Conclusion

Tanto vivir entre piedras,I lived among stones so long, Yo creí que conversaban. I thought I heard them talking. Voces no he sentido nunca,It ­wasn’t exactly with voices, Pero el alma no me engaña.But something more ­gently rocking.

Algún algo han de tener ­They’ve got something ­going on Aunque parezcan calladas. As they sit ­there so discreetly. No en vano ha llenado DiosNot in vain did God, ­after all, De secretos la montaña. Load the mountain with secrets.

Algo se dicen las piedras.Something they say to each other A mí no me engaña el alma.I feel it within my soul Temblor, sombra o qué sé yo, A tremor, a shadow, who knows what, Igual que si conversaran. The same as if they ­were talking

Ah, si pudiera algún día Ah! If only I could live just like that, Vivir así, sin palabras. someday, speechless.

· Argentinean poet and folk singer Atahualpa Yupanki Atahualpa Yupanki’s poem transports us to a universe where even stones have a life of sorts. Yupanki’s songs incarnate a philosophy of place, territory, and landscape. These cosmovisions animate the thought for the transitions of many communities. Transition ideas are being elaborated explic­itly by many groups. As Guillermo Palma, a Rarámuri indigenous activist, puts it, “tenemos que autopensarnos a nosotros mismos para defendernos” (“we have to auto-think ourselves in order to defend ourselves”).1 While each social group, or socionatural assemblage, needs to broach this process out of its own resources and historical circumstances, no single social formation has the complete onto-­epistemic architecture necessary to deal with the hydra of global capitalism, as the Zapatista call it. In some instances, designers can build on, and help catalyze, the emergent transitions in their own locations through situated transition design practices.

Rather than summing up or even revisiting the book’s main arguments, I would like to rearticulate some of the questions that ­will undoubtedly remain a ­matter of debate as a way to conclude. ­These questions bring forth the highest stakes for design. In a way, they make the book unravel as it ends, hopefully to be rewoven by others in their own ways, or at least return its arguments to their status as hypotheses. Before tackling ­these questions, however, I start this conclusion in an epistemic-­political register to propose a princi­ple for transition thinking and design, that of the Liberation of ­Mother Earth. This is followed by brief remarks on “designs from the South,” and fi­nally a discussion of open questions, including modernity, technology, ­futures, and the university.

The Liberation of ­Mother Earth as Transition Design Princi­ple

A new statement travels the world: La Liberación de la Madre Tierra (the Liberation of ­Mother Earth). Recently expressed by the Nasa ­people, it echoes in many corners of the planet and announces other worlds to come. “But we say—as long as we continue to be indigenous, in other words, children of the earth—­that our ­mother is not currently ­free for life, but she will be when she returns to being the soil and collective home of the peoples who take care of her, re­spect her, and live with her. As long as it is not this way, neither ­will we be ­free, her ­children. All ­peoples are slaves along with the animals and all beings of life, as long as we do not achieve that our ­mother recovers her freedom.”2

Conclusion203It is somewhat paradoxical that statements of this sort are uttered in contexts of war and aggression against communities. But it is precisely because what is at stake in ­these contexts is the defense of life that the emphasis on the complementarity between ­humans and nonhumans emerges with par­ticu­lar clarity and force (“who would have believed it: heart and earth are one single being”).3 ­These narratives of communities in re­sis­tance evince a kind of knowledge that, “while a reflection of ancestral wisdom, is not an issue of essential identities, but rather signals the possibility of widening the meaning and practices of togetherness within a process of collective weaving” (P. Botero 2013, 50). Ancestrality, in the view of many of these collectives, implies actively looking at the ­future.

What I am proposing is that all transition thinking needs to develop this attunement to the Earth. In the end, it seems to me that a plural sense of civilizational transitions that contemplates—­each vision in its own way—­the Liberation of ­Mother Earth as a fundamental transition design principle is the most ­viable historical proj­ect that humanity can undertake at pres­ent. Elsewhere, in an article about the state of Latin American critical thought, I argued that critical thought ­today is an interweaving of three threads: leftist thinking, autonomous thought, and the thought of the Earth. While ­these threads overlap, they are distinct. The Left’s concerns with exploitation, domination, inequality, and social justice are as impor­tant as ever, yet much leftist thinking continues to be anthropocentric, patriarchal, ethnocentric, and universalizing, and its view of transitioning to socialism or postcapitalism is limiting. Many of the autonomy thinkers, for their part, maintain ontological commitments to unexamined forms of anthropocentrism, hence the need to imbue autonomous thought with a strong notion of relationality. Finally, the thought of the Earth—or rather, sentipensar con la Tierra, thinking-­feeling with the Earth (Escobar 2014)—­does not refer so much to ecological thinking as to the profound conviction of our indissoluble connection with the Earth and with every­thing that exists in the universe, the unity of all beings.

The thought of the Earth has its own implications, eloquently expressed by the nasa activists in the same text: “Nos liberamos con la tierra para convivir. Este es nuestro llamado y compromiso. Esto significa no solo liberar la tierra y empoderarse de la lucha, sino también liberar el pensamiento, el corazón, las voluntades, la identidad, la alegría, la conciencia y la esperanza.” (We f­ree ourselves as we ­free the Earth so that we can live together well. This is our call and our commitment. This does not mean only to liberate the land and empower ourselves through the strug­gle, but to ­free up the thought, the heart,

204Conclusion the ­will, identity, happiness, consciousness, and hope.) Like in Bob Marley’s stunningly po­liti­cal “Redemption Song,” each person and each group ­will need to reflect on this call in her or his own way.4

Building Bridges between Design for Transitions in the Global North and in the Global South

In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, the decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo (2011) identifies five global trajectories that, in his view, shape possi­ble ­futures: de-­Westernization, re-­Westernization, re­orientations of the Left, spiritual options, and decolonial options. The latter two can be seen as “roads to re-­existence delinking from the belief that development and modernity are the only way to the f­uture” (64). Which ­future prevails ­will depend on the struggles and negotiations among t­hese trajectories, likely without a winner. “If t­here is a winner,” Mignolo adds, “it would be the agreement that global ­futures ­shall be polycentric and noncapitalist. Which means that a strug­gle for world domination…w ould yield to pluriversality as a universal proj­ect” (33-34). Citing Humberto Maturana’s maxim that “when one puts objectivity in parentheses, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other” (27), Mignolo goes on to expound the decolonial option as the clearer path ­toward the pluriverse. This is a hopeful vision. It seems to me that one could explicitly posit emergent visions of transitions as another historical force within the spectrum of trajectories. Transition thinking may be found in the leftist, spiritual, and decolonial pathways ­imagined by Mignolo; however, in the senses discussed ­here—as an array of explicit discourses and imaginations—it cannot be encompassed within any of them.

This book is about redesigning design from within and from without, a proj­ect on which a number of design thinkers, as we have seen, are already embarked. Little is known about how this process is taking place in the Global South, and in this book I have dealt with this issue only obliquely, through my discussion of transition narratives and autonomous design. The process of building bridges between transition design visions in the Global North and the Global South has already commenced. This goal is pres­ent, for instance, in Colombian design theorist Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero’s (2015a) conceptual framework that explic­itly speaks about “el sur del diseño y el diseño del sur” (the south of design and the design of the south), where south stands as an onto-­epistemic border where pluriversal theoretico-­practical design proj­ects might emerge. In contradistinction with much northern design practice, with its instrumental and commercial orientation, such proj­ects would explore ­viable designs stemming from communal worlds, where each community would practice the design of itself on the basis of local, decolonial knowledges (Gutiérrez Borrero 2014, 2015a, 2015b). Knowledges and ontologies from the South would act as alternative operating systems enabling autonomous forms of design. This sort of “anti-­industrial design”—or, rather, way of provincializing industrial design as one possibility among many—explic­itly aims at designs for conviviality.

Diseños del sur also stands for the rich variety of diseños otros (other designs and design other­wise) associated with notions that name the onto-political thrust of groups embarked on their own alternatives to hegemonic modernity, such as Buen Vivir, ubuntu, swaraj, or degrowth (Kothari, Demaria, and Acosta 2015). Finding inspiration in the Lakota principle of mitakuye oyasin that posits that not only humans are persons but also rocks, soil , rivers, plants, and even ­things, Gutiérrez Borrero goes on to posit southern forms of design based on a relational ontology of multiple personhood. From ­here he draws a vital question:

What happens, then, when we design on the basis of design thinking basedon other notions and by other names, of sciences which are not such, inorder to create alternatives to development with technologies and indus tries that are something else? We are confronted by older idioms that weare just beginning to hear anew, and by epistemologies in search of aliases.Designs from the south ­were always ­there, albeit with other names, weare just starting to perceive them. It takes time to recognize them. Nowwe need to begin the task of designing with them and of letting ourselvesbe designed by them. (2015a, 126)

This listening to design’s idioms from the Global South animates a recent set of essays assembled under the concept of “design in the borderlands” (Kalantidou and Fry 2015). Explic­itly conceived from the perspective of the geopolitics of design knowledge, and in full acknowledgment of design’s Eurocentrism and its status as a global force, the volume attempts to “unconceal the way that design operates within a global world order” and, conversely, to ascertain the role that design can play in creating decolonial ­futures (Pereira and Gillett 2015, 109). While paying attention to both “the globalization of Eurocentric power by design” and “the design of globalization by the Eurocentric mind”

206Conclusion (Fry and Kalantidou 2015, 5), the volume argues for the existence of “contra-Western understandings of design” (6) and illustrates instances of place-­based design practices that enact such counterdiscourses. One learns in the volume about resourceful vernacular design practices by other names (for instance, in Africa), the emergence of the design profession in vari­ous parts of the world, the possibilities for ontological redesigning in the Global South, and the helpful notion of “designing for creative ontological friction” in a way that “explicitly and reflexively recognizes ontological difference across dif­fer­ent social formations” ( James 2015, 93). The result is both a pluralization of the history of design and the beginning of a genealogy of decolonial design practices.

The borderlands are strategically impor­tant spaces for the reconstitution of an ethics and praxis of care in relation to what ­ought to be designed, and how. For Tony Fry (2017), this would be an ontology of repair of the broken beings and broken worlds that have resulted from centuries of defuturing designing and their alleged accumulated outcome, the anthropocene. Herein lies the possibility of, and ground for, the reconstitution of design in, for, and from the South, not as a total rejection of design but as “critical se­lection and local innovation” (46) involving the creation of structures of care ­toward the Sustainment:

The central issue and proj­ect for design of/by and for the South is anotherkind of ontological designing—one based on the creation of structures ofcare able to constitute the Sustainment…How can a designer be designedto be a provider of care via the designing of ­things that ontologically care?The answer to this question requires acknowledging that a new kind of de signer depends upon the arrival of a transformed habitus…[ It requiresan] understanding of design’s implication in the state of the world and theworlds within it. To gain this understanding means fully grasping the scaleand impact of design as an ontological force of and in the world in its mak ing and unmaking…Acquiring such knowledge leads the proto-­designer tolearn how to read what is brought into being by design causally. Thereafter,what design serves is the creation of a ­future with a ­future. (28, 29)

The constitution of a field of “design for/by/from the Global South” is thus a very welcome and timely call, for two main reasons: first, ­because much of what goes on under the banner of design in the Global North is not appropriate for design in the South (and increasingly inappropriate to a North in crisis as well); and, second, ­because ­there is ­great potential in design’s re­orientation to serve a range of theoretical and po­liti­cal proj­ects in the South.

Conclusion207The convergence between transition design narratives in the North and in the South can also be explored by positing the existence of two converging dynamics responding to the defuturing and delocalization effected by the global order: the first dynamic is Ezio Manzini’s cosmopolitan localism, “capable of generating a new sense of place,” as a historical condition of communities (2015, 25). This dynamic occurs more readily within the Global North, given the extent of the decommunalization of socie­ties and the specific imperative of relocalization that ensues. Cosmopolitan localism entails a dynamic reinvention of the communal through a multiplicity of activities concerning food, the economy, crafts, and care. Many of ­these activities can also be seen in the Global South. Yet, and this is the second dynamic, t­here are other, somewhat specific dynamics in the Global South where old (vernacular) and new forms of design combine, yielding an entire range of situations, from improvisational design for survival to the design of urban neighborhoods out of displacement, and from alternative cap­i­tal­ist and noncapitalist economies to autonomous strug­gles for Buen Vivir. Would it be too far-­fetched to see in ­these twofold, albeit glaringly uneven, dynamics a convergence of the sort intuited by Manzini? “All of ­these ideas, the activities they refer to, and the relationships they generate seem to me beautiful islands of applied cultural and socioeconomic wisdom. They are islands in the sea of unsustainable ways of being and doing that is, unfortunately, still the mainstream throughout the world. The good news is that the number of t­hese islands is growing and generating a wide archipelago. An archipelago that could be seen as the emerging dry land of a rising continent: the already vis­i­ble expression of a new civilization” (26).

­These convergences are of course not guaranteed. Transition design needs to deepen its critique of capitalism and liberalism and its awareness of the ways in which it still shelters modernist commitments such as belief in the individual, anthropocentrism, and reliance on po­liti­cal processes that depend, by their very nature, on the ontology of subjects and objects.5 Northern transition design visions need to think decolonially and postdevelopmentally, as discussed in chapter 5. Conversely, autonomous design, diseños otros, and designs from the South need to broach the questions of innovation and technoscience in earnest. In this it has a lot to learn from ecological design in northern visions. To return to Manzini: “I think that what social innovation is indicating, with its idea of a well-­being based on the quality of places and communities, is the seed of a new culture. Or better, a metaculture which could be the platform for a multiplicity of cultures [a pluriverse]…the culture of a society in which places and communities are not isolated entities but become nodes in a vari-

208Conclusion ety of networks…helping to create a resilient planet where it would be pos­sible for us and for f­uture generations to live, and hopefully to live well” (207). The convergence of transition design, design for autonomy, and diseños otros might prove to be a power­ful force for counteracting the centuries-­old but ongoing ontological occupation of people’s lives (communities, territories, places) by the nonconvivial technologies of patriarchal cap­it­al­ist modern designs. By connecting to each other, they might extend like rhizomes, possibly emerging into local and regional topologies of partially connected worlds, eventually leading to the rising continents of relational living envisioned by Manzini and ­others.

Some Open Questions

Fi­nally, I would like to tackle a set of interrelated questions concerning modernity, technology, ­futures, the communal, the pluriversal, and the university as a way to conclude. What follows is offered in the spirit of a counterpoint to what has already been said, that is, by getting at the issues from somewhat differ­ent vantage points as a way to giving them a dif­fer­ent form.

The Question of Modernity

First, the question of modernity. To paraphrase: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of modernity. This is a question that does not go away completely. As Humberto Maturana and Gerda Verden-Zöller say, “our ­human existence is one in which we can live what­ever world we bring about in our conversations, even if it is a world that finally destroys us as the kind of being that we are” (2008, 143). Might the civilizational conversation called modernity be at risk of reaching this point? If modernity is ineluctably all we have to go on, then this book’s propositions could legitimately be qualified as romantic or utopian (as they inevitably ­will be by many).

Let me attempt, however, two final displacements of modernity’s centrism. We already encountered Ashis Nandy’s telling reversal that the pathologies of science-­driven modernity have already proven to be more lethal than the pathologies of traditions. Beyond a handful of philosophical treatises, we in the Global North rarely entertain seriously the end of modernity; actually, most scholars react strongly and disdainfully against such a proposition, disqualifying it as utopian or even reactionary. It is, however, implicit (though rarely stated out loud) in most transition discourses. None other than the revered Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has spoken openly about it in his critique

Conclusion209 of consumerism: “This civilization of ours ­will have to end one day. But we have a huge role to play in determining when it ends and how quickly… Global warming may be an early symptom of that death” (2008, 43-44). He goes further, inviting us to actively accept the end of our civilization by meditating on this thought: “Breathing in, I know that this civilization is ­going to die. Breathing out, this civilization cannot escape ­dying” (55). This is the call that the transition “bells of mindfulness” makes to us: to move beyond a civilization that has become so antithetical to the ontology of interbeing.6

­There is a second tactic we can take in relation to modernity, akin to J. K. Gibson-­Graham’s analy­sis of capitalism and po­litic­al economy (Gibson-Graham 2006; Gibson-­Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013); this would include three steps: first, to deconstruct the modern centrism of most social theory, that is, the way in which social theory’s lenses inevitably endow modernity with the ability to fully and naturally occupy the field of the social, so as to make invisible or secondary other ways of constructing societies; second, to reconstruct our understanding of the social by positing the existence of modern, alternative modern, and nonmodern (or amodern) forms of being, knowing, and ­doing; and, third, to inquire into how we can foster the alternative modern and nonmodern forms collectively. This would include the question of how we might cultivate ourselves as subjects who desire noncapitalist, nonliberal, and nonmodern forms of life. For under the visi­­ble part of the iceberg of the social (what is perceivable as conventionally modern) ­there lies an entire set of practices that can hardly be described as modern and that perhaps can be theorized as nonmodern or amodern (besides ­those that are clearly anti-­modern). This is a theoretico-political proj­ect that still remains to be done.7

A common strategy by critical scholars is to pluralize modernity. ­There is a risk, however, in ­doing so. While it makes a lot of sense to speak about alternative or multiple modernities worldwide—­dif­fer­ent Eur­o­pean modernities, Latin American modernities, Chinese or Arab modernities, or what have you—­the risk is to reintroduce, through the back door of the premise of a single shared world or real, the universality of dominant modern ways of seeing. A second danger is to absolve modernity from any wrongdoing, since ­after all many of ­those who are “differently modern” (say, among peripheral or nondominant Eur­o­pean regions or cultures) ­will argue that they never ­were part of the dominant modern order (from which they have nonetheless benefited im­mensely). To avoid ­these risks, the pluralization of modernity ­will have to be done decolonially—t­hat is, keeping in sight three proc­esses: dominant

210Conclusion modernity’s negation of other worlds’ difference, the re­sis­tance and excess constituted by subaltern subjects at the fractured locus of the colonial difference (Lugones 2010b; de la Cadena 2015), and the challenges to the dominant modern core stemming from nondominant modern sources. In other words, all worlds need to broach the proj­ect of remaking themselves from the critical perspective of their historical location within the modern/colonial world system.8

For moderns, actively facing the ontological challenges posed by the idea of the end of modernity—of a world significantly or radically dif­fer­ent from the current one—is not easy; it induces a type of fright that is deeply unsettling. Ontologically oriented design needs to articulate this civilizational anxiety in effective ways. ­After all, most other worlds have had to exist (and still do) with the fright and, not infrequently, the real­ity of their vanishing. An important ele­ment in the strategy of nondominant or alternative moderns would be to effectively activate their specific critique of the dominant modern (which would place them in the position of fellow travelers, not enemies, of t­hose who uphold more explic­itly positions that are “beyond modernity”).

Rationality, Technoscience, and the Real

Closely related is the thorny assessment of science and its rationality. Is technoscience even partially adaptable or reversible, as all transition narratives implicitly assume? Is this not also a rather baseless and naive desire? Any redesigned design philosophy must articulate a critique of the rationalistic tradition and reconstruct its own mode of rationality, open to the plurality of modes of consciousness that inhabits the pluriverse. But is this ­really pos­sible? This does not mean an antiscience position; in fact, none of the authors invoked in ­these pages sustains such a position. Nandy’s approach is illustrative: “Modernity knows how to deal with t­hose who are anti-­science or anti-technology; it does not know how to deal with t­hose using plural concepts of science and technology” (1987, 137), which is the case for most of our authors, from Ivan Illich and Francisco Varela to Enrique Leff and Val Plumwood.9 The social movements invoked here openly allow for creative, critical uses of modernity within traditions, but they insist on doing so from the perspective of local autonomy, subordinating science and technology to buen vivir and to strengthening the convivial fabric of life. The same holds for engagement with markets and the economy: these should be subordinated to buen vivir according to place-­based criteria, rather than the other way around. To argue that the critics and activists believe other­wise is to perform a travesty of their actual concepts and practices.

Conclusion211Always at play in ­these debates is the question of the real. By its very nature, this question ­will remain unsettled. The position I have taken in this book is consistent with a philosophy of strong relationality: an epistemology and ontology without subjects, objects, and processes that are inherently or intrinsically existent by themselves—­what biologist Kriti Sharma (2015) calls radical contingentism. It is our epistemologies and ontologies that sustain “both the sense of separateness of objects from subjects and the sense of interaction of objects with subjects” (100). Subjects, objects, proc­esses, structures, essential properties and identities, and so forth depend on ­these assumptions. This folk essentialism is stronger for ­those of us who go on living in the Cartesian theater. Some spiritual traditions like Buddhism and animism and many traditional cosmologies have ways to diffuse ­these essentialisms or hold them at bay (through par­tic­ul­ar practices and rituals but often through mundane daily practices of interbeing). Shifting our existence—our bodies, minds, and souls—­into a relational ontology challenges any objectifying notion of a real. To listen to Sharma once more:

Sometimes when we come across a spider’s web, it can be difficult tofind where it’s anchored; yet the assumption is that it is anchored some where; it is easy to assume that the dense net of experiences is anchoredsomewhere—in a world of objects, or a body, brain, or soul. We often be lieve that the regularities we experience must be grounded in some kindof substance beyond them—­material, spiritual, or mental. However, it isentirely pos­si­ble that the net is aloft, that it is not tethered to anything out side of it. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, the net is all t­here is, so there canbe nothing outside of it that could serve as a tether. (100-101)

So-­called traditional ­peoples have no prob­lem living with this realization. For the Kogui of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, each act of living is an act of weaving—­one weaves life in thought as much as on the land, and certainly in re­sis­tance; indeed, it is in the loom that all the ele­ments of the world come together. The Kogui, moreover, live with the conviction that their weaving is essential for the balance of the universe as a whole. In the Fanti-­Ashanti tradition from the Gulf of Benin, the bisexual spider god/goddess Anansi incessantly weaves life from her own material and cognitive resources (Lozano 2015; Arocha 1999). Since the conquest and slavery, her threads unite Africa and Amer­i­ca, and in the Colombia Pacific, Anansi is said to have created the fractal jungle and the meandering estuaries with threads she pulled out of her belly. She or he continues to link each newborn to the territory

212Conclusion through the practice of the ombligada, which in the Pacific is carried out by midwives.10 For Betty Ruth Lozano (2015), Anansi is a meta­phor of survival and self-­sufficiency, and midwives must be seen as practi­tioners of reexistence and as spiritual leaders who embody an insurgent imagination. It is thus that ­these relational worlds strug­gle to persevere as the kind of worlds they are, even if ­under ferocious attack.

­Those of us who inhabit the liberal worlds of “real realities” and “autonomous individuals” can certainly come to understand the profound insights of relationality theoretically; yet conceptual analy­sis can carry us only partway in the journey ­toward more relational living. To the theoretical work we need to add some form of practice that takes us into other habits and modes of living and interexisting, of being in a world that is made up of ­things that are real yet not inherently in­depen­dent.11 Shifting to the terrain of practice places us in a situation, from the realists’ perspective, where the question of the real can never be ultimately settled, so it ­shall remain so.

Do “Traditional Communities” Design? ­Toward a Practice of Disoñar (Designing-­Dreaming)

This brings me to one of the most intractable questions about nondualist approaches to design, which I have bracketed thus far. The question has two corresponding, though seemingly unconnected, sides. First, is it really pos­si­ble to come up with a notion of nondualist design that avoids the modern ontology of Enframing, within which every­thing that exists does so as “standing reserve” for instrumental ­human purposes (Heidegger 1977)? In other words, is nondualist design not an oxymoron, for is design not always about ­human proj­ects and goal-­oriented change, about an analytics and ethics of improvement and an inescapable ideology of the novum, that is, of development, pro­gress, and the new? Moreover, why use the word design at all, especially for nonmodern contexts? This is the other side of the concern: is it advisable to use the concept of design in connection with struggles for autonomy by communities and collectives struggling precisely to keep dualist ontologies and instrumentalizing technologies at bay? Would it not make more sense to declare ­these communities “design-­free territories”? ­After all, is not the utopia of some of them that of preserving their ability to live outside of, or beyond, the damaging designing effected by patriarchal cap­it­al­ist modern life?12

The question of designless communities is posed indirectly by Maturana and Verden-Zöller:

Conclusion213Our ancestors in non-­patriarchal cultures lived in a systemic dynamic in terconnectedness within a cosmos that they ­were aware of and able to inte grate. And as they lived their cosmic interconnectedness, they lived it in asystemic thinking of multidimensional coherences that they knew how toevoke but could not describe in detail. In that way of living they ­were notconcerned with controlling the dif­fer­ent aspects of their existence. Theyjust lived them; and they did so through the conservation of practices thatboth conserved and realized their harmonious participation in the cosmicdynamics of their daily living in the ­human community to which they be longed. (2008, 126; emphasis added)

We find related arguments in ethnographic engagements with nonmodern ­peoples. Amazonia ethnology, for instance, shows how elders throughout the region used to hold—­some still do, though more precariously—acomplex shamanic knowledge of the entire Amazon basin, without ever having traveled far from their own places, and despite their dif­fer­ent locations and languages, from Colombia and Peru to Brazil. This knowledge was grounded in a tight relation between the level of thought (pensamiento) and that of practice. The practices—­concerning community spaces, ­water and plant worlds, cultivation and food, fishing and hunting, healing, and so forth—simply enacted what was already known in thought (this is the “they just lived them” part of the above quote, but according to a systemic knowledge of the world). There used to be agreement among the vari­ous groups on how to live and manage the territory. All of this points to the existence of a lived knowledge out of which entire worlds ­were (and to some extent still are) constructed. As some designers argue, ­there is a design process in t­hese knowledge practices, even if without any explicit design concept. Much of this came ­under attack with colonialism, evangelization, and development, and even more so t­oday with extractivism in indigenous territories.13

My argument is that the conditions for spontaneous relational living only partially exist at pres­ent; hence, designlessness as such is a forgone historical possibility, even if it can still be posited as a desirable horizon. Said otherwise, while many territorial communities could be said to live life according to implicit relational knowledge (akin to Varela’s ethical know-how), it is also the case that all communities are variously thrown into the pro­cess of having to practice both embodied and detached reflexivity about their historical circumstances, sometimes even as a ­matter of sheer survival. How to design without instrumentalizing relations (especially without pushing ­these rela-

214Conclusion tions further into an objectifying and individualizing mode of hierarchy and control) becomes a crucial question. Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold’s (2013) nonteleological and open notion of design offers one such approach, one capable of giving direction to collective pro­cesses without fixed end points, pathways without targets, weavings rather than blueprints, planes de vida (life proj­ects) rather than conventional plans, and so forth. It seems to me that the frameworks of transition design, design for social innovation, autonomous design, and diseños otros aim in this direction, even if often falling short of the task, ­whether ­because of the demands of strategy, lack of clarity about what is at stake, orga­nizational pressures, or what have you.

That said, I believe the issue of ­whether indigenous communities design should remain an open question. But from this provisional discussion we can rearticulate the question in a way that applies to communities and social groups in many parts of the world: how do we make effective weavings and foster mutually enhancing entanglements of worlds in the face of the catastrophe visited on the planet by the current global cap­i­tal­ist One-­World order? Earth’s territories, including cities, are where we, ­humans and not, go on weaving life together. Design can thus become an open invitation for us all to become mindful and effective weavers of the mesh of life. To do so, design needs to contribute to creating conditions that dampen our impulse to think and act like modern individuals—to interrupting our “self-­alchemization” based on notions of self-improvement in ­favor of an ethics of autonomous interexistence, albeit without negating our capacity to operate in modern worlds at the same time. This calls for designs that foster convivial reconstruction and that promote “healthy and enabling instrumentalizations” for behaving responsibly ­toward “the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” (Bennett 2010, 12, 36).

Gatt and Ingold’s perspective would have designers follow “the ways of the world as they unfold” (145). It argues for a type of flexibility that “lies not only in finding the ways of the world’s becoming—­the way it wants to go—­but also in bending it to an evolving purpose. It is not, then, only a ­matter of ­going with the flow, for one can give it direction as well. Designing for life is about giving direction rather than specifying end points. It is in this regard that it also involves foresight [futuring]” (2013, 145). To realist ears, this sounds like phenomenological utopia, perhaps nonsense, even more so if one attends to this notion’s sequitur: “Design, in this sense, does not transform the world, it is rather part of the world transforming itself” (146; emphasis added).

It might be that all communities are poised ­today, to varying degrees, between living according to their embodied and place-­based norms, on the one

Conclusion215 hand, and giving explicit and effective direction to their collective life, on the other. The issue is how to do it from within a culture of relationality and a biology of love by working at the level of the collective emotioning that is the basis of the social life of a collectivity, while avoiding falling back into established categories and merely utilitarian “preferred solutions”—in other words, by continually renewing the ­will to be communal. Perhaps this is what is meant by disoñar (to embed design with dreams, to dream in order to create), a concept used by some groups in Colombia to signal a practice that is dif­fer­ent from, and goes well beyond, the well-i­ntentioned but ultimately self-­defeating projects of “saving the planet” and “helping ­others.”14 To ­these slogans, one might ­counter with this one: A disoñar, a re-diseñar, a recomunalizar! Dream-design, redesign, recommunalize!

Back to the Pluriverse and Po­litical Ontology

Does the concept of the pluriverse, and the field of po­litical ontology that attends to it, have a f­uture with f­utures? Or will ­these concepts, and ontological design itself, become yet one more academic endeavor, in­ter­est­ing but defuturing in relation to enabling worlds, knowledges, and lives other­wise? The answer ­will depend on the extent to which the notions of the pluriverse and po­liti­cal ontology can sustain their effort to disentangle themselves, perhaps not completely but significantly, from the modern episteme. We raised this issue in passing in the discussion of the politics of the ontological turn in chapter 2. I would like to offer a few additional comments from the perspective of how worlds relate to each other and of the limits of modern knowledge’s ability to understand what makes the modern and the nonmodern dif­fer­ent yet not entirely separate, partially connected yet also divergent in relation to each other.

The concept of partial connection is useful to enable the analys­is of how worlds appear to be shaped, and even encompassed, by each other while remaining distinct (de la Cadena 2015, 33). It provides a conceptual means to understand the ontological complexity of “­really existing” partially connected worlds, of how worlds can be part of each other and radically dif­fer­ent at the same time. It is necessary to start by emphasizing that radical difference is not something “indigenous ­people have” (275) but designates relational existence ­under conditions of partial connection, where ­every world is more than one (not complete or total unto itself) but less than many (that is, we are not dealing with a collection of interacting separate worlds); all worlds are, in short, within the pluriverse.15 The question remains, however, of how to make

216Conclusion explicit the onto-­epistemic politics of translation ­going on between worlds ­under conditions of partial connection that are also asymmetrical relations.16

One way to think about this difference, as Marisol de la Cadena (2015) meticulously exemplifies in her recent ethnography of multiply interacting “Andean worlds,” is in terms of the ontological excess that subaltern worlds continue to exhibit in relation to dominant worlds. ­There is, for instance, much in Andean indigenous worlds that does not abide by the divide between ­humans and nonhumans, even if the divide is also pres­ent in many of their practices. The question thus arises of how to understand worlds that clearly live partly outside of the separation between nature and humanity but who also live with it, ignore it, are affected by it, utilize it strategically, and reject it—­all at the same time. A pluriversal attitude in relating to indigenous groups who defend mountains or lakes on the basis that they are “sentient beings” or “sacred entities” (our modern translation) would allow mountains or lakes to be what they are, not mere objects or in­de­pen­dently existing ­things; above all, it would suspend the act of translating ­these arguments into “beliefs,” which is the main way in which moderns can accommodate them from the perspective of an ontology of intrinsically existent objects or nonhumans. Clarity about ­these issues of partial connection and translation is essential in design activities in pluriversal contexts.

A timely question for all those worlds that never wanted, or no longer want, to abide by allegedly universal rules is that of how to relate with dominant worlds that do not want to relate. To develop tools that enable going beyond the modern notion of politics based on the partition of real­ity into discrete and unconnected subjects and objects is crucial; this implies recognizing that while worlds are connected to one another, they diverge at the same time—indeed, such divergence, and not only homogenization, is a sign of our times. In fact, subaltern worlds need to diverge in order to live in partial connection with dominant ones. A decolonial politics would allow for this divergence to take place, “with no other guarantee than the absence of ontological sameness” (de la Cadena 2015, 281). Is this enough to go on, at least for t­hose of us who inhabit dominant worlds and yet are committed to an ethics of contributing to bringing about more favorable conditions for the perseverance of the relational worlds ­under attack? Are ­these ideas enough in order to design/struggle in tandem with the worlds of the peoples-­territory discussed in chapter 6? With communities in the Global North also determined to embark on their own transition path ­toward the pluriverse? How do we let ourselves be affected by ­these worlds? How can we “disrupt the composition through

Conclusion217 which the world as we know it constantly makes itself homogenous” (de la Cadena 2015, 282), by building on what in each world challenges the One-­World World’s ability to fulfill itself?

Let’s quote Mario Blaser at length to close this question for now:

Po­liti­cal ontology is intended neither as a pedagogic proj­ect to illuminate a real­ity that deficient theorizing cannot grasp, nor as a proselytizing proj­ect to show the virtues of other, nonmodern blueprints for a good life. Such readings would confuse an attempt to carve out a space to listen carefully to what other worldings propose with an attempt to rescue and promotethose worldings as if we knew what they are about. Po­litic­al ontology is closer to hard-­nose pragmatism than to the liberal desire to understand every­one; the pax moderna no longer holds (if it ever truly did), and dominance without hegemony is a costly proposition when ontological differ ences become po­liti­cally active. (2013, 559)

Po­liti­cal ontology is thus not a new approach for another realist claim on the real; in fact, one may say that the worlds briefly described in this book are not “­really existing” ontologies “out there” but a manner of foregrounding the array of ways of conceiving what exists so as to make palpable the claim of multiple ontologies or worlds. Po­liti­cal ontology is, in a way, a “foundationless foundational” field (Blaser 2013, 551) with a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal sensibility, an open-ended ethical and theoretico-­political proposition, rather than a hard-­nosed claim on the real. Po­liti­cal ontology is a way of telling stories differently, in the hope that other spaces for the enactment of the multiple ontologies making up the pluriverse might open up.

As the scale and pace of destruction continue to expand through the massive extractive operations needed to keep the cap­it­al­ist industrial system ­going, ­these issues take on added meaning. Environmental conflicts are often ontological conflicts; patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist modernity entails the ontological occupation of the existential territories of ­humans and nonhumans; and ­people’s strug­gles are thus ontological struggles. Hence the importance of placing design within this ontological politics, including the negotiation of what counts as po­litical and real.

Design with/out ­Futures? Take II: From Crisis to Reexistence

Design, it is often stressed, is about (preferred) f­utures. But is not the notion of f­uture, and even f­utures and the futural, inevitably modern? ­There is no need to rehearse here the arguments about the existence of multiple tempo-

218Conclusion ralities among social groups for whom the notion of linear, cumulative time does not make much cultural sense, where even life and death are so intermingled as not to mark beginnings and ends. Moreover, is not the notion of the ­future inevitably compromised in repre­sen­ta­tions of the Global South, where poor countries always end up at the losing end of the “uneven distribution of apocalyptic ­futures” so central, for instance, to climate change discourses?17 Why, then, use ­future(s) at all? Let us see if we can gain further clarity on the issue of ­future(s) that has remained unproblematized in this book so far.

We hinted in the introduction at the idea of the bifurcation taking place regarding the question of “posthuman” f­utures. This is the open question par excellence, regardless of the certainty with which the proponents of the most vis­i­ble answer to the posthuman uphold their views. This bifurcation involves two paths, which we may call “return to Earth” and “the human beyond biology.”18 By the first I mean—in the company of the many sages, activists, and intellectuals from territorialized communities; wise elders from “an alternative West”; and ecological and feminist thinkers—s­omething more than merely ecological or environmentally correct living. Returning to Earth implies developing a genuine capacity to live with the profound implications entailed by the seemingly ­simple princi­ple of radical interdependence. To return to the notion of the biology of love (recall that for its proponents this is not a moral precept but a way to name the structural dynamics of interdependence they discover at the foundation of all life; call it “care” if you prefer): “The biology of love, the manner of living with the other [­human and nonhuman] in the doings or be­hav­iors through which the other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself, and in which we human beings take total responsibility for our emotions and for our rational doings, is not a coexistence in appropriation, control or command” (Maturana and Verden-­Zöller 2008, 118).

Living with the Earth within the biology of love supposes a mode of existence in which relations of mutual care and re­spect are spontaneously realized—­a mode of living that involves our ­whole life and that can take place only within what we have called the communal. It means cultivating this principle not only theoretically but by living it autonomously. It means being actively cognizant of how “patriarchality through mistrust and control, through manipulation and appropriation, through domination and submission, interferes with the biology of love, pushing humans away from the domain of collaboration and mutual re­spect ­towards the domain of po­litical alliances, mutual manipulation, and mutual abuse” (119). Sounds familiar, right? “And as the biology of love is interfered with, our social life comes to an end” (119; emphasis

Conclusion219 added). This is because the biology of love is the principle of all successful sociality. From many territorial groups at pres­ent we learn the chief po­liti­cal implications of this lesson: that the care of communal territories/worlds is the fundamental po­liti­cal task of our times.19

Let us now look at the second scenario, by most counts the most likely to gain the upper hand. This is the overcoming and total transcendence of the organic basis of life dreamed up by the technopatriarchs of the moment. This scenario necessitates an ongoing legitimation of the ontology of separation. It would not have such a hold on the popul­ar imagination ­were it not for the fact that its pivotal constructs—the individual, markets, expert knowledge, science, material wealth—­are paraded ­every night for hours on end on cnn and the like and in the annual rituals of the Davos men and World Bank and International Monetary Fund economists, as if they truly represented the fundaments of ­human life. Be that as it may, the technological imagination is power­ful, even more so perhaps when depicting the final alchemic fantasy of a world that no longer depends on nature. The entire panoply of biological, material, and digital technologies is placed at the ser­vice of this imaginary. Sure, the bodies of animals and plants might tolerate a high level of manipulation if certain fundamental cellular features are respected, so to this extent these developments may justifiably be seen as feasible. The corollary of this possibility, however, is, literally, earth-shattering. A question becomes imperative: “in doing all this, ­will humanness be conserved or lost?” (Maturana and Verden-Zöller 2008, 116). These authors continue:

Ac­cep­tance of the legitimacy of the manipulation of the biosphere in gen eral, and of human life in par­tic­u­lar, becomes the norm in the ser­vice oftechnology through the blindness of non-­systemic [nonrelational] think ing. Does it matter? If technology becomes the most fundamental andcentral feature of ­human endeavors, then indeed it does not ­matter thatin the technological expansion and complication of h­uman activities­human beingness as Homo sapiens-­amans should be lost to be replaced bythe conservation of some new being like Homo sapiens agressans, or Homosapiens arrogans, for example. The conservation of some new Homo sapiensidentity ­will change the course of history, and ­human beingness as Homosapiens-­amans ­shall dis­appear, or it ­will remain hidden in some distantpockets of primitive life…B ut if loving humanness remains impor­tantand valuable for us as human beings, then technology will not determine

220Conclusion­human life, and the biology of intimacy [interconnectedness] ­will not belost or destroyed but ­will be conserved. (119)

We are confronted here with the rise of a posthuman quite dif­fer­ent from that envisioned by posthumanist social theory. The human would not disappear as such, as many environmentalists dread (rightly so), but would mutate into another type of being. The stakes are clear. How shall ontologically oriented design face the quandaries of life beyond biology? Will designers be able to resist the seduction of this power­ful imaginary? For the technoworlds created by ­these imaginations are unfailingly loaded with the promise of unlimited growth, novelty, power, adventure, and wealth (as if t­hese ­were the ultimate criteria of a good life), albeit at the cost of alienating us ever more from our participation in the life of Earth. Will designers be able to contribute to dissuading unreflective publics from succumbing to the virtual realities offered by the patriarchal and capitalistic technological imaginations of the day?20

Is the fundamental question of design t­oday then about diverging imaginations of the ­future? One t­hing is certain, that despite the fact that design has often maintained an utopian tendency, ­today’s professional practice of design has a strong propensity “to abdicate from futuring,” in the face of which it makes sense for transition designers to counter “with a revived insistence on design taking responsibility for the f­utures it materializes” (Tonkinwise 2015, 88). As Fry argues, Sustainment “can only be realized by being constituted as a proj­ect with a specific agenda that is based on a rupture with the telos of past world-­making” (2015, 63; see also Stewart 2015). This notion of the futural goes against the constitutive teleology of patriarchal cap­ital­ist modernity. Perhaps it is only thus that one can hope to ­counter the pervasive defuturing of worlds effected throughout the centuries by the instrumentations of the Enlightenment proj­ect. Moving from the historical (a renewed understanding of our current ontologies and social systems) to the futural might provide some openings to address the question of genuinely open ­futures.

Many ­people, doubtlessly many environmentalists, feel an immense sadness when confronted with the devastation of life. How can one accept a life without the anaconda, the jaguar, or the elephant, or so many birds and millenarian trees, rivers, landscapes, and snowy peaks, or even the smallest living beings that go unnoticed altogether? How can one think about the reconstruction of the House of Life (the Ecozoic) so as to avoid such ­futures? Can one bring back beauty and harmony into the world, so undermined in the name

Conclusion221 of urban comfort and efficiency? There is no doubt that beauty—which for some theorists has actually been an impor­tant piece of evolution, perhaps even its telos (Goodwin 2007; Lubarski 2014)—has been a major victim of the anthropocene; in fact, one may posit that the systematic exile of beauty from modern life is one of its most salient dimensions. These, too, are relevant questions for con­temporary design.

Optimistic readings of the anthropocene are of course welcome if they push against the bound­aries of the techno-­capitalistic liberal mind-­set. Writer and eco-­philosopher Diane Ackerman (2014), for instance, constructs one such hopeful view based on her analy­sis of human agency in the face of ecological disasters, focusing on ­those ­human responses that for her represent a rising consciousness of our partaking of the natur­al world (green-­belt corridors; successful ecosystem restoration programs; recovery of species in extinction through ge­ne­tic science; constructive wilderness management schemes; advances in neuroscience, robotics, nanotechnology, biomaterials, and regenerative medicine; and so forth). Such analyses, it seems to me, need to take into account si­mul­ta­neously the other side, as it ­were, of the kind of global modernity in which we currently live—­the dialectic of the incredible complexity of the current system of global capital ­under corporate control, on the one hand, and the brutal simplicity of its results, on the other, the simplicity that condemns millions of ­people and species to constant destruction, displacement, incarceration, and expulsion, as Saskia Sassen (2014) so eloquently has shown. At stake are veritable “predatory formations” (much more than just rapacious elites) characterized by unheard-of systemic capacities that generate sustained expulsions through novel structures of rule bringing together technological, financial, market, and ­legal innovations, a global operational space to which most governments acquiesce as the said formations go on performing ever more extensive resource grabs (of land, water, the biosphere), leaving human and ecological devastation in their wake. It is these geographies of destruction that we need to pair with our more optimistic readings of ­human agency, lest our analyses end up contributing to more of the same or, worse, widening the space of the expelled.

We should be clear about something: the anthropocene does not start with capitalism and modernity (hence, it is not enough to speak about a “capitalocene”); it stems from much farther back. While it might not be appropriate to speak about a “patriarchocene,” it is impor­tant to acknowledge that it was in the long history of patriarchy that life’s constitutive relationality began to

222Conclusion be systematically broken down, and hence it is ­there that we find the long-standing source of the crisis.

How about the University?

One final question: does the university have any positive role to play in relation to transition and autonomous design? Is the university not irremediably ensconced within the Enlightenment proj­ect just alluded to, with its liberal, anthropocentric, and capitalistic trademarks? Stated in terms of po­liti­cal ontology, is the university not one of the most effective occupying forces of ­people’s lives and territories, along with the State, the police, and the army?21 Can the university ­really move beyond its inexorable ties to the cultures of expertise so decried by Illich throughout his entire oeuvre so that it can serve convivial visions? Can designers and ­those engaged in the recommunalization of life “escape (disabling) education” so that they can design and learn “within grassroots cultures” (Prakash and Esteva 2008), ­those cultures for whom conventional education has meant only the devaluation of their forms of knowledge and lives? Answers to t­hese questions go in all directions, from ­those who advocate for giving up on the university as the site of life-affirming practices to ­those who would fight for its epistemic decolonization and pluralization, especially in the face of the unrelenting corporatization of the academy ­going on in so many countries.

Anne-­Marie Willis’s constructive provocation to the doctoral transition design program at Car­ne­gie Mellon University helps us here. For this design thinker, transition design “is reformist, not revolutionary…It ­doesn’t capture the extent of divestments needed for a significant cultural shift ­towards Sustainment…T­here is a prob­lem in branding and marketing a radical postgraduate program, a program intending, if it is serious, to dismantle the system” (2015, 70). This is so ­because of the pervasive commodification, instrumentalization, and corporatization of higher education. Founded on the princi­ples of separation and disconnection from the natu­ral world, academic knowledge in general seems unprepared to provide us with the earth-wise knowledge needed for the integral functioning of humans and the Earth. Neither does it seem capable of accommodating the rooted, incarnated vernacular knowledges of the “refusenik cultures” with their wisdom about dwelling, presence, and place that is essential for the reclaiming of the commons and the rerooting of worlds (Prakash and Esteva 2008).

Can academic knowledge be made less hierarchical and elitist? In the Latin American decolonial theory grammar, this is known as epistemic decolonization.

Conclusion223 Epistemic decolonization involves critically assessing “which concepts are we moved by and how we move ­those concepts and theories that are presupposed in the decisions that affect us day in and day out” (P. Botero 2013, 44). Within this perspective—­aptly called “collective research and action”—“the communities are an integral part of knowledge as researchers, and the researchers are part of the collective ­doing” (44).22

This reflection gives me pause to return to the location of the pres­ent work. Is not this book also part of the same acad­emy? No doubt it is, in both its language and its mode of construction. Could it also be part of the decolonizing effort? Perhaps, although this ­will depend on the decolonizing practices and discourses in which it might successfully participate. I want to emphasize, more than anything, that this book is not another attempt, no ­matter how well intentioned, to teach others how to be or what to do, especially not those communities struggling for their autonomy. They know what to do better than anybody ­else. In this sense, the book is not proselytizing nor developmentalist. I have presented these ideas as a working hypothesis, more pertinent perhaps for ­those of us who spend most of our lives in the spaces most directly shaped by the individualizing and objectifying modern categories, from which we are ever attempting to disentangle ourselves, with limited success at best. Let us say, in the spirit of cultural studies, that the ideas contained ­here are ­shaped by my reading of the current conjuncture; it is, however, a historical reading that pertains to many ­people and groups, albeit not to all.

Revisiting the Stakes

At the other extreme from the views of the techno-­fathers and the marketers, we find complexity theory biologist Brian Goodwin’s vision of “the ­great transformation”:

I am optimistic that we can go through the transition as an expression ofthe continually creative emergence of organic form that is the essence ofthe living pro­cess in which we participate. Like the caterpillar that wraps itselfup in its silken swaddling bands prior to metamorphosis into a butterfly, wehave wrapped ourselves in a tangled skein from which we can emerge onlyby ­going through a similar dramatic transformation. In the world of insects,this transformation occurs as a result of a self-­digestion, a meltdown of thecaterpillar in which only a few living foci of living tissue, the imaginal discs,remain intact. It is from this that the legs, wings, antennae, body segmentsand other structures of the adult form emerge as an integrated, transformed

224Conclusionbeing, the butterfly. What the cultural correspondences of this meta­phormight mean we can only speculate. (2007, 177)

For some indigenous and other subaltern ­peoples in Latin Amer­i­ca, this ­great transformation is none other than the pachakuti: a profound overhaul of the existing social order, not as a result of a sudden act or a new ­great synthesis of knowledge or novel agreements, but of an expansive and steady, albeit discontinuous, effort to permanently unsettle and alter the established order. The pachakuti, or the ­great cycles of the Mayan calendar, are long-­standing concepts of ­peoples who are strictly contemporaneous, that is, ­peoples for whom “­there is no post' nor pre’ ­because their vision of history is neither linear nor teleological; it sketches a path without ceasing to return to the same point” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2014, 6). The pachakuti “evokes an inversion of historical time, the insurgency of a past and a ­future that might culminate in catastrophe or renewal…What is experienced is a change of consciousness and a transformation in identities, modes of knowing, and modes of conceiving of politics” (6).

It seems daring to apply these concepts to the transitions into which we are being thrown at pres­ent, but I find in them a more constructive way of thinking about human ­futures than in the prescriptions in vogue given to us by established institutions, such as the impoverished post-2015 sustainable development agenda or, even less so, the technological alchemies of the day, which would most certainly cause even greater destruction of the Earth with their offering of illusive f­utures.

Perhaps we can hear the rumblings of the pachakuti in the transition initiatives and grassroots strug­gles for autonomy in so many parts of the world, as in Arundhati Roy’s poetic evocation of it, “Another world is not only pos­si­ble, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” (quoted in Macy 2007, 17). For this pro­cess to take off on a surer footing, albeit in unpredictable directions, the dream of fitting all worlds into one has fi­nally to be put on hold.

Epilogue

Rethinking design from the vantage point of relationality, and vice versa, was a major aspect of this book, as was the proposition that autonomy (again, in the con­temporary Latin American sense, not as found in Kantian moral philosophy or in classical liberalism) can be an expression of the radical relationality of life. Together, t­hese two lines of argumentation—on design and autonomy—­allowed me to propose a praxis space generated by the interplay

Conclusion225 of an ethics of world making and a politics of social existence, and to bring a pro­cessual and relational ethics into design itself and into all we do.

The propositions presented in this book have oscillated between a politics of the real and a politics of the pos­si­ble—­between pragmatism and utopi­anism, if you wish. The politics of the real, as should be clear, redefines the politics of the possible, and vice versa; this is one of the strong arguments of neorealism. By adopting a perspective of radical relationality one not only multiplies the reals but redraws the maps of what is pos­si­ble. Yet this does not do away with the dire questions of po­liti­cal strategy posed by the current conjuncture. What are the best ways of going about the redesign of t­hose institutions that keep unsustainability, growing in­equality, and odious, unacceptable levels of injustice in place? Of Thomas Berry’s (1999) four institutional formations responsible for unsustainability (governments, universities, or­ga­nized religions, and corporations), it is clearly the fourth that continues to gain the upper hand-in fact, one of its major triumphs has been to deploy its central logics in the midst of the other three, as attested by the steady corporatization of higher education and the State that has taken place over the past three de­cades.

­There is an imperative need to fight over governments, universities, and spiritualties by reimagining them through the lens of relationality, lest we continue to be subject to the logic underlined by Walter Benjamin long ago, that “even the dead ­will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this ­enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (1968, 264). In the same oft-­quoted thesis, Benjamin redefines the politics of the real: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to seize it ‘as it ­really was’…It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger…In ­every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition anew from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (265). Tell this to the co­ali­tion of Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation so courageously and brilliantly opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline; they have long known what it means to be the victims of naturalized traditions of dominance, for they have faced a politics of genocide and erasure that seems never to come to an end, an enemy that continues to be victorious. Through their struggle, they summon the past in order to shake up our established politics of the pos­si­ble and the real.

The return of the Right occurring in so many countries on every continent is not so much an indication that the immediately preceding regimes ­were much better—­they stemmed from the same traditions Benjamin spoke about, ­those of dominant modernities—but of the pains to which such traditions go to achieve self-­reproduction. The resulting structures of rule being set in

226Conclusion place at pres­ent might end up being even more exclusionary and damaging than t­hose they are seeking to replace; if this proves to be the case, nineteenth-and twentieth-­century modernity would indeed look in retrospect like benign, well-i­ntentioned, and enlightened social ­orders, as their found­ers and defenders claim. Nevertheless, as the social basis for dispossession widens (proliferating extractivism, truly massive displacement and expulsion, xenophobia, growing incarceration…) , so do the fields of potential antagonisms multiply, and thus so might the seeds of potentially impor­tant transformations.

This is the source from which the digna rabia (rightful anger) springs, the forceful outrage that so many ­people, from all walks of life, feel in Donald Trump’s United States, Mauricio Macri’s Argentina, or Michel Temer’s Brazil, to speak only of the most flagrant cases in the Amer­icas. Thinking about the effective redesign of institutions in this context becomes one of the most pressing cultural-­political proj­ects in which the acad­emy can engage; at its best, it ­will do it by joining forces with on-t­he-­ground strug­gles fighting for justice and the active acknowl­edgment of the value of all forms of life in the world.

Notes

Conclusion

The opening poem was translated by John Chasteen, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

1 Remark made at one of the events on the Mexican crisis convened ­under the rubric “Defending Our Common House,” or­ga­nized by Gustavo Esteva and held in Mexico City on November 16-21, 2015. The Rarámuri ­were formerly known as Tarahumara.

2 “Lo que vamos aprendiendo con la Liberación de Uma Kiwe,” from the website of the Tejido de Comunicación Asociación de Cabildos del Norte del Cauca, http://­anterior. nasaacin.­org/­index.­php/­nuestra-­palabra/­7987-­lo-­que-­vamos-­aprendiendo-­con-­la -­liberaci%C3%B3n-de-uma­kiwe, accessed June 8, 2017.

3 “Lo que vamos aprendiendo.” 4 “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can f­ree our minds…

­Won’t you help to sing ­these songs of freedom, it’s all I ever had, redemption songs.” From the album Uprising (1980). 5 Yet one finds statements critical of capitalism in the transition design lit­er­a­ture, for instance, from Cameron Tonkinwise: “Within design thinking ­there is an idealistic drive ­toward anti-­capitalism, or at least anti-­business-­as-­usual” (2012, 14). At the same time, the same author warns that design “tends to be ameliorative rather than po­liti­cally pursuing structural change” (2015, 87). 6 This idea has found a recent lucid expression in the domain of insurrectionary politics: “The biggest prob­lem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead…[Its end] has been clinically established for a century” (Invisible Committee 2015, 29). Talk of crisis is a surrogate for the realization that it is the West that is the catastrophe—­nobody is out to destroy the West; it is destroying itself. 7 I owe the idea of extending Gibson-­Graham’s analy­sis of capitalism to modernity to Nicolás Sánchez, who suggested it in one of the sessions of my Anthropology of Design gradu­ate seminar in the spring of 2016. 8 My concern with the risks of pluralizing modernity has benefited greatly from discussions with friends in several parts of the world. ­These friends rightly point, conversely, at two risks in the pluriversal position: the alterization of difference (locating difference, and hope for change, in the more clearly identifiable subaltern groups, such as ethnic minorities) and the tendency to treat modernity as hegemonic and homogeneous. All worlds have to be historicized deeply—­all worlds (­whether traditional or modern) contain a judicious mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. 9 Nandy’s remark was made in reference to Gandhi. For Nandy, one of the paradoxical implications of Gandhi’s thought was that “it is more civil not to be civilized in the modern sense” (Nandy 1987, 146). 10 The ritual of la ombligada (ombligo means “navel”) refers to the act of burying the umbilical cord and the placenta after a child is born near the house or under a tree by the edge of the forest (for girls and boys, respectively). The navel of the newborn is subsequently filled with a pulverized natural substance—­animal, plant, or mineral—in such a way as to transmit the substance’s properties to the individual. In so doing, the newborn is deeply connected to the territory and made to partake in some fashion of the rest of the natu­ral world. See Escobar (2008, 113-115) for a description and analysis of this ritual, including the main ethnographic studies of it in the Colombian Pacific. 11 “Contingentists preserve the world’s real­ity”—­concludes Sharma—­“just by their refusal to posit an order that is radically external to subjects, a truth that perceivers will never attain, or a real­ity from which subjects are forever separated” (2015, 98). This is consistent with Maturana and Varela’s solution, already quoted in chapter 3, of finding “a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at ­every moment, but without any point of reference inde­pendent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions” (1987, 241). 12 We discussed this question intensely with a group of ten doctoral students at my weeklong seminar on the anthropology of design at the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán in October 2015. I thank all the seminar participants for their insights. Thanks also to Enrique Leff and Gustavo Esteva for conversations on the same issue, held in Mexico City in November 2015, and to Walter Mignolo (conversation in Durham, North Carolina, May 26, 2016). The position taken ­here is, of course, mine. 13 The points about Amazonian knowledge became clear to me after pre­sen­ta­tions and discussions with don Abel Rodríguez, an indigenous botanist and healer from the Nonuya nation (Colombian Amazon), and with don Abel’s partners, the anthropologists Carlos Rodríguez and María Clara van der Hammen, from Tropenbos International in Bogotá (http://­www.tropenbos.­org/­country_­programmes/­colombia). ­These conversations also included designer and visual artist Fernando Arias, from More Art, More Action (http://­www.­masartemasaccion.­org/­), and anthropologist Astrid Ulloa. The conversations took place at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on March 31-­April 1, 2016. See also van der Hammen (1992). 14 Disoñar is made up of two words, diseñar (to design) and soñar (to dream); the intention is to bridge t­hose two activities, formulate new utopias, and come up with creative solutions to livelihood prob­lems. The concept started to be used in Cali by the poet and environmentalist León Octavio in the late 1980s (conversation with Cristina Ríos, Chapel Hill, April 2016, and with León Octavio, Cali, October 2016). According to Adolfo Albán Achinte, from the Universidad del Cauca, the concept has been in use among groups in Cauca since the late 1980s (conversation in Popayán, October 2015). It is now used by a few groups in several countries in Latin Amer­i­ca; ­there is a periodic “International Encounter of Disoñadores” and meetings of disoñadores para el Buen Vivir (Disoñadores for Buen Vivir). ­Every year, peasant activists and intellectuals gather in Manizales, Colombia, for an annual gathering called Ecovida (EcoLife), whose purpose is to disoñar the territory and the defense of life. See the Proceedings of the Gathering of Disoñadores del Futuro, held in Nariño, Colombia, in 1996 (Asociación Para el Desarrollo Campesino 1996). 15 The pluriverse, one can say, is fractal, or endowed with self-­similarity: anywhere you look at it, and at any scale, you find similar (yet not the same) configurations, meshes, assemblages…that is, the pluriverse.

Notes to Conclusion 257 16 The concept ­here is that of “controlled equivocations” (originally proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), a condition obtained when one becomes aware of what might be lost in translation ­because the worlds in question only partially share their categories, or not at all (see de la Cadena 2015, 116).

17 The perceptive notion of the “uneven distribution of apocalyptic ­futures” was proposed by Saydia Kamal, a recent PhD graduate at unc-­Chapel Hill from Bangladesh, in expressing her concern with the many lopsided repre­sen­ta­tions that paint her country as the poster child of food crises and climate change effects, thus calling for an entire politics of intervention and governance by international nongovernmental organi­zations in the name of adaptation (conversation in Chapel Hill, March 2016). My thanks to Saydia and other students pres­ent for this enlightening discussion on the risks of speaking about ­future(s).

18 I am doing a play on words with the subtitle of Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When ­Humans Transcend Biology (2006). Tonkinwise exemplifies this bifurcation in terms of “smart green ­future cities” and “cyborgian singularity” (2015, 88).

19 It is also, a bit unexpectedly perhaps, the lesson drawn by insurrectionary anarchists: “The first duty of revolutionaries is to take care of the worlds they constitute” (Invisible Committee 2015, 194).

20­Will we even know the difference between the two (or perhaps more) posthuman scenarios? “The inferno of the living is not something that ­will be; if ­there is one, it is what is already ­here, the inferno where we live ­every day, that we form by being together. ­There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space” (Italo Calvino, 1972, 165). Or, for one final music tribute, another expression of the same thought: “So, do you think you can tell Heaven from hell, blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?” (Pink Floyd, “Wish You ­Were ­Here,” 1975).

21 I am aware that this is a very strong statement. While ­there are certainly hundreds of worthy endeavors and life-affirming examples of academic knowledge, taken as a whole the acad­emy, I say, is an instrument of ontological occupation. This is particularly true for elite universities. The more elite the university (e.g., the Ivy League in the United States and like-­minded institutions), the closer to power circles, the more distant from poor ­people’s lives and emotions, and the more invested they are in maintaining business-­as-usual options.

22 The collective research and action is based on the notion of “social theory in movement,” a kind of theory that “takes the quotidian re­sis­tance of the communities as its point of departure in order to crystallize actions conceived from the communal locus of enunciation, as the communities weave plural collective meanings from within their own diversity; in ­doing so, such theory constructs a place of counter-­power to homogeneous theorizing with its modeling of the world in terms of pro­gress, order, and development” (P. Botero 2013, 30). ­Here we find an alternative understanding of theory and its role in research for social transformation.

258 Notes to Conclusion