Thus we confront the prob­lem of understanding how our experience—t­he praxis of our living—is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at ­every instant the result of our biological and social histories. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of ­Human Understanding

The ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture ­because a major ­factor in its development has been the rationalist culture and the associated hum­an/nature dualism characteristic of the West… Rationalist culture has distorted many spheres of h­u­man life; its remaking is a major but essential cultural enterprise…The ecological crisis we face is thus… a crisis of the culture of reason or of what the dominant culture has made of reason. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason

Más allá de la razón hay un mundo de colores.
”­There is a world of colors beyond reason.” Adolfo Albán Achinte, Más allá de la razón hay un mundo de colores

To pose the question of a redirection of design in a fundamental manner, it is necessary to venture into the cultural and philosophical tradition from which it arises and within which it functions with such ease. Con­temporary philosophy and cultural theory abound in critical analyses of this tradition, usually ­under the guise of the critique of metaphysics (the illustrious tradition from Friedrich Nietz­sche and Martin Heidegger to Gianni Vattimo and Michel Foucault) or the critical analys­is of modernity (Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Charles Taylor, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour, to mention just a few in Eur­o­pean and Anglo-­American scholarship, to which we should add contributions from the fields of cultural studies and postcolonial and decolonial theory). In this section, however, I will draw on a little-­known set of authors precisely because they foreground the question of design. The preferred term utilized by ­these authors to refer to the pervasive cultural background within which much of our con­temporary world unfolds is the rationalistic tradition. I should make it clear, however, that what I am trying to make here is not a philosophical argument per se, but a claim about a broader cultural phenomena: the effects of a “tradition” in orienting people’s (including designers’) ways of thinking and being. My interest also lies in making connections among this tradition, the ecological crisis, and the cultural and po­liti­cal struggles around nature and difference in Latin Amer­ica.1

Rationalism and the Cartesian Tradition

The tradition we are talking about is variously referred to as rationalistic, Cartesian, or objectivist and is often associated with related terms such as mechanistic (worldview), reductionistic (science), positivistic (epistemology), and, more recently, computationalist (model). For Francisco Varela, the term that best captures the tradition is abstract, by which he means “this tendency to find our way ­toward the rarified atmosphere of the general and the formal, the logical and the well defined, the represented and the foreseen, which characterizes our Western world” (1999, 6). This is an apt definition of logocentrism, or the belief in logical truth as the only valid (or main) grounds for knowledge about an objective world made up of ­things that can be known (and hence ordered and manipulated at ­will; see Vattimo 1991). For now, suffice it to say that at the basis of the tradition are assumptions about the correspondence between language and real­ity, or repre­sen­ta­tion/thought and the real. In or­ga­nized science as much as in daily life, this tradition operates in pervasive ways (see Winograd and Flores 1986, ch. 2; Nandy 1987). In science it is connected to what biologist Lynn Margulis and collaborators have descriptively called the “Cartesian license” (Sagan, Margulis, and Guerrero 1997, 172), which not only placed “man” on the highest rung of the ladder of being but led science to investigate real­ity by separating mind and ­matter, body and soul, and life and nonlife—­what they call a kind of forgery that ­imagined a dead cosmos of inanimate ­matter.

This is, of course, well-­trodden terrain in Western philosophy. We ­shall see, however, why Varela views this feature of our knowledge practices as limiting in some fundamental ways, including for the very philosophical traditions that call it into question. We ­shall also see how it shapes some of the strongest structures of the dominant form of Euro-­modernity (the belief in the individual, in the real, in science, and in the economy as self-­constituted entities). Fi­nally, we ­will discuss the extent to which the tradition is deeply connected to a determining feature of such modernity, namely, ontological dualisms. ­These dualisms underlie an entire structure of institutions and practices through which the oww idea is enacted, effecting at the same time a remoteness from the worlds that we inevitably weave with others and from the natural world, a feature that we ­will locate at the basis of not only the ecological crisis but also attempts to redress it, ­whether through relational practices of design (see the next chapter) or po­liti­cal action informed by the relational and communal logics of some social movements (chapter 6). There is thus a concrete purpose in introducing the rationalistic tradition ­here before tackling these other issues.

Let us start with a peculiar reading by Varela and colleagues of the Cartesian/rationalistic tradition: “It is b­ecause reflection in our culture has been severed from its bodily life that the mind-­body prob­lem has become a topic for abstract reflection. Cartesian dualism is not so much one competing solution as it is the formulation of this prob­lem” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 30). As a formulation of the question of the relations among mind, body, and experience, it is partial at best. A clear example of the shortcomings of this approach is the standard conceptualization of cognition as the repre­senta­tion by a discrete mind of a preexisting, separate world (cognition as the manipulation of symbols). For Varela and colleagues, this is fundamentally mistaken; for them, rather than “the repre­sen­ta­tion of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind,” cognition is “the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (9). When you think about it, it makes perfect sense: mind is not separate from body, and both are not separate from the world, that is, from the ceaseless and always-changing flow of existence that constitutes life (or can you r­eally separate them out?). By positing the notion of cognition as repre­sen­ta­tion, we are all cut off from the stream of life in which we are ineluctably and immediately immersed as living beings.

They call this view cognition as enaction (embodied action). It is based on the assumption of the fundamental unity of being and world, of our inevitable thrownness into the world (or throwntogetherness, to use geographer Doreen Massey’s [2004] wonderful neologism).2 It also assumes that the primary condition of existence is embodied presence, a dwelling in the world (see also Ingold 2000, 2011). By linking cognition to experience, our authors lead us into an altogether dif­fer­ent tradition. In this tradition we recognize in a profound way that “the world is not something that is given to us but something we engage in by moving, touching, breathing, eating” (Varela 1999, 8). A number of consequences follow. The first is that while there is indeed a distinction between self and world in this view, t­here is also a fundamental continuity between them (emphatically expressed in the dictum that t­here is an “unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing”; Maturana and Varela 1987, 25); the rationalistic tradition remains at the level of the divide, thus missing much of what goes on in life. Second, while we live in a world accessible through reflection, this accessibility is limited; ­here lies one of the traps.

As Humberto Maturana tellingly underscores, ­there is an emotional side to all forms of rationality in that ­every rational domain is founded on emotional grounds, “and it is our emotions that determine the rational domain in which we operate as rational beings at any instant” (1997, 5); in other words, even the decision to be rational is an emotional decision. The consequences are far from negligible: “We are rarely aware that it is our emotions that guide our living even when we claim that we are being rational…[a]nd in the long run we do not understand our cultural existence” (6; emphasis added). In addition, all modes of knowledge based on reason get at only part of the ­human experience, the reflexive part, bracketing its immediate, lived aspects, that is, our essential historicity. This historicity is most cogently expressed by Maturana and Varela in the quote that opened this chapter: “Thus we confront the prob­lem of understanding how our experience—t­he praxis of our living—is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at ­every instant the result of our biological and social histories.” The implication for knowledge of this inevitable immersion is that we need to find “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” (Maturana and Varela 1987, 241; see also 1980).

This injunction has been anathema to the Western rationalistic tradition, for which the world out t­here preexists our interactions. In the enactive approach, we are always immersed in a network of interactions that are at every instant the result of our biological and cultural histories. We necessarily cocreate the world with others (­humans and nonhumans) with whom we live in coexistence. The ultimate conclusion drawn by Maturana and Varela is no less startling, and equally foreign to modern logocentrism: “We have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth” (1987, 248). The Buddhist notion of dependent coarising, the complexity theory concept of emergence, Maturana and Gerda Verden-Z­öller’s (2008) biology of love, and the feminist emphasis on care and love agree with this view. ­These are principles of relationality. But before we go t­here, I’d like to briefly discuss some other consequences of the rationalistic tradition, starting with the individual. Four beliefs—in the individual, science, the economy, and the real—­are part of the default setting of design theory and practice as we know it; in other words, design inevitably takes place within such an ontological background.

Four Fundamental Beliefs in the Modern Onto-­epistemic Order

The Belief in the Individual

One of the most profound—and even damaging—consequences of the rationalistic tradition is the belief in the individual. This belief, one might say, constitutes one of design’s main wicked prob­lems. Throughout the centuries, colonialism, modernization, development, and globalization have been the economic and po­litical proj­ects that carried with them into most other world cultures the Trojan ­horse of the individual, destroying communal and place-based forms of relating (Esteva and Prakash 1998). This continues to be a neglected dimension in analyses of neoliberal globalization—­the fact that it entails a veritable cultural war against relational ways of being and the imperial imposition of the cultural regime of the market-­based individual. The genealogy of the modern individual has of course been traced in critical scholarship (e.g., by Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, and Taylor). It has been linked to the history of needs, disciplinary practices, commoditization (the Marxist theory of ­labor and alienation), and a ­whole set of po­liti­cal technologies centered on the self. Despite ­these analyses, the notion that we exist as separate individuals (the possessive or autonomous individual of liberal theory, endowed with rights and ­free ­will) continues to be one of the most enduring, naturalized, and deleterious fictions in Western modernity (see Dreyfus and Kelly 2011 for a compelling recent analysis of the cultural nihilism associated with this belief that resonates with the concerns of this book).

Melanesian and Amazonian ethnography has been particularly effective in unsettling the trope of the modern self by showing the rich gamut of social regimes of personhood that do not conform to Western notions of the self, many of which are deeply relational (e.g., Strathern 1988; Battaglia 1995; Viveiros de Castro 2010). Buddhism, of course, has for over twenty-­five hundred years developed a power­ful theory and practice of living based precisely on the nonexistence of what we call the self—in fact, for Buddhism, attachment to the self and fixation on an objectivist notion of the real are the fundamental causes of suffering rather than freedom. Mindfulness meditation is geared toward cultivating a nonconceptual wisdom that transcends the subject/object division. A main teaching in this tradition is that all ­things without exception are empty of essence (a lesson the modern academy has been grappling with for only a few de­cades through the notion of antiessentialism). A correlate notion, already mentioned, is that nothing exists by itself, that every­thing interexists; this theory of interbeing is a power­ful critique of the modern idea that whatever we perceive is real in and of itself .3

The Buddhist realization of the empty self finds a correlate in Varela’s notion of the virtual self, derived from the biology of cognition and theories of emergence and self-­organization. This virtual self is “a coherent pattern that emerges from the activity of s­imple local components, which seems to be centrally located, but is nowhere to be found, and yet is essential as a level of interaction for the be­hav­ior of the ­whole” (1999, 53; see also Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). The mind/self is an emergent property of a distributed network, or rather of a patchwork of subnetworks, from neurons to language and symbols, assembled by a complex pro­cess of tinkering, which neither has a uniform structure nor is the result of a unified design (e.g., Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 105; Sharma 2015). In the end, one can say that “the cognitive self is its own implementation: its history and its action are of one piece” (Varela 1999, 54; italics in the original). Alternatively, one may say that the self is a nexus “within a continuously unfolding field of relations” (Ingold 2011, xii). The idea of the nonexistence of the self—or a profoundly relational notion of the self—is simpler than it sounds. Sometimes I ask my students, somewhat jokingly, ­whether they have seen the self; hard to pinpoint, ­isn’t it? This absence of a self, however, does not entail placing in doubt the stability of the world, nor the world’s regularities and coherences (more on this l­ater). What it means is that we also have to give up, along with the notion of a personal self, the idea of a world that has a fixed and ultimate ground.4

Despite its emphasis on participation and interactivity, the emergent design culture that I described in the last two chapters continues to function within a Cartesian view of the world as made up of individuals and t­hings; this belief shapes the notion of design agency. The hold of the individual as the design agent par excellence is beginning to loosen, however, and the newer tendencies aim to find a balance between disembedded and relational understandings of the person. Two par­tic­ul­ar notions can be credited for this impor­tant change. The first is the idea that design takes place ­today in systems of distributed agency, power, and expertise, within which it is becoming more difficult to maintain the fiction of the isolated individual, and even that of the designer genius at work in the studio. Closely related are the notions of codesign and dialogic collaboration, through which designers and common folk alike “rediscover the power of doing ­things together” (Manzini 2015, 24). The reawakening of things local and communal fits into this changing landscape of design conditions. Echoing Ivan Illich’s critique of the disabling nature of modern technologies, Ezio Manzini finds in the growing desire to abandon individualistic lifestyles a hopeful condition for collaborative design (94-98). From the design world, then, ­there is also relational pressure being exerted on that most recalcitrant of modern constructs, the so-­called individual. More, however, is needed before relational personhood can become the default setting in a postindividualist world. This takes us into the second strong structure of modernity, the belief in the real.

The Belief in the Real

What can be more real than the world on which we plant our feet, or the surrounding world into which our minds seemingly awake? Fair enough. The issue, however, is how the rationalistic tradition translates this basic datum of experience into the belief in an objective real­ity or an outside world, prior to, and in­de­pen­dent of, the multiplicity of interactions that produce it. This objectivist stance is at the basis of much design practice and needs to be tempered in a nondualist ontological conception of design. For one thing, this belief in the real leads to an ethos of human mastery over nature, a pillar of patriarchal culture. It disempowers us for partnering with nature and other humans in a truly collaborative, earth-­wise, and stream-­of-­life manner. Such a notion of the real also buttresses the idea of a single world that calls for one truth about it. Social movements such as the Zapatistas have pointed to this assumption of One World or of a universe with One Truth as the basis of neoliberal globalization, so it has become a target of many social movements, to which they counterpose a view of a world where many worlds fit. Science and technology studies has discussed at length the process by which the “unfolding but generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce par­tic­u­lar realities,” which makes up the world as multiple, gets reduced to a “single out-­thereness” that then becomes the stuff of our experience (Law 2004, 7). By enacting a One-­World World (oww), this Euro-­American metaphysics, as John Law calls it, effaces multiple realities through complex pro­cesses of power. By ethnographically showing how dif­fer­ent realities are patched together into discrete “out-­therenesses,” one could hope to counteract the ontological politics of the oww with another that operates on the basis of radical ontological difference and pluriversality (Law 2011; Mol 1999; Blaser 2010; de la Cadena 2010; Escobar 2014). This politics is crucial for ontological design.

The notion of the OWW signals the predominant idea in the West that we all live within a single world, made up of one underl­ying real­ity (one nature) and many cultures. This imperialistic notion supposes the West’s ability to arrogate for itself the right to be “the world,” and to subject all other worlds to its rules, to diminish them to secondary status or to nonexistence, often figuratively and materially. It is a very seductive notion, however; the best way to dispel it is, perhaps, ethnographically and decolonially, as Law suggests. “[T]­here is a difference,” he states, invoking a comparative ethnographic argument:

In a Eur­o­pean or Northern way of thinking the world carries on by itself.­People ­don’t perform it. It’s outside us and we are contained by it. But that’s not true for [Australian] aboriginal p­eople. The idea of a real­ity out ­there, detached from the work and the rituals that constantly re-­enact it, makes no sense. Land ­doesn’t belong to ­people. Perhaps it would be better to say that­people belong to the land. Or, perhaps even better still, we might say that pro­cesses of continuous creation redo land, ­people, life and the spiritual world altogether, and in specific locations. (2011, 1)

As he hastens to say, what is involved ­here is not a ­matter of beliefs (or, worse, the assumption that our Western view is the truth, since it is validated by science, whereas theirs is just a belief) but a ­matter of reals. The question for design remains, what would it take for designers to operate without a purely objectivist and single vision of the real? To embrace the notion that design practices, too, might contribute to creating multiple notions of out-thereness, rather than a single one? And, moreover, to take seriously the view that real­ity is an ongoing and continuous flow of forms and intensities of all kinds? We ­will get back to ­these questions in our discussion of the relational ontologies mobilized in territorial strug­gles in Latin Amer­ic­a.

Nobody within the Anglo-­American acade­my has crafted a view as c­ounter to the ontology of the OWW as Tim Ingold (2000, 2011). In this anthropologist’s view, the world is anything but static and inanimate, not an inert container. It is rather a meshwork made up of interwoven threads or lines, always in movement. As much as any other living being, ­humans are immersed in this meshwork. Drawing insights from animist cultures and philosophies, Ingold (like some transition visionaries and biologists and many indigenous and spiritual teachers) arrives at the idea of a sentient universe. The resulting framework cannot but be deeply relational; a sentient universe is one in which “it is the dynamic transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds…continuously and reciprocally bring one another into existence” (2011, 68). To sum up, “­things are their relations” (74; see also Strathern 1991). It should be clear that in such a vision of the world it is practically impossible to demarcate a single, stable real.5 To be able to do so, one has to parcel out entire domains of the meshwork as inanimate; this is precisely one of the modern operations par excellence; indeed, moderns imagine the world as an inanimate surface to be occupied; for many relational cultures, on the contrary, h­umans and other beings inhabit a world that is alive.6 While moderns occupy space, nonmoderns dwell in places by moving along the lines and threads that produce the place. It is instructive to quote again from Ingold to dispel once and for all the OWW idea: “Rather than thinking of ourselves only as observers, picking our way around the objects lying about on the ground of a ready-­formed world, we must imagine ourselves in the first place as participants, each immersed with the ­whole of our being in the currents of a world-i­n-­formation: in the sunlight we see, the rain we hear and the wind we feel in. Participation is not opposed to observation but is a condition for it, just as light is a condition for seeing ­things, sound for hearing them, and feeling for touching them” (2011, 129).

One of the most cogent instantiations of this idea was actually developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by scholars who started to conceptualize the circularity between observer and observed within what came to be known as second-­order cybernetics (or the cybernetics of ­observing systems). ­Going against the grain of dominant ­scientific positions that posited the separation of the observer from the observed as the princip­le of objectivity, ­these theorists argued that this separation was not only impossible but even undesirable. In his poetic recollection of this development at a conference in Paris in 1991, Heinz von Foerster (perhaps the central figure in the movement) claimed, “I would like you to join me in a land where [the nonseparation of observer and observed] is not forbidden; rather, where one is encouraged to write about oneself. What else can one do, anyway”? (1991, 2). Explaining the historical shift from looking at t­hings “out t­here” (acting as if one ­were an in­de­pen­dent observer “that watches the world go by,” as if “through a peephole”) to “looking at looking itself,” he concludes, “What is new is the profound insight that a brain is required to write a theory of a brain…[Thus, one is rather] a person who considers oneself to be a participant actor in the drama of mutual interaction of the give and take in the circularity of ­human relations” (2). His ultimate conclusion is still at the center of debates on the real ­today: that to act is to change oneself and the unfolding universe as well.7

In other words, we are not radically separate from what we commonly conceive of as external real­ity, but rather such real­ity comes into being moment by moment through our participation in the world (see also Sharma 2015, 4). Is it even pos­si­ble to think about design in such a deeply relational, processual, historicized, and seemingly ever-­moving and ever-­changing life, a world always in formation? This is one of the main questions to be tackled in the next chapter.

The Belief in Science

The belief in the real is largely validated by an equally naturalized belief in the concept of science as the foundation of valid knowledge claims in modern socie­ties. Besides the well-known discussions in modern social theory about the status of science, say, from philosophical (critique of epistemological realism), feminist (phallogocentrism), and other poststructuralist perspectives (the politics of science-­based truth claims), t­here are lesser-known currents that figure infrequently, or too tangentially, in the former set of analyses—­for example, debates about indigenous, local, and traditional ecological knowledge; discussions about the geopolitics of knowledge and epistemic decolonization; concerns with cognitive justice; and so forth. Besides showing how the hegemony of modern knowledge works to make invisible other knowledges and ways of being, some of ­these tendencies highlight the links between hegemonic scientific practices and vio­lence and oppression in non-­Western contexts.

Such is the case with what in my mind is one of the most enlightening set of critiques of modern science, namely, that produced somewhat collectively by a group of South Asian cultural critics who offer brilliant examples of the dissenting imagination.8 Investigating the effects of science in third-world contexts, as the work of ­these intellectuals shows, provides for a very differ­ent reading of science, one that, while acknowledging that metropolitan science might have been associated historically with dissent, demonstrates that not only has this ceased to be the case but science has become the most central po­litical technology of authoritarianism, irrationality, and oppression of peoples and nature. As a reason of state, science operates as the most effective idiom of violent development and even standardizes the formats of dissent. In the face of this, the semiarticulate protests of the subaltern rise, at times becoming creative assessments of Western knowledge, lessening science’s hegemony and keeping alive a plurality of consciousnesses. Of par­tic­u­lar interest for our concern with relationality and design is the argument that, by splitting cognition and affect and ideas from feelings, in the interest of objectivity, science contributes to heightening modernity’s tendency t­oward pathologies of isolation and vio­lence, enabling scientists to get credit for constructive discoveries while avoiding responsibility for the destructive ones.

Or­ga­nized science thus becomes ine­ffect­ive as an ally against authoritarianism and increasingly dependent on market-­based vested interests. This motivates the power­ful and perhaps startling indictment, by Ashis Nandy, that “of all the utopias which threaten to totalize the ­human consciousness, the most seductive in our times has been the one produced by modern science and technology” (1987, 10). In this way, science loses sight of its potential role in the search for nonoppressive forms of culture and society. It cannot even enter into dialogue with other forms of knowledge given its de facto claim to have the monopoly on knowledge, compassion, and ethics. Awareness of this epistemic politics that characterizes mainstream science becomes a required ele­ment when designers and others are working with marginalized groups.

The Belief in the Economy

It is not surprising to find a most acerbic assessment of economics from the same pen: “Our ­future is being conceptualized and s­haped by the modern witchcraft called the science of economics” (Nandy 1987, 107). The issue goes well beyond economics per se in the sense that the rise of this science since the late eigh­teenth ­century hides an even more pervasive civilizational development, namely, the invention of something called the economy as a separate domain of thought and action, linked to another power­ful fiction, the self-­regulating market—­with the science of economics purportedly capable of telling us the truth about it.9 It might well be the case that neoliberal economics has been shaken by the financial crisis of 2007-2008, but its imaginary—­individuals transacting in markets, unfettered production of commodities, unlimited growth, accumulation of capital, pro­gress, scarcity, and consumption—goes on unhindered. The result, as Tony Fry puts it, is that “the ­future is being butchered on the slaughter bench of economic growth” (2015, 93).

This highly naturalized discourse undermines most of the current proposals for sustainability and for moving to a postcarbon age, and will need to be tackled as such in critical design frameworks. The denaturalization of the economy is an area of active critical work, for instance, in the imagination of diverse economies beyond the capitalistic one (Gibson-­Graham 2006) and social and solidarity economies (largely in Latin Amer­i­ca; see, e.g., Coraggio, Laville, and Cattani 2013; Coraggio and Laville 2014), or in proposals for decroissance (degrowth) in Europe and for alternatives to development in South Amer­i­ca. More tellingly, it can be discerned at the grassroots level; as Gustavo Esteva provocatively puts it, “­those marginalized by the economic society in the development era are increasingly dedicated to marginalizing the economy” (2009, 20). Decentering the economy from social and ecological life is a sine qua non for all transition activism and design. It is expressed in many of the ongoing experiments with relocalization of food production, for instance.

With the consolidation of “the economy” from the late eigh­teenth ­century on, we have in place a tightly interconnected set of crucial developments in the cultural history of the West, namely, the individual, objective real­ity, truthful science (rationality), and self-­regulating markets. The ensemble of the individual, the real, science, and the economy (market) constitutes the default setting of much of socionatural life in late modernity; they are historical constructs, to be sure, but also beliefs to which we are deeply attached in our everyday existence ­because of the pervasive social structures, pro­cesses, and practices that hold them in place, without which we cannot function. They reveal our commitment to individualism, objectivism, and economism; in fact, they are va­ri­e­ties of essentialism and, in the case of the market at least, fundamentalism. It would take a relatively profound ontological transformation on our part to alter this default setting at the individual, let alone collective, level. Said other­wise, the notions of the individual, the real, and the economy as having intrinsic existence by themselves, in­de­pend­ent of the relations that constitute them, and of us as observers, are instances of “folk essentialism,” as Kriti Sharma (2015, 12) wonderfully puts it. They seem to us completely real, yet they depend on an entire complex set of operations. It is precisely this impression of real­ity that we need to probe more deeply to arrive at a view of their ineluctable contingency.

Whereas science imposes its criteria of rationality and objectivity on all forms of knowledge, supported by a Euclidean view of inde­pen­dent real­ity anchored materially in space and time, economics performs a related operation by taking the sphere of production out of the flow of socionatural life, and technology sediments this ontology with its nonconvivial, industrial instrumentations. ­Humans, fi­nally, learn how to operate like individuals by construing themselves as raw materials for endless improvement (“self-­alchemization” in Claudia von Werlhof ‘s [2015] terms). It is thus that within modern patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist socie­ties we learn from childhood to prioritize production and consumption (at the expense of other manners of valuing existence), individual success (instead of collective well-­being), orientation ­toward the ­future (instead of mindfulness to the pres­ent and dwelling in the hic et nunc of quotidian existence), and the subordination of spirituality and the awareness of the unity of all that exists to the materialism of commodities, of being to possessing. All of this has the cost of making us see ourselves as separate and distant from nature and others (­whether in terms of gender, race, culture, or what have you), thus bracketing, if not denying, their coexistence in a relation of mutual re­spect.

It is this onto-­epistemic formation in which we are enmeshed, largely without our knowing it. This, too, is the meaning of our ontological commitment to “being modern.” The question we need to ask, in ever more refined and enabling ways, is ­whether it is pos­si­ble to imagine other forms of knowingbeing­doing without losing our ability to navigate skillfully the meanderings of the modern constellation structured by the four beliefs so sketchily analyzed. Pursuing this goal implies significant ontological work on our part. We cannot place this entire historical circumstance at the doorstep of the rationalistic tradition, of course, but the process is deeply intertwined with that rationality and its associated ontology. To this topic we dedicate the next section.

Issues and Prob­lems with Ontological Dualism

Questions of ontology were sidestepped in much of con­temporary theory ­after the linguistic turn and the concern with epistemology ­after the rise of poststructuralism in the acad­emy. However, the relation between understanding and ontology has been central to philosophical traditions such as phenomenology, and perhaps it is no surprise that the concern with ontology is coming back in social theory and in fields such as geography, anthropology, po­liti­cal philosophy, and science and technology studies. Part of this return is due to intra-­academic trends, but a good deal of it finds its impetus in social and ecological concerns and movements beyond the acad­emy, and it is impor­tant to have both sources in mind.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores define ontology simply as concerned with “our understanding of what it means for something or someone to exist” (1986, 30).10 Ontology has to do with the assumptions dif­fer­ent social groups make about the kinds of entities taken to exist “in the real world.” Notice that this definition does not entail a strong realist position (the assumption of a common or universal under­lying real­ity); at the same time, this does not mean that “the mind” constructs the world (a kind of subjectivism); the definition tries to get at the existence of multiple worlds while maintaining a nonobjectifying notion of the real. Our ontological stances about what the world is, what we are, and how we come to know the world define our being, our ­doing, and our knowing—­our historicity. ­Here it is impor­tant to keep in mind the distinctions among epistemology (referring to the rules and procedures that apply to knowledge production, including what counts as knowledge and what the character of that knowledge is), the episteme (the broad, and largely implicit, configuration of knowledge that characterizes a par­tic­ul­ar society and historical period and that significantly shapes the knowledge produced without the awareness of ­those producing it), and ontology.11

Mario Blaser (2010, 2013) proposes a three-l­ayered definition of ontology, where the first layer is the one already hinted at: the assumptions about the kinds of beings that exist and their conditions of existence—asort of inventory of beings and their relations. The second layer refers to ways in which ­these ontologies give rise to par­tic­u­lar socionatural configurations: how they “perform themselves,” so to speak, into worlds. In other words, ontologies do not precede or exist inde­pen­dently of our everyday practices; worlds are enacted by practices. Fi­nally, ontologies often manifest themselves as stories, and ­these make the under­lying assumptions easier to identify. This layer is amply corroborated by the ethnographic lit­er­a­ture on myths and rituals (of creation, for instance). It also exists in the narratives that we moderns tell ourselves about ourselves, which are repeated over and over by politicians in their speeches or, invariably, in the six ­o’clock news’ rendition of “what is happening in the world.” This “what is happening” invariably refers back to the ontological ensemble of the individual, the real, science, and the market, that is, to the fact that we see ourselves as self-­sufficient subjects confronting an “external world” made up of preexisting, self-­standing objects that we can manipulate at ­will, or at least hope to. In short, what cnn or the bbc reports on, from an ontological perspective, is the status of this ensemble, including threats to it, though ­these are invariably explained in terms of the same categories, never allowed to drift too far out into other cultural worlds.

This argument holds for all areas of social life; for instance, the divide moderns make between nature and culture, which entails seeing nature as inert, informs the agroindustrial model of agriculture that from the time of slave plantations and “scientific forestry” in Germany in the eigh­teenth c­entury to ­today’s transgenic seeds, pushed by agribusiness corporations, has become dominant in many parts of the world. From a relational ontology, something like a plantation of a single crop produced for profit and the market does not make any sense. On the contrary, relational ontologies are performed into cultivation practices more akin to what peasants have traditionally done (multicropping, with production for subsistence as well as the market; a diverse landscape, with links to communities and gods, etc.), or to the kinds of localized, organic, resilient, and democratic agricultural systems that ­today’s agroecologists propose as the way out of the food crisis. But this is getting ahead of the story of relationality, and it is time to say something more general about dualism before moving on to the next section.

A number of authors emphasize three fundamental dualisms in what I have referred to here as the dominant form of Euro-­modernity: the divide between nature and culture, between us and them (or the West and the Rest, the moderns and the nonmoderns, the civilized and the savages, ­etc.), and between subject and object (or mind/body dualism) Latour’s (1993) characterization of the first two divides as central to the constitution of modernity is well known. Blaser (2010) adds that the second divide is in turn essential to the making and functioning of the first and refers to it as “the colonial divide.” This is not the place to trace the genealogy of t­hese divides; suffice it to mention that ecologists and feminists place emphasis on the mind/body, culture/nature, and man/woman divides as foundational to patriarchal cultures, reductionist forms of science, disembodied ways of being, and t­oday’s ecological crisis. Some biologists argue that the pervasive binarisms have led to a reduction of complexity in our accounts of the world that has consequences for our understanding of, and interactions with, such a world, and so forth. The lit­er­a­ture is huge, but ­here again I purposefully want to identify three points that are seldom emphasized or even flagged in Euro-­American academic scholarship.

The first point is that the prob­lem is not that dualisms exist; ­after all, many socie­ties have been structured around dualities, although in most cases ­these are treated in terms of the complementarity of nonhierarchical pairs (e.g., yin-yang dualities). The prob­lem is with the ways in which such divides are treated culturally, particularly the hierarchies established between the two parts of each binary, and the social, ecological, and po­liti­cal consequences of such hierarchies. In the argot of a current Latin American perspective, this feature is referred to as coloniality, the central feature of which is the categorization and hierarchical classification of differences, leading to the suppression, devaluing, subordination, or even destruction of forms of knowledge and being that do not conform to the dominant form of modernity. Coloniality cemented the dichotomy between the human/civilized (European) world, further classified in terms of gender, and the nonhuman/uncivilized (the nonmodern, racialized dark peoples of the world, described, like animals were, in terms of their biological sex) (Lugones 2010a, 2010b).

These systems of classification became the crux of the proj­ects for bringing “civilization,” “modernity,” and, l­ater on, “development” to much of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer­i­ca. In short, ­there is no modernity anywhere without this coloniality; coloniality also implies a pervasive Eurocentrism—ahegemonic repre­sen­ta­tion and mode of knowing that claims universality for itself, derived from Eu­rope’s claimed position as the center. A corollary of this conceptualization of modernity/coloniality is that the very pro­cess of enacting it always creates types of “colonial difference”—encounters, border zones, processes of re­sis­tance, hybridization, assertion of cultural difference, or what have you—where dominant modern forms fail to fulfill themselves completely as such, revealing si­mult­a­neously the arbitrariness (and often brutality) of many aspects of the modern proj­ect, and the multiple assertions of pluriversality, what in the decolonial perspective is called “worlds and knowledges other­wise.” We ­will discuss ­later on the implications of the colonial difference for ontological design and designs for the pluriverse.12

Australian feminist and environmental phi­los­op­her Val Plumwood has drawn out the implications of dualist thinking in terms of what she calls the ecological crisis of reason. For her, the ecological crisis is a crisis “of what the dominant culture has made of reason” (2002, 5). This form of rationality, which claims mastery over nature, relies on multiple “centrisms” (anthropocentrism, self-­centrism, Eurocentrism, androcentrism) and has produced, in the age of global markets, “ratiogenic monsters.” Blind to our ecological embeddness, this reason-­centered culture supports elite forms of power, strengthens the illusion of the autonomous individual, and idolizes an economic rationalism that ingrains masculinity and invisibilizes the agency of nonhumans and subordinated groups. Rather than relying on “the same elite culture and developmentalist rationality that led us into the mess” (16) in the first place—in other words, rather than intensifying the same reason-­centered culture, as solutions such as the purported green economy do—­her advocacy is for a form of nondualist, noncolonialist rationality that resituates human practice within ecology, and nonhumans within an ethics of re­spect and responsibility (see also Leff 2002, 2015, for a related argument and proposal).

The second observation is that ­these three salient dualisms work themselves out into a ­whole series of other divides, including the following (not an exhaustive list): human and nonhuman, live (life/organic) and inert (matter/ inorganic), reason and emotion, ideas and feelings, the real and its represen­ta­tions, the secular and the sacred or spiritual, what is alive and what is dead, the individual and the collective, science (rationality, universality) and nonscience (belief, faith, irrationality, culturally specific knowledge), facts and values, form and content, developed and underdeveloped. In both academic and activist worlds, we are witnessing a renewed interest in the subordinated side of the dualisms across an entire spectrum of their manifestations, a sort of return of the repressed sides of the pairs as impor­tant dimensions of what constitutes life itself—­for example, growing attention to emotions, feelings, the spiritual, ­matter, nonscientific knowledges, body and place, nonhumans, nonorganic life, death, and so forth. Taken together, the recent emphases can be seen as mapping an emerging ontological-­political field with the potential to re­orient cultural and social practice in ways that clearly foster the intersecting goals of ecological sustainability, social justice, and pluriversality.

The Po­litic­al Activation of Relationality

We hypothesize that this process amounts to a po­liti­cal activation of relationality (Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar 2014).13 This activation can be gleaned from developments in fields as varied as local food and environmental activism, opposition to extractivism, alternative economies, digital technologies, and some va­ri­e­ties of urban environmentalism, as well as from emerging transition frameworks, such as degrowth in the Global North and “alternatives to development” and Buen Vivir in the Global South; actors operating within ­these vari­ous fields are crafting a lexicon for a significant cultural and ecological transition, driven in part by an emphasis on nondualist, postcapitalist, and nonliberal ways of being and ­doing (more on this in the last two chapters).

The academic critical perspectives that could be said to fall within the proj­ect of unsettling dualisms have been growing over the past de­cade, largely ­under the headings of postconstructivist, postdualist, neorealist, and posthuman approaches (related to the ontological turn discussed in the previous chapter). More explic­itly concerned with both epistemology and ontology, the recent perspectives seek to transcend the limits of deconstructive and discursive analyses by venturing into the positive proj­ect of how the world can be—a­nd be understood—other­wise; in so doing, they afford new concepts, questions, and resources. Some of ­these works aim to theorize the productivity of life in all of its dimensions and ineluctable immanence (Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Luisetti 2011); ­others underscore the vast range of agency associated with nonhumans and the manifold ways in which the world gets to be assembled (actor-­network theory; e.g., Law 2004; Latour 2007). Still ­others return to issues of embodiment and corporality, through which subjects make themselves and their worlds (e.g., Grosz 2010); explore social life from the ­angles of temporality, openness, and becoming (Connolly 2011); or develop novel conceptualizations of interspecies relations and communities (e.g., Haraway 2008). Some related trends focus on rethinking cognition in order to underscore the radical contingency of all real­ity (Sharma 2015), explore the ways in which cognition can be extended through biotechnical couplings supported by digital technologies (Halpin, Clark, and Wheeler 2010; Halpin and Monnin 2014), discuss ontological emergence from the perspective of neo-­cybernetics (B. Clarke and Hansen 2009), and draw implications from the affirmation of the sentience of all living beings not only for how we understand consciousness as a profusely distributed property of all beings but also for how the world (from the Earth to our bodies and ourselves) is ceaselessly cocreated by flows of energy and material (Sagan 2011), which are sometimes also seen in terms of a spirit force that pervades even what moderns consider to be the inanimate world (TallBear 2011).14

This brings me to the third aspect of the growing concern with dualisms. This is the extent to which the tendencies so hastily described above can be seen as questioning the modern social theory episteme. If one takes this episteme to be structured by a few major practices, the question becomes w­hether the emergent tendencies are capable of unsettling this epistemic space in more significant ways than has been the case with critical theories so far, or ­whether they rather continue to function within it.15 Generally speaking, the recent approaches aim to go beyond an ontology and epistemology of subjects and objects and point at the shortcomings of a politics derived from such a dualist understanding. There is, then, much to learn from them. By focusing on the repressed side of the dualisms, they move at the edges of the Western social theory ­table (in the Foucauldian sense), yet one may won­der ­whether, by continuing to appeal to a logocentric understanding, they remain trapped within the ­table. To explore this question, I return briefly to Varela’s argument about the shortcomings of rationalistic styles of thought.

Varela’s Move: On the Limits of Modern Social Theory

For science writer Dorion Sagan, modern approaches to the social and natural sciences have “block[ed] out most of the world” (2011); hence, what we are witnessing in the turn to animal, nonhuman, more-t­han-human, and posthuman studies is the return of all ­those unacknowledged aspects of the living that make life pos­si­ble. In responding to Sagan from the perspective of Vine Deloria’s “American Indian metaphysics,” Kimberly TallBear (2011) argues that some of ­these trends and categories still endow nonhumans with humanlike biographical and po­litical lives that assume somewhat in­de­pen­dent standpoints and, above all, that they are still inadequate to describe all relations among beings. She also pushes us to think about the ways in which some of the cutting-­edge trends reproduce some of the modern binaries, including that of life and nonlife, resulting in the exclusion of, say, stones, trees, or thunder from being effective forces in the world, and even perhaps having sentience (on pansentience, see also Rose 2008; Goodwin 2007). Despite their efforts, do the recent tendencies continue to uphold in some fashion an intramodern (largely Euro-­American) understanding of the world (as decolonial theorists might argue)? Do they continue to function within a much-­renewed, but still primarily Western/modern, episteme?16

As a provisional hypothesis, I argue that the reliance on long-­standing forms of rationality and logocentric analy­sis remains central to critical academic production (this book included!) and that, despite its remarkable productivity, it has consequences for finding our way beyond the dominance of dualist ontologies. To develop this hypothesis, I start by recalling Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch’s argument about the limits of abstract rationality and their insistence on joining reflection and experience. This is precisely what phenomenology attempted to do, yet—V­arela and coauthors argue—it failed to fully address the radical questions it raised. Why? Their answer is relatively ­simple, yet the implications are far reaching. Phenomenology breaks down precisely ­because its analy­sis of experience remained “quite within the mainstream of Western philosophy…It stressed the pragmatic, embodied context of human experience, but in a purely theoretical way” (1991, 19; emphasis added). Could this assessment—­that phenomenology is still “philosophy as theoretical reflection” (20) and that, more generally, “even though it has recently become quite fashi­on­able to criticize or ‘deconstruct’ the standpoint of the cogito, phi­los­o­phers still do not depart from the basic practice responsible for it” (28; italics in the original)—apply to social theory as a w­hole, perhaps even to ­those trends that problematize its structuring dualisms?17

While this question w­ill remain open in this book, we might find clues for further discussion of the issue in ­these authors’ subsequent move: “What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-­ended reflection…W hat this formulation intends to convey is that reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself…When reflection is done in that way, it can cut the chain of habitual thought patterns and perceptions such that it can be an open-­ended reflection, open to possibilities other than ­those contained in one’s current repre­sen­ta­tion of the life space” (26). They refer to this form of refection as embodied reflection. In other words, for ­these authors, theoretical reflection does not need to be—or not only—detached. The second ele­ment in their formulation of the breakdown of phenomenology, and the ­actual bold step, is to suggest that “we need to enlarge our horizon to encompass non-­Western traditions of reflection upon experience” (21; see also Varela 1999), including philosophy in cultures other than our own. They find a compelling path in one such tradition, the sophisticated and centuries-­old Buddhist philosophy of mind, particularly its method of examining experience, called mindfulness meditation, intended to lead the mind back from the abstract attitude to the situation of one’s experience.18

It is impor­tant to emphasize that none of the authors we are reviewing are calling for a wholesale rejection of Cartesian rationality nor of the subject-­centered reason so much discussed by the intramodern phi­los­o­phers of modernity (e.g., Habermas 1987); rather, they advocate for a weakening of its dominance and a displacement of its centrality in the design of the world and our lives. This is done in the name of re­orienting the rationalistic tradition (Winograd and Flores 1986); fostering embodied, situated forms of reflection (e.g., Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991); imagining nondualist forms of rationality that enable us to resituate ­humans within an ecological understanding of life (e.g., Plumwood 2002; Leff 2015); arriving at decolonial and genuinely intercultural modes of knowledge production (decolonial theory; see, e.g., Walsh 2009); or moving t­oward convivial socie­ties where nonconvivial tools have a role to play but do not dominate (Illich 1973). In ­doing so, ­these authors are moved by two aims: the first is to point out the consequences of the dualisms, especially how disconnected we normally are from many aspects of everyday existence; the second, perhaps more crucial for this book, is to argue that the practice of transformation ­really takes place in the pro­cess of enacting other worlds/practices—­that is, in changing radically the ways in which we encounter ­things and ­people, not just theorizing about such practice (e.g., Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997, 165). In t­hese proposals we find clues t­oward this path, whether the renovated practice is Buddhist, ecological, po­litical, decolonial, or a reimagined design approach. Let us listen to two final statements on the first aspect before concluding with a brief discussion of relationality.

The New Zealand environmentalist Deborah Bird Rose has powerfully stated the case against dualisms; Western dualisms, she says, sustain “a feedback loop of increasing disconnection. Our connections with the world outside of self are less and less evident to us, and more and more difficult to sustain and to experience as real” (2008, 162).19 A certain derealization parallels the desacralization that follows from dualist rationality. “If life is always in connection, and if ­those connections are being destroyed, as they are ­these days at an enormous rate, what becomes of the remaining of life?” (166). Nandy (1987, 102-109) underscores the effect of or­ga­nized science in fueling “the ­human capacity to isolate” and fostering affectless forms of “sanitized cognition” at both the individual and collective levels. All cultures, in his view, however, find means to respond to the pathologies of isolation, to de-i­solate themselves in vari­ous ways, including through religion. In pondering the construction of nonoppressive socie­ties in ways that do not render them newly oppressive ­orders themselves, Nandy insists on the need to take into account the “visions of the weak” and their notions of a good society and a desirable world. For Nandy, this has to be done by bearing in mind that “their apparent inability to withstand analytical thought, and their defensiveness and diffidence in the face of Cartesian categories—­all contribute to their undervaluation” (18).

­Here Nandy spells out one of the most intractable, and damaging, expectations of institutionalized dualist thinking:

­There is a pecking order of cultures in our times which involves ­everydialogue of cultures, visions and faiths and which tries to force the dia logue to serve the needs of the modern West and its extensions withinthe non-­West. Under every dialogue of visions lies a hidden dialogue ofunequals…A culture with a developed, assertive language of dialogue oftendominates the pro­cess of dialogue and uses the dialogue to cannibalize the cul ture with a low-key, muted, softer language of dialogue. The encounter thenpredictably yields a discourse which reduces the second culture to a specialcase—an earlier stage or simplified vision—of the culture with the asser tive language of dialogue. (14-15; emphasis added)

Nandy’s warning could help explain the resurgence of fundamentalisms (as a response, sometimes violent, to the skewed distribution of cultural resources in the global po­litical economy of dialogue), or the reenactment of cultural subordination by ­today’s Latin American governments and nongovernmental organ­izations when they utilize domineering modernist languages in their “negotiations” with indigenous, peasant, and black communities and movements that, historically, could be said to have had less assertive languages of dialogue. This notion also serves as a critique of so-­called conflict resolution methodologies developed at elite schools such as Harvard University and exported all over the world, or approaches to “democracy building” and “transitional justice” in “postconflict” regions. In all of t­hese cases, the assertive (Western, allegedly rational) apparatuses of dialogue operate as po­litical technologies to subdue relational visions of peace, dialogue, and life. Said other­wise, discussions of cultural visions, civilizations, and intercultural dialogue involve complex ontological and po­liti­cal processes. This epistemic politics becomes another ele­ment in the proj­ect of infusing design with a progressive politics.

Relationality: Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide

If not dualism, if life is always in connection, then what? The immediate, obvious answer to disconnection, isolation, and so forth is, of course, to reconnect—­with each other, with our bodies, the nonhuman world, the stream of life (e.g., Macy 2007). One rising answer to the problematic of disconnection/reconnection is thus relationality. ­There are many ways to understand relationality. Dualism is itself a form of relationality but one that, as we have seen, assumes the preexistence of distinct entities whose respective essences are not seen as fundamentally dependent on their relation to other entities—­they exist in and of themselves. Network theories imply a more serious effort at taking into account the role of interrelations in making up ­things and beings. Many network approaches nevertheless still take for granted the existence of inde­pen­dent objects or actors prior to the networking, and despite their thrust ­toward topological thinking, they fall back into Euclidean geometries of objects, nodes, and flows. As Sharma puts it, speaking about the ­notion of interdependence in biology, many of ­these notions still imply “in­de­pen­dent objects interacting.” ­There are two shifts, according to Sharma, that have to happen for a genuine concept of interdependence to arise: the first implies going “from considering ­things in isolation to considering ­things in interaction”; the second, more difficult to accomplish, is “from considering ­things in interaction to considering ­things as mutually constituted, that is, viewing ­things as existing at all only due to their dependence on other ­things” (2015, 2).

Is it pos­si­ble, then, to develop a deeper notion of relationality, one in which the relational basis of existence radically pervades the entire order of t­hings? One general princip­le I find useful is that a relational ontology is that within which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. In t­hese ontologies, life is interrelation and interdependence through and through, always and from the beginning. Buddhism has one of the most succinct and power­ful notions in this regard: nothing exists by itself, every­thing interexists, we inter-are with every­thing on the planet. This princip­le of interbeing has been amply developed in Buddhist thought.20 A dif­fer­ent way to look at it, from the perspective of phenomenological biology, is the already-­mentioned idea of the “unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing” (Maturana and Varela 1987, 35); in other words, ­there is a deep connection between action and experience, which in turn instills a certain circularity in all knowledge, which Maturana and Varela summarize with the maxim “All ­doing is knowing, and all knowing is ­doing” (26), or by saying that “­every act of knowing brings forth a world” (26). This coincidence of being~~­doing~~knowing implies that we are deeply immersed in the world along with other sentient beings, who are similarly and ineluctably knower-­doers as much as ourselves. This equates with Sharma’s insistence that genuine interdependence obtains only when we consider all entities as mutually constituted.

More academically—­and this has been one of the most fascinating strands of anthropological research since the 1960s, if not before—e­cological anthropologists have shown through ethnographic fieldwork that many groups throughout the world do not base their social life on the distinction between nature and culture (or ­humans and nonhumans), or at least not in the ways in which moderns do. In many cultures, on the contrary, rather than separation, ­there is continuity between what moderns categorize as the biophysical, ­human, and super­natural domains. Anthropologists working with indigenous groups in the Amazon or North Amer­ic­a, aboriginal groups in Australia, or vari­ous groups in Melanesia—­including key figures such as Marilyn Strathern, Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro but many ­others in many other countries as well—­have richly described the local models of nature that underlie ontologically vibrant relational worlds. Eduardo Restrepo (1996) and Astrid Ulloa (Ulloa, Rubio, and Campos 1996; Ulloa 2006), for instance, have provided compelling accounts of the local models of nature of black and indigenous groups in the Colombian Pacific rain forest region; even though all of these groups are of course also coconstituted by modern imaginaries, they sometimes enact worlds in movement for the defense of their territories and difference (Escobar 2008, 2014). In other words, ­these groups are involved in the po­litical activation of relationality. 21

The sources of relational thinking are not restricted to the non-­West. ­There are impor­tant sources in what could be called “alternative Wests” or “nondominant modernities,” and possibly in the worlds being created in urban areas in the Global North as a result of ecological activist commitments. Biologist Brian Goodwin (2007), for instance, speaks of a “Goethean” science of qualities that acknowledges the importance of feelings and emotions as impor­tant sources of knowledge creation, and as essential ele­ments in “healing our fragmented culture” (see also Kauffman 2008 on the need to go beyond the dualism of reason and faith). Earlier philosophical or aesthetic traditions in the West are being summoned by scholars and, to a lesser extent, activists in their search for nondualist perspectives, as witnessed by renewed interest in the works of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and John Dewey and the writings on nature by the American romantics. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) posits the idea of the existence of a nonoccidentalist West in the philosophies of Lucian de Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa, and Blaise Pascal. To t­hese could be added nondualist thinkers from other parts of the world who have had some resonance in the West, such as Jiddu Kirshnamurti and Sri Aurobindo, spiritual teachers from India.

The landscape of explorations of nondualism is thus becoming rich and vast, no doubt a sign of the times, of the very fact that “all our stories are now being deflated thanks to Earth” (Rose 2008, 166). If one thinks about climate change, for instance, one has to agree with Rose, despite the facile positions of geoengineers and green marketers. The growing visibility of nondualism is also a reflection of the fact that nobody r­eally performs as a pure woundup Cartesian toy. Phenomenologically speaking, we simply ­can’t; we refuse to partition life entirely according to fixed divides. The impetus to re/connect (socially, ecologically, spiritually) is always ­there, and we activate it daily in many ways, even in our otherwise-­objectifying relations with the “natur­al world” (e.g., in planting a garden) or when we disrupt the constant boundary making we perform as “individuals” (reaching out to ­others). The question remains, however: what would it mean to develop a personal and collective practice of interbeing? How do we innovate with postdualist ways of inhabiting the planet that are more amicable to the continued existence of all sentient beings, ways in which, to rely once more on Thomas Berry’s (1999, 11) inspiring statement, h­umans become pres­ent to the planet in a manner that is mutually enhancing? How do we engage in the “geographies of responsibility” (Massey 2004) that our constitutive interrelatedness with all sentient beings necessarily implies? Can these be fostered in the most modern-­driven con­temporary settings? Can we find sources of the nonself, and do so not only among ­those who live in the shadow of the liberal diaspora (Povinelli 2001) in distant lands but also among ­those of us inhabiting the densest liberal worlds?

We w­ill leave pending the question of ­whether pointing out the dualisms is in itself sufficient to get rid of the coloniality of the dualisms. As we suggested, for this to happen it is necessary to step out of the (purely) theoretical space into some domain of experience (po­liti­cal, contemplative, even policy or design oriented, or what have you)—in other words, it is imperative to engage with (or perhaps contribute to creating) worlds where it is impossible to speak of nature and culture as separate (or only in terms of nature/culture in separation, since we cannot avoid the divide altogether; that is, even groups that strive to maintain a relational ontology have to maintain both at the same time: dualist talk and practices of nature, on the one hand, and the nondualistic practices of relational beings, on the other). Said more simply, theorists cannot maintain both feet in the academy and purport that they/we are bringing about a dif­fer­ent world; they/we need to put one foot in a relational world (or worlds)—to practice what we preach.

It ­will likely be objected that in order to speak about relationality I am introducing a new binarism (dualist and nondualist ontologies). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s partial way out applies h­ere: “We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a proc­ess that challenges all models. Each time, ­mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass…[Dualisms are] an entirely necessary ­enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging” (1987, 20-21). Sometimes the “­mental correctives” do not need to be as complicated as social theory might want them to be; uncommon reversals with ­simple caveats might suffice. Sometimes I wond­er, for instance, why we (critical theorists) are so prone to speak about alternative or multiple modernities but cannot imagine thinking seriously about alternative traditions. I ­will end this part with an insightful reversal by Nandy that should make us pause and think about such a possibility (Nandy’s caveat here is that we need to avoid narrow-­minded traditionalisms that demystify modernity while remystifying tradition, and to allow for critical dialogue, interaction, and mutual transformation among cultures within a genuine intercultural communion): “The pathology of relatedness has already become less dangerous than the pathology of unrelatedness” (1987, 51). To paraphrase, the pathologies of modernity have already proven to be more lethal than the pathologies of traditions; ecologically at least, this seems an incontrovertible statement.

It could be said that with the progressive expansion of the dominant forms of modernity “humanity” started its cultural, existential, and po­litical journey into the terrain of ontological dualism. Starting from local histories in some corners of Eu­rope, the journey evolved into a “global design” (Mignolo 2000). Is it pos­si­ble to re­orient such a tradition and to redirect the journey into an altogether dif­fer­ent direction? Is this what the planetary ecological and social crisis is all about, or at least one of its impor­tant dimensions? Can design play a role in such a re­orientation of both the cultural background and the journey itself?

Notes

Epigraphs: Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of ­Human Understanding (1987), 241; Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), 4-5; Albán Achinte, Más allá de la razón hay un mundo de colores (2013).

1 A word about the authors in question: the three main ones are Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Fernando Flores. Maturana and Varela are known as the originators, beginning in the late 1960s, of the Chilean school of cognitivism. Their main intervention has been to propose a theory of cognition that contrasts sharply with established positions. Beyond cognition, they have proposed an entire conceptual framework for understanding living beings, based on the notion of Autopoiesis (self-­creation). As they state in their landmark study (1980; originally published in Spanish in 1973), their work can be considered an original and complete system of thought, a theoretical biology. While Varela in the 1980s sought to refine his approach through a dialogue withBuddhism (see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Varela 1999), Maturana continued working on what he calls a biology of love—l­ove as a biological and social phenomenon. The root of their work is their early neurobiological research, but they are deeply influenced by phenomenology. While their work is increasingly being recognized world wide, it remains relatively marginal outside some strands of cognitivism, systems theory and cybernetics (yet see B. Clarke and Hansen 2009 for a collection devoted to Varela’s work). Based on Maturana and Varela, along with Heidegger and Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Flores and Terry Winograd proposed their ontological approach to design. Flores has also collaborated with phi­los­ophers in his effort to develop non-­Cartesian frameworks for social action (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997).

2 Readers acquainted with the work of Heidegger will obviously recognize t­hese notions(being-­in-­the-­world, readiness-­to-­hand, thrownness, and background of understanding), and likewise some of Gadamer’s and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s notions. Again, let me underscore that while ­these are impor­tant sources for Maturana and Varela, so is their biological understanding, along with, in Varela’s case, Buddhist philosophy of mind.

3 The Buddhist lit­er­a­ture on the mind is so vast that it is almost ludicrous to mention any par­tic­u­lar sources. However, for useful introductions to the question of mind by an esteemed Buddhist teacher who also engages with Varela’s work, see Mingyur Rinpoche (2007); for the notions of mindfulness and interbeing, see Nhat Hanh (1975, 2008). A key foundational Buddhist text from the twelfth ­century is found, with con­temporary commentary, in Thrangu Rinpoche (2003, see especially ch. 17, “The Perfection of Wisdom-­awareness”). A classical guide in Tibetan Buddhism for dealing with the nonexistence of the self and achieving freedom from ego clinging (a guide to the practice of cultivating compassion, known as lojong) is found in Kongtrul (2005). Central to Buddhist meditation practice are the notions of interrelation and interde­pen­dency, impermanency, and compassion. Joanna Macy draws on ­these notions to develop her vision of transition, to be discussed in chapter 5 (Macy 2007; Macy and Johnstone 2012).

4 Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch refer to the vari­ous realist and foundationalist forms of cognitivism as being trapped within “the Cartesian anxiety” (see ch. 7 of TheEmbodied Mind [1991]).

5 Maturana and Verden-Zöller (1993) emphasize the importance of consciously accepting or rejecting the notions of objective real­ity and universal truth. Deciding to reject­ these notions means opting for the pluriverse, that is, for the idea of multiple legitimate domains of real­ity and multiple explanations of them by observers.

6 The best traditions of folk ­music articulate powerfully the popu­lar wisdom of attachment to place and landscape within the flow of life. Think, for instance, of the poet, composer and singer from Northern Argentina Atahualpa Yupanki, for the Latin American context.

7 Von Foerster goes on to draw a set of revealing implications from this analys­is, including that objectivity is “a popu­lar device for avoiding responsibility” (1991, 5). For him, objectivity can ground a set of moral codes but not a compelling ethics. This was an exciting development that brought together pioneers of information, communications, and cultural theory such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Stafford Beer, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Humberto Maturana and that influenced the notions of self-­organization, autonomy, autopoiesis, and self-­referentiality. ­These debates anticipated much of what was discussed in the 1980s ­under the headings of constructivism and postmodernism. I have taken the above quotes from von Foerster (1991), https://­pdfs.semanticscholar.­org/­7ff9 /­4a923a0111eb9bcc3f08b3f01109e790a732.­pdf. A published version of the conference talk is included in a collection of essays by von Foerster (2010).

8 I am drawing here largely on Ashis Nandy (1987, 1988, 2012). The group includes, among ­others, Shiv Visvanathan; Claude Alvares; some of the critics of development, such as Rajni Kothari, D. L. Shet, and Smitu Kothari; and the iconoclastic chemical engineer C. V. Sheshadry (“a classicist scientist, a crank who…s aw the autobiography, the laboratory, and the constitution as thought experiments, a visionary who felt India could transform the idiocies of globalisation into something life giving,” according to Visvanathan [2002, 2163]). Visvanathan wrote one of the first ethnographies of laboratory science (1985). Some of the subaltern studies scholars have been associated with the group, as have at times the works of Vandana Shiva and Veena Das (e.g., Shiva 2005, 2008; Das 2007, 2015).

9 The landmarks of the invention of the economy and its relation to the rise of markets have been eloquently traced by Karl Polanyi, Louis Dumont, Fernand Braudel, and Michel Foucault as well as historians of capitalism such as Maurice Dobb and E. P. Thompson. This is, of course, a central aspect of what Polanyi (1957) so aptly called “the ­great transformation.” In a dif­fer­ent vein, I would say that economics is a cogent academic tradition that many of its practition­ers find exciting (like, say, physics or mathe­matics or indeed any branch of academic knowledge). The prob­lem, however, is that when exercised via policy as a hegemonic form of truth, it becomes a pillar of structured unsustainability and social in­equality.

10 This thus means that ontology is historical; an amusing thought is that it might even be species specific: “Even the most hard-­nosed biologist…w ould have to admit that t­here are many ways the world is—­indeed even dif­f er­ent worlds of experience—­depending on the structure of the being involved and the kinds of distinctions it is able to make” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 9; emphasis added).

11 Foucault (1970: xi) describes the episteme as “a positive unconscious of knowledge”; he differentiates among three epistemes in post-­Renaissance Eu­rope, the last being the modern episteme that crystallized in the late eigh­teenth ­century with the figure of Man as its center: Man as the foundation, subject, and object of all knowledge. In this modern episteme, the analy­sis of life, ­labor, and language took on the forms of modern biology, economics, and linguistics, respectively. This is dif­fer­ent from epistemology; the natural, social, and ­human sciences have seen three contending epistemologies: positivist (dominant in the physical and natu­ral sciences), dialectical (Marxist approaches), and constructivist.

12 For a pre­sen­ta­tion of the decolonial perspective and a set of references, see Escobar (2008, ch. 4); Mignolo and Escobar (2010). The main names associated with it are Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo, but it includes a network of scholars, intellectuals, and activists particularly in the Andean countries and the United States. It should be emphasized that this perspective is not the same as postcolonial theory.

13­ Here we refers to ongoing work on relational ontologies I am ­doing with Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena; see, e.g., Blaser (2014); de la Cadena (2010, 2015); Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar (2014); Escobar (2014).

14 This is a partial list of perspectives, largely from cultural theory (see Escobar 2010b for a review of this lit­er­a­ture). Along with ­these trends has come a renewed attention to certain authors (a new list of influences), including Spinoza, Bergson, Nietz­sche, Whitehead, the pragmatists (William James) and romantic writers (Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau), Deleuze and Guattari, and Merleau-­Ponty; a few of t­hese authors also appeal to complexity, evolutionary, and biological theories by Vladimir Vernadsky, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lynn Margulis, and Susan Oyama, and to cognitivism, including Varela. A state-­of-the-­art collection on ­these trends is de la Cadena and Blaser (2017), largely drawn from the perspectives of science and technology studies.

15 I think the following practices are the most central in the modern episteme within which mainstream and critical social theories alike function: the parceling out of the uninterrupted complexity of the flow of socionatural life into allegedly separate and autonomous domains, such as the economy, society, nature, culture, the polity, the individual, and so forth; the attachment of a discipline to one or another of t­hese domains, the truth of which they are supposed to reveal (economics, sociology, psy­chol­ogy, po­liti­cal science, anthropology, ­etc.); and the existence of three main approaches and epistemologies: liberal, Marxist, and poststructuralist. This space is, of course, always being challenged from without by artistic and social movements (e.g., romanticism, anticolonialism, surrealism) and from within by critical currents. However, my argument is that taken as a ­whole the academy, including critical cultural and social theory, systematically reproduces this epistemic space.

16 A strictly Foucauldian perspective would ask whether the figure of “Man” that is at the center of the modern episteme has been removed from its centrality. I can only say for now that most tendencies still show lingering forms of anthropocentrism, androcentrism, and Eurocentrism and continue to function within the oww.

17 In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith thoughtfully ponders the risks incurred when indigenous ­peoples use academic writing to discuss their history and situation of oppression; in doing so, she asks, do they not run the risk of writing about indigenous peoples “as if we r­eally ­were ‘out ­there,’ the ‘Other,’ with all the baggage that this entails”? (1999, 36; see also Walsh 2012). As she adds, “academic writing is a form of selecting, arranging and presenting knowledge… [It reinforces and maintains] a style of discourse that is never innocent” (36). I believe this concern with logocentric writing is close to Varela’s. The condition of possibility of academic writing is still a certain Western ratio, a feature that characterizes the entire system of the human and social sciences within the modern episteme (Foucault 1970, 377, 378).

18 The conversations established by ­these authors between Western and Buddhist scholars on the mind, including the Dalai Lama, have been very fruitful and are chronicled in various proj­ects and books.

19 Karl Marx’s concepts of commodity fetishism and alienation were already an argument about disconnection—in his case, the invisibility of the social ­labor embedded in the commodity and the way this is central to profit making.

20 Well known is the example of the flower given by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh; the flower does not exist in isolation but interexists with the plant, the soil, the ­water, the pollinating insects, and even the sun, which are all essential to its existence (e.g., Nhat Hanh 1975, 2008). As Sharma adds, “the sense of a flower’s continuity over time is a kind of experience, not an autonomous feature of an external world” (2015, 12). In Buddhism, meditation on interdependence goes along with equally impor­tant reflections on impermanence and compassion; only then can the insight of interbeing be fully realized. The ultimate aim is to be able to practice interdependence, not to get caught up in philosophical reflection on it.

21 This is an intellectual approximation to relationality, of course; grasping its nature more fully, according to some, demands transrational forms of engagement with the real, such as contemplative, hallucinatory, or shamanic experiences.