Book: A World of Many Worlds (2018)
Author(s): Marisol De La Cadena & Mario Blaser (Eds)
Pluriverse: Proposals for A World of Many Worlds
In this introduction, Blaser and Cadena (2018: 1-24) offer proposals for the possibility of many worlds by reflecting the explosion of political protest in the world of Anthropocene. The regime of extractivism and necropolitical alliance between the state and corporations to supply massive national or global resource demands. We face that these regimes also have destructed other-than-human worlds and natural environments. Understanding a political issue is often impossible and even disempowering the other-than-humans person (when we think about animals or mountains as living entities—a cultural belief).
Before we experience the sense of crisis, the world of powerful, which are the vision of common goods and civilization development is dominant in our one-world world; a world assimilates all other possible worlds, by presenting itself as exclusive and beyond. Thus, extractivism continues the practice of terra nullius in the dangerous world by expanding one-world, rendering empty the places and making absent the worlds. Various grassroots protests against its extractivism, joint progress with different ways but interest in common which are not the same interests or called uncommons.
Inspired by the Zapatista declaration, this proposal is not only an abstraction but being ethnographic, so that pluriverse is multiple possibilities worldings coming together as an ontological politics of practices in heterogeneity. Casa states that pluriverse as a matter of care because it is opening toward possibilities of many worlds. This political ontology wants to criticize the onto-epistemic limits of the modern world and also provides the specific worlding movement constantly through negotiations, enmeshments, crossings, and interruptions. It means political ontology as a way to empower an imaginary of politics the pluriverse, as a field/study, and intervention in their worlding actions.
Another main issue of many worlds approach is the proposition of knowledge status to understand the domain of divergence. Divergence does not refer to difference between entities, but it constitutes the entities (or practices) as the emergence both in their specificity and with other entities or practices. Also, divergence opens incommensurability dialogues, the conditions for a decolonial practice where both cosmopolitics (politics among heterogenous worlds) and political ontology is met to the possibility of divergence among collectives composed of humans and non-humans. Other-than-humans (instead of non-human) emphasize that they are also actors but did not share the epistemic or ontological status of laboratory things or social kinds. Stengers provokes this notion by reclaiming animism, other-than-humans participated in political negotiations and reclaiming the cultural tolerance and onto-indigenous politics.
The phenomena of the Anthropocene are an opportunity for pluriversal worldings because this epoch disrupt the great divides, nature/culture, that made the one-world. On the other side, the Anthropocene can be considered as the collective moment when we are moving through the great divides coming together into a public space and at same time understand the lack of modern epistemic regime. The worlding practice make different assumption that nature is multiple, noncoherent and ongoing and against modern worldview that culture is merely multiple but nature as only singular, coherent and stable. In other words, to respond the problem of human self-destruction or self-preservation during the Anthropocene times, people need to rethink whole assemblages of human and non-humans (or we called more-than-humans).
To conclude this proposal, they introduce human beings as Terrans, it means that in the sense of the end of the world as we know human being is not merely a molar body. The Anthropocene as a big problem also doesn’t need the big-scale solution, but opening a speculative approach in possibility worlds and never-ending as a final conclusion. There are some essential points for answer proposals, for instance; first, to destabilize a hegemonic modern state of affairs; second, to rethink what a political circumstance might be and how it might become; and, the last invitation is to propose uncommons as counterpoint to the common good and to slow down a developmentalism-progressive version to strengthen the possibility of pluriversal worldings in the heterogenous divergence. Following the introduction and proposal by Blaser and Cadena, I personally agree with these proposals invitation so that we have a perfect time along with the Anthropocene, to remember once a world of many worlds that its actually has been situated us previously.
Mahaswa's Thought 