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| Kleftiko, Milos, Greece on July 21, 2025 |
Note: This text is based on a longer paper completed in February 2024. In the following months, three prominent US-based journals promptly declined considering it for publication. In my mind, this proved the paper’s main point: that the modern West, including the academy, cannot genuinely entertain novel ideas, proposals and practices emerging from the world’s peripheries, essential to the fundamental task of rethinking and reconstructing the world. Ergo, it must be pushed into thinking, being, and doing otherwise than it does as a matter of life and death. My thanks to Christopher Newfield for including it in his blog, and to Clive Dilnot for his generous and pointed feedback.
Part I
“The times are urgent, let us slow down” (Bayo Akomolafe)
“Nosotrxs no pedimos la propiedad de la tierra, nosotrxs proponemos otro arte de habitar en la tierra”; (“We do not demand property over land; we propose a different art of dwelling on the Earth”). Moira Millán, Mapuche activist and protector of her people’s territory.[1]
In recent years, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has sponsored a series of debates on some of the most heated issues of our time. Focused on the US, and featured in its flagship journal Daedalus, its Bulletin, and special reports, some of which were the result of high-level commissions appointed by the Academy, these debates were convened under momentous rubrics, successively: Distrust, Political Polarization, and America’s Challenged Institutions; Reimagining Our Economy; and Forging Climate Solutions. It is not my intention in this brief article to analyze or even summarize the arguments and findings of these commissions, publications, and debates, nor am I suggesting that they are not worthy of broad discussion. They certainly are, and they are eloquently articulated by the Academy’s President, the Commissions’ chairs, and the leading articles in the various publications.[2]
Taken as a whole, the debates make considerable and imaginative contributions to the processes of deepening democracy, democratizing the economy, and making government more responsive to enduring problems of inequality, racism, the distrust of institutions and science, failed governance and markets, the regulation of technology and social media, and policy paralysis in the face of aggravating climate change, among others. In fostering these debates, the Academy aimed to contribute to rebuilding the foundations for “an expanded community of fate,” one capable of ushering the country into a more just and sustainable society and economy within our lifetime.
My aim, rather, is to highlight the ontological and epistemic constraints under which these and similar debates take place in the US, and which significantly limit the field of possible inquiries and their potential reach. My analysis is largely informed by my participation in Latin American intellectual-activist spaces, in which I find both a persuasive framing of the civilizational crisis of capitalist modernity and an eager search for alternative narratives of the economy, society, life and the human to deal with such crisis. It is also informed by the growing concern with ontology in critical academic spaces in both the Global North and Global South, fostered by the need to question anew modernity’s foundational dualisms, particularly the separation between humanity and nature, subject and object, and civilized and uncivilized --in other words, as a response to modernity’s pervasive anthropocentrism, rationalism, and ethnocentrism and their naturalization as universal features of all worlds and kinds of human.
In contrast to these features, at the interface between activist and critical academic spaces, perhaps more actively in Latin America but also in other parts of the world, one increasingly finds that crisis-related discussions rely on notions of relationality, pluriversality, care, and civilizational transitions. Emerging from these other debates are cogent and practicable ideas towards what could be called a new ontology of the human, one capable of grounding worldmaking practices that are attuned to the reality of a living cosmos, and an ethics of care for the entire web of life as the principle for rethinking the economy, society, and the world. My contention is that these other debates can illuminate the onto-epistemic limitations under which the US debates take place, and their attending political implications.
The overall question guiding my argument could be summarized thus: Is it possible to think about the predicaments facing the United States (and, by extension, the West and much of the world) without relying solely, or even principally, on the naturalized constructs of Liberal Secular Humanism? What would it take to really think and imagine alternative worlds from beyond the hegemony of the civilization project premised on infinite growth, ruthless competition, possessive individualism, colonial relations with much of the world, and extractive capitalism? I hasten to say that I write with a sense of urgency about the need to imagine radically different narratives of life, humanity, society, and the economy. I am concerned this sense is all too dulled in the US --a reflection, no doubt, of its having been the world’s superpower for too long--, including the academy (although here I would include the academies in most of the world, trapped as they are in neoliberal productivist mindsets). This historical condition has greatly limited the capacity of critical social theory to think outside the onto-epistemic box of modernity.[3]
The dire need for broadening the debate.
I start with the premise that thinking constructively and effectively about the contemporary policrisis from within the mainstream ontological, epistemic, and political traditions of Western modernity has become a historically foregone possibility. Climate collapse, obscene inequalities, the war in Ukraine and, most poignantly, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza as an inconceivably exaggerated response to Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 provide conclusive proof of the utter inability of the world's economic and political elites to choose life over death. Thus, while the dissolution of the modern West as a universalizing civilizational project was a long time coming, it’s now becoming a fait accompli. A life-centered reconstruction of human consciousness and social worlds has become impossible from within the ontoepistemic and political mainstream.[4]
All civilizational projects that claim any degree of universality are surely mired from the start in conflicts and contradictions, no matter how remarkable their achievements. Yet the Planet/World is now in the hands of a small group of unaccountable super-rich people with incredible power, dramatically distant from the reality and the lives of everyone and the non-human world; this elite holds the power to make as they will, even destroying peoples and territories worldwide in pursuit of their narrow interests. A new global power structure –a loose assemblage of mega corporations, a hypertrophied cloud-driven financial sector, unbridled militarism, reality-making media conglomerates, and weakened yet still essential nation states--, constitute the infrastructure of this New Order. Buttressed by Artificial Intelligence and the algorithmization of most dimensions of life, this infrastructure is enabled by seemingly infinite amounts of energy and increasingly intertwined with ever more powerful criminal networks and cartels. The dream of patriarchal alchemy seems fulfilled, namely, the creation of incredible wealth from the endless reprocessing and destruction of matter.[5]
Given this civilizational conjuncture, my contention is that while a substantial ontological and political reorientation of the long-standing universals of Western modernity (democracy, freedom, equality, secularism, progress, science and technology and, last but not least, Humanity) is still thinkable, and needs to be pursued, there is a second project that is coming into the intellectual and political scene, which envisions a steady but sweeping departure from such universals based on the acute awareness of the co-existence of a multiplicity of entangled but irreducible worlds, or a pluriverse. While the former project addresses the crisis and ways forward by positing alternative forms of modernity, the latter aims to move beyond the modern. “Alternative modernities” and “beyond the modern,” respectively, serve as shorthand for both projects. If the former envisions a transition from “the age of empires to the age of the Human”[6] –or, as Professor Sheila Jasanoff put it in her recent contributions to the Daedalus debate, it would need to involve a substantial revisiting of democracy and of the relation between expert-based truth, politics, and trust through a novel rearticulation of pluralistic civic epistemologies[7]--, the latter focuses on “an emergent politics of life beyond the human.”[8]
My contention is that both projects will need to foster genuine relationality and care for humans and the non-human world if they are to illuminate workable paths towards pluriversal transitions. I will devote the rest of the paper to the proposition of going “beyond the modern” -- onto-epistemically, epistemologically, and politically--, as a heuristic for thinking about transitioning towards care-based and life-centered societies and economies.
An emergent politics of life beyond the modern human.
Revisiting the question of the human is crucial to move beyond the modern. Let us listen to philosopher Yuk Hui’s cogent articulation of the current predicament: “How should we respond to the challenge the human has undertaken to eliminate its own condition of existence?,” he asks.[9] For Hui, the coincidence of the technological triumph of modernity with its meltdown is opening the possibility of multiple cosmotechnical starting points for new world histories and futures.[10] It is important to add, however, that we are dealing here with the challenge some humans have unknowingly undertaken, albeit through their own designing, which calls on us to scrutinize the human from beyond the modern onto-epistemic configuration.
Nigerian cultural theorist and public intellectual Bayo Akomolafe similarly warns us that we cannot continue thinking about the climate crisis with the same categories that created it, including the human, [a]s if the word ‘human’ is a self-evident category that is not already simmering with tensions, elisions, disputations, and troubling departures.” As he continues, “[o]n a planetary scale the very notion of ‘Man’ … is being called into question by ‘something’ greater than ourselves. Something incalculable and unnamable. Something that exceeds frameworks [and] resists solutions.[11]
That something that exceeds all frameworks and resists “solutions” is none other than Earth and life themselves, in all their relational mystery and complexity. Their containment within the neat categories of the Western episteme has proven lethal, despite and because the enormous productivity of Western science and technology.[12] Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls this Man into question through her powerful analysis of what she describes as a “monohumanist genre of the human”: the idea of the human as “naturally” Western, liberal, secular, and bourgeois, thus also “naturally” competitive, rational, individualistic, and so forth.[13] By framing the human within colonial history –from the perspective of the “dysselected” (those considered naturally “unfit”)--, Wynter’s analysis of monohumanism affords original insights to construct a pluriversal horizon for humanity. This starts by broaching the question, whose idea of the human are we talking about? For the question of the human takes different forms for differently located and embodied humans, especially for those subjected to the symbolic and physical violence associated in one way or another with Universal Man and with the constructs of liberal humanism. Needless to say, the task of pluriversalizing the human is dauntingly complex, given the generalized destruction of life effected by monohumanism via globalized capitalism with their attendant monotechnologism and monoeconomism.
Relationality as the real foundation of life.
Thinking about new conditions for being human thus implies a pluriversal questioning of any universal idea ofhumanity premised on the exclusionary category of “Man.” Along with pluriversality, relationality and care are strongly emerging as a basis for rethinking the human as well as many social practices. Relationality, or the radical interdependence of everything that exists, rather than separation, is increasingly posited as the real foundation of life in a variety of fields (from quantum physics and postdualist social theory to concerns with spirituality and the sacred) and in indigenous, feminist, and ecological activist practices. It is a counter to the prevailing ontological dualisms of modernity. The southern African concept of Ubuntu --I am because you are, I exist because everything else exists, including the entire range of non-human entities--, serves for many as an apt vernacular description of relationality.
Ontologically, relationality asserts that entities do not pre-exist their relations. Selves and objects are not autonomous and unitary, but rather emerge through myriad relations –in other words, everything is mutually constituted.From a relational perspective, living beings are coparticipants in the constitution of the world through their perceptions and actions. This phenomenological view can be found at play in many indigenous worlds, but it is also present in the yearning for more relational lives among many people and social movements. Living relationally –attuned to being Earth-- seems to be an idea whose time has come, but it needs to be actively cultivated as an existential and practical horizon in all we do. This radical notion of relationality challenges head on the tradition within which humans have lived, and in many cases thrived, in the modern age.[14]
Care as the basis for a transformative social praxis[15]
If another (ontology of the) human is possible, this means that it must be moved by other forces from those of separation, competition, accumulation, individuality, hierarchy, and control. The notion of care has been gaining ground as an expression of this search and as a correlate of relationality. If everything is ineluctably connected with everything else through relations of constitutive interdependence, it follows that the only genuine social ethics is one of compassion and care for all beings. Conversely, a genuine ethics of care requires that society be redesigned on the foundation of the profound relationality of all existence.
The question becomes: Can modern societies be reoriented ontologically towards interdependence, so that they can foster genuine care? The complexity of such reorientation arises from the long historical connection between patriarchy, capitalism, ontological dualism, and the lack of care. The fact that patriarchy is a most enduring ontology predicated on separation, appropriation, hierarchy and control, and that capitalism can only thrive on competition, accumulation and the ideologies of scarcity, individuality, and greed means that patriarchal/colonial capitalist societies are ontologically unprepared for exercising genuine care. To put it succinctly, modern societies are at their root anti-care or can only care in an instrumental way. Hence, placing depatriarchalization and the transcendence of colonialism and capitalism at the forefront of all we do, is of foremost importance.[16]
We find many expressions of this idea in feminist, environmental, and ethnic movements. If we understand designing in a broad way, that is, not as a professional practice but as something all humans have the capacity to do, we arrive at the a view of designing as the praxis for the reconstitution and caring for the web of life, in all its dimensions: the care, healing, and repairing of the bodies, territories, landscapes, communities, cities, and institutions that we all are and inhabit. This care and designing perspectives provide us with another starting point and another affect to broach the question of what’s wrong with “America” and how to think constructively about it beyond what “America” has been till now.
The imperative of transitioning between narratives of life and the human.
The planetary polycrisis --that is, an entanglement of crises with potentially destructive nonlinear and cascading interactions among them—, demands a significant revisiting of what life, the human and the world have come to be because of the ways of being, knowing and making that have characterized the modern era.[17] While the Anthropocene and polycrisis discourses do not broach these underlying questions, they are stirring up concerns about dramatic upheavals, catastrophes, and even civilizational collapse. The open discussion of these dreadful futures, including occasionally in global summits--, is revealing. A new sense of historical mission seems to be on the rise. One might think that the time for collective reflection and horizontal organizing for the ending of the socioeconomic orders premised on infinite growth, ruthless competition, and extractive capitalism has arrived.[18]
One of the concepts that has been gaining purchase to convey the felt need for a new type of action and imagination is that of socioecological transitions. Particularly in the Global South, the most innovative of these transition discourses take as their point of departure the notion that the contemporary ecological and social crises are inseparable from the dominant model of social life, whether categorized as industrialism, capitalism, modernity, (neo)liberalism, anthropocentrism, capitalist patriarchy, coloniality, or Judeo-Christian civilization. Shared by most of them is the contention that we need to step beyond existing institutional and onto-epistemic boundaries if we truly want to strive for worlds and practices capable of bringing about the significant transformations seen as needed.
Transitioning between narratives of life emerges as a purposeful descriptor and enabling formulation of the existential and political mandate confronting us. Common to many transition visions is that humanity is entering a planetary phase of civilization because of the accelerating expansion of the modern era. Changing the foundational myths that silently but effectively have constructed much of the world, placing it at the edge of the abyss, arises as a crucial aspect of all transitions.[19]
Wynter names the human species homo narrans --the ones who narrate ourselves—, placing the accent on how people create stories about life and about who we are, and how we live within the stories we create. From this perspective, changing the story of life changes the lived experience of life. Yet, what happens when as a myth-making species humans actively forget that they are making myths? Cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick, in conversation with Wynter, writes that modern, secular, rational human beings are storytellers “who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological” and, one may add, economic.[20] In inventing ourselves as subjected to the allegedly iron laws of biology and economics, we occlude the fact that we are the ones who tell ourselves the stories of biology and economics, and of what it means to be primarily bioeconomic entities. Is it possible to investigate anew the incredible designing force of the bioeconomic narrative in all we do at present, especially in “America” and the West but increasingly, albeit unevenly, in most of the world? To address this question, it is important to “get back to Earth” from the perspective of the polycrisis.
As the consequences and modes of operation of nonrelational living become evident, a clearing begins to appear for the incredible potential of relationality to become visible. Awareness about being Earth-bound and finite is intensifying, fostering a lexicon centered on notions such as resurgence, regeneration, repairing, healing, caring, re-earthing, reweaving, reanimating, and so forth. These categories recenter human action on the defense, care, and reconstitution of life. New paradigms of relation between humans and the Earth find unexpected inspiration in the incredibly relational character of nonhuman living beings, including, notably, fungi, mycelia, rhizomes, and forests and in cultures and ontologies that have lived with the strong awareness that the Earth and the entire cosmos are alive, such as animistic and Indigenous ontologies.
In other words, the polycrisis summons us to rethink and remake the making of life and the world. “Remaking” goes hand in hand with the contention that we all make our worlds all the time through our day-to-day interactions and through the structures of thought that we inhabit and that inhabit us, largely without our realizing it. More than ever, we confront the need to overcome the inertia of acting out of the toxic loops in which we, moderns, in particular are enmeshed as alleged individuals. Becoming relational transitioners involves awareness of where we’ve been, then skillfully and consciously acting otherwise, collectively, with an awareness that as we do so we are contributing to re/make life and life-worlds.
This must be a pluriversal project that goes well beyond the boundaries of the West, as intellectuals and activists form the world’s peripheries are cogently demonstrating. There is only so far you can go into remaking the making of the world if one remains within the ontology of rearranging objects and concepts dualistically, in the hope that so many “green” or “sustainable” or even socially “just” practices might deliver us safely into the capitalistic future of ever-growing comfort and abundance for all. The sense of being actively defutured surely creates real pressures to slip back into the race for individual survival and success, but in doing so we abdicate the possibility of building collective, long-term survival for all beings and worlds that flourish. This is why actively observing how we are being made and defutured by our foundational narratives becomes essential for reimagining worldmaking collectively.
There are possible points of departure everywhere for the caring and reweaving task, most auspiciously in the work being undertaken at the onto-epistemic and social peripheries of anthropocentric worlds. Some of these groups are asking empowering questions such as: where in our lives might we rebuild conscious interdependence? Where are there spaces for cultivating the conditions for regenerating and re-entering the stream of life? Where and how can we cultivate technologies of care, new “we’s” and forms of collectivity? Often flourishing in the cracks and fissures of oppressive designs and practices linked to colonial capitalism and extraction, these groups seem attuned to the intuitive, the irrational, the feminine, and the sacred; building rhizomes in multiple directions with like-minded experiments, concepts and struggles; committing to place despite the pressure to delocalize and decommunalize; creating pluriversal kinds of collective intelligence on the heels of digitality; organizing horizontally for the phasing out of a civilization premised on bioeconomic narratives and capitalist hegemony.
Part II of this post will discuss the implications of these reflections for modern social theory and the academy.
PART II
Part I briefly outlined the need for transitions from a destructive to a regenerative planetary consciousness; and from an understanding of the human as “naturally” competitive, individualist, instrumental, and so forth to multiple other ways of being human centred on interdependence and care. Several of the arguments have direct and challenging implications for modern knowledge, rationality, and the academy,
First, it is one thing to write about radical interdependence as life’s foundation, and quite a different one to make the shift towards effective inter-existence in practice. How do we become genuine practitioners of interdependence? Further, we can only arrive at insights on these questions through direct and sustained engagement with those re/emergent forms of interdependence, whether in the world’s peripheries or in non-dominant modernities and emergent or alternative Europes. It is in these knowledge and action spaces where other possible futures can be imagined.
Finally, there are dire implications for modern thought and actions of thinking pluriversally by looking beyond academic theory. Paths for pushing beyond the grasp of modern rationality can only be illuminated by delving into the practices of social groups whose cosmovisions, based on interdependence, still make them more attuned to the fact that we all live within a living cosmos and a living Earth.
The quandaries of modern social theory
Let me explicitly address the question of the academy’s role in contributing to the thought and praxis of transitions towards relational, pluriversal, and onto-epistemically just worldings. Like any other practice, the academy is bound to think about this role in the auspicious but tense space that opens today, perhaps with greater clarity than ever, in between World and Earth. By World I mean the totality of the world designed by humans, particularly by that world named modernity.. By Earth, in keeping with many indigenous cosmologies, I mean the totality of forms, patterns, and entities that inhabit our planet, in their amazing, untamable self-organizing dynamic, the result itself of an incredibly complex cosmogenesis and of evolutionary histories of the cosmos and the earth --what physicist David Bohm beautifully called the “unbroken wholeness” of the universe. In between World and Earth, there opens a vast space where thought and praxis can think and do otherwise, perhaps anew. A guiding question suggest itself: Can the academy be reoriented, onto-epistemically, institutionally, politically so that it can contribute to bring a measure of balance between the designed World and the autopoietic Earth?[21]
This question can be further addressed by dwelling on a second space, which also has ontological and political undertones: this is the space between the Emergency/emergencies, understood as the dire, tragic situation in which humanity and the planet find themselves at present, on the one hand; and the Emergence/emergences, conceived of as the re/birth of something genuinely new. I am talking here about a social, ecological, and onto-epistemic Emergency (staggering inequality and wars; climate and biodiversity collapse; inability of modern knowledge and ontology to deal effectively with the above); and of a social, ecological, and onto-epistemic Emergence/emergences (the irruption of unsuspected actors and struggles for multiple forms of justice; the emergence of the Earth herself as subject; and the coming into visibility of relational ontologies and epistemologies).[22] Between World and Earth, and between Emergency and Emergence, one finds lurking both new conditions for thought and new ontologies of the human.
How does academic knowledge fare in all this? All forms of knowledge emerge within an historical derived set of conditions of possibility, or episteme. This is also the case for the Enlightenment tradition, or “The Age of Man,” as modernity is often called. Modern social theory (MST) belongs to this episteme. By MST, I mean a mode of knowledge that operates based on abstraction and detachment; which takes these epistemological operations as the only valid method to produce universally valid, comprehensive, and reproducible knowledge about an external “reality”; and that, in so doing, disqualifies other ways of knowing, which are seen as partial, subjective, or as mere beliefs.
This model was historically borrowed from the physical and natural sciences; it became prevalent in most fields of knowledge after the 1950s with the rise of empirical social sciences. A founding premise of the social sciences is that the whole of life is divided into allegedly autonomous spheres—the social, the economic, the political, the biological, the individual, and the cultural—that particular sciences (sociology, economics, political science, biology, psychology, geography, and anthropology) can know with a high degree of complexity and confidence. While divvying up the world in this way is considered necessary for making sense of otherwise unruly complexities, the need to tame complexity analytically unwittingly created a vision of reality that became functional to existing processes of exploitation and domination (think about economics, to start with!).
While these processes are well known, I would like to discuss several additional issues. In attempting to free modern thought from these constraints, critical social theory but it has faced some severe limitations. Such limitations include: first, the fact that abstract thought leaves out the realm of embodiment, practice, and experience, which is essential to understand the relational making of the world. In doing so, it separates the act of knowing the world from action in the world; this is the well-known and much questioned separation between the observer and the observed.Second, MST forgets that the question of the human takes different forms for different humans, especially for those subjected to the symbolic and physical violence associated with colonial Universal Man. Consequently, third, MST evinces a certain ignorance of its historical locus of enunciation within the ontoepistemic configuration of Man, most poignantly brought into view by the question of whose idea of knowledge, and of the human, are we talking about? Fourth, MST forgets that concepts are always limited in being able to fully apprehend the messiness and contradictions of life, springing from the uncontainable creativity of the living cosmos and the living Earth.
While each of these factors marred MST’s ability to arrive at a genuinely relational conception of life and politics, this does not mean that it all has been “wrong.” In its critical variants, MST often unveiled the complicity of established ideologies in the maintenance of extant systems of domination, whether capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, White supremacy, or heteronormativity. Many of the great social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to important transformations of MST (e.g., Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and queer movements). Yet mechanistic and rationalist approaches have prevailed, and the modern academy, taken as a whole, has been pivotal to the maintenance of the image of a single reality and world understood in the terms of liberal, secular humanism –what sociologist of science John Law fittingly calls “the One World World.”[23] These assumptions constitute the main default settings of modernity and occlude deeper understandings of relationality. Indeed, one may contend that the academy has been a major force in the ontological occupation of people’s experiences and knowledges and of the human/non-human tapestries that are people’s life territories.
Poststructuralism was insufficient to enable a more decisive move out of dualism, rationalism, and realism. Poststructuralist analyses were effective at deconstructing hegemonic understandings of society, but much less so at reconstituting the understanding of reality along nondualist lines. This was, in many ways, the problem: brilliant at critique, but not so much at affording alternative accounts of reality. It might be the case that the age of only critique is over, and that the real task now is to imagine and propose transformative worldmaking practices. Theoretical critique needs to be coupled with a renewed concern for intervention, praxis, and the exploration of other ways of being, doing and making. The time has come to push the Enlightenment episteme beyond its constitutive links to patriarchal monohumanism, rationalism, and ontological dualism.
Above all, it is now crucial to delve into those spaces of living, making, and mobilizing where relationality has long been, or it is being newly, actively cultivated. There we will find fresh clues for remaking and restor(y)ing life. Is this pragmatically attainable for us moderns who have spent much of the last five centuries proudly distancing ourselves from land, emotions, mystery, and sacredness—or any form of relationship that might be seen as tainting our “objective,” “rational” knowledge? Many of the clues to move in this direction are to be found beyond the comfortable walls of the academy, in the terrain of diverse activism and social movements operating with theory but in practice, often in unexpected ways.[24]
My hunch is that many academics know and feel, at some level, that business-as-usual academic practices fall short of the historical imperative of moving closer to the elusive goal of a post-Enlightenment episteme. Yet most seem unwilling or incapable of acting accordingly. The signs have been sent, yet the bells of the academy fail to ring to this inner call, as we shall comment further below.
The alchemy of the AI Revolution meets the Revolution of Care
Being, knowing, and designing otherwise thus must take into account the ontological predicaments of monohumanism and monotechnologism. In this context, the praxis of repairing, healing, and caring for life’s web of interdependencies might be posited as a pluriversal strategy to overcome the most destructive aspects of the technological reshaping of worlds. From this exercise might emerge novel ideas about limits that incorporate the onto-epistemic, existential, and political conditions necessary for respecting the constitutive relationality of all existence
My hunch now is that the AI Revolution will have to be met with una revolución del cuidado, a Care Revolution based on the foundation of relationality.[25] But again, here we find ourselves in the paradox of living in societies that are ontologically unprepared for exercising genuine care –the paradox consisting in that what is most needed is what seems farthest away. Can this change? Only if we move the debate on technology pluriversally, decolonially, and relationally. The onto-epistemic pluriversalization of technology demands cultural-political work of utmost importance, driven by questions such as: How do we want to live? What kinds of worlds do we want to create? Pluriversalizing technology entails visualizing technologies that support a world of many worlds; technologies intended for the reconstitution, and healing of the nearly generalized ontological uprootedness from body, place, and landscape; technologies that might enable humans to reclaim their capacity for making life more collectively and autonomously, instead of outsourcing it to institutions, experts, the state, and the capitalist economy. Pluriversalizing technology should contribute to dismantling the mandate of masculinity that is at the core of the object-driven ontology of modernity, learning to think and make with those who rise in defense of their life territories and who still aim to have a different relation with the living cosmos in the face of generalized cybernetic thinking.
As the new alchemists, AI creators and investors are involved in machine learning writ large; it couldn’t be any different in a world created as if humans exist in an inert Universe and a passive Earth, based on the long tradition of mechanistic thought. The world of the AI techno-patriarchs is a world devoid of real people, communities, and landscapes –a world deeply entrenched in the anthropocentric idea of mastery over nature. Is another “machine learning” possible, one capable of supporting the Care Revolution? Might digital activists, perhaps some of the same AI creators who are beginning to voice their existential and political unease with the state of things AI, be in search of clues towards a different relation to technology?
No doubt, we are increasingly enmeshed in gigantic technological systems (aggregate data sets, networks, prediction algorithms, sensors, interconnected “smart” devices) with a tendency to totalize and supplant embodied, place-oriented life. Under the maddening pace of monohumanism and monotechnologism, we are falling further and further away from being attuned to Earth. We need to provide a clearing for alternative narratives of life and the human capable of mobilizing us towards altogether different ways of dwelling on the Earth. At stake is a reappropriation of technology in attunement to place, locality, and the relational reality of a living cosmos, placing technology at the service of multiple ways of worlding.
Beyond technology, and whatever we mean by the term, “humanity” is poised today at the edge of an Emergency. Somewhat differently than in other periods when philosophy was confronted with a similar juncture, Emergency here means a moment where not only thought and being are at issue, but the becoming of Life and its futures on the Planet. Dwelling in the Emergency and actively opening to what is emergent have become essential tasks. Many points of departure are already being intuited and charted by multiple actors, far from the spectacles of war, profligate consumption, and the enthrallment with social media and all things AI. As the wise poet put it long ago, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears” (Rumi). Could this apply to “America” and “the West” at present?
Coda. America: the bad news and the good news.
Let’s shift register, into the explicitly political, with the help of the poetic, to bring this text to a close. There is some hope that the ensuing years may mark the date when large numbers of the world’s intellectuals, activists and spiritual leaders finally come to denounce with the sharpest voices a bare fact: that the United States and much of the West are leading the destruction of the Planet and its many worlds, including the same secular liberal world from which they descend. With the façade of liberal humanism lifted once and for all, world elites, with rare exceptions, have become the cheerleaders and faithful managers of Planetary Terricide, with Biden and Netanyahu as the great patriarchal officiants of such a project at this very moment. The shallowness of the 2024 pre-electoral political debate is the icing on the (poisonous) cake. For many abroad, it makes patently visible the provincial globalism that has characterized the American political system since the end of the Second World War if not before.
The current onto-epistemic crisis has been long in gestation. In 1925, the poet Robinson Jeffers, who was to become a well-known naturalist and conservationist by the 1950s and 1960s, wrote these angry and prescient words about the America of his time, edging faster and faster from Republic to Empire, in his well-known poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic.”
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to
empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens …
And here, the promise, the hope, a metaphor for the civilizational transition America –and all countries and societies in the world—are summoned to embark upon, a beacon for the emergence of multiple other projects of renewal and rebirth, as far away as possible from the smell of empires, of what kills and maims humans and the Earth:
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to
make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and
decadence; and home to the mother.
We find support for this idea in many other sources from visionaries, spiritual teachers, and grassroots activists, including indigenous people’s persistent invocation of Mother Earth. But can we hear them? Can we hear the alarms?[26] The stakes are stated loudly and clearly in a well-known song:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
….
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free
We asked for signs
The signs were sent…
I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me.[27]
Right now, it seems that few in “America,” including in the power circles of government and the academy, can hear the bells ring –the bells of mindfulness, or care, or genuine plurality, of real justice, or a world centered on life, on humans attentive to the force of Earth and the Cosmos. The signs have been sent…. Isn’t it time to stop running with “that lawless crowd”? Let’s dwell in the light sneaking in through the cracks, as with the many beautiful experiments in most parts of the world that are being tried out by countless persons, activists, and movements eager to transitioning towards a life where Life can be cared for.
I borrow the expression “beautiful experiments” from Saidiya Hartman’s lucid reconstruction of the lives and deeds of young Black women arriving from the U.S. South to New York (Harlem) and Philadelphia, between the 1880s and the 1930s, only to find an equally virulent, albeit different, form of racism in what they expected to be spaces of freedom in the urban north. As Hartman tells us, the challenge is to see how they survived, and at times even thrived, in the context of brutality, deprivation and poverty, how their beautiful experiments in living –in between the crowded tenements and the street, the laundry work and their intimate lives--, yielded lives that were painful but at times also beautiful, fugitive moments of going about as if they were free, in the mist of “the insistent hunger of the slum.”[28]Theirs was a “revolution in a minor key.”
Hartman is painfully aware of the onto-epistemic and societal grasp on Black lives, but refuses to see in their kind of urban maroonage only the horror and not the beauty, to linger on the tragedy without putting forward a compelling view of how young colored girls tried “to make a way out of no way, to not be defeated by defeat,”[29] so as to set into motion “a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible.”[30] Hartman’s creative, careful, and loving unearthing of the histories of these forgotten young women demonstrates why another possible is, and must be, possible. In reinventing possibility, we broach the ontological and political task of reinventing and pluralizing the future. This is the good news, despite their limitations and contradictions, that the academy, the media, organized religion and science, and institutions should be talking about.
[1] Akomolafe, “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us.” The Emergence Network, August 17, 2019, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/what-climate-collapse-asks-of-us, (accessed April 1, 2024); “Moira Millán y el Buen Vivir originario,” Pensamiento Ambiental, (May 22, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiRYUW8R08 (accessed April 1, 2024).
[2] See the special issues of Daedalus, “Institutions, Experts & the Loss of Trust, (Fall 2022) and “Creating a New Moral Political Economy” (Winter 2023); see also the Reports, Advancing a People-First Economy (Cambridge: AAAS, 2023) and Forging Climate Solutions. How to Accelerate Action Across America (Cambridge: AAAS, 2023); and the Spring, 2023 and Winter, 2024 issues of the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for articles on the “Distrust and Political Polarization” and “Climate Change” debates, respectively. The Commission on Reimagining our Economy also sponsored the publication Faces of America. Getting By in Our Economy (Cambridge: AAAS, 2023).
[3] This article is written in a hybrid genre, between an academic paper and a free-flowing essay, which is the format I find most appropriate to the argument I want to make and the effect I would like to produce. This means the reader should not expect an erudite treatment of fields and literatures, but a free borrowing and reweaving of multiple long-standing and emerging trends. I am drawing partly on a recent paper, “Planetary Universalisms / Planetary Terricide: A pluriversal perspective,” prepared in January, 2024 for the meeting on “What is Universalism,” Venice, June 21-22, 2024, sponsored by the Berggruen Institute, and on a co-authored book, Relationality. An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human(London: Bloomsbury, 2024), with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma. I trace back the seeds of this paper to the 1980s when, while a PhD student at UC Berkeley, I came across Wilhem Reich’s Listen, Little Man; it was during those years that I also came across the poem by Robinson Jeffers I quote at the end of the paper. Since then, the idea came of one day writing a paper entitled, “Listen, American People.” While the sense of the American people has changed dramatically since the 1980s under the pressure of social movements, identity politics, and multiculturalism there is a sense in which being “American” (and Western and modern) still names a weighty cultural identity.
[4] My remarks on Hamas’s attack on Israel need to be understood in the context of Israel’s continued virulent conquest of Palestinian territories enabled by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, with the support of the West. Rashid Khalidi summarized this context succinctly: “[T]he modern history of Palestine can be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020), p. 9.
[5] See Claudia von Werlhof, “Destruction through ‘Creation.’ The ‘Critical Theory of Patriarchy’ and the Collapse of Modern Civilization.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 24(4): 68-85, 2013.
[6] Lorenzo Marsili, From the Age of Empires to the Age of Humanity, Noema, July 27, 2023, https://www.noemamag.com/from-the-age-of-empires-to-the-age-of-humanity/
[7] S. Jasanoff, “The Discontents of Truth & Trust in 21st Century America,” Daedalus 151(4): 25-42, Falle 2022.
[8] “Beyond the modern” is the title of a new Bloomsbury book series edited by Clive Dilnot and Eduardo
Staszowski. As the series description reads, “[r]ecognizing that a key challenge of our time is to invent new alternatives to modernity that can effectively redress capitalism’s blind march toward greater social and natural disasters [the books in this series] focus on teasing out what is immanently possible within what-now-is.”
[9] Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), p. 249. There have been many problematizations of modern notions of the human, most famously perhaps Michel Foucault’s argument about the figure of Man as the foundation of a knowledge configuration or episteme, which crystallized at the end of the eighteenth century. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
[10] Yuk Hui, “Singularity Vs. Daoist Robots: Is there another path than accelerated Western modernization?,” Noēma (June 19, 2020), https://www.noemamag.com/singularity-vs-daoist-robots, (accessed January 6, 2022).
[11] Bayo Akomolafe, “Coming Down to Earth: Sanctuary as Spiritual Companionship in a Time of Hopelessness and Climate Chaos,” 2020,https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/coming-down-to-earth (accessed January 24, 2024).
[12] I use the notion of episteme in the Foucauldian sense, i.e., as a historically constituted knowledge configuration that conditions from the start can be known and thought in each society throughout a particular age.
[13] Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Wynter arrives at this deconstruction through a rigorous historical and philosophical examination of the genealogy of the modern human, from the Copernican Revolution to Darwinian/Malthusian and economic macronarratives of the 18th and 19th centuries, which resulted in a bio-economic “genre of the human” that has steadily extended to all corners of the world through colonialism, development, and globalization. For an extended exposition of Wynter’s work, see Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma, Relationality.
[14] Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, Relationality.
[15] For Heidegger, care is a fundamental existential structure. Feminists have made substantial contributions to the conceptualization of care. See, e.g., Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017).
[16] The discourse on the crisis of care (e.g., the precarity of services to children, youth, older adults, and the differently-abled, plus health, housing, and education crises) is telling in this regard. As Italian designer Ezio Manzini puts it, this results in the paradox of living in societies of services that are also careless societies. Manzini, Livable Proximity. Ideas for the City that Cares (Milano: Bocconi University Press, 2022).
[17] On the notion of the polycrisis, see The Cascade Institute, https://cascadeinstitute.org/about/overview/
[18] It is telling that the revered Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to contemplate this possibility: “Breathing in, I know that this civilization is going to die. Breathing out, this civilization cannot escape dying.”[18] More than a death after which nothing remains, at stake would be an exceptionally tense phasing out of the dominant civilizational project, for many of its realizations will go on, as elements of other configurations of Earth, life, world, and the human.
[19] See A. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press 2018) for a review of the literature on transitions, and Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma’s Relationality for a full development of the argument of transitioning between narratives sketched out here.
[20] Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” p. 11.
[21] M.C. Escher’s lithograph, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), tellingly illustrates not only the sense of living in a designed world that design us back, but Heidegger’s well-known argument about modernity as “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper Torchbooks (1977).
[22] I adapt the notion of Emergency/y and Emergence/s from post-Heideggerian philosopher Richard Polt’s account of Heidegger’s concepts, which Polt uses for his development of a “traumatic ontology” appropriate to our tragic age. As he surmises, “We must think not merely about emergencies, but in them. To think in emergency would be to dwell in it and dwell on it. Emergent thinking must be able to stand emergency itself –stay with it, endure it, speak from it.” Polt, Time and Trauma. Thinking through Heidegger in the Thirties (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 227). My thanks to Fernando Flores and B. Scot Rousse for bringing this work to my attention.
[23] John Law, “What’s wrong with a one-world world?” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015), 126–39.
[24] See Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma, Relationality, for an extended discussion of the limitations of MST and why dealing with them needs to engage with the worlds of political activism, sacredness, and a myriad of experiments and practices concerning the environment, designing, social justice, and so forth. In the academic domain, a series of thinkers are being rediscovered as forerunners of the idea of life’s deeply immanent, relational, and processual character, such as Spinoza, the North American pragmatists (James, Dewey), the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and the two great proponents of rhizomatic thought, Deleuze and Guattari. There is much to be learned from these exponents of a wiser, alternative West, who still help us to unlearn the mainstream West.
[25] I borrow the expression “revolución del cuidado” from former Colombian congresswoman and long-time feminist activist Angela María Robledo, as proposed in the March 18, 2024 session of the Advisory Committee to Colombia’s Vice-presidency on the design of the National System of Care, in which we both participate.
[26] London-based artist Aura Satz recasts the question of sirens and alarm in insightful ways with ontological undertones in her new film, Preemptive Listening (2024), https://preemptivelisteningfilm.com/
[27] Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” from the album The Future, Sony Music, 1992.
[28] Hartman, Wayward Lives, 84.
[29] Hartmand, Wayward Lives, 347.
[30] Hartmand, Wayward Lives, 59.
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