Bob Jessop (2002) has depicted the
latter as a transition from “Keynesian welfare national states” to “Schum-
peterian workfare postnational regimes4. Other scholars talk, more simp-
ly, of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and financial capitalism
(Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), or of the advent and progressive
strengthening of neoliberal rule (Harvey 2005). The association between
the two transitions – the academic and the social, or socio-cultural –
strengthens if one reflects that, if indeterminacy is the semantic thread of
the former, insecurity is the semantic thread of the latter. People’s exposi-
tion to the “risks” of the new world (dis)order engendered by post-
Fordism or neoliberalism may differ according to the opportunities and
protections related to the occupational link with the new economy, yet
this (dis)order and the implied centrality of unpredictability and insecuri-
ty have increasingly become a shared framework of meaning, a taken for
granted condition of life (Azmanova 2010).
     The problem, of course, is how to read this association. Drawing upon
an analysis of a corpus of literature in business management, Luc Boltan-
ski and Eve Chiapello (2005) conclude that the post-Fordist reorganiza-
tion of capitalism has crucially built on the integration of the “artistic cri-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
  In Jessop’s description, the first regime aims at full employment and economic
planning, prioritises social policies over economic development, centres policy-
making and implementation on the national scale, and grounds public choice on
neo-corporatist models; the second regime aims at increased competitiveness of
national and local economies, focuses on technological innovation, places econo-
mic development over social policies, centres policy-making and implementation
at the supranational and local scale, and grounds public choice on public-private
partnerships and stakeholder consultations and negotiations.
Pellizzoni                                                                      83
tique” that the social and intellectual movements of the 1960-70s had ad-
dressed to state-organized capitalism, translating the plea for freedom, au-
tonomy and creativity into a case for flexibility, networking, communica-
tion and permanent education. Critics of neoliberalism talk of an elite
hegemonic project (Harvey 2005), stressing how well identifiable academ-
ic circles, think tanks and international institutions have actively support-
ed and policed the spread of neoliberal ideas (Mirowski and Plehwe
2009).
     Singling out specific, influential sources of diffusion of ideas, however,
does not correspond to explaining why such ideas are found interesting
and convincing by wide and diversified audiences. The reason of the
spread of the values of the new economy well beyond its actual borders
(Sennett 2006) and of the enduring consensus over the fundamental be-
liefs of neoliberalism in spite of repeated débacles (Centeno and Cohen
2012), is probably to be sought at the level of fundamental ontological
and deontological beliefs5.
     As a matter of fact, new materialist “affirmative” standpoints about
contingency and indeterminacy resonate with the way in which science
and the biophysical world are being “neoliberalized” – no doubt a dis-
turbing alignment, if one considers the emancipatory implications gener-
ally associated with the ontological turn. “Neoliberalization” of science
and nature is usually taken to mean, on one side, changes in the institu-
tional set up and functioning of science – the start-up company, the scien-
tist-entrepreneur, etc. (Lave et al. 2010) – and on the other the increasing
management of natural resources and environmental issues through mar-
ket-oriented arrangements (Castree 2008).
     However, more profound features can be detected. As Antoinette
Rouvroy remarks in her study on the relationship between genetics and
neoliberalism: “the social/economic/technical/political structure of socie-
ty and innovation [are] related to each other, as part of the same metabo-
lism, interacting in a dialectical manner, each being performative for the
others” (Rouvroy 2008, 6). Similarly, for Melinda Cooper “the history of
neoliberal theories of economic growth and biotechnological visions of
growth needs to be pursued simultaneously”, namely the economic crisis
of the 1970s has found a reply in a series of legislative and regulatory
measures “designed to relocate economic production at the genetic, mi-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
  Foucauldian scholarship has stressed the peculiar veridical mechanism of
neoliberalism, as a political project that seeks to create a social reality that it
maintains already exists. On one side institutional practices and rewards are
developed in order to expand competitive entrepreneurship. On the other,
neoliberal intellectuals claim to purport not an ideal, but a reality: human nature
(Lemke 2003; Read 2009). As a consequence any failure of the market, any
evidence opposed to the promised increase in freedom and efficiency simply
marks the distance between a trans-historical reality and contingent flaws,
constraints, oppositions and irrationalities (Pellizzoni and Ylönen 2012).
84                                                           Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

crobial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within
capitalist processes of accumulation” (Cooper 2008, 19).
    Whatever the intentions of technoscience theorists and developers,
the de-standardization of life operated by the life sciences, with their in-
creasing focus on the extremes rather than the norm, is consistent with
growing demands for flexibility and speed of change. “Even in the work
of Prigogine and Stengers the new political economy of nature sounds
suspiciously like the new political economy of neoliberalism” (Cooper
2008, 42).
    One may disagree with possibly too trenchant arguments, yet neolib-
eralization appears in many ways to be intertwined with technoscientific
change, as both a trigger and a consequence (Pellizzoni and Ylönen
2012). For a start, there is plenty of evidence that disequilibrium, unpre-
dictability and indeterminacy are central to neoliberal rationality. Pat
O’Malley (2004), among the others, is particularly effective in showing
how for neoliberal theories and policies proper calculations of risk are the
exception, while reasoned bets over unpredictable futures are the rule.
Uncertainty is seen as premised on entrepreneurial creativity, which re-
quires intuition, foresight, flexibility, experiential judgment, rules of
thumb and so on. Turbulence and contingency, as produced by global
trade, innovation-based competition and floating exchange rates do not
mean threatening uncontrollability, but lack of limits, room for manoeu-
vre, opening up of possibilities.
    The most immediate interface between neoliberal rationality and
technoscience is represented by regulation. Biotechnology patents, for
example, regard a living entity as an artefact if its basic functional param-
eters can be controlled (thus reproduced), establishing a correspondence
between information and matter, so that rights in property over infor-
mation can be subsumed into rights in property over the organisms in-
corporating such information, and vice versa (Carolan 2010). We are
therefore facing ontologically ambiguous entities, oscillating between ma-
teriality and virtuality.
    A further ontological ambiguity stems from the claim that patented ar-
tefacts are indistinguishable from nature for any practical purpose (in-
cluding the need of specific regulation). Artefacts are thus simultaneously
identical to and different (more usable, more valuable) than natural enti-
ties. Patents, in short, produce indefinite entities, simultaneously material
and informational, ontological and epistemic in character, the economic
value of which resides precisely in this ambivalent status (Pellizzoni
2011).
    Carbon trading provides another example. The possibility of markets
in permits to emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) or in credits earned by not
emitting them rests on the operators’ acceptance of a conversion rate be-
tween CO2 and other GHGs: the “global warming potential” (GWP), as
established by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Reduc-
ing one’s CO2 emission or buying credits sold by someone else who,
Pellizzoni                                                                85
somewhere in the world, is reducing another GHG is assumed as (physi-
cally, thus also financially) equivalent (MacKenzie 2009). Therefore GWP
is an abstraction, like money, since it works as an exchange rate. Yet, it is
also something bound (not) to happen in the atmosphere, a(n allegedly)
prevented physical thing or phenomenon. In short, GWP is an ontologi-
cally indeterminate entity, oscillating between reality and virtuality, mat-
ter and symbol, concreteness and epistemic construction. Weather deriva-
tives (possibly the most evident example of how biophysical uncertainty
can be transformed from trouble into asset) work precisely in the same
way, being designed to hedge and trade securities contingent on unpre-
dictable states of weather, either catastrophic or not.
    Regulation has been and still represents a crucial avenue to the inter-
penetration of neoliberal rationality and technoscience imagination and
application. The dominant socio-cultural milieu, however, permeates
technoscience beside and beyond regulation. One example comes from
geoengineering, and namely from the still largely prospective and as yet
unregulated field of “solar radiation management” (SRM) (Royal Society
2009; Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013). Techniques aimed at reducing
the net incoming solar radiation by deflecting sunlight or by increasing
the reflectivity of the atmosphere, of clouds or the Earth’s surface seem
apparently to belong, whatever their technical novelty, to the traditional
family of techno-fixes.
    There is, however, a major difference. Given the constitutively inde-
terminate, open-ended character of the system on which SRM aims to in-
tervene, talking of control, even in probabilistic terms, seems inappropri-
ate. To “control” means to keep the behaviour of a system within prede-
fined parameters. Here we could, at best, talk of capacity to react and
adapt – on the spot, moment by moment – to the constant swerves of the
system. Even in ideal conditions of technical capacity the idea is, once
more, of “riding” uncertainty rather than “managing” or “coping with” it.


5. Conclusion

    In this contribution I provided some preliminary remarks for an in-
quiry into new materialism and, more broadly, the ontological turn in so-
cial theory. We have seen that cutting-edge technoscience plays a central
role in grounding and legitimizing an account of the biophysical world
and human agency that takes distance from both traditional realism and
cultural constructivism. We have seen that the conceptual exchange be-
tween social theory and different biophysical science fields, in itself hard-
ly a novelty, is characterized by a marked tendency to shift from “as” to
“is”, downplaying the conventional aspect of scientific accounts and the
metaphorical character of their transfer to different domains. We have al-
so seen that explaining this in terms of intellectual disputes and theoreti-
cal oscillations between realism and constructivism tells only part of the
86                                                                Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

story. The other is likely to be found in a deeper, broader socio-cultural
change. A number of indicators suggest that this change begins to gain sa-
lience in the 1970s and corresponds, both in terms of chronology and of
the rationality at work, with the profound social and cultural restructur-
ing engendered by the transition to post-Fordist, financial capitalism and
the advent, spread and strengthening of neoliberal rule.
    The precise way in which the link between this socio-cultural transi-
tion and the intellectual shifts occurred in specific areas of inquiry in the
biophysical and social sciences have to be accounted for is a difficult
question, on which only empirical studies may shed light. Whatever the
outcome, the main suggestion of these notes is that analyses of the specif-
ic influences and conceptual transfers between scholarships – be they
mediated through academic curricula, department organizations, funding
schemas, integration of intellectual traditions6 or other mechanisms –
should not neglect another sort of inquiry, focused on more fundamental
movements in ontological and deontological beliefs.
    From this viewpoint I think that a relevant indication is offered by the
importance given by new materialists to the sheer power that current
technoscience is able to express: “the extraordinary challenges and per-
ceived success of so much scientific and technological research” (Kirby
2008, 7). It is the meaning of this “success” – its underpinnings, necessity
and implications – that should be interrogated, beginning with its connec-
tions with the “operational paradigm” – the paradigm by which being
and doing, existence and its actual effects, are inseparably connected –
which Giorgio Agamben (2013) places at the grounds of Western moder-
nity.


Acknowledgements
     I am grateful to Francesca Musiani and Annalisa Pelizza for useful feedback.
This work is part of an ongoing project on the ontological turn in social theory
and the politics of nature, partly supported by Italian Ministry for University and
Research funds (MIUR PRIN 2010-11).
     Ideas have been discussed at various meetings, including the conference “Risk
and uncertainty: ontologies and methods”, European Sociological Association Re-
search Network ESA-RN22 & International Sociological Association Thematic
Group ISA-TG04 (Amsterdam, 23-25 January 2013), the 4S (Society for the So-
cial Study of Science) Conference 2013 (San Diego, CA, 9 – 12 October) and the
ISA 2014 Congress, Research Committee RC24 “Environment and Society” and
Thematic Group TG04 “Risk and Uncertainty” sessions (Yokohama, 13-19 July).




!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
  For example, the impact of French post-structuralism on the intellectual life in
the US is well documented by Cusset (2008).
Pellizzoni                                                                      87
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Pellizzoni                                                                    89
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Pellizzoni                                                               91
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