immanence

A very helpful analytical review of the “relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education” has just been published online by Ambio. While it’s limited to a certain selection of key publications, the article, by European sustainabililty researchers Zack Walsh, Jessica Bohme, and Christine Wamsler, covers the terrain of “relational approaches” to ontology, epistemology, and ethics in a fair and evenhanded way.

Here’s their “tanglegram of key relational discourses” (click for larger version):

It’s, admittedly, an odd diagram, in which the artificial division into ontology, epistemology, and ethics renders different discourses (as they call them) separate from each other in seemingly random and potentially misleading ways. For instance, deep ecology and ecocentrism, which are in many respects identical or at least highly overlapping, appear far from each other; and process philosophy is depicted as an outlier at the left end despite its links in practice to several of the other discourses. As I try to show in Shadowing the Anthropocene, separating ontology from epistemology and ethics is a futile endeavor, even if distinguishing between them is useful.

But mapping out such a broad terrain can hardly be done two-dimensionally (let alone from the “god’s eye” distance they are working at) and the authors deserve plaudits for at least trying. The article makes for a very good starting point for reading up on this range of approaches.

The authors’ concluding summary highlights much of what’s at stake in the relational “paradigm shift” they are advocating:

Our analysis shows that relational ontologies aim to overcome the bifurcation of nature/culture and various other dualisms (e.g. mind/matter, subjectivity/objectivity) shaping the modern worldview. Differentiated (as opposed to undifferentiated) relational ontologies respect the integrity of individuals while understanding how their being is fundamentally constituted by relations of all kinds. In this context, speculative realism, process philosophy, new materialism, and indigenous and religious wisdom traditions are systems of knowledge providing particularly well-developed understandings of relational ontology relevant to sustainability.

Our review also shows that relational approaches to epistemology account for the observer’s role in shaping knowledge; acknowledge that agency is distributed across networks; view objects as assemblages of humans and nonhumans; increasingly focus on transdisciplinary methods to cut across disciplinary boundaries; and use diffractive methods to integrate different ways of knowing.

Lastly, our review shows that relational approaches to ethics include non-anthropocentric perspectives; value non-human nature in non-instrumental terms; use intersectional methods to analyze the inter-relations between social and ecological issues; and contextualize human–nature interactions in light of asymmetrical power relations and dynamics between assemblages or networks of interest.

In relation to the process-relational theory this blog highlights (mapped out in my Process-Relational Theory primer and in other writings), it’s worth noting the distinction the authors make between “undifferentiated” (or monistic) and “differentiated” relational ontologies. Process-relational theory in a post-Whiteheadian vein falls into the latter. While the distinction is helpful, it raises the question of how “differentiated” some of the other approaches are (deep ecology, for instance), or, for that matter, how differentiated (in the usual sense) some of the categories are (“religious wisdom,” for instance, which is hardly a unified or even definitionally viable category).

As I’ve argued before (many times on this blog), a focus on process helps to eliminate the vacuity that can result from an undifferentiated ontological relationalism, where everything is said to relate to everything else but it’s not clear how, in what contexts, or what the implications are for action by any specific agent. (That’s the kind of difference mapped out, in the area of Buddhist philosophy, by Peter Kakol and Steve Odin in their work comparing process philosophy with Madhyamika and Hua-Yen Buddhisms, respectively.)

Another source the authors might have consulted, which I’ve finally gotten around to reading (it had been on my reading list for a couple of years), is the Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies.

This anthology of analytical articles covers the work of 36 “process philosophers” from across history. The list ranges from Laozi, Heraclitus, and Confucius to the usual western subjects — Spinoza, Leibniz, Peirce, James, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Dewey, and Deleuze — to a variety of names who deserve equal recognition (Tarde, Kitaro, Bateson, Merleau-Ponty, Naess, Serres) and many that aren’t usually thought of under the “process philosophy” rubric (Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Arendt, de Beauvoir, Ricoeur, Garfinkel, Foucault, Irigaray, Sloterdijk, and some others). The selection raises the usual questions about whom to include and exclude (with some names that I would include notably missing), but at 600 oversize pages plus index (and a reasonable price tag, as far as Routledge volumes go), one could hardly fault the editors for not being ambitious.

The volume opens with a fairly short but beautifully synoptic introduction, “Process Is How Process Does,” by the four co-editors (it can be read on Academia and ResearchGate). They articulate the “thinking” of process in terms of five aspects — temporality, wholeness (or “the intimacy between the whole and the parts”), openness, force, and potentiality — and then define process research as a method (meta, “after,” and hodos, “way, motion, travelling, journey”) of “following a way,” with an emphasis on “belonging to and becoming with the world,” particularity (“each thing is a multiplicity of becomings relative to the connections it makes (and is potentially capable of)”, and performativity.

The volume ends with an almost mantra-like, vaguely Heideggerian meditation by Robert Cooper called “Process and Reality,” which follows a zigzaggy line in attempting to define and clarify process: as “the continuous making and moving of forms,” “the continuous coming-to-presence of the forms and objects of everyday life,” “a divided state of being in which human agency is forever suspended between the ceaseless act of making forms present and their constant recession,” “the continuous anticipation of what is not present in space and time in order to make it present,” and it goes on.

I have not read enough of the chapters yet to see how they do with the various concerns I would bring to them — ecology, environment, sustainability, justice, culture, and so on. But reading the volume makes me wonder why, of all fields, it is the field of organization studies that seems to have taken up process philosophies in the most innovative and interesting ways.

One of the insights I gained while reading Philippe Lorino’s insightful chapter on Charles S. Peirce is that Peirce’s process semiotics provides a foundation for understanding beings like us (“us” meaning everything, not just humans) as not only autopoietic, as Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition would claim, but also allopoietic — that is, not only self-generating and self-maintaining, with a structural closure in and against our “structural coupling” with our environments, but as also engaged in the generation of “something else” (allo-). This is of course Deleuze’s insight about our always becoming-other. And it is what I aimed for in Ecologies of the Moving Image with my reconstruction of the concepts of geomorphism, biomorphism, and anthropomorphism — the creation of something aimed for in and through our actions (and which I should have generically called allomorphism).

It is this which ultimately reminds me of the greatest attraction of process philosophy — its central emphasis on the feeling of being alive, in the midst of things happening, with a sensitivity to what is happening, how it is happening, and the opening up of the world that it makes possible.