*Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, Kriti Sharma* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## The dominant story of life is not working > You might recognize the following version of the myth of ourselves as individuals, since it is widely available and practiced: > > *I am an individual; I was born in a family from two parents, having a particular sex. I am a unique human with a personality, a life cycle, choices to make, options to take; I am not nature, nature is “out there.” Given that scarcity is the iron law of life, my options and choices will be determined by the state of the economy and the resources, commodities, properties, and opportunities I might be able to command in the market (food market, education market, job market, health market, house market, religion market ...), which is where I find all the tools and elements for making my life. So, I better listen to the economists and the scientists for information and guidance; even if they might get it wrong sometimes, their knowledge is the only reliable way to know the world and plan ahead. This is what being rational, secular, and realistic is all about: adopting as my own the picture of the world given to us by science, a world that is always external to us, which moves around us without our participation in it, really, because we live within a single world and objective reality, even if different societies might have different beliefs about it, or different “worldviews.” And if there is one real, then there surely must be one possible, or at least a preferable possible, which it is the best we, rational people, can do to control the conditions of our lives ... because science is true, and true is the fact that we live in market-driven societies, and that we are individuals endowed with rights and choice who live in national societies with their institutions and laws, which we can opt to change through a democratic process ....* > > This is the “song of myself,” to borrow from Walt Whitman, that many of us tell ourselves daily; this song creates the singer, an atomized individual working diligently and rationally to secure their individual well-being, forgoing the essential collective dimension of social life. The quality of open-endedness that characterizes relationality: > If the world is not already finished, if it is not already out there, if it depends on our participation for its continued creation, then in every moment, there is always the chance of change. No matter how habitual, entangled, and addicted we are. No matter how deep the canyon, no matter how long the tires have been spinning in the mud. Our species may have been doing the same thing for millennia, passing on intergenerational trauma as culture, and still there is the chance of another way. The ant trail shifts left instead of right; the land-adapted ungulate tests out the waters. As long as there is life, there is hope, there is possibility. > The only reason this bears stating at all is because of a remarkably narrow and fatalistic view of the future and of life that seems to have settled over the modern world like a chilly fog—sometimes even over those most committed to transformational change. It passes as “realism” but is instead a two-dimensional simplification of reality. The interesting and tricky thing is that this current narrow story of realism is so powerful, we rarely recognize that other stories are possible. One of our main contentions here is that a belief in the predetermined, radically externalized world is precisely one of the moves that habitually replicates the same kinds of selves and worlds. It is a way of giving up in advance on the possibility of a different future. This is a core feature of dualism. > the collective field of courage, life, and love that some Black and Indigenous feminists, environmentalists, and others are already creating at the shoreline of reason > Notably, many of the examples of relationality we explore are non-Western or come from the “global majorities”—those marginalized within the dominant old story. This is not an essentialist argument but a recognition that those on the margins and those who have been oppressed generally—women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, urban marginals, the poor—have more access to understanding the limits of the dominant, as well as to seeing alternatives, due to historical circumstances. ## Remember > *That which we have made*, we can unmake, then, *consciously* now, remake. > – Sylvia Wynter The book follows this structure based on Wynter's quote: 1. Remembering: “that which we have made, we can unmake ...” 2. Choosing: “... then, consciously now ...” 3. Designing: “... remake.” ## 1 - Bio-Graphies: Relational stories of life within and beyond the natural sciences > May we remember that scarcity, separation, and supremacy are myths as we recreate relationships and systems sourced in deep care for ourselves and each other. > – Kim Calhoun > What happens, asks Wynter, when a mythmaking species actively forgets that it is making myths? What happens when it places its creator radically outside of its own creative activities? “We keep our authorship and agency opaque to ourselves,” she writes. Cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick, in conversation with Wynter, writes that modern, secular, rational human beings are “storytellers who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological.” The dominant story of human beings: - We are a single species defined by biology. - Life is primarily a struggle to accumulate matter and energy for survival and reproduction. - It is hierarchical, in which the fit and unfit are sorted out by the force of natural selection. - There's no mention of the storytelling being who narrates our own story. > Wynter’s thesis is that just as our biologies (our bodies, communities, and ecologies) give rise to our stories (insofar as they make possible the capacity for language and myth), our stories in turn also act on our biology. That is, our stories work on us biologically—physiologically, neurologically, neurochemically. They activate us at the level of synapse and hormone, of gut and marrow. For example, we live within the myth that it was ultimately nature who sorted humanity into the housed and the houseless, into the tiny few hyper-securitized behind gates and the vast many precarious and always on the edge of death. Natural selection was made into a law that exists outside of humanity and has the agency to sort us justly into fit and unfit. The story is repeated, familiarized, spoken with great confidence and authority, and therefore it becomes so convincing—so scientific and universal, so reasonable and unassailablethat we viscerally in our bodies feel that we will die if we violate the laws we ourselves have created. We feel that if we do not “win” by making enough money or being “fit” enough to survive by the standards of our society, we will die. Our bodies tremble horrified at the prospect of abject poverty, exile, and social or physical death. > > So even if we say that the law is in a sense fictive, we can hardly say that it is not effective. The law becomes real—it actually works. The laws we make work not only on our individual bodies but also on others. In our fear and revulsion at the violation of the law, we react in disgust and indignation when we see others violating the law, and therefore we make it true that they will die materially and/or socially if they violate the law. If someone else is deemed as somehow deviant or unfit, we will place them outside the circle of social care, and we will say—with no hint of dishonesty—that it was not us who did it but the law of nature. Hence, “we keep our authorship and agency opaque to ourselves.” Cognitively and physiologically, once we create our creators and place them radically outside of ourselves, they truly become agents, and we can no longer afford to see ourselves as agents. > In the dominant story of biology, biology means the set of material laws within which all living beings, including human beings, live. In Wynter’s view of biology, biology means the material conditions that give rise to the human capacity for mythmaking and are in turn responsive to myths that are made. In the post-Darwinian, modern era, biology is also the name of one of the dominant myths. That is, seen from Wynter’s critical standpoint, Biology-the-Discipline is the dominant, expert discourse on life in the modern era. Human biology in this sense (a) enables the creation of myths, (b) is the substrate that is responsive to myths, and (c) today, is a dominant myth to which human beings are responsive. Said otherwise, humans as bio-mythological beings have created a story about ourselves as predominantly biological beings, and this story (which is called, simply, “the field or discipline of biology”) works on us biologically and cognitively. > > What does this thesis accomplish? What possibilities does this critical Wynterian view of biology raise? Wynter is using the force, power, familiarity, and cognitive consonance of “the natural” to both describe our current reality and to point beyond it. She is mobilizing nature—the powerful myth of nature—to move away from meaning constraint and toward meaning possibility and agency. As “moderns,” we are people for whom nature, science, biology, and the natural carry great weight—even if we are skeptical of them or yearn to think otherwise. We are formed by these myths both by adoption of them and in reaction to them; they are the current ascendant founding myths. If we are to take a next step, to get to another place, it will be from here, from where we are. By suggesting that we are biologically, naturally storytellers who tell ourselves who we are, Wynter both affirms this dominant myth and expands it to mean that we are not trapped by biology or nature but rather made creative and powerful by them. > > Wynterian biology thus becomes a bridge for those of us who narrate ourselves as modern, secular humans: a means to get from here to there, from this ground to elsewhere, a transition. > Wynter’s phrase “human being as praxis” suggests that human being is not a noun, an entity with properties and features that are basically static and able to be dissected by mechanistic explanation. Rather, being human is an active practice. “That which we have made, we can unmake, then consciously remake.” This offers the possibility of a different kind of biopolitical project: to change the embodied experience of being alive from one of scarcity, supremacy, and separation to one of ease, generosity, and belonging. > Again, we write for the hybrid, the transitional, for whoever around us and whatever part of us is on a journey toward becoming people who do not live scarce, small, disconnected, insecure, and scared. To get to a livable future, something has to change. That something is us: the part of us that is viscerally convinced that survival means scarcity, struggle, and supremacy. [Davis 05/2019 - Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises](zotero://select/items/1_5VT3NJEL) > We do not underestimate the central importance of wresting material resources back to collective stewardship and liberating the commons. Simultaneously and interdependently, it is also necessary to take on the central task of undoing scarcity, supremacy, and separation at the level of gut and marrow. Indeed, if, as Wynter suggests, our narratives are designed to bring out some of our capabilities and to obscure others, and if our designed narratives design us, then the question of re-storying is a central task of designing. A most urgent task—both through the changing of infrastructures and through the changing of our founding myths—is to make ourselves into the kinds of beings (individually and collectively) who no longer relate with life as a scarce commodity to be guarded and hoarded. > The story of life is big—we are simply caught in a tiny story. What is life capable of? The sheer plenitude of the world means there is no drying up of findings, metaphors, and interpretations of natural phenomena. The “data points” that make up our known world are relatively few, even in today’s much-touted world of “big data.” Given how much could be theoretically observed, measured, or even simply experienced, we have collectively gathered just a fraction. Of all the scientific experiments that could be done to elucidate various causal relations, only a tiny number have been (or may ever be) done. Yet the scientific model of reality can nonetheless feel rather airtight and complete—as if science and the entire enterprise of knowledge production was more or less finished and we were just working out the last minor details. It is like seeing constellations within a smattering of stars: given just a few data points, we fill in the rest with theory, image, or story. Life is far vaster than any one idiom, valence, or explanation. Understanding life (even if one restricts oneself to equating the term “understanding life” with a technoscientific explanation of life) is necessarily using story to pattern sparse pieces of evidence with rich and myriad possible interpretations. In short, it is a work of art. > The sheer expansionism of colonialism and capitalism has resulted in an echo chamber where the modern subject almost exclusively encounters its own voice, and takes this to be universal, immutable reality. If a civilization has been exceedingly successful in putting up mirrors everywhere, all it will be able to see is its own reflection. Perhaps every culture is a hall of mirrors. But the current dominant culture horrifyingly and increasingly seals off any exit, in part as a result of its own expansion and domination. > All origin stories have a structure, says Wynter: there is a fundamental insoluble problem, and there is a means of resolution. In the origin story of Adam and Eve, the problem is original sin, and the solution is to become reborn into the community of Christians and to be saved in Christ. In the origin story of the human given by the biological sciences, the problem is natural scarcity. Simplythe story goes—there is never enough; populations outstrip their resources, and competition within species for these scarce resources reigns rampant. Darwin borrowed this insight from his contemporary Malthus, himself a Christian pastor skeptical of the natural sciences, who saw famine and poverty as God’s designs to prevent people from descending into indolence, and vociferously opposed wealth redistribution on those grounds. > Today, scarcity is mythologized as a primary existential law to which human beings (and all organisms) are utterly subordinated, and the solution to this fundamental problem is to become masters over scarcity by following the rule of economist-priests. Capitalism promises and delivers (at tremendous cost) just such mastery over scarcity, while of course producing and reproducing scarcity everywhere: hunger here while grain is dumped there, glittering highrises and vast stretches of shanties, and the overall ongoing global tightening of the rule that no one shall acquire access to the means of survival except through money and markets. “But there is no natural scarcity. It is a schema. It is a story. It is a concept of Malthus.” Sylvia Wynter, in an interview with Natalie J. Marine Street - https://purl.stanford.edu/kd232zm4370 > Heresy indeed. Everyone knows—on a gut-and-marrow level—that there is simply not enough, that those who do not hustle do not survive, that a good number of those who do hustle do not make it either. Death itself, holding Malthus’s scythe, speaks across the centuries to this very moment to whisper into each personal ear: “Make money or you will die.” But not everyone embraced Malthus' ideas like Darwin did. The Russian scientists at the time were quite scornful of the idea of nature being tightly wedged in competition. – [Todes 1989 - Darwin without Malthus: the struggle for existence in Russian evolutionary thought](zotero://select/items/1_WXMLXNQE) > The founding mythology of scarcity produces a subject who will never have enough. The subject knows scarcity viscerally. And the collective affirms the individual subject’s fears by making scarcity real—by making it true that those outside the social circle of care will not have enough. Thus, scarcity works as a production of limitation by the discourses and practices—namely, the things most commonly said and done—that center scarcity. > > It is the terror induced by the myth of scarcity that makes the transition from bioeconomic Man to another kind of being particularly difficult. ## 2 - Modern thought and the active production of nonrelationality The social sciences have molded four foundational categories of modernity: the human, life, thought, and the sacred. > We define terricidio not only as the killing of tangible ecosystems and of the pueblos (peoples) that inhabit them, but also the killing of all the forces that regulate life on earth, what we call the perceptible ecosystem. We understand terricidio as the consequence of the dominant civilizational model that is putting our future on this planet at risk, and which today is manifested in climate change and its consequences. > - The First Climate Encampment “Peoples Against Terricide" in 2020, Argentina, led by Indigenous Women's Movement for Buen Vivir > The “perceptible ecosystem” includes many elements that for us, moderns, are imperceptible, including spiritual beings, ancestors, and knowledge. As they explain, they are essential to repairing and maintaining the biophysical ecosystems; no matter how much ecological restoration and reforestation is undertaken in a given Indigenous territory, if the perceptible forces that inhabit these areas disappear forever, life (and the territories) will never be the same. > The categories of thought matter; the modern worlds constructed based on these categories, despite and because of their substantial achievements, are now working to render all worlds and the planet desolate. The good news, however, is that other civilizational models and thought practices exist or might be imagined, including those of Indigenous peoples. As the Movement of Indigenous Women for Buen Vivir put it: “Each Indigenous people have the theory and practice of a social existence in reciprocity with nature and whose main value is the sustainment of life. [But] we have permitted a system of death that has denatured humanity to be imposed on us.” Importantly, in the same statement they proclaim: “Today, the social emergent is Earth herself, and we are spokespersons for her pain.” Modernity consists of many loaded binaries - us / them - humans / nonhumans - subject / object These three binaries produce other divides: - living / nonliving - reason / emotion - ideas / feelings - real / representations - secular / sacred - life / death - individual / collective - science / non-science - facts / values - developed / undeveloped > These binaries suppress important dimensions of life—for example, emotions, feelings, the spiritual, nonscientific knowledge, body and place, nonhumans, “lesser” humans, nonorganic life, death, and so forth—with dire consequences. [Law 2015-01-02 - What's wrong with a one-world world?](zotero://select/items/1_DNPAZRKU) > By modern social theory, we understand a particular mode of knowledge that operates based on abstraction and detachment; which takes these epistemological operations as the only valid method to produce universally valid, comprehensive, and reproducible knowledge about an external “reality”; and that, in so doing, disqualifies other ways of knowing, which are seen as partial, subjective, or as mere beliefs. This model, historically borrowed from the physical and natural sciences, is prevalent in the social sciences. It presupposes that the whole of life is cut out into allegedly autonomous spheres—the social, the economic, the political, the biological, the individual, and the cultural—which particular sciences (sociology, economics, political science, biology, psychology, geography, and anthropology) can know with a high degree of complexity and confidence. That these domains have been artificially sundered apart from the flow of life escapes these disciplines’ practitioners. While some might argue that divvying up the world in this way is necessary for making sense of otherwise unruly complexities, we suggest that this need to tame complexity analytically, unwittingly creates a vision of reality that is functional to existing processes of exploitation and domination. ### Wynter's Man1 - homo politicus The Copernican revolution in the 16th century decentered the Christian God and gave rise to a view of the human as capable of understanding the universe through reason. ### Wynter's Man2 - bioeconomic Man Bioeconomic man is shaped by natural selection, resource scarcity, and political economy. Homo economicus is the "being who wears himself out while struggling against scarcity, trying to avert death." ### Life in a mechanistic universe > Margulis was a biologist with a philosophical imagination, who resisted reducing life to any single principle of determination, whether genes, photosynthesis, cell division, or reproduction. > In Margulis’s work one finds an extraordinary relational imagination at work. Life is relation, flow, impermanence, contamination, and endless transformationin short, pluriverse. Life’s history shows an unmistakable tendency to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. [Margulis 1998 - Symbiotic Planet: a new look at evolution](zotero://select/items/1_DQWPIVGB) - I like the word she uses: "planetmates" > Let us think about the following: If we really saw ourselves as part of the earth, would we dump so many toxics in the air, water, soil, and seas? Would we injure the soils with so many chemical substances allegedly to grow more food and faster, not realizing that the same chemicals will come back to hurt us in the very foods we eat? Would we drive so many of the earth’s creatures to extinction, knowing that in doing so we are imperiling our own futures? Would we build cities that are veritable islands of concrete from which natural habitats have been banished or unbelievably constrained? Would we scour, and scar, the earth in search of minerals so we can live half-absorbed in front of our digital screens? No, we would not. Why do we keep on doing it, then? The answer, at one level, is deceptively simple: precisely because we do not perceive our relationality: we see ourselves as separate from Earth, from rivers, from clouds, from soil, from birds and animals and plants and microorganisms, from mountains and spirits and the sea. Our perspective as autonomous selves desensitizes us to the fact that what we do to Earth we do to ourselves. [Margulis 2000 - What is life?](zotero://select/items/1_X55HKUWK) > Autopoiesis and survival imply that all living beings, including plants and microorganisms, perceive; this perception was already present in the earliest bacteria. > Margulis and Sagan’s daring remarks on consciousness as a central dimension of life placed them on a collision course with established biological paradigms. For them, thought was the product of the very dynamic of matter and energy; “spirit and mind,” they claim, “are no celestial sparklings but sovereign to living matter. Thought derives ... from the activity of cells." ### Patriarchy > ... patriarchy is the most enduring political technology of separation and one of the main sources of the active production of nonrelationality; it undercuts attempts to live lives attuned to the interdependence of existence. ## 3 - The political activation of relationality: Ontological slippages as portals to relationality > "All Life is interrelated, and we are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny .... I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be—this is the interrelated structure of reality." > – Martin Luther King, 1967 Christmas Eve sermon > Ultimately King saw the struggle for civil rights as a spiritual and ontological struggle over our very understanding of the nature of reality and what it means to live together as humans. For him, Beloved Community is both the ontological foundation and ethico-political goal of all struggles for liberation. This was a radical vision in which all struggles and all peoples were seen as interconnected—presaging what we here call relational politics. With King, we affirm that the spiritual and ontological dimensions of activism and change work are key. > However, our dominant understandings and vocabularies of the political were then, and still are, not sufficient for making sense of these dimensions. In fact, we believe a large part of the reason why the civil rights movement did not achieve the more radical vision of Beloved Community has to do with the fact that the dominant language and imaginaries of “the political” that activists and intellectuals were—and, to a large degree, are still—using were not capacious enough. These languages and imaginaries are not capable of holding or making sense of the project in its totality, a totality and complexity that itself cannot be contained by the modernist category of the political. > As this chapter will show, one of the common tendencies is a propensity for a politics of relationality to emerge, be celebrated, even marveled at, then, almost as quickly, denounced for being ineffective or failing. These denouncements are not only painful, often leading to a sense of complete disillusionment, along with desires to withdraw or give up, but also weaken the other stories and worlds that had, even if only temporarily, gained both visibility and substance. Since the modernist ontology currently saturates our sense of political possibility, the relational story of life needs to be strengthened by being practiced, narrated, and collectively given meaning. We need new storying of and for our movements. We write to describe and help embolden and sustain such practices. We believe that naming and storying are powerful political practices and that if we can come to see and name the patterns for what they are we might not be so quick to disinvest from these projects. > Learning to stay with relational “flashes” requires not only a new vocabulary but also an understanding that new worlds created by these movements coexist with the dominant ones. This coexistence matters a great deal because unlike the modernist version of reality that denies multiplicity, a relational or nondualist perspective operates from the understanding that there are multiple worlds. Thinking ontologically about contemporary movements has additional and important implications. First, it suggests that many movements, such as the civil rights example above, are not simply responding to a national or historical moment delimited in time and space, but that they respond to fundamental crises of a much longer durée. Second, that these crises are not only matters of economics or justice or representation, but of entire ways of knowing, being, and doing. Third, it requires recognizing that many things that do not register on our current list of political success, or even effects, might in fact be a lot more significant than we think. When recast in a relational view of reality, things that get dismissed as minor, cultural or insignificant in our current view of politics, might turn out to be very significant, even world changing. Four reasons why social movements have often missed their transformative potential: 1. misunderstanding the goal of social movements as a result of narrow notions of failure and success; 2. folding difference back into a dualist worldview; 3. reenacting a dualism between the individual and collective; 4. holding to the need to identify good versus bad ### Slippage 1: Confusing a politics of relationality for failure > This is the first area of slippage: the limited understanding of the goals of these movements, which is itself based on a limited understanding of the political. A limited understanding of the political is one of the core assumptions or default settings of modernity. When people speak of OWS and AGM as failures, these critiques emerge from a specific modernist view of the political. Such views take for granted naturalized entities such as the State, political parties, elections, markets, and individuals, as well as temporal and cultural logics of progress and end-goals, in turn closely linked to a specific view of power. > > What is missed in these critiques is the relational, or pluriversal, dimension. OWS and AGM were spaces where new capacities for living and being were developed and articulated through practices of occupying space (e.g., Zuccotti Park, and many other smaller spaces where local OWS movements took place). Many other processes took place in those spaces, such as stopping the daily hustle and acceptance of the status quo; connecting with others abused or ejected from the dominant economic logic; “occupying the imagination”; and generally disrupting the assumed normalcy of life under capitalism. ### Slippage 2: The need for a new vocabulary and a new ontology: The Alter-globalist flash > For perhaps more than its opposition to neoliberalism, the AGM was notable for the new practices, vocabularies, and imaginaries that arose from it. The movement authored, invented, and recovered many important concepts, technologies, and practices from myriad political cultures and traditions. Terms such as emergence, networks, social forums, counter-summits, affinity groups and spokes-councils, unity in difference, Indymedia, democracy from below, and (depending on where you draw the line around this movement) also Buen Vivir (living well/the good life), food sovereignty, and more. Not coincidentally, many of the most important concepts and practices came from groups and movements in the Global South. For example, “a world where many worlds fit,” “caminar preguntando” (walking while questioning), “autonomy,” “walking at the pace of the slowest,” all originated with the Zapatista movement—a part mestizo, mostly Indigenous movement in the rural southeast of Mexico, to be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. These practices and vocabularies came as a result of the meshworking among many different place-based movements including the Zapatistas, but also the movement of unemployed workers in Argentina, women farmers in India and Africa, European and North American autonomists and anarchists, feminists, and numerous movements of Indigenous peoples. > Yet, changing the language did not sufficiently address the paradigm shift required or the consequences for politics from a relational view of life. So, while numerous activists and academics beautifully captured the idea of a remade political terrain, without a concomitant and more radical recognition that this terrain went beyond the confines of modern versions of reality, in which the political is itself not bounded in recognizable ways, the power of these new politics failed to register or receded and there was a failure to recognize the more profound challenges to the modern onto-epistemic configuration they entailed. ### Slippage 3: Beyond dualisms: The question of individuals and how we conceive them > Contrary to dualist accounts of individuals versus collective, Indigenous communitarian formations do not suppress personal expression, and they are not homogeneous but plural. > Leftist ideology shares key elements with liberal capitalism. These include (1) the individual/collective binary; (2) a belief in the centrality of the economy and economic growth, closely related to (3) a commitment to modernity, progress, development, and a forward notion of time; (4) naturalized notions of rights and nation-states; (5) a belief in Globality—an abstract space-time presumed to be universal, which explains the erosion of place and the creation of a One-World world; and (6) the exaltation of scientific rationality and the rejection of knowledges that acknowledge uncertainty, mystery, ineffability, or sacredness. These shared assumptions correspond with the default settings of modernity. An important difference is that within Marxism the concept of dialectics offers the seed of a different epistemology and worldview that comes closer to relationality, though in practice this vision of dialectics often falls victim to the same slippage back to modernist dualisms. ### Slippage 4: Equating relationality with good (as opposed to bad): essentialism and other problems of dualism > Interestingly, while many on the left have gotten quite good at historicizing and problematizing concepts such as the individual, what often happens is that after we accurately identify the fallacy of the individual and the production of nonrelationality we rather quickly fall back into a dualist or modernist mode, treating these nonrelationalities as if they were coherent, fixed realities. > One of the clearest places we can see both the potentialities of relationality and many slippages is in activist practices seeking to address racism and white supremacy. Anti-racist activists and race scholars hold sophisticated and nuanced views of race as illusory and contingent. Such activism works to simultaneously historicize and denaturalize the constructs of race and whiteness; address the contemporary manifestations of racism and white supremacy; and transform them, all without essentializing or fixing “white people” (as oppressors, or enemies) or “people of color” (as victims, or heroes). However, repeatedly, in practice, politics slips back into practices that presume that there are “white people” and “people of color,” rather than webs of relations that produce stories and norms of whiteness and others. Terms such as white-ally; privilege; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), while intending to combat racism, can often end up reinforcing the idea of race and the default equation of whiteness as the norm into which people seek inclusion. [Fields 2012 - Racecraft: the Soul of Inequality in American Life](zotero://select/items/1_I769LHU3) [Harney 2013 - The undercommons: fugitive planning & black study](zotero://select/items/1_K85JY6DG) ## 5 ### Ontology #### Winograd and Flores > As indicated in Chapter 5, Winograd and Flores define ontology simply as “our understanding of what it means for something or someone to exist.” They underscore the ontological character of designing by positing the need to recognize “that in designing tools, we are designing ways of being.” Every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that, however minutely, it inaugurates a set of practices, ways of knowing, and modes of being. We design tools, and these tools design us back. Design contributes to establish the traditions within which humans understand their structures of possibility. > Against the mind-body dualism—leaning on Martin Heidegger’s understanding of the unity of being-in-the-world—Winograd and Flores uphold the primacy of practical understanding. For them, the world “is always organized around fundamental human projects and depends upon these projects for its being and organization.” This means that the skillful disclosing of new worlds demands pragmatic activity around a shared concern. We may surmise that when pursuing different worldmaking practices, activists and designers act as ontological disclosers in this sense. #### Mario Blaser According to Mario Blaser there are three main definitions or dimensions of ontology: 1. “Any way of understanding the world must make assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist, and what might be their conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of being and their relations is an ontology.” 2. “Ontologies do not precede mundane practices, but rather are shaped through the practices and interactions of humans and non-human. Hence, ontologies perform themselves into worlds—thus I use the term ontologies and worlds as synonyms.” 3. “Ontologies must be understood as the total (i.e. including discursive and non-discursive) enactments of worlds. In this sense, myths are neither true nor false; they engender different worlds which have their own criteria for defining truth.” > While some fear that ontological arguments lead us to a form of radical constructivism in which anything goes, and where all stories of reality are considered to be equally valid—such that, for example, Trump’s or Bolsonaro’s denial of the coronavirus, or other claims of “fake news,” get equal footing with the scientifically verified “facts”—we contend that this fear is misplaced. It misses the more important fact that worlds are made through stories and practices. The fact that some people manipulate these stories to generate confusion and a lack of confidence in expert knowledges does not negate this fundamental claim, but points to the essence of the matter: the making of reality is political, hence politics is always ontological. In Indigenous worlds, the assumption of relationality serves as a check to manipulation, because no one assumes the world to be objectively “out there.” Without that assumption, the discernment around particular stories itself becomes an important cultural matter. # Quotes # References [Wynter 09/2003 - Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument](zotero://select/items/1_BVG7QK8G) [Weber 2020 - Sharing life: the the ecopolitics of reciprocity](zotero://select/items/1_UTR482YJ) [Winograd 2008 - Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design](zotero://select/items/1_A3BJJP45) [Mol 2002 - The body multiple: ontology in medical practice](zotero://select/items/1_WHS6H9B5)