Pluriversal Problems,Revolutionary Remedies

In 2015, John Law offered an excellent summary of what, according to the title of his paper, was ‘wrong with a one-world world’:

[O]ne-world metaphysics are catastrophic in North-South encounters. They reduce difference. They evacuate reality from non-dominant reals. They turn other worlds into the mere beliefs of people who are more or less like you and me—and correspondingly more or less (probably more) mistaken. They insist, in the end, that there is a universe and that we are all inside it, one way or another. (Law, 2015, p. 134)

The kind of situations in which the failures of ‘one-world metaphysics’ become particularly apparent are both common and fairly easily described, at least schematically. Imagine that two groups come into contact. One of these groups (Group A) possesses an ontology in which Gods are existent and active parts of the universe. The other (Group B) works with an ontology close to that of the modern, secular West, one in which Gods are assumed to be either non-existent or non-active. The former explains recent, damaging events where the earth has shaken in terms of divine anger, the latter in terms of tectonic activity. What happens in such an encounter? How do the two collectives explain and work with this difference? Each would no doubt persist in their explanations, at least for some time, but we have many historical cases in which groups like Group B would seek to explain why Group A thinks the way it does in terms of the failings of some people to overcome ‘superstition’ and embrace the realities that modern science has revealed to us. Thus, to take merely one example, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous dismissal of Indian modes of thought in 1835:

The question now before us is simply …whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether…we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter. (Macaulay, 1935)

This sort of imperial arrogance is rather less common than it once was (although it has certainly not disappeared), but it has been replaced by a liberal relativism that possesses its own flaws. In place of an explanation that would, to return to an earlier example, dismiss talk of angry Gods as the cause of tremors as superstitious backwardness while lauding contemporary seismic studies, we might encounter the suggestion that both Group A and Group B were really ‘talking about the same thing’. That they, in fact, were simply offering competing representations of truths—beliefs—about our shared world. Seemingly symmetrical, however, this analysis would be anything but, for it would be predicated on an ontological commonality when precisely that commonality is what is in question. It would shift from a Macaulayite insistence that the English possess knowledge while Indians possess superstitious and wrong-headed beliefs to the claim that both sides possess beliefs (more or less true) about the same, single world.

Two problems remain. The first might be reduced to a kind of hidden bad faith. The liberal solution I have outlined tends to suggest that there are (a) phenomena that are part of our world and (b) beliefs about those phenomena. Yet what counts as a phenomenon is dependent on ontology. One can relativise beliefs about the causes of tremors if both sides of a dispute agree that tremors exist. But how does one set up the problem if one begins with precisely what is under contention? For example, one side might take it as the fact that the liquid in front of me was just instantly transmuted into wine from water and proffer theories about how this occurred. What happens if the other side refuses to accept this ‘fact’ as a fact? Then, we are not comparing representations but have rather returned to our original problem. Before we can relativise beliefs about our shared world, we first need to establish some agreement over the basic properties and entities of that world.

The second problem is equally fundamental. Imagine that we can be fully agnostic regarding the nature of the world, thus allowing both transubstantiation and earth tremors as phenomena that are part of our shared experience and in potential need of explanation. How reasonable is it to assume, nonetheless, that we all inhabit the same universe, one that obeys the same rules and contains the same entities for all of us? Such a view is fundamental to the ontology of the modern, secular West. Is it equally fundamental to all cultures or is its imposition as part of a symmetrical solution to cultural disagreement, in fact, a source of asymmetry? The answer would seem to be the latter. Thus, for example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes the opposition between what he terms ‘our modern multiculturalist and uninaturalist ontology’ (many cultures, one nature) and ‘Amerindian cosmopraxis in the form of a perspectivist theory of transpecific personhood, which is by contrast unicultural and multinatural’ (many natures, one culture) (Viveiros de Castro, 2015, p. 56). In comparing two radically different cultures (one human, another non-human), the Amerindians that Viveiros de Castro studied insisted that cultural significance was fixed—humans and non-humans enjoy manioc beer—but the substance each drank was different. The substance we know as blood is—and is not simply like—manioc beer to the jaguar.

The problem for indigenous perspectivism is not therefore one of discovering the common referent (say, the planet Venus) to two different representations (say, ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Evening Star’). On the contrary, it is one of making explicit the equivocation implied in imagining that when the jaguar says ‘manioc beer’ he is referring to the same thing as us (i.e., a tasty, nutritious and heady brew). In other words, perspectivism supposes a constant epistemology and variable ontologies, the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents. (Viveiros de Castro, 2015, p. 59)

In response to such problems, Law notes, postcolonial theorists have moved beyond epistemological symmetry towards ontological symmetry, suggesting that it is the assumption that we all inhabit a single, shared world that is the problem:

…this is the core question that they ask: Are we dealing with matters of belief? Are we simply saying that white people believe one thing, for instance about what we code up as ‘nature’, whereas Aboriginal people believe something different? Or is something different going on? The new postcolonial response is that the differences are not simply matters of belief. They are also a matter of reals. What the world is, is also at stake. (Law, 2015, p. 127)

A related set of moves may be found in a recent volume edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, each of them has done superb work precisely problematising the assumption that a single, secularist ontology can adequately explain all phenomena (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). They, like others, have found inspiration in a statement made by the Zapatistas in 1996. ‘Many worlds are walked in the world’, reads the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle.

Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us… In the world of the powerful, there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit. (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018, p. 1)

What was needed, de la Cadena noted in 2010, was a fundamental transformation of how we conceive of the political, one willing to commit to a world of many worlds or a pluriverse. In such a world, multiple ontologies would be nestled, cheek by jowl, and disputes would not be resolved by reducing different realities to a single, common universe. Instead, then, of conceiving of ‘politics as power disputes within a singular world’, one would embrace ‘the possibility of adversarial relations among worlds: a pluriversal politics’ (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 360). In common with Law, Helen Verran and others, the focus is on maintaining difference—including ontological difference—rather than seeking to eradicate it in order to find a single ‘common ground’ that always seems—whatever efforts are made—to reaffirm the worlds and the being-in-the-world of the modern West. For peoples around the world(s), facing profound economic inequities and devastating environmental crises, the way forward does not involve capitalist solutions like enclosures, liberal solutions such as appeals to a single common good, nor even leftist insistence on maintaining and expanding the commons but instead embracing the ‘uncommons’.

While usually deployed across adversarial political positions, all three concepts converge in that they require a common form of relation, one that (like labor or property) connects humans and nature, conceived as ontologically distinct and detached from each other. Any of these three concepts—including the commons in its progressive version—may cancel the possibility of worldings that diverge from the ontological divisions and relational forms they require… [T]o avoid cancelling divergence, we propose the uncommons as the heterogenous grounds where negotiations take place toward a commons that would be a continuous achievement, an event whose vocation is not to be final because it remembers that the uncommons is its constant starting point. (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018, pp. 18–19)

I have a great many sympathies, both intellectual and political, with this pluriversal project. Indeed, the places where I diverge have little to do with the identification of the deep problems—political, social and natural—posed and produced by ontological asymmetry. They have to do, instead, with the solutions put forward so far, particularly as these have been suggested as a means of grappling with ontological disagreements of a particular and important kind, namely those—such as the dispute between my fictive culture A and culture B—having to do with the existence and agency of Gods or spiritual beings. All pluriversal proposals, I seek to show first, are not created equal. Several maintain a human-centred world, even as they countenance the multiplication of realities connected to human action. Second, even those pluriversal projects that do not place humans at the centre of their ontologies seem to profoundly understate the difficulties involved in changing the ontology of the modern West sufficiently that other ontologies are to be tolerated. De la Cadena and Blaser write of ‘negotiations’, for example, while Law describes the need ‘to craft ways of doing so that are themselves contingent, modest, practical and thoroughly down-to-earth; ways of proceeding that acknowledge and respect difference as something that cannot be included’ (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018, p. 19; Law, 2015, p. 128). Neither negotiation nor craft will be sufficient, however. For the West, at least, a world of many worlds cannot be made without destroying the one-world world produced and maintained by our current legal, political, and social systems. A different world is possible, but the way towards it is not via individual collaboration but rather a deep and world-shattering revolution.

Ontology and Practice

To illustrate the first issue—the fact that many pluriverses remain human-centred, I will begin by sketching out a problem—one similar to those described above—put forward by the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. How might we grapple, Chakrabarty asks, with the case of the not-yet-modern peasant, who insisted on recalling pasts that included the actions of gods and spirits? Democratically minded and inclusivist histories might wish to incorporate the perspectives of such a person, yet they could not do so on his terms. In explaining the reason for a rebellion, the peasant might point to the exhortations of their gods as a cause. ‘For a historian’, Chakrabarty wrote, ‘this statement would never do as an explanation, and one would feel obligated to translate the peasant’s claim into some kind of context of understandable (that is, secular) causes animating the rebellion’. Yet, doing so placed the historian in a bind. ‘In his own telling, then, the subaltern is not necessarily the subject of his or her history, but in the history of Subaltern Studies or in any democratically minded history, he or she is’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 103). History might license many forms of relativism, but it would seem to reach a limit here: for a cause to be accepted as part of a historical explanation, the cause requires existence. Within the secular academy, however, Gods cannot be, so one might say that ‘the Santal believed that Gods destroyed their enemies’, but one could not unproblematically write, as a causal statement, that ‘Gods destroyed the Santal’s enemies’. By contrast, one could write both that ‘the Santal believed that floods destroyed their enemies’ and ‘floods destroyed the Santal’s enemies’, because floods are an existent part of the historian’s world and are adequate to the task being described. So dire was this problem that Chakrabarty suggested in 1992 that the only recourse was a ‘politics of despair’ (Seth, 2017).

In a later text, Chakrabarty would argue that he had found a partial solution to this paradox. Elsewhere, I have tried to show that this solution does not work, in large part because it relies on the assumption of an ontological commensurability between the world of the Santal and that of the modern historian. I will not rehearse the details here except to note that one of the signs that Chakrabarty does not treat the world of the Santal and his own symmetrically may be found in the language he uses to write about Gods. Although insistent that Gods have existence, the existence he allows is a profoundly human-centred one. Gods and spirits, he writes, are ‘existentially coeval with humans, and… the question of being human involves the question of being with Gods and spirits’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 16). At more than one location, he declares that Gods ‘are as real as an ideology is—that is to say, they are embedded in practices’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 78). We should note immediately that this is a limited kind of reality or existence. Ideologies are created by humans: they have no existence independent of us. One would not, after all, say that trees or rocks are ‘as real as an ideology is—that is to say, they are embedded in practices’, for we would presumably acknowledge that the existence of trees is not wholly dependent on human being. Nor would we insist that trees and rocks are ‘existentially coeval with humans’. Trees and rocks existed, we might say, before humans and may well continue to do so when we are all gone. We might then ask whether Gods are more like trees or more like ideologies? And the answer, for many peoples, the Santal included, is that Gods are more like trees. Indeed, the point should be made more strongly: for many peoples, it is Gods who create humans and not vice versa, and hence Gods who precede humans in time. Chakrabarty might allow Gods and spirits existence of a kind, but his Gods and those of the Santal have little in common.

This critique applies broadly to other thinkers, such as John Law and Annemarie Mol, who explain ontology in terms of practice. ‘Different realities’, writes Law, ‘are enacted in different practices’ (Law, 2015, p. 130). ‘If an object is real’, states Mol similarly, ‘this is because it is part of a practice. It is a reality enacted’ (Mol, 2002, p. 44). Insofar as each scholar limits their claims to realities produced by humans, such claims seem unproblematic. Mol, after all, is describing the multiple arterioscleroses produced ‘in a single medical building’ by different practices of studying and treating the disease (Mol, 2002, p. 55). Law and Marianne Lien explore the realities produced via the various means by which humans obtain salmon. Yet Law also contends that ‘…different realities are done in different ways in different places. These have to do with nature and its relation to culture, to the social, or to the gods’ (Law, 2015, p. 134). That last case requires some explication. For we should ask, most fundamentally, whose practices are we studying? Do only humans have practices, or do trees have practices that produce realities? Do Gods? Surely before we can associate practices with an entity, we must first make an assumption about their existence. We might further ask whether all of existence is predicated on human action. Was there no reality before humans were around to bring it into being through their practices? Emphases on practice merely reinforce the human-centred understanding that the Santal’s case resists and that peoples outside the West have often so vehemently criticized. ¹ Practice-based pluriverses, to put it simply, will not help us with the Gods.

Revolutionizing the Universe

Let us proceed, then, with a less limited understanding of realities. Let us simply posit a world of many worlds, one where a world containing Gods bustles up against a world where Gods have never been; worlds where humans make ontologies shuddering against worlds where humans do little compared with other species and beings of another mould. A pragmatic question remains: The world-of-many-worlds is not “the world of the powerful” where room exists “only for the big and their helpers.” So, how do we move from the universe of the powerful to the pluriverse of us all?

Although my own work and world have been shaped by such writings, I do not think that it will be sufficient, moving forward, to simply publish more accounts of people who posit the reality of Gods and their capacity to effect change. This alone will not alter the causal logics of modern academia. After all, we already publish such accounts, along with fiction, counterfactuals and so on. There is no in-principle problem with publishing and ‘representing’ such work. The problem arises when we interrogate what will be accepted as a causal explanation. We might, for example, write multiple counterfactual histories of a world where Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election. ² But, we would not be allowed to begin with that absence of an event and then explain the entrance of the United States into World War II. Events or actors judged to be ‘not real’ might be illustrative, but they cannot be causal in their own right.

Perhaps a worked-through analogy will make this clearer. I will situate it within the legal system rather than the halls of academia so that we can see that this is an issue that pervades the entirety of our thought. Imagine two law cases where a defendant seeks a not-guilty verdict in a trial. In the first, the defendant has been drugged and immobilized, so they are completely incapable of any motion of their own. A villain takes their hand in his own, wraps their finger around the trigger of a gun and has them shoot someone dead. The defence here seems straightforward. Being in someone else’s control, they are not responsible for their actions, and the hunt would be on for the Moriarty-like figure who carried out such a devilish crime. Imagine, for the second case, a member of the US religious right who shoots a physician outside an abortion clinic. At trial, the defendant claims that they are not responsible for their crime, for (some version of) the Christian God took possession of them and worked through them. They were aware of this spirit the whole time, they argue, but were incapable of resisting it even had they wished to. That second defence will fail, and one can imagine two outcomes, both of which rest on different claims of falsity. Either it is concluded that the defendant does not believe this account (false belief) and is convicted, or they truly do believe this account, in which case the defence might be an insanity plea. Because Gods are not real and do not act in such a way (even if they are real), the only other response is an asylum.

We should ask two questions in response to these scenarios. First, how would we get from the one-world world to that in which a God will stand trial—or refuse to stand trial, perhaps—for murder? I would suggest that only a complete revolution will make this possible, a world turned upside down at every level: political, legal, cultural, social, economic and so on. Academic prose and small-scale negotiations can only do so much. The second question is equally important and is currently the one that bothers me most. Do we want this revolution? Ontological symmetry has been put forward as a means of helping to overturn the vast inequalities that pervade the modern world. But there is no guarantee that a pluriverse will be better for the dispossessed than a universe. Will not the Gods of the powerful have more force than those of the weak?