It is a familiar analysis of modernity that it splits the world up in ‘common-sensical’ but ultimately untenable dualities, such as the distinction between society and nature. This analysis has perhaps been made most well-known by Bruno Latour (quoted in Aistara 2013), who sees the ‘proliferation of hybrids’ – hybrids of the natural and the social/technological – as both a core characteristic produced by modernity and a core threat to the modern ontology. According to Sterling (2007), “the essence of the modern worldview was (and still is) the perception of ‘discontinuities’ between subject/object, mind/body, people/nature and other such poles, underlain by a powerful mechanistic metaphor informing our sense of the world.” Escobar (2012, p.16) summarizes the modern ontology as: “we see ourselves as self-sufficient subjects confronting a world made up of self-standing objects which we can manipulate at will.”[1]
The three main dualisms perceived and enacted through the modern ontology are those of us/them, society/nature and subject/object. Thinking about these distinctions, we might notice that they go hand in hand with the production of the world into three (or perhaps four) separate – hierarchically ordered – categories: first there are the inert materials and things studied by physics and chemistry, then there is an emergent category of living things studied by biology, and from there emerges a ‘highest’ category of complexity which is the capacity for self-awareness and intersubjective culture, studied by the social sciences and humanities. This last category could then still be subdivided into a category of people with whom we identify (‘us’), and a category of people with whom we don’t (‘them’).These categories become separated and separable through the three principal dualities (see figure 1). To many modern Western minds, object is taken to mean all materially tangible stuff, while subject refers to all living awareness. Nature is usually understood to include biogeochemical phenomena and non-human species, but also instincts and genetic inheritance in both humans and non-humans; society, on the other hand, includes not just all humans, but also learned behavior and (human-built) technology. Perhaps the most sensitive categories of all, ‘us’ could mean anything from moderns and ‘developed’ societies to ‘civilization’ and ‘high culture’, while ‘them’ might refer to non-moderns, ‘developing’ societies to even such labels as ‘primitives’ or ‘low culture’. In effect, all dualisms are ways of ‘othering’, thus leading to distantiation, alienation, non-identification and potentially demonization (Sargisson 2000). It should be made clear that dualism is not necessarily a problem in itself, even though it necessarily leads to an inaccurate perception and representation of the world. It is a problem because it is widespread, dominant, and dominating, thus leading to the destruction and oppression of other – nondual and relational – ontologies[2]. Also, and most importantly for the subject matter of this thesis, it can be argued to stand in the way of sustainability (Sterling 2007; Escobar 2012; Burke & Arjona 2013; Van Dijk & Van Dijk 2012). So what are the alternatives?
“Relational ontologies are those that eschew the divisions between nature and culture, individual and community, and between us and them that are central to the modern ontology” (Escobar 2011). But what is relationality? In a relational ontology, “nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it” (Escobar 2012, p.31). “In these views, the world is a pluriverse, ceaselessly in movement, an ever-changing web of interrelations involving humans and non-humans” (p.66). To live in a relational world means to live in a world of becomings, of all-reaching ever-growing lines of interrelatedness. It is a world much less close to the one we construct in language, but at the same time much closer to our moment-to-moment embodied experience of life as it happens through us. As Ingold (2011) puts it: we do not live in a world of nouns and verbs; it is not the wind that blows, in fact the wind is the blowing; in the same vein, the ecovillager is the firewood-chopping and the ecovillage is the reskilling. Macy and Brown (2014, p.138) concur that the shift toward relationality is one “from separate entities to flows of relationship, from substance to process, from noun to verb.”
A relational world is a world made up of intermingled (and perhaps somewhat messy) continuities. Importantly, these continuities are expressed and experienced through concrete, skilled, engaged, idiosyncratic relations. Relationality is thus based in very analogue, physical and full-bodied ways of relating, in know-how rather than know-what or know-why (Van Schyndel Kasper 2008; Krogh and Jolly 2012; Van Dijk & Van Dijk 2012). It is found in “concrete, localized forms of ethical expertise based on nondual action for ordinary life, which moderns usually disregard” (Escobar 2012, p.37). Other terms associated with relationality are integrative, holistic, systemic, connective, ecological, participative and co-evolutionary (Sterling 2007).
Whereas unsustainability is rooted in processes of alienation, distantiation and rationalization, sustainability depends on the feelings of closeness, connectedness and interdependence associated with relational ontologies. In other words, if we want to live in a sustainable world, it is more helpful to have to a plurality of different (maybe even incompatible) but locally rooted ontologies, than to strive for a single unified worldview which allows for maximal manipulation but suffers from minimal local-ethical adaption.[3] Figure 2 shows what a relational pluriverse might look like in contrast to the modern universe.
[1] As Escobar (2012, p.16) points out, the modern ontology has many aspects that can be seen as rooted in the same set of cultural assumptions: rationalism, Cartesianism, objectivism, reductionism, positivism, computationalism, logocentrism, individualism, scientism, economism, etcetera.
[2] The destructions of relational worlds by modernity – with science acting as a prime political technology to this end – are extensively discussed by Law (2011) and Escobar (2012). This is an important aspect of modernity and it provides still more reasons for discussing unsustainability as an ontological problem. However, for reasons of brevity and clarity I choose not to discuss it here.
[3] Ingold (2008) develops an elegant and quite similar argument about this in a chapter called Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism, in which he points out how images of the globe – also in terms like ‘the global environment’ – are reinforcing a kind of distantiation (associated with colonization) that is unhelpful in bringing about sustainability. What he pleas for instead is a ‘spherical’ awareness of being enveloped by the world, attuning to the things that directly surround us.
To Build A Home 