Puzzling about Realism and Contradiction in the Ontological Turn

In this paper I reflect on one current of thought within the ontological turn, the post-ANT theories of writers such as John Law and Anne-Marie Mol.  In works like The Body Multiple (Mol) and After Method (Law) these writers have put forward persuasive arguments in favour of the idea that the socio-technical world is enacted and performed through the practices and understandings of actors (and actants).  Nevertheless, it is worth considering the potential parameters and limitations of this approach.  In this paper I want to examine two key issues.  One is the extent to which enactment-based ontologies have a lingering commitment to realism.  Programmatic statements from writers such as Law suggest that realism is something to be done away with.  However I will argue that enactment-based theories rely on a minimal commitment to realism.  A key example of this is that in ‘demonstrating’ processes of enactment at work these theories make implicitly realist claims about the character of the socio-technical realm before and after an enactment has taken place.  The second issue that I want to examine relates to the intertwining of epistemology and ontology in enactment-oriented approaches.  Law argues that a social scientific account can legitimately be contradictory where socio-technical reality is itself contradictory.  But this raises tricky epistemological issues including the puzzle about how we distinguish between cases where a contradictory theory is correctly capturing contradictory reality, and cases where such a theory is simply confused and in need of correction.  I explore the extent to which enactment-oriented approaches offer a satisfactory answer to this question.