Relationality (Escobar et al) – Notes

While this is a book about crises and it strives to contribute to changing the world, it is not a solutionist book. At this time, solutions cannot help but remain stuck in the same paradigm or story as the problems they describe and presume to be real. Instead, this is a book about the possibility of designing and making life otherwise, which as we say early on, requires a different story, told in a different tone, from a very different starting point. (p.xv)

We prefer to speak of designing: always a verb, a process, an open-ended imagination concerned with making life, and potentially, a modality of active caring. Designing relationally means creating with the awareness that we are in inextricable relationship with one another, with the earth and with numerous non-human entities, and that, moreover, we ourselves are constitutively relational. We are complex webs of relationships, comprising minds, bodies, hearts, communities, knowledges and so forth. We are webs that are in relationship with the future, the present and, importantly, the stories we tell about them (p.xvi)

A similar concern was steadily arising in some social science and humanities fields, often under the guise of “relational ontologies”, and also on the margins of unexpected fields such as management, planning and social work. (p.xvii)

The entire endeavour [writing the book] was animated by our intuitive observation and evolving understanding that while there were numerous differences in the practices that we started to call relational, there was also something shared: a core resonance, something that worked against the dominant story of discrete objects and subjects, or of politics being limited to the state and capitalism, and which evinced an effect of possibility, love and connection” (p.xvii-xviii)

The move to relationality entails a new or different ontology of the human. Thinking ontologically about relationality and transitions is a crucial premise of this book. In the last instance, one may say, it is all about ontology, that is, about thinking differently about what is real and hence what is possible (p.6)

For now we want to stress that today’s challenges are not just about politics, economics, culture, or even just about epistemology (how we know); while these are important, the challenges summon us to reconsider what we think about reality, about the contemporary modes of being human, about the relation between being, knowing, and doing (with no separation among them),and about the philosophical architecture of modernity, all of which have to do in one way or another with ontology (p.6)

Though the dominant civilization is premised on the radical separateness of objects and subjects, of selves and the environment, relationality is a different foundational story of life and reality, and hence a different point of departure (p.6)

Yet it has been known and practiced widely. At its heart, relationality points to the radical interdependence of all things. The South African principle of Ubuntu declares, “I am because you are, I exist because everything exists”. Pat McCabe, Dine and Lakota elder, writes that relationality means the understanding that “every action we take affects every other being sooner or later” (p.6)

The ideas of “connection”, “interdependence”, “communication”, and “network”, that have been so popularized and exploited by 21st century capitalism, are premised on a very thin notion of relations as a network of transactions (p.8)

If the use of “relation” has become so brittle and thin, then relationality cannot properly convey the depth of mutuality, shared destiny, gratitude, care, and responsibility that we share as beings alive together in this world upon which we necessarily depend. Part of our work in this book is to amplify and help restore the meaning and gravity of relation, of what it means to be related, and what ethical responsibilities ensue. (p.8)

There is an important difference between relationality understood as a fundamental condition of existence and reality, on the one hand, and the notion of connection between already existing entities on the other. Said differently, the words interconnectedness and relatedness often presume separation, then a subsequent relationship. But we can think of relatedness differently. I am not related to my right hand – I am my hand, it is me, and we were never two separate things that were subsequently bound by relation. The degree of mutuality we mean to evoke in the word “relationality” is an intimacy with our relations that is as immediate as our own limbs. Another way to put this is relationality or interdependence comes first. Nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it (p.8)

Relationality, then, is a particular way of knowing, being, and doing – it anchors a distinct onto-epistemic formation, or as we prefer to describe it in this book, it is the key to a new story of life. It is challenging to write about precisely because it entails the conditions of and for an emergent reality, rather than already existing or known entities or concepts (p.9)

Five principles of relational politics: Contingency, emergence, radical uncertainty, non-normativity, and heart-based epistemology (p.17)

“May we remember that scarcity, separation, and supremacy are myths as we recreate relationships and systems sourced in deep care for ourselves and each other” (Calhoun, AbunDance Healing Arts email). This quote conveys beautifully and succinctly what we understand, quote, designing relationally, quote, to mean, colon, to remake relationships and systems centered in care and not in the myths of scarcity, separation, and supremacy (p.24)

The biologies of human beings – our bodies, communities, and ecologies – support consciousness, awareness, language, sociality, storytelling, and myth. The communicative, creative, artistic, storytelling, and meaning-making activities of human beings in turn create lived worlds and lived selves. Wynter read and drew inspiration from the findings of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to draw this schema of humans as, in a sense, circular beings; as creators of ourselves and our worlds, and simultaneously as creations of the worlds we bring forth. The closest visual metaphors for the strange situation in which we find ourselves may be M.C. Escher’s surrealist drawings, wherein objects and subjects, creator and creation, self and environment, foreground and background, entangle in infinite loops within which one aspect cannot be picked out as primary, fundamental, or original. Rather, objects and subjects, creator and creation, self and environment, are depicted as mutually constituted, arising simultaneously and interdependently (p.25) – similar to diagrams of multi-level, recursive, complex adaptive systems

[Anthropologist Rita] Sergato finds this dualist rationality to be central to gender and sexual domination. “It is against these foundational binarisms of the modern West that we need to orient our insurgency”, she concludes, which leads her to emphasize the communal and the relational under the rubric of the historical project of vincularidad or relationality (p.69)

King himself situated the struggle for black people’s rights in the context of a global liberation thrust that he termed Beloved Community. Beloved Community refers not to specific communities of affinity, but to the interdependence of all life – where interdependence is understood as a fundamental and universal law of reality. In 1967, King gave a sermon on Christmas Eve in which he articulated one of the most precise definitions of relationality or interdependence we have come across: (p.89)

“All life is interrelated, and we are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality”

Ultimately, King saw the struggle for civil rights as a spiritual and ontological struggle over our very understanding of the nature of reality and what it means to live together as humans. For him, Beloved Community is both the ontological foundation and ethical-political goal of all struggles for liberation This was a radical vision in which all struggles and all peoples were seen as interconnected, presaging what we here call relational politics (p.90)

Emergence is the reality of many living systems – such as ant colonies, amoebas, fungi, beehives, weather systems, our brains, jazz improv, as well as many cities and social systems. From our perspective, it can be seen as a general principle of reality, meaning that reality would be better understood from the perspective of emergence and self-organisation rather than mechanistic causality (p.119)

Interesting stuff about curiosity and relationality, in that not knowing something can be seen as a gap or it can be seen as an opportunity for curiosity and learning (p.120)

“One of the most important concepts they, Zapatistas, shared globally was the importance of caminar preguntando, walking while questioning. No maps or ten-point programs, simply humility and a road made by walking (p.127)

We need to grow our muscles and capacity for love. As Bell Hooks points out in All About Love, love is not simply a feeling, it is a verb, it is a practice. One cannot love abstractly, but through specific experiences one can gain access to the universal force of love. Many philosophers, gurus, activists, religious leaders from traditions too numerous to name, have long held that expanding our capacity for love is literally the point of life on earth, as we also discovered with Maturana and Verden-Zöllerin chapter 2. We are struck by the ubiquity of this insight, that at the root of it all is the presence or absence of love (p.149)