Documentality: Why it is necessary to leave traces

Documentality is at once a systematic critique of many presuppositions of Western philosophy since Kant and an intervention in the ongoing debate about the peculiar characteristics of social reality. The first phase of Ferraris’ argumentation aims at clarifying the distinction between epistemology, understood as the theory of what scientific knowledge is, and ontology, understood as the theory of what the world is made up of. Traditionally, it has been thought that scientific knowledge should provide the paradigm for our interactions with the world; Ferraris argues rather that we should disinguish more sharply experience – which does not require the conceptual apparatus that Kant associated with perception – from theoretical enquiry – which does require that apparatus, but is a much rarer phenomenon than is often thought. The confusion of epistemology with ontology leads to what Ferraris calls “the Transcendental Fallacy”. The notion of ontology that emerges from this examination is then applied to the question of how social reality is constituted. Over the last fifteen years, the views of John Searle have been highly influential in this field; where Searle proposes that social objects derive their status from “counting” as having a certain function on the basis of “collective intentionality”, Ferraris puts in the place of such potentially arbitrary features the notion of a text as the bearer of stability for understanding how institutions work. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Ferraris offers a typology of forms of writing that allows him to give innovative accounts of what a bureaucracy is and why it is necessary, of how we can understand an artwork, and of what our individuality as social creatures amounts to.