Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). 'Today, difference is embodied for me most powerfully in the concept of the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity.' xvi '[...] designs for the pluriverse becomes a tool for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds.' p.4 ''[…] autonomous design as a particular ontological design approach in dialogue with the transition visions and design frameworks. The basic insight is, again, seemingly straightforward: that every community practices the design of itself.' p.5 'A fundamental aspect of autonomous design is the rethinking of community or, perhaps more appropriately, the communal; this rekindled concern with the communal is in vogue in critical circles in Latin America and in transition movements in Europe concerned with the relocalization of food, energy, and the economy and with transition towns and commoning, among others.' p.5 'This proposition will serve as a partial anchor for proposing a par tic u lar practice and way of thinking about the relation among design, politics, and life, to be called autonomous design.' p.5-6 'Readers might rightly wonder what these ideas about autonomy, relational living, and so forth have to do with design, ontological or otherwise. Moreover, is autonomous design not an oxymoron? The possibility I am trying to ascertain is quite straightforward in principle: whether some sort of ontologically oriented design could function as design for, and from, autonomy. Here again we confront one of the key issues of this book: can design be extricated from its embeddedness in modernist unsustainable and defuturing practices and redirected toward other ontological commitments, practices, narratives, and performances? Moreover, could design become part of the tool kit for transitions toward the pluriverse? What would that imply in terms of the design of tools, interactions, contexts, and languages in ways that fulfill the ontological design principle of changing the ways in which we deal with ourselves and things so that futuring is enabled?' p.15 'The book should thus be read as constructed along three axes: ontology, concerned with world making from the perspective of radical interdependence and a pluriversal imagination; design, as an ethical praxis of world making; and politics, centered on a reconceptualization of autonomy precisely as an expression of radical interdependence, not its negation.' p.21
'Discussions of the relation between design and politics reflect the fact that design has become a formidable political and material force; the corollary is whether design is becoming, or can become, a promising site for the transformation of the entrenched cultures of unsustainability toward pluriversal practices. Reframing design practice ontologically is intended as a contribution to this discussion. It is also an attempt to locate design politics in its capacity to generate new entities and relations, that is, to unveil design’s capacity “to ‘propose’ new kinds of bodies, entities and sites as political”, thus expanding established understandings of the political.' p.59 '[…] pluriversal, that is, as fostering the coexistence of multiple worlds. By resisting the neoliberal globalizing project, many marginalized communities are advancing ontological struggles for the perseverance and enhancement of the pluriverse.' p.70
'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.' p.94 '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, inorganic, 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.' p.95 'In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo (2011) identifies five global trajectories that, in his view, shape possible futures: de- Westernization, re- Westernization, reorientations of the Left, spiritual options, and decolonial options. The latter two can be seen as “roads to re- existence delinking from the belief that development and modernity are the only way to the future”. Which future prevails will depend on the struggles and negotiations among these trajectories, likely without a winner. “If there is a winner,” Mignolo adds, “it would be the agreement that global futures shall be polycentric and noncapitalist. Which means that a struggle for world domination . . . would yield to pluriversality as a universal project”. Citing Humberto Maturana’s maxim that “when one puts objectivity in parentheses, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other”, Mignolo goes on to expound the decolonial option as the clearer path toward the pluriverse.' p.205 'A pluriversal attitude in relating to indigenous groups who defend mountains or lakes on the basis that they are “sentient beings” or “sacred entities” (our modern translation) would allow mountains or lakes to be what they are, not mere objects or independently existing things; above all, it would suspend the act of translating these arguments into “beliefs,” which is the main way in which moderns can accommodate them from the perspective of an ontology of intrinsically existent objects or nonhumans. Clarity about these issues of partial connection and translation is essential in design activities in pluriversal contexts.' p.217 'My concern with the risks of pluralizing modernity has benefited greatly from discussions with friends in several parts of the world. These friends rightly point, conversely, at two risks in the pluriversal position: the alterization of difference (locating difference, and hope for change, in the more clearly identifiable subaltern groups, such as ethnic minorities) and the tendency to treat modernity as hegemonic and homogeneous. All worlds have to be historicized deeply— all worlds ( whether traditional or modern) contain a judicious mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly.' p.256
