Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Book Review)

(Image source: https://lrc.berkeley.edu/event/pluriversal-politics-a-book-talk-by-arturo-escobar/ )

Do you ever wonder whether ‘real’ change in the world is possible? And, if so, what do you imagine the ‘world’, the ‘real’ and the ‘possible’ to be in these scenarios?

In his latest book Pluriversal Politics (2020), Arturo Escobar invites his readers to open themselves precisely to these questions. Even more so, he calls upon us to ‘think possibility differently’ by engaging with life beyond the end of one’s own epistemological and ontological nose. Firmly situated within the nascent field of political ontology, Escobar grounds his book in the proposition that worlds/realities are always plural and constantly in the making. Moreover, ‘if worlds are multiple’, he states, ‘then the possible must also be multiple’ (ix). Perhaps most importantly, this multiplicity also has profound political consequences. In his collection of eight essays, most of them originally written in Spanish between 2014 and 2017, Escobar thereby continues his previous reflections on the concept of the pluriverse, offers thoughts on the praxis of interweaving multiple reals and sketches transitions to a ‘pluriversal politics’. More precisely, he considers his book as a tool for thinking and imagining a political horizon for a world ‘where many worlds fit’ (ibid.).

While Escobar refrains from making any universalizing claims, he introduces a set of mutually reinforcing pillars upon which his approaches to the pluriverse and its politics rest: (1) a critique of globisms and emphasis on the relocalization and recommunalization of social life; (2) a groundedness of his reflections in his experiences and engagements in/with Abya Yala/Afro/Latino América; (3) sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) with concepts arising from social movements, activist-thinkers of the South, the ontological turn as well as Latin American Critical Theory; and, above all, (4) radical relationality.

In his preface to the English edition, he offers extensive critical reflections on his terminology, conceptual classifications and particularly on the relations between what he terms ‘modernist’ and ‘pluriversal’ politics, their potential and existing tensions and overlaps (xii-xxxiii). While Escobar sees e.g. neoliberal political designs to be at odds with a nondualist pluriversal politics, he still considers leftist struggles for social justice a stepping stone towards the pluriverse, even if they do not fully embrace radical relationality (xvi). Mobilizing Afro-pessimist critique, Escobar sharply highlights the limitations of this endeavor and raises incredibly intriguing and relevant questions. Nevertheless, he still proceeds to gently nudge the reader to use a radically relational lens in imagining a pluriverse that entangles both dualist and nondualist ways of worlding. In line with his agenda to open rather than foreclose imagination of the possible, he ultimately leaves it up to the reader to assess this approach. Yet, it is precisely these questions, nuances and potential limitations that those familiar with political ontology will crave to dive more deeply into and that require orientation in order to imagine a political horizon capable of making webs of human/more-than-human relations flourish on a shared planet.

These wonderings and open questions linger with the reader throughout the volume. The eight essays are all in dialogue with each other but are largely written to stand on their own. The first chapter deepens some of the theoretical and philosophical reflections put forward in the preface. Inspired by what Escobar refers to as ‘ancestral traditions’ characterized by radical relationality as well as academic trends that center around the agency of more-than- humans in co-fabricating social and political worlds, he sketches a set of principles for thinking about strategies for pluriversal transitions (30). These axes are then further discussed throughout the book.

Chapter 2 begins to engage with some of these axes through the ambitious endeavor of reviewing and recasting Latin American Critical Thought. Vouching for an inclusion of three major currents – thinking ‘on the left, from below and with the earth’ – Escobar sets out to challenge leftist aspirations to universality and emphasizes on the entanglements of notions of and struggles for autonomy, communality and place-based modes of existence.

Chapter 3, ‘The Earth-Form of Life’, mobilizes Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge to trace Indigenous Nasa thought of liberating a feminized planet. However, the essay is largely confined to outlining this methodology rather than actually engaging it. This could be traced back to the book’s ensayo style and is in line with Escobar’s main aim to stir the imagination rather than presenting theoretically and empirically rigorous work (ix–x).

Whereas most chapters could easily be read as exploratory notes or proposals for entire book projects, chapters 4 and 5 are the perhaps most well-rounded essays, despite their strong overlaps if read chronologically. Chapter 4 engages with the framework of Epistemologies of the South and draws its ontological and ethno-territorial dimensions through a revision of discourses and practices of buen vivir and postdevelopment. Like most of the other essays, one of the chapter’s major strengths lies in the effort to ‘think beyond the academy’, to interweave theory and practice and to decenter dualist frameworks (75-80). In doing so, although not expounded, Escobar seems to hint at a hierarchy of worlds and the power dynamics at play in assembling the pluriverse, resonating his rootedness decolonial thought. Complementary to the ontological dimensions of chapter 4, chapter 5 then focuses on intellectual colonialism, particularly in Latin American Social Theory. Here, besides mapping five major emerging trends which overlap with his earlier moves to thinking ‘from below’ and ‘with the earth’, he shares a concise set of ‘post-Enlightenment’ characteristics necessary for achieving epistemic justice, or ‘autonomous social theories’, as he refers to them (93–95).

Lastly, the final three chapters follow a refreshingly different format: chapter 6 consists of a written exchange between Escobar and Gustavo Esteva, centered around (post)development, and chapters 7 and 8, albeit in different ways, are propositions for pluriversal designs for a transformation of socioecological relations in Colombia. Nevertheless, particularly chapter 6 underscores some of the limitations and open questions raised by the preface: As Escobar writes, ‘our critique is not really anti-European or anti-West but in favor of Mother Earth liberation and the pluriverse; and the Earth and the pluriverse are all of us ... we all need to make serious efforts to ... live between, with, and from multiple worlds’ (115, emphasis original).

While it is hard to disagree with the latter, as well as with Escobar’s caution not to overgeneralize the ‘West’, his appraisal still begs the question whether the pluriverse can and should be for all of us, i.e. all ways of worlding? As Escobar states himself, some ways of worlding are thoroughly at odds with radical relationality and are to be considered the root of past and current planetary crises (xii; xvi). Can a pluriversal politics that is not decidedly counterhegemonic and anti-imperialist in its ontological dimensions truly foster a ‘world where many worlds fit’? Is a pluriverse that continues to accommodate ontological dualisms a pluriverse that the planet can bare? Or is the pluriverse itself already inherently anti- or alter-modern by acknowledging a multiplicity of reals?

Despite or precisely because of the abundance of wonderings that this volume stimulates, it is impossible to do Escobar’s work justice within the limits of a book review. He offers ways of

philosophizing life that not only have a strong emphasis on but also rootedness in praxis and activism. The ensayo format compellingly communicates a tentative cartography of the pluriverse and the book itself embodies pluriversal worlding. In addition, despite the volume’s regional focus on Abya Yala/Afro/Latino América, Escobar’s decolonial lens and focus on the (re)localization of action invite any reader to extrapolate his ideas to other contexts.

Nevertheless, the book’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it raises a plentitude of intriguing and extremely relevant questions that it does not intend to answer. This even evokes a slight sense of dissonance within Escobar’s main argument and his commitment to ‘the kinds of politics that defend a deeply relational understanding of life’ (xiii): On the one hand, the book aims to make radical claims by shifting towards radical relationality. On the other hand, it then compromises this radicality by continuing to accommodate pol- itical designs that may not sufficiently grasp the interconnectedness of life and the resulting necessity to see all forms of (in)justice as interdependent. If ‘pluriversal politics itself involves ... inhabiting a spectrum from the radically relational to the modernist liberal’ (xvii), one cannot help but wonder if this is a pluriverse that the planet wants and needs. Hence, a tension remains as to whether Pluriversal Politics is actually radical enough.

Finally, returning to the main goal of the book and Escobar’s explicit request to evaluate it ‘by the extent to which it succeeds in opening up the ... imagination to ... an ontological politics towards the pluriverse’ (x), it certainly accomplishes its aim. Even more so, it invites the reader to re-imagine pluriversal politics not as the mere designs for pluriversal transitions (xvi) but as the strategies that foreground an acknowledgement of a multiplicity and hierarchy of worlds and, consequently, a redistribution of power. Such a step may require what Latour called a metaphysical ‘bomb’, referring to Viveiros de Castro’s work, rather than an exclu- sively relational lens. But, who knows; in the spirit of imagining possibility differently, perhaps there is indeed another ‘possible’ possible beyond the one(s) presented by Escobar?

published 2022 in Politics, Religion & Ideology

to cite: Lisa Ausic (2022): Pluriversal Politics: the Real and the Possible, Politics, Religion & Ideology, DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2022.2112703