Negotiating Pluriversality

Abstract

In this essay, I examine opportunities for re-viewing what I call, after John Law, examples of “one-world world” arguments through the lens of negotiating pluriversality. Specifically, I look at examples of arguments that placed side-by-side suggest that life will not return to what life was like in the recent past due to accumulating social crises and ecological disasters that have been increasing in both amount and intensity. What links these arguments is a one-world world presumption that we are all in this together. My approach is to disentangle and re-view the arguments separately as accounts of experiences of conjugated power relations and gray space. I propose that re-viewing one-world world arguments for purposes of negotiating pluriversality benefits from, following Achille Mbembe, “the analyst [revealing] the myriad ways ordinary people guide, deceive, and toy with power instead of confronting it directly” and, following Ariella Azoulay, remaking a “never-ending series of [constitutive] moments … into a never-ending project.” Ultimately, I argue negotiating pluriversality involves ascertaining ways communities in transformation can, as Azoulay puts it, reinvent the ways they “tie themselves together.”