Why Relationality?

What is our Reality?

We wake up in the morning as individuals, and from that moment to the moment we return to sleep, we experience ourselves as something like hard, self-contained billiard balls bumping up against other such spheres.  The dominant, common-sense model of the cosmos is that the universe is something like a giant spherical jar, and we and all other beings and objects are contained within it like marbles jostling each other around. This model may be so commonsense that it may not even occur to us to be a kind of worldview, or cosmovision, a map of the world that we keep in our minds all the time to give us a sense of orientation.

But what if we are not so stable and self-contained?  What if the geometry of the universe is not a giant sphere outside of us within which we live tiny and contained?  What if the universe is shaped more like a strange infinity loop, akin to Escher’s famous and dizzying picture Drawing Hands where the artist depicts two hands, each drawing the other into being?  In this dizzying spatial model, all beings and objects would indeed be placed outside of us and surrounding us, but they would also equally be contained within us; they would be as constitutive of ourselves as our own eyes, thoughts, or breath. 

A major contention of this project is that because of “the map” afforded by our dominant commonsense cosmovision, the very world that we collectively design under the premise of separation in turn (re)creates us as beings who experience ourselves as intrinsically separate individuals surrounded by the same. The thought experiment presented above is one of many possible cosmovisions not based on the metaphysical assumption that we are intrinsically separate individuals surrounded by entities that are themselves intrinsically separate from us. To push the envelope, there exist many other cosmos, reals, and possibles that do not abide by the presupposition of separation; in fact, we argue that nonseparation, or interdependence, is the condition of all living things.

Why does Relationality matter? What is at Stake?

While certainly having an accurate map, description or story of Reality matters, the reason for this project is ultimately political.  We believe that understanding this story, and the alternatives relationality offers, is crucial for making sense of and addressing the most pressing crises–ecological, political, cultural and social–  of our times. This project is premised on the belief that at the root of many contemporary crises are assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology), and how we know what we know (epistemology). In addition to  the ontology or cosmo-vision of separateness described above, is a belief in certain key dualisms that organize the kinds of actions we can take, and solutions we can pursue, in addition to the kinds of entities, organizations and institutions that might exist or have agency. 

Some of the dualisms that anchor our modern world include mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, economy/society, human/non-human, secular/sacred, rational/irrational and modern/non- modern. These are crucial because they not only reinforce the notion of a clear divide between knowing subject and universally knowable object, they produce limited (and at times false) understandings of power, oppression and destruction as well as impoverished understandings of emancipation, well-being and life.  

Ultimately, we believe that key to constructing livable worlds, then, is not just a matter of finding solutions to these various crises within our current paradigm, but precisely, in the cultivation of ways of knowing, being and doing premised on an ontology and epistemology of interdependence and relationality. 

Some examples of difference between these paradigms/solutions within this different paradigm of relationality include:

• Ecological sense of interdependent self vs. autonomous individual outside of nature
• Prison abolition and transformative justice vs. Prisons and punitive justice
• Local living economies  vs. extractive profit-driven economy (capitalism) 
• Agroecology and regenerative agriculture vs. monocrop, industrial agriculture
• Autonomous, self-reliant, local governance vs. to Liberal Representative Democracy
• Buen Vivir (Collective Wellbeing) vs Development 
• Heart and Body based knowing vs Mind(only)-based rationality