Quick thoughts on the World Social Forum in Montreal this August: Another world is needed. (What happened to "possible"? ) Conway's review of the WsF and the Edges of Global Justice is particularly useful, and she offers a good overview of a feminist response to pensiamente uno, a radical critique of the dominant epistemologies of the West. This feels crucial, urgent, since it is the way we structure revolutionary presents and futures. If our world is on its way to permanent disfigurement, and according to Bifo, semiocapitalism is blitzing our psyches ( just two of the "wages of sin"), what are our cognitive options?
One alternative: de Sousa Santos offers Epistemologies of the South, a dense decolonial brew. This argument is about the coloniality of power - the power to decide what should be studied, civilized, patented, harvested, and litigated. I've posted a good review of this work below, and includes de Landa, Dussel, Escobar, and others. All men, from a Latin American philosophical frame.
But where are we after we scale abyssal thinking? Yes to a "postcolonial or postimperial conception of rights, and they are: the right to knowledge; the right to bring historical capitalism to trial in a world tribunal; the right to a solidarity-oriented transformation of the right to property; the right to grant rights to entities incapable of bearing duties, namely nature and future generations..." (Barreto, below, p 26). But are rights redeemable? Are there other ways to know "justice"? Doesn't Boaventura de Sousa Santos still wake up in the "West"?
On a radical reconfiguring of the ways we even position critique, we could add from the same region, the "ontological turn." Consider Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism. (Notes for further exploration: his Métaphysiques Cannibales (PUF, 2009) offers an important critique of Descola’s ontological typologism. Latour's “Perspectivism: type or bomb?” sketches the public debate between Viveiros de Castro and Descola.)
We're still in the middle of a massive shift from positivism, scientism, one-world-ism, but how does a paradigm dissolve to reset the next one? If this is post- post-modern, post-structuralist, what are we pre ? We seem to be in the midst of parallel paradigms, or a mix of them interacting, like "scattered hegemonies." I pick up Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions - here's a short cut. It's like Mr Toad's wild ride (a mix of Wind in the Willows and the ride at Disneyland.) The Dalai Lama challenges brain scientists to rethink the neurological route if it doesn't lead to reincarnation. Imagine the moment when little Krishna (who has been eating mud) opens his mouth and his mother Yashoda sees the whole universe whirling inside him. Too much ontological shock for his dear human mother, so the boy-god neuralyzes her, a la Men-in-Black.
I keep asking the same questions: do all these new post-Western re-"orient"-tations shift the ways we act and be in the world? Frame our problems? Who is included in the solutions? What happens to the way we live if our justice is hyper-dimensional and space/time is heterogeneous, if it circles in on itself? Searching for ways to new modes of thinking.
Yes, I know, these are scattered notes to self, not explanations for you. (How did we get from de Landa to Descola, from de Sousa Santos to the Dalai Lama, to Bifo?)
One alternative: de Sousa Santos offers Epistemologies of the South, a dense decolonial brew. This argument is about the coloniality of power - the power to decide what should be studied, civilized, patented, harvested, and litigated. I've posted a good review of this work below, and includes de Landa, Dussel, Escobar, and others. All men, from a Latin American philosophical frame.
But where are we after we scale abyssal thinking? Yes to a "postcolonial or postimperial conception of rights, and they are: the right to knowledge; the right to bring historical capitalism to trial in a world tribunal; the right to a solidarity-oriented transformation of the right to property; the right to grant rights to entities incapable of bearing duties, namely nature and future generations..." (Barreto, below, p 26). But are rights redeemable? Are there other ways to know "justice"? Doesn't Boaventura de Sousa Santos still wake up in the "West"?
On a radical reconfiguring of the ways we even position critique, we could add from the same region, the "ontological turn." Consider Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism. (Notes for further exploration: his Métaphysiques Cannibales (PUF, 2009) offers an important critique of Descola’s ontological typologism. Latour's “Perspectivism: type or bomb?” sketches the public debate between Viveiros de Castro and Descola.)
We're still in the middle of a massive shift from positivism, scientism, one-world-ism, but how does a paradigm dissolve to reset the next one? If this is post- post-modern, post-structuralist, what are we pre ? We seem to be in the midst of parallel paradigms, or a mix of them interacting, like "scattered hegemonies." I pick up Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions - here's a short cut. It's like Mr Toad's wild ride (a mix of Wind in the Willows and the ride at Disneyland.) The Dalai Lama challenges brain scientists to rethink the neurological route if it doesn't lead to reincarnation. Imagine the moment when little Krishna (who has been eating mud) opens his mouth and his mother Yashoda sees the whole universe whirling inside him. Too much ontological shock for his dear human mother, so the boy-god neuralyzes her, a la Men-in-Black.
I keep asking the same questions: do all these new post-Western re-"orient"-tations shift the ways we act and be in the world? Frame our problems? Who is included in the solutions? What happens to the way we live if our justice is hyper-dimensional and space/time is heterogeneous, if it circles in on itself? Searching for ways to new modes of thinking.
Yes, I know, these are scattered notes to self, not explanations for you. (How did we get from de Landa to Descola, from de Sousa Santos to the Dalai Lama, to Bifo?)
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