nondualist

In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality:

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.

[[Ele­ments for a Cultural Studies of Design]] pp.70-71

Mangrove forests are primary examples of relational ontologies. The mangrove-world is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by a multiplicity of beings and life forms, involving complex weavings of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon), human activity, spiritual beings, and so forth. There is a rhizome-like logic to these entanglements, very difficult to map and measure, if at all; this logic reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place. ==Said otherwise, things and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.== From a capitalist perspective, transforming them from “worthless swamp” to agroindustrial complexes is a laudable aim (Ogden 2011). In these cases, the insatiable appetite of the OWW spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-world, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Escobar 2008, 2014). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-world the possibility of existing as such. Local struggles constitute attempts to re/establish some degree of symmetry to the partial connections that the mangrove-worlds maintain with the OWW.

‘Weak’ vs ‘Strong’ or ‘Radical’ Relationality

Pluriversal Politics p.xiii-xiv:

Let me introduce the notion of radical relationality. It refers to the fact that all entities that make up the world are so deeply interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves. Modern epistemology grants entities a separate existence, thanks to the foundational premises of the separation between subject and object, mind and body, nature and humanity, reason and emotion, facts and values, us and them, and so forth. Ontological politics destabilize these dualisms. In both activist and scholarly domains, the challenge to the modernist separation between humans and nonhumans occupies an especially relevant place. The field of political ontology actually focuses on the analysis of environmental conflicts as ontological conflicts involving contrasting configurations of the human/nonhuman relation. […] All forms of politics are relational, yet differently so. I sometimes use a heuristic to distinguish between “weak relationality” and “strong relationality.” In the former, characteristic of modernist politics, entities are first assumed to be ontologically separate; then they are reunited through some sort of connection, such as a “network,” but even when this is done, it is clear that the entities, now found to be related, preexist the connection. More importantly, modernist forms of politics stem from ontologies that are deeply embedded in the negation of the full humanity of multiple others and the nonhuman, and this has to be taken seriously into account when considering them as strategies for action. In radical ontological politics, by contrast, there are no intrinsically existing entities to be found, since ==nothing preexists the relations that constitute it;== in other words, reality is relational through and through.