Ontological Sociology

Ontological Sociology is a new theoretical approach to the study of social reality. It is grounded in the belief that life, society and culture are all living systems. An ontological sociologist would argue that social reality is not static but rather co-evolving with human beings who are constantly changing it through their actions. Ontological sociology holds that human beings are autopoietic systems, meaning they have a circular process of self-creation and environmental participation.

[ontological-sociology]

Ontological Sociology is Fluid

Ontological Sociology is a new theoretical approach to the study of social reality. It is grounded in the belief that life, society and culture are all living systems. An ontological sociologist would argue that social reality is not static but rather co-evolving with human beings who are constantly changing it through their actions.

Ontological sociology holds that human beings are autopoietic systems, meaning they have a circular process of self-creation and environmental participation. This process of self-creation and co-relationship occurs through the interactions between individual agents and their environment.

[ontological-sociology]

Our Proprietary Platform is built from Online Information Systems and based on Social Architecture Methodology including Networks and Social Theory. At the heart of our program, it affords us a…

Our Proprietary Platform is built from Online Information Systems and based on Social Architecture Methodology including Networks and Social Theory.

[st-just]

“The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of ‘imagination’ and 'creativity’, set in an environment that might well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestation of imagination or creativity in the cradle. I am not a scientist. I work in social theory. But I have seen in the results in my own field of endeavor. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have, instead, largely been reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scribes, scribbling endless annotations to French theorists from the 1970s.”

— David Graeber, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

[ontological-sociology]

This is addressing one of my pet peeves...

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

For analysis not to be an infinite process, for it to find its own internal limit, the analyst's interpretation, which bears upon the signifier, must also reach the real of the symptom, that is, the point where the symbolically non-meaningful latches on to the real…

Lacan introduced a new object in psychoanalysis, the Borromean knot. This knot is both a material object that can be manipulated and a metaphor for the structure of the subject. The knot, made up of three rings, is characterised by how the rings (representing the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary) interlock and support each other. From this point on in Lacan's teaching, the real was no longer an opaque and terrifying unconceptualizable entity. Rather, it is positioned right alongside the symbolic and tied to it by mediation of the imaginary. Thus, whatever our capacity for symbolizing and imagining, there remains an irreducible realm of the non-meaning, and that is where the real is located (see Lacan, 1974-1975). In the final years of his teaching, Lacan took up the question of the symptom and the end of the treatment (1975; 1976). If the symptom is "the most real thing" that subjects possess (1976, p. 41), then how must analysis proceed to aim at the real of the symptom in order to ensure that the symptom does not proliferate in meaningful effects and even to eliminate the symptom? For analysis not to be an infinite process, for it to find its own internal limit, the analyst's interpretation, which bears upon the signifier, must also reach the real of the symptom, that is, the point where the symbolically non-meaningful latches on to the real, where the first signifiers heard by the subject have left their imprint (Lacan, 1985, p. 14). According to Lacan, to reach its endpoint, an analysis must modify the relationship of the subject to the real, which is an irreducible whole in the symbolic from which the subject's fantasy and desire derive. This notion of the real has given rise to numerous misunderstandings. Some have interpreted its resistance to formalization as a slide into irrationality. Others, by identifying the real with trauma, have made it a cause of fear and anxiety. Yet we all have an intuitive experience of the real in such phenomena as the uncanny, anxiety, the non-meaningful, and poetic humour that plays upon words at the expense of meaning. Thus, when the framework of the imaginary wavers and speech is lacking, when reality is no longer organized and pacified by the fantasy screen, the experience of the real emerges in a way that is unique for each person.

Martine Lerude. The Real. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan Library Reference. 2005

[ontological-sociology]

This visualization technology afforded Lacan the means to return again to his superliminal rationality and escape from the trans-logical powers of submersion in the subjective pulchritude and fantasmagorica. In the Borromean Knot, Lacan discovered his own private Shemhamphorasch.

[ontological-sociology]

Disrupting death: How we could live forever in digital form

VR, robots, chatbots and holograms could allow us to exist forever in some way.

Just scratching the surface of what we can do with conceptual transhumanism. These conceptual architectures can be applied to many varied fields, Sociology being at the forefront. In order to more expansively define the ontology of Humanism, we will need to look beyond (and thus to transhumanism) if we want to encompass all the rich possibilities of existential expression.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Effective ideologies blur the lines between empirical realities and political interpretation. Some members of the human species are indeed driving planetary life into the planetary inferno. This geological and geohistorical transition is often narrated as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. Major corporate news platforms – like The New York Times and The Economist – are very happy with that formula, Age of Man. It supports an ideological claim – the idea of Man as a collective actor, the “human enterprise” – with another: Good Science. It’s not a new trick. Invoking natural law is ancient sport in capitalism. Malthus did it. The eugenicists did it. Paul Ehrlich and neo-Malthusians did it again after 1968. In every case, it’s a means of erasing capitalist webs of power, profit and life behind the planetary crisis. It is a way of short-circuiting the possibility that working classes will grasp the climate crisis as capital-induced rather than human-induced: as the result of capitalogenic rather than anthropogenic forcing.”

— Jason W. Moore, Opiates of the Environmentlists? Anthropocene Illusions, Planetary Management & The Capitalocene Alternative

[ontological-sociology]

This serves the same function in many other realms as well.

[ontological-sociology]

Ontological Sociology: A Self-Referential Frame

The sociological perspective is a self-referential frame. It is a way of making sense of our world by looking at it through the lens of society. Sociology is an objective science that studies the social world, but its concern is with the subjective elements of human experience. Ontological Sociology as a self-referential frame looks at how people interact with each other and how they are influenced by society. It also looks at how people make decisions and what they think about their decisions afterwards.