10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17552
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2038-3460
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Atsuro Morita
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018
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Book Reviews
2022-03-26
2023-06-30
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
224-228
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Atsuro Morita
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17552
224
Osaka University
2038-3460
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228
Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018
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224                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

      Arturo Escobar
Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the
Making of Worlds, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2018,
pp. 312

Atsuro Morita Osaka University

    Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse might look like an unusual
book for an anthropologist. Rather than the usual suspects of anthropolog-
ical theory, the book extensively discusses works by design theorists. Esco-
bar explores the relevance of these theorists in efforts to make livable
worlds by indigenous, feminist, and decolonial social movements in Latin
America and beyond. These movements include the Zapatista and Colum-
bian Afrodescendant movements, as well as transition town initiatives in
the Global North, to name just a few. These movements aspire to a pluriv-
erse, “a world where many worlds fit,” to replace the modernist world that
has homogenized and destroyed diverse ways of inhabiting the planet.
    While the book has stirred up enthusiasm among designers across the
globe, its truly interdisciplinary nature might be perplexing for some an-
thropologist readers who know Escobar primarily as the author of Encoun-
tering Development and other works in critical anthropology. (This is ex-
actly what I have observed in my home country, Japan.) However, in my
view, Designs for the Pluriverse offers an alternative mode of critical schol-
arship that is much needed today to respond to our worsening climate and
ecological crisis. In this review, I will provide an overview of the two cen-
tral points of significance of the book for reimagining critical practice. One
concerns the shift from knowing to making, and the other the need for
“sophisticated conjunctions” of different knowledges to tackle the unprec-
edented challenges of our ecological present (Jensen and Morita 2020; Jen-
sen 2021). Designs for the Pluriverse itself exemplifies how these two
themes are inseparably entangled and serve as scaffolding for the book’s
call for a shift toward making other worlds possible.
    The ever-deepening ecological crises in the past few decades seem to
have fundamentally altered our understanding and expectation of the
modern world, especially the fundamental unsustainability of a world run
by fossil capitalism. If there is any shared feeling in the Global North today,
it might be the sense of losing the ground upon which everyday life and the
expectation of the future are built on (Latour 2017). One salient future of
today’s predicament is the close linkage between this everyday sense of up-
rootedness with planetary processes. The proposed geological epoch of the
Anthropocene points to the fundamental destabilization of the ground by
illuminating how the planetary environment itself has been shaken by hu-
man activities, particularly those driven by the imperative of unlimited eco-
nomic growth. This destabilization also has direct consequences for the
Book Review                                                               225
way critical scholarship operates. Bruno Latour has once noted that in the
modernist ontology that presupposes the separation between a single real-
ity and multiple human views on it, critical practice concerns revealing the
singular real that is hidden by beliefs, political agendas, or ideologies. In
other words, the critical move that aspires for deconstructing beliefs and
ideologies itself rests on the assumption that the firm ground of reality ex-
ists relatively independent from human action (Latour 1999). But when the
planetary ground itself is shaken by the unintended consequences of our
collective actions, how can critical scholars find such a ground?
     Designs for the Pluriverse contains a response to this question. The book
urges designers, anthropologists, and other critical scholars to join forces
with social movements that call for just and sustainable worlds. Here the
Zapatista call for “a world where many worlds fit” epitomizes the book’s
commitment not only to these radical movements but also to shifting the
focus of critical scholarship. While the world in the modern sense, or what
John Law (2015) calls the one-world world, now appears as a destructive
force for not only indigenous worlds but also itself, critical scholarship can
no longer draw on the world that resides “out there” to justify its political
vision. Rather, as Escobar repeatedly asks in this book, critical engagement
should concern foregrounding, sustaining, and strengthening other forms
of worlding that nurture and draw on relational ontologies of the mutual
constitution of humans and nonhumans. Here the question of ontologies
becomes a normative one with an urgent call to act.
     Escobar’s normative take on ontologies draws on an unlikely combina-
tion of political ontology by the anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and
Mario Blaser (2018) and ontological design by Terry Winograd, the Amer-
ican computer and cognitive scientist, and Fernando Flores, the Chilean
engineer and philosopher who served as finance minister in Allende’s gov-
ernment. On the one hand, de la Cadena and Blaser raise the question of
many worlds in the context of indigenous communities’ struggle to protect
their territories in Latin America, where, just like so many other places,
extractive capitalism increasingly threatens to destroy their livelihood and
communal relations. While shedding light on complex entanglements be-
tween people and their non-human companions such as animals, land-
forms, and landscapes, de la Cadena and Blaser argue that indigenous prac-
tices enact worlds, configurations of humans and non-humans, in distinct
ways that do not fall into the western ontological distinction between na-
ture and culture, subject and object (Omura et al. 2018). In collaboration
with indigenous activists, these authors aspire to defend these worlds from
the brutal force of extractive development. This is an elaborated version of
the call for an ontological commitment that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(2003: 4) declared almost 20 years ago: “anthropology is consistently
guided by this one cardinal value: working to create the conditions for the
conceptual, I mean ontological, self-determination of people”.
226                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
     While political ontology provides the vision for Designs for the Pluriv-
erse, ontological design offers a means to achieve it. Following Winograd
and Flores, Escobar directs attention to the way designed objects, tools,
and systems design back their users and thus remake the world. The design
of a tool, for example, assumes a certain work organization that embodies
a taken-for-granted understanding of how humans and nonhumans relate
with each other. Thus, designing a new tool is consequential for the socio-
material order by either reproducing or possibly disrupting it. With Wino-
grad and Flores, Escobar notes that the current practice of designing is
deeply entrenched in the modern dualist ontology and thus the major task
for pluriversal design is bringing about and exploring “breakdowns” that
suspend the dominant idea of how the world operates.
     Here the key question of critical scholarship shifts from how we can
know other worlds to how we can make space for other worlds to emerge.
By making new objects, organizations or systems, design can potentially
bring about breakdowns to create this space. In terms of this focus on mak-
ing, Designs for the Pluriverse resonates with the growing body of experi-
mental literature that sees collaboration and making as a form of critical
exploration. Escobar in fact reviews this trend, particularly the work of
Tim Ingold and the emergent field of design anthropology. In addition, the
past few years has witnessed the further expansion of experimental works
in anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that engage
making and creative practice (Jungnickel 2020). These efforts try to inte-
grate hands-on experience of making into critical exploration of socio-ma-
terial orders (Ratto 2011), often through ethnographic practice that essen-
tially draws on collaboration with others (Estalella and Sánchez Criado
2018).
     Indeed, whether critical scholarship can shift toward making is a cen-
tral question of Designs for the Pluriverse. Chapter 3 of the book overviews
recent debates on ontologies in anthropology and beyond. As Escobar con-
cludes, there are already rich and diverse works that critically examine the
dualist ontology of modernity, diagnose it as the main cause of the climate
and ecological crises, and explore non-dualist alternatives. However, Es-
cobar questions whether such critical efforts, including Designs for the Plu-
riverse itself, still remain within the modern dualism since they are mostly
theoretical discourses. Citing the biologist and cognitive scientist Francisco
Varela and his colleagues, Escobar argues that an embodied sort of reflec-
tion as experience, not on experience, is needed to shift away from modern
dualism (p. 98). He notes: “the practice of transformation really takes place
in the process of enacting other worlds/practice — that is, in changing rad-
ically the ways in which we encounter things and people, not just theorizing
about such practice” (p. 99, emphasis original). Design theory seems to
play an important role for this embodied reflection. On the one hand, de-
sign theory is scholarly reflection on the practice of designing and making.
In this regard it is not so different from other theories. But at the same
Book Review                                                                227
time, as Donald Schön (1983) noted a long time ago, this theoretical reflec-
tion also participates in the embodied practice of making as a guideline,
vocabulary, or framework. In this regard, design as reflective practice hints
at what embodied reflection would look like.
    In the argument of Designs for the Pluriverse, the conversation between
widely different traditions, from theories in the academic disciplines of an-
thropology and design, to the practices and thought of social movements,
plays a key role. Casper Bruun Jensen (2021) recently noted that the plan-
etary crisis of the Anthropocene reveals the insufficiency of existing disci-
plines and categories, and demands new alliances between different knowl-
edges. What Jensen sees as important in this alliance is not an integration
of different knowledges into one coherent framework. Rather, it is the “so-
phisticated conjunctions” of knowledges that allow different knowledges
to co-exist and influence each other while retaining their respective dis-
tinctiveness (Jensen and Morita 2020). Designs for the Pluriverse exempli-
fies the significance of such a sophisticated conjunction to imagine a new
form of critical practice and to also tackle the unprecedented challenges of
our time.
    As the ground for our modern life, including an academic one, slowly
crumbles, anthropology will need to find new ways to keep its commitment
to “the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples” (Viveiros de
Castro 2003, 17), possibly without such a stable ground as existed in mod-
ernist ontologies. In the place of academic privilege to reflect on the world,
Designs for the Pluriverse offers a new alliance with designers, social move-
ments, and indigenous communities to continue pursuing this pluriversal
ambition. The practice of design and making that materially and concep-
tually opens up space for other worlds to emerge plays a central role in this
endeavor. With authors such as Kat Jungnickel (2020) and Adolfo Estalella
and Tomás Sánshez Criado (2018), Designs for the Pluriverse breaks new
ground where collaborative designing and the making of things, organiza-
tions, and events become crucial contributions of critical practice.
    Designs for the Pluriverse invites readers to join the collective effort to
make other livable and sustainable worlds possible by not only critically
thinking, but also making and designing otherwise. The book also demon-
strates how sophisticated conjunctions can serve as scaffolding for this plu-
riversal ambition, and the many changes that would need to occur if we
were to follow this path. The ongoing climate crises will certainly force us
to change our ways of doing anthropology. But if a world of many worlds
is what anthropology is always after, perhaps changing the rest would be
worthwhile.

References
De la Cadena, M. and Blaser, M. (eds.) (2018) A World of Many Worlds, Durham
       and London, Duke University Press.
228                                                            Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
Estalella, A. and Sánchez Criado, T. (2018) Experimental Collaborations: Ethnog-
        raphy through Fieldwork Devices, New York, Berghahn.
Jensen, C. B. (2021) Thinking the Earth: Cosmo-Ecology and New Alliances in the
        Anthropocene (available at, https://www.academia.edu/28962338/Think-
        ing_the_Earth_Cosmo_Ecology_and_New_Alliances_in_the_Anthropo-
        cene)
Jensen C. B. and Morita A. (2020) Deltas in Crisis: From Systems to Sophisticated
       Conjunctions, in “Sustainability”, 12 (4), pp. 1-14.
Jungnickel, K. (ed.) (2020) Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Com-
       municating Research. Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press.
Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cam-
       bridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2017) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Cambridge,
       Polity.
Law, J. (2015) What’s Wrong with a One-World World?, in “Distinktion: Journal
        of Social Theory”, 16 (2), pp. 126-139.
Omura, K., Grant J. O., Shiho S. and Atsuro M. (2018) The World Multiple: The
      Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, London,
      Routledge.
Ratto, M. (2011) Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology
       and Social Life, in “The Information Society”, 27 (4), pp. 252-260.
Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action,
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                                    ***

   S. Grosjean and F. Matte (eds.)
Organizational Video-Ethnography Revisited. Making Visible Material,
Embodied and Sensory Practices, Cham, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 182

Barbara Pentimalli Sapienza University of Rome
    In the last few years, we have witnessed a visual turn (Hassard et al.
2018) in organizational studies thanks to the flourishing Video-Ethnogra-
phy (VE) enabling to record and analyze the tacit, material, and embodied
aspects of workplace practices. As stated in the introduction of the book,
edited by Sylvie Grosjean and Frédérik Matte, both professors of Organi-
zational Communication at University of Ottawa in Canada, VE pursues
