The Pluriverse, Beyond the Concept of Practice: On the Reality of Occurrence, Utopianism, and Prison Abolition

Abstract

The concept of practice frequently occupies a central explanatory role in pluriversal theorists’ accounts of what constitutes a world or reality. Often, the many worlds that populate the pluriverse are described as immanent creations of practice, the pluriverse’s multiple realities as products of interrelated social and material practices. Although liberating in many ways, pluralizing reality through the concept of practice also risks perpetuating certain limitations on reality’s expansibility. As a result, the theme of practice in pluriversal theory risks obscuring the potential and the urgency of the pluriverse’s inclusion of worlds that would benefit greatly from its redistribution of the real and yet are not best understood strictly in terms of practice. This article considers the world of prison abolition in this light, connecting not only the importance of, but also the reality and ontological weight attributed to, imagination in prison abolitionist work with the ontological expansiveness of pluriversal theory.