One topic that has recently received increasing attention in the field of environmental humanities is an inquiry into the ontological status of the Earth, or even its modes of existence. In plural, because the Earth may as well be the only one we have, but it has changed both in terms of History and in terms of the relationship that the beings composing and inhabiting it have established with it. This constitutes one of the most striking findings of the new geological epoch – which, despite being called the Anthropocene, is perhaps better understood as the epoch of the Earth. That is, the epoch in which the Earth ceases to be a mere scenario and becomes the center of concern for all its inhabitants. And such acknowledgment imposes a series of struggles and demands.
One of these struggles concerns new problems posed by the relationship between the one and the multiple, which can be summarized as follows: on the one hand, we need to recognize the legitimacy of the worlds lived and conceived by extra-modern peoples, worlds that diverge on important aspects from the Western one. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that such peoples are also, like all other terrestrial living beings, facing the « same » ecological collapse of global dimension.In this statement, I mainly follow Stengers, Tsing et. al., and Maniglier. Stengers, Isabelle. « The Challenge of Ontological Politics. In A World of Many Worlds. M. de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, eds. pp. 83-111. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Tsing, A. L.; Mathews, A.; Bubandt, N. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20. Current Anthropology 60 (suppl. 20): S186–S197; Maniglier, Patrice. 2020. How Many Earths? The Geological Turn in Anthropology. The Otherwise 1:61-75, and Maniglier, Patrice. Le philosophe, la Terre et le virus: Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité. Paris: Éditions Les Liens qui libèrent.
The question is significant because, just when the ideal of universalism seemed to have lost prestige in the human sciences (due to the accumulation of atrocities committed in its name), the Anthropocene threatens to bring it back into the spotlight. Would the global nature of the ecological catastrophe imply the epistemic indestructibility of the universal? What happens to political ontology – understood, as we will see, as the need to establish « a world in which many worlds fit », as the Zapatistas would sayEjército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EJLN). 1996. « Cuarta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona ». January 1. https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/1996/01/01/cuarta-declaracion-de-la-selva-lacandona/. – in the face of the overwhelming evidence of this catastrophe? Along with the struggle to understand the contours of this global phenomenon – which many have considered a « negative universal »Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35:197-222. – comes, therefore, a requirement. Such an investigation must be committed to the defense of the ontological self-determination of those collectives which have never been modernLatour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993., which covers everything from their struggles for political autonomy to their own ways of conceiving and interacting with other-than-human beings.
Before delving deeper into this topic, it may be important to briefly discuss this ontological pluralism that conditions my investigation of the « global ».
Over the past 30 years, the concept of « ontology », which has a long and respected tradition in philosophy, has been utilized in theories originating from disciplines other than philosophy (though often in close dialogue with it). The field that has spearheaded this movement is anthropology, and its « ontological turn » is associated with the works of authors such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour. Historically, anthropological studies have revolved around the concept of « culture » - a concept heavily influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who posited an unbridgeable gap between the world and its representationKohn, Eduardo. 2015. Anthropology of ontologies. Annual Review of Anthropology 44:311-327.. Conversely, the ontological turn in anthropology expresses the commitment to take as legitimate realities, and not as mere cultural representations, the assemblage of beings, temporalities, spaces and relations that shapes non-modern ways of life.
Within this movement, the parameters that were once used to define the beings that constitute reality – parameters that, in the eyes of so-called Westerners, appeared to be universal - are now seen as regionally specific. In other words, they are viewed as particularities of a way of life that does not hold ontological privilege over others. Thus, there is a strong political aspect to this ontological turn in anthropology. For instance, Viveiros de CastroViveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Who is afraid of the ontological wolf? Some comments on an ongoing anthropological debate. Manuscript of the lecture given at CUSAS – Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture, May 30. asserts ontology is mobilized as « a philosophical war machine both anti-epistemological and countercultural (in both senses of ‘counterculture’). » Additionally, for Marisol de la CadenaDe la Cadena, Marisol. 2014. The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess through Ontological Openings. Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 12., an anthropology guided by ontological openness enables us to situate modern politics and challenge its hegemony by exposing its universalist ambitions. Moreover, according to authors such as Eduardo KohnKohn, Eduardo. 2015. Anthropology of ontologies., Elizabeth PovinelliPovinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press., Bjørn Bertelsen, and Synnnøve BendixsenBertelsen, Bjørn Enge; Bendixsen, Synnnøve. 2016. Recalibrating, alterity, difference, ontology. In Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. B. E. Bertelsen, C. Bendixsen, eds. pp. 1-40. London: Palgrave MacMillan., the ontological turn consists of a response to conceptual problems and contradictions that arise when the humanistic foundations of anthropology are confronted by the ecological crisis that defines the Anthropocene.
The definitions and claims mentioned above help clarify the challenge presented by ontological politics, as philosopher Isabelle Stengers sees it: the need to « take a stand for some of the meanings of both politics and ontology, and not for others »Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. The Challenge of Ontological Politics. In A World of Many Worlds. M. de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, eds. pp. 83-111. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 83.. The sense of politics she refers to points to a concept familiar to those who follow her work: cosmopolitics. Here, I will attempt to characterize it, although I may not capture all its nuances. Cosmopolitics can be seen as a speculative belief that politics can proceed in a way that takes into account the objections of those who will suffer the consequences of decisions, even if those objecting are not part of the deliberation. This implies that participants may be willing to let go of certainties that assure them that the concerns of others « don’t matter so much » in the face of the gravity of the issue and the urgency of the decision that needs to be madeStengers, Isabelle. 2007. La proposition cosmopolitique. In L’émergence des Cosmopolitiques, Jacques Lolive et Olivier Soubeyran, eds. pp. 45-68. Paris : La Découverte Recherches; Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Cosmopolitcs [vol. II]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press..
However, when it comes to political ontology, Stengers sees cosmopolitics as « badly limited. » This concept was designed for situations where different people are engaged with a cause. But when others are the only ones concerned with a cause that involves more-than-human subjects to whom they feel bound (for example, when the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa urges the non-indigenous people to stop mining the Amazon to avoid scaring away the spirits that ensure the fertility of the forest), what typically comes into play is tolerance: we may accept that such a cause is important to them, but we do not feel personally connected. This is why Stengers argues that when it comes to political ontology, ontology needs to be a matter of commitment – an engagement for a world where many worlds can coexist. And, as I want to argue, this commitment is better understood in terms of a compromise: compromising as a means for producing real commitment.
Delving deeper into this topic, it may be interesting to note that the word for commitment in Portuguese is « compromisso » – which evokes both making an agreement (compromise) and being bound by a promise/intention (commitment). Etymologically speaking, it comes from the Latin compromittere – a combination of the prefix com (together) with promittere (to promise) – meaning « to adjust or resolve by mutual concessions »Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=compromittere..
This promise of mutuality is perhaps the greatest challenge of ontological politics since, without it, the claim of pluralism can slip into a « simple goodwill »Stengers, Isabelle. 2020. « We are divided. » e-flux journal 114, December. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/366189/we-are-divided/. manifested in the abstract demand for « respect » for other ways of life. Malcom FerdinandFerdinand, Malcom. 2019. Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. calls this inoffensive demonstration of solidarity « sympathy-without-bond ». By this, of course, I do not mean that we should renounce respect. But if there is only respect, these divergences can be treated as incommensurable, and this would make us lose the opportunity to think in the face of them and thus make room for other peoples’ vital struggles to become ours too.
It is important to emphasize, however, that it wouldn’t be the case of « adopting » the cosmology of the other, understanding mutuality as the suppression of differences. As Viveiros de Castro states, that would just mean « inverting [our] irrepressible missionary drive »: « if it is no longer a matter of making others think like us, then we must think like them. » Instead, what we should do is « think with them », « to take the difference of their thinking seriously, » he says. « It is only by fully embracing this difference and these singularities that we can imagine (build) the common »Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2012. « Transformação » na antropologia, transformação da « antropologia ». Mana [online] 18 (1):151-171, 164, my emphasis..
Thus, ontology truly becomes a matter of commitment when we turn it into a tool to build this common – understood as a possible unity grounded in multiplicity, a common that is not a « same. » To take up the Zapatista slogan, ontology as commitment concerns not only the multiplicity of worlds but also the unity that encloses such multiplicity – « for a world where many worlds fit », the emphasis indicating the common that emerges from the recognition of interdependence among diverse worlds. So, in the remainder of this text, I will try to precise a meaning of « world » capable of making room for interdependence. Then I will better specify the contours of this « global ». At last, I will point to some « affective dispositions » (for lack of a better term) that may assist in making this commitment.
In a recent paper, researcher and artist Patricia Reed states that a world is « composed of contents, the identification of those contents, and by the content-relations within – semantically, operationally, and axiologically »Reed, Patricia. 2021. The end of a world and its pedagogies. Making and Breaking 02, 1.. A world gains concreteness as ways of doing and saying affirm the coherence between these three elements, but not only: its increase in consistency is linked to the criteria of habitability, which means that a world is only « worldified » via processes of localization. Still according to Reed, « the endurance of a world depends on the degree to which its conditions of necessity […] compel […] its members to affirm its configuration in practice, despite whatever dissenting attitudes that may be held »Ibid. – in the example she provides, it is possible to be strongly against capitalism and yet be unable to avoid paying bills –, so that worlds able to withstand and absorb such frictions are the most enduring. Such conditions of necessity produce a perception of the inalterability of that world: this is why worlds seem complete, total, or natural. But all worlds can eventually come to an end, due to the inability of an existing configuration to absorb frictions.
When we recognize « the threshold of insuppressible frictions »Ibid., 2. that germinates within a world, we may glimpse its incompleteness and the possibility, if not of its end, at least of its reconfiguration. This is the point where we seem to be today, insofar we see the incongruence between Euro-modern practices of globalization and what many have called « planetary »: a theoretical model that explains how Earth’s habitability has been sculpted over millions of years through the interaction between physical, chemical, and biological processes, which needs to be taken into account in the modes of inhabitation of all terrestrials. We are all perplexed and stunned because we still don’t know how to « world » the planetary.
What I want to highlight here, however, is the promise of mutuality and renewal carried in the perception of a world’s incompleteness. Reed claims globalized modes of inhabitation have mono-dimensional tendencies: a single metric for measuring value, the proliferation of agricultural monocultures, a single model of human behavior, a single « geography of reason ». Directed toward the elimination of the diverse, the expansion of such modes of inhabitation is based on an effort to « make small. » The elimination of diversity also disregards frictions as a means to produce « outside views » that would allow us to see our world as incomplete – a symptom of this is to think that we are completely submitted to capitalist logic. This leads the author to suggest that « struggles for otherworlds demand a minimum speculative commitment to the incompleteness of all worlds: that it is possible to configure coexistence differently »Ibid., 4..
For Reed, the planetary is a call to compose a « multidimensional spatial diagram » capable of accommodating the « exponential multiplication of relationships between diverse entities, temporalities, chemistries, and materials »Ibid., 4.. So planetary dwelling must prioritize a structural « thickness »: « the problem space shifts from questions of where things stand […] to how things ‘hang’ together »Ibid., 4.; the emphasis moves from the paradigm of existence to that of coexistence. This perspective, extrapolated from discussions of Earth-system sciences to metaphysics, invites us to consider Denise Ferreira da Silva’s proposition that « differences are inseparable: they exist and cannot be flattened by a small-world imposition, but crucially, they coexist within an n-dimensional planetary configuration, which means they hang together through some qualitative relationship »Ibid., 5..
It is in this very key that we can also read the « ontology of the Earth » that philosopher Patrice Maniglier has been developingSee Maniglier. How Many Earths? And Maniglier. Le philosophe, la Terre et le virus.. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is less a theory about the Earth « itself » or « in general » than about the Earth regarded as a global entity, that is, when the Earth shows itself capable of reconfiguring the spatial distribution of terrestrials – a mode of existence that was unknown to us before the advent of the Anthropocene. More than a collection of constituted ecosystems, today the Earth is better conceived as the set of parameters that condition the ecological diversity of the world. It is at the structural level of the global regulation of variations that the Earth best shows itself, at least in its scientific version, which many call Gaia.
However, the global reality of the Earth is not only found in the image of Gaia: science offers a very important version of this entity, but it needs to be composed with other versions. Giving science the privilege of defining the global would mean repeating the colonial structure; the global would imply exclusion rather than composition. Applying comparative anthropology to bring more complexity to this conception of the Earth as a structure of variation, Maniglier proposes that the worlds of the various cosmologies constitute divergent realities; accordingly, the Earth would be the structure in which these realities relate to each other through their very divergences. Taking interdependence and ontological pluralism seriously implies thinking of the Earth as the result of the composition between the different versions that the world assumes in the various ontologies; only this way can the Earth express a totality open enough to constitute one, but not the same world. Finding the Earth amid its ontological variations would thus become the political commitment of our time.
Finally, what affective dispositions might favor this commitment? Stengers and Didier DebaiseDebaise, Didier; Stengers, Isabelle. 2022. An ecology of trust? Consenting to a pluralist Universe. The Sociological Review Monographs, 70(2):402-415. associate the effort of making a small world – they speak of thinning the world – with the « horror of becoming a dupe » that characterizes the experience of modernity. This horror is generally expressed by the opposition between knowledge/truth and belief/falsity. Such horror would have given rise to a culture of distrust that makes moderns suspect everything and subject everything to testing – what coincides with the disqualification of knowledges that do not measure their efficacy according to the same tests. Quoting William James, for whom « philosophies are intimate parts of the universe: they express something of the universe’s own thought of itself »Ibid., 404., the authors wonder: « What universe is being created with and through our distrust? »Ibid., 405.. For them, the modern association of truth with disenchantment has a performative power which produces, as its ontological consequences, the thinning of the world.
In this sense, Debaise and Stengers suggest that we should subject our ideas to a more relevant test than merely trying to distinguish true from false: we should check whether our ideas favor the thinning or thickening of our conditions of existence and thought. An idea such as « dependence » operates the first movement: capitalism is expert in creating dependence. It does so by tying chains one to the other and by making negligence irreversible, creating the « infernal alternatives » that make us feel divided and powerless. Conversely, an idea that favors the thickening of the world is that of interdependence. Stengers states elsewhere that, « if the Earth is not only inhabitable but teeming with life, […] this is owed to the creation of relationships of interdependence. Relationships that do not arouse the imagination of liberation because the beings who participate in them become capable of what they wouldn’t be capable of by themselves »Stengers, Isabelle. « We are divided. ». The authors conclude: interdependence, like dependence, is an abstraction, but an abstraction that thickens the world.
Consenting to interdependence thinking, then, can be a means of reclaimingPignarre, Philippe; Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. La sorcellerie capitaliste : Pratiques de Désenvoûtement. Paris: La Découverte; Stengers, Isabelle. 2012. Reclaiming Animism. e-flux Journal 36, July. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/; and Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. The Challenge of Ontological Politics. confidence in the generative power of relationships in societies formatted in the logic of the « small-world ». It allows to produce a collective power that makes us capable, along with others, of what we could not do alone. From the perspective of political ontology, interdependence relates to a speculative bet that we may learn not only to « believe » in the other-than-human subjects to which non-modern peoples address, but also to be affected by the way these peoples honor their obligations to those other-than-humans. Making ontology a matter of commitment, therefore, implies « [suspending] ontologies and epistemologies, ‘holding them lightly’, in favor of more venturesome, experimental histories »Haraway quoted in Debaise, Didier; Stengers, Isabelle. 2022. An ecology of trust?, 412. in which divergences do not lead to oppositions, but rather to solidarities capable of producing unexpected modes of response-abilityHaraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.. This is an essential attitude for the composition of the common that Stengers and Debaise call pluriverse (another good term for our global).
In conclusion, all these propositions help to outline the silhouette of the global/common that we are dealing with here. The sense of « global » that emerges from them functions as a means to keep the difference between worlds active and to resist the temptation of imposing a single world – a temptation that can arise with the acknowledgement of the planetary character of the ecological crisis. Examining the paths that build (and destroy) the interdependence between different ontologies allows us to realize the possibilities that these ontologies have to keep on becoming others – which is crucial to glimpse new ways of occupying this Earth undergoing such a huge transformation.