#pluriverse

“The notion of oww [One-World World] 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 ”

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