Rethinking the political in the pluriverse: The ethico-political significance of care

Abstract

Postfoundational political thought is characterized by a distinction between “politics” (a socio-symbolic order that delineates what is knowable and thinkable) and “the political” (the instantiation of a socio-symbolic order). This article critically engages with the postfoundational thought of Jacques Rancière to rethink “the political” in the context of the pluriverse, a matrix of multiple distinct yet interconnected worlds. In so doing, this article challenges the idea that “care” is not properly political. Specifically, I argue that in the context of the pluriverse, socio-symbolic orders, or worlds, are not instantiated as such; rather, they must be established and, importantly, reestablished in the face of one another. From this vantage point, caring for and maintaining worlds—especially worlds marginalized by relations of power in the global political economy—is of political and ethical significance. This article thus offers a decolonial and feminist approach to thinking about the political as it (a) destabilizes the Westerncentric assumption that there is one-world, and takes different worlds as worlds seriously; and (b) centers issues of care and reproduction, demonstrates how they are politically and ethically salient, and thereby contributes to the project of foregrounding the political import of care.

Scholars in the postfoundational political thought tradition mobilize a theoretical distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Politics, as Edkins (1999) explains, is that which can be understood as the political reality as it is already described and acknowledged. It captures the contingent (and always historically and contextually specific) foundations that render certain things knowable, thinkable, and speakable, and that thereby constitute a socio-symbolic order. The political, on the other hand, “has to do with the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics” (Edkins, 1999: 2, emphasis in original). The political is a simultaneous moment of de-grounding, as one socio-symbolic order is ruptured, and re-grounding, as another is established in its place. In this way, the framework serves as a critical lens from which to foreground both the contingency of any socio-symbolic order (as it is always instantiated and susceptible to rupture and re-instantiation, i.e. the political), and the ways in which such “contingent foundations” (Butler, 1992) nonetheless fundamentally structure social life (i.e. serve as a socio-symbolic order which demarcates politics).

The purpose of this article is to reconceptualize the politics/political distinction in the context of the pluriverse. Coming largely from Latin American decolonial studies and critical anthropology literature (e.g. Blaser, 2018; de la Cadena, 2010, 2015; Escobar, 2016, 2020; Mignolo, 2018; Rojas, 2016), the notion of the pluriverse points to the existence of multiple worlds that are partially connected but that exceed each other in complex ways. Or, as Hutchings (2019) outlines, the pluriverse is a dual assertion: it reveals that a one-world ontology underpins the modern world (in both theory and practice), and, in pointing to other actually-existing multiple worlds—where worlds, I have argued elsewhere (FitzGerald, 2022), can be understood as “onto-epistemologies,” by which I mean co-constitutive ontologies and epistemologies that are together enacted through collective practices and thereby constitutive of forms of life—it demonstrates that this one-world assumption is false. In this dual claim, the pluriverse also draws our attention to the “particular ethical and political effects” (Hutchings, 2019: 116) of upholding a one-world assumption and obfuscating the multiplicity of being-knowing that exists globally. Specifically, this commitment to “one worldism” (Law, 2015) denies other ways of being-knowing the status of “worlds”; modernity’s one-worldism, for instance, tends to downgrade radically different onto-epistemologies to traditions, beliefs, or paradigms, while it reserves the hold on the real for itself (i.e. it is the one true and universal world). The notion of the pluriverse, then, seeks to critique such one-world assumptions (or, as Escobar (2016: 22) puts it, seeks to “interrupt the one-world story”) while simultaneously giving “full ontological weight” (Holbraad et al., 2014: np) to different onto-epistemologies. As Mignolo writes, “[P]luriversality as a universal project means that the universal cannot have one single owner: the universal can only be pluriversal” (2018: x). The pluriverse is a normative call to envision and build a world in which multiple worlds are possible as worlds.

For this reason, I see the pluriverse as part of a decolonial ethics (e.g. Dunford, 2017; Hutchings, 2019; Odysseos, 2017; Zembylas, 2020). Importantly, I say “a decolonial ethics” because the commitment to “disruption of prevalent figurations, languages and ways of thinking about ‘ethics’” (Odysseos, 2017: 449) that is inherent to a decolonial approach resists totalizing or settling this ethical project in some final way. Yet, as Odysseos (2017: 449, emphasis in original) advises, we can fruitfully “insist on the question of decolonial ethics.” In this spirit, I do not attempt to layout a definitive account of decolonial ethics, but rather, I draw upon Odysseos’ (2017: 449) prolegomena to decolonial ethics, which outlines “the preceding, insufficient but necessary, orientations that call for new ways of narrating, world-disclosure and praxis in the world with others.” Of special import for the discussion at hand, these orientations include a commitment to decolonial critique and displacement, in which “universalizing and monolingual predicates” are foregone so as to maintain “openness through multiple imaginaries” that refuse to “yield to ideological stabilisation” (Odysseos, 2017: 451). The purpose of this argument is to pursue such critique and reimagining by mobilizing the pluriverse to consider the normative dimensions underpinning the politics/political distinction, particularly as represented in the work of Jacques Rancière, ¹ and to assess if these concepts, as currently conceived, are compatible with the pluriversal context, and with developing new ethical orientations for the pluriverse.

Ultimately, I argue that the politics/political framework is limited by a commitment to a one-worldism. Further, this commitment, I suggest, is incompatible with a decolonial and pluriversal ethics. As Dunford (2017: 393) states, “Any option that inevitably depends upon the systemic destruction of other worlds would violate the principle of a world in which many worlds can fit.” While I do not mean to overstate the significance or consequence of the politics/political framework (as in, I do not wish to claim in some straightforward consequentialist way that this framework “systematically destroys” other worlds), I do assert that frameworks premised on and committed to one-worldism contribute to broader relations of power, including the creation of epistemic landscapes in which certain things (worlds, forms of life) are rendered invisible. These concepts must therefore be reimagined if they are to be useful when contemplating both political and ethical horizons in the pluriverse, and if they are not to be complicit in the erasure of certain worlds as worlds. The particular rethinking I pursue here, moreover, reveals that from a pluriversal vantage point (as opposed to a one-world framework) issues of care and reproduction—in addition to “newness” and “rupture”—are of great political significance.

This article therefore also speaks (albeit less explicitly) to debates regarding the political import of care. As Ferrarese summarizes (2016: 152), “the political scope of vulnerability [and, I would add, our responses to vulnerability, are] almost unanimously denied.” Care and reproduction—by which I mean the many ways in which we respond to the vulnerability of human experience so as to meet our needs and reproduce ourselves as well as is reasonably possible (Fisher and Tronto, 1990)—appear to be decidedly un-political. As the ceaseless, repetitive, iterative actions in and through which we reproduce ourselves, our social relations, and our socio-symbolic orders, care seems to reside exclusively in the sphere of politics (Hoppania and Vaittinen, 2015). The political, as concerned with the rupture of a socio-symbolic order, and the instantiation of something new, appears to be diametrically opposed to care, which often seeks to reproduce, sustain, and maintain that which already is. Yet, as I argue below, re-thinking the political in the context of the pluriverse fundamentally challenges this valorization of newness, and in so doing, provides a starting place to center the ethico-political significance of caring for and reproducing worlds.

To develop this line of thinking, I focus on Rancière’s (1999) postfoundational political theory in which he articulates his conception of the distinction between politics and the political, albeit using the terms “the police” and “politics” respectively. Through this discussion, I demonstrate that Rancière’s theory is limited when considered in the context of the pluriverse, where there are multiple worlds (socio-symbolic orders, onto-epistemologies) that are partially connected and co-constitutive in intricate ways. More exactly, Rancière’s focus on rupture and newness as “politics” obfuscates the fact that in the pluriversal context, where worlds establish and, crucially, reestablish themselves in the face of each other, the reproduction of a certain world or order (and especially one which is marginalized and rendered precarious through colonial-capitalist relations of power) may be both ethically desirable and politically significant. An understanding of the political as antithetical to the care, maintenance, and reproduction of a world cannot attend to this important facet of the pluriverse and fails to offer us a lens to consider fully the political consequences of worlds interacting with, and being relationally tied to, other worlds in messy and power-laden ways.

More simply, this article argues that in taking the pluriverse seriously, we must trouble dominant understandings of the political which privilege rupture and newness at the expense of care and reproduction. As alluded to above, I believe that this article thereby offers a decolonial and feminist approach to thinking critically about the instantiation of socio-symbolic orders (the political) as it (a) destabilizes the Westerncentric assumption that there is one-world or order, and thus moves us in decolonial directions that take different onto-epistemologies seriously and (b) centers issues of care and reproduction, demonstrates how they are politically and ethically salient, and contributes to the feminist project of countering the devaluation of care, which has been marginalized by masculinist, Westerncentric norms that prioritize rationalism and independence (e.g. Robinson, 2020). If we are to decolonize/dehierarchicalize the current global order, in which modernity has the hold on “the totality of the real” (Vázquez, 2011: 33), while other onto-epistemologies are relegated to the status of traditions, beliefs, or paradigms, I contend that we will need to rethink the politics/political distinction such that we can consider the political-ethical significance of both the disruption of worlds, on the one hand, and the reproduction of worlds, on the other.

A brief note on worlds, care, and broader implications

Before proceeding, I wish to present a few qualifiers about this argument—what it is trying to do, and what it certainly cannot do. First, the pluriverse, as a world of many worlds, is extraordinarily thorny: it is a paradox of connections and excesses, it is “more than one, but less than many” (Blaser, 2018: 47). Put another way, “things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything or dominates over everything” (James, 2004, lecture 8; cited in Hutchings, 2019: 116). The claim that multiple worlds should be allowed to exist as worlds is not meant to propose that they are—or should be—independent units. Instead, the idea is that “worlds external to one another” can coexist and interact “without one subsuming the others” (Hutchings, 2019: 116).

Yet, save perhaps the extremist of cases, “subsumption” is also murky water: can parts of one world “subsume” parts of another without violating a pluriversal commitment? Does interaction and connectedness inherently lead to one-sided subsumption? Because worlds are connected by relations of power and our shared material being, hybridity is, at the very least, clearly inevitable, but furthermore, potentially desirable (depending, most certainly, on numerous factors, perhaps most important of which is the ways in which relations of power shape such hybridities). Indeed, I think it would be foolish to assert that every instance of world-interaction is harmful or negative; worlds themselves are unfinished projects, or relational becomings, and I think that in and through their connections, worlds can come to exchange, revise, and reorient various practices in ways that enrich the “the possibilities and the goods of [all of our] shared lives” (Walker, 2007: 258).

At the same time, however, historical relations of power, especially those related to colonialism and the expansion of global capital, have exhibited totalizing tendencies: erasure and absolute subsumption seem to be the very impetus of these systems of power. I would assert that it is, in fact, these very tendencies that the pluriversal privileging or foregrounding of difference/excess aims at. Relatedly, it also seems to me that the notion of the pluriverse seeks to dehierarchicalize the ways in which the connections between worlds leads to hybridities that are radically unequal and destructive for certain worlds and people and not others. Such a project is, obviously, very different from attempting to prevent exchanges and unfoldings all together. But of course, drawing clear lines around any of this is impossible, and while I nod to this throughout this argument, I do not proclaim to be doing the work of evaluating which practices, relations, and connections should be upheld or disrupted here (although for some thoughts on this, see FitzGerald, 2022).

A similar disclaimer can be made about care in this article. I speak of care, and the ethico-political significance of care, throughout this piece, though I do not fully develop these discussions. Care, like the pluriverse, is extremely complicated; as many have shown, care is a site of political contestation (e.g. Ferrarese, 2016; Hoppania and Vaittinen, 2015; Narayan, 1995). Care is varied, sometimes takes surprising forms and appears in unexpected spaces (e.g. Krystalli and Schulz, 2022), and different collectives have different practices of care that sometimes exist alongside each other unnoticed, while at other times, they are deeply antagonistic (e.g. Blaser, 2018). However, it is also beyond the scope of this article to do justice to the complexities of care, and what it means to care for one’s own world, or perhaps the worlds of others—though I do, again, speak broadly of these concerns in the argument that follows.

Instead, my reason for bringing up these things (which I admittedly cannot fully address here) is that I believe that wading through these difficult conundrums (ascertaining where and how worlds can connect in ways that are generative, as opposed to harmful; sorting out how worlds are co-implicated in caring for one another or not; navigating the messy paradox of difference and interconnectedness) is, in fact, the ethical-political task in the pluriverse, and this task demands a variety of tools and capacities. As Hutchings (2019: 124) writes, the pluriverse

focuses our attention on what it means to live with others without subsuming them into one world or another. It makes us think about how coexistence and collaboration work and the kinds of virtues and capacities they rely on and cultivate. A pluriversal ethics is not about finding out the right answers but about experiments in ‘being with.’ It is not something that can be known in any satisfactory way; it is only something that can be done.

I see this argument as a very small contribution toward cultivating this type of ethical orientation/practice. I am concerned here with how certain conceptualizations of politics and the political prevent or enable thinking about “coexistence and collaboration” work, and perhaps even obfuscate the political significance of the ways in which different worlds, in their ongoing reproduction, are “being with” other worlds, including worlds that dominate. Thus, while I cannot tend fully to the possibilities opened by this argument (although these are central to my broader research agenda, see FitzGerald, 2022), I do discuss these things (if imperfectly) to help point to the reasons why I suspect that reconceptualizing the political in the context of the pluriverse is necessary. This reconceptualization, I further claim, can provide an orientation (in the spirit of Odysseos’ prolegomena), or a starting point, that may better help us think through, contemplate, hear, see, and narrate ethico-political horizons that align with decoloniality and caring for multiple worlds. It may provide us with a vantage point for beginning to approach the hard work of adjudicating which world-making practices we want to live with (i.e. which should be reproduced) and which we do not (i.e. which should be ruptured), and help us cultivate more amenable practices to support “experiments in ‘being with’” (Hutchings, 2019: 124). In the end, however, the fruitfulness of this orientation can ultimately only be revealed and judged in and through future work, critique, and praxis that may take up this orientation, and make use of these conceptual tools, as a part of a variety of “intersecting disclosive, educational, and political projects of decolonisation” (Odysseos, 2017: 459).

Rancière’s police and politics

To begin outlining Rancière’s (1999) discussion of politics (“the political”) and the police (“politics”), consider the scenario where an employer (for example) gives an employee an order. If the employer, upon issuing the instruction, were to ask “Do you understand?,” Rancière argues that the employer falls into a “‘performative contradiction’ that undermines the force of their utterance” (Rancière, 1999: 45). The employer’s question restricts the employee’s response to one of two possibilities: either the employee does not understand what the employer has said, or the employee understands only insofar as they accept the employer’s formulation of the problem (Russell and Montin, 2015: 544). As Rancière (1999: 45) writes, then, “‘to understand’ means two different, if not contrary, things: to understand a problem and to understand an order.” From this vantage point, as Russell and Montin (2015: 545, emphasis in original) point out, “there is no dissenting view that does not, in some sense, constitute a misunderstanding.” Consequently, those in positions of authority are able to exclude subordinates “from participating as equal communication partners if they wish, by construing disagreement as a failure of understanding” (Russell and Montin, 2015: 545). The employee must either “understand” (agree) or they “do not understand”—there can be no dissent.

From this point emerges a crucial conclusion: because the power dynamics set up the speech act in such a way that one interlocutor is unable to offer a rational contribution to the dialogue (as a dissenting view can always be construed by the other as a “misunderstanding”), “then properly speaking one is not denied access to discourse since one is thought to have nothing to say that could count as a relevant contribution in the first place” (Russell and Montin, 2015: 546). There is a “partition of the perceptible” (Rancière, 1999: 45) or “partition of the sensible” shaping the dialogue:

The partition of the sensible is the dividing-up of the world (de monde) and of people (du monde), the nemein upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, as that which separates and excludes; on the other, as that which allows participation. A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared common (un commun partagé) and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined in sensory experience. This latter form of distribution, which, by its sensory self-evidence, anticipates the distribution of part and shares (parties), itself presupposes a distribution of what is visible and what not, of what can be heard and what cannot. (Rancière, 2010: 36, emphasis in original)

A given partition of the sensible (i.e. a matrix of contingent assumptions that organize the speech situation, including the space, object, and subjects of speech), there is a divide or order which (unevenly) distributes those recognized as speaking beings and those who are not (i.e. those who have no part in the speech act at all) (see also Rancière, 1999: 45).

This partition of the sensible, in many ways, brings us back to the postfoundational distinction between politics and the political and illuminates how this distinction is crucial to Rancière’s thought, although he does employ different terms for these concepts. Police (the term Rancière uses akin to the way “politics” has been defined in the introduction above) is the “system of distribution and legitimization” which organizes and authorizes powers and distributes places and roles (1999: 28). Rancière’s politics, on the other hand, is akin to “the political.” Politics is reserved “for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration – that of the part of those who have no part” (1999: 29–30). In other words, police refers to the actually existing socio-symbolic order and politics refers to activities that contravene this order in a radical and antagonistic manner. Political speech, then, is disagreement (i.e. a break with police).

So what of ethics? For Rancière, I suggest that the normative dimensions of his theory can be most fully developed through his understanding of the relationship between the police and politics. The police, as a socio-symbolic order, is always-already contingent, and politics as such is only possible because of the contingency of the police. There is no foundational order, only infinite possibilities of police orders that may emerge in and through—or perhaps more precisely, after—politics. A related point, somewhat ironically, is that this same contingency points to a sort of universal assumption of equality, or what Rancière calls an “egalitarian contingency” (1999: 71), as “all speaking beings are able to construct meaning and so give rise to alternative subjunctive spaces” (Russell and Montin, 2015: 548; see also Rancière, 1999: 30). Whenever a speaking being who, under a certain police logic, is a part of the part that has no part asserts and demonstrates their “equal capacity to imagine a world and their equal capacity for the critical evaluation of speech” (Russell and Montin, 2015: 550)—that is, they act as though their actions are not constrained by the inequality of a police order that allocates them as part of the part that has no part—the axiom of equality is demonstrated. Such a demonstration of equality constitutes politics, or what other postfoundational scholars call “the political,” as it makes “visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (Rancière, 1999: 30). As a result, equality for Rancière takes on an axiomatic quality (Myers, 2016). As Myers (2016) explains, equality is both the underlying assumption of every human relationship and social order, despite apparent hierarchies, as well as an act that is performed temporarily whenever the part that has no part asserts themselves as the equal of all others.

At first glance, this axiom of equality may appear to provide a departure point for ethics in the pluriverse: infinite orders are possible because of radical contingent egalitarianism (because there is no ultimate or transcendental foundation, there can be no one, final, universal world), and when those who are a part of the part that has no part (e.g. marginalized worlds) assert themselves as equals, this equality is made apparent in practice, and there is the possibility of a political moment in which the unequal police order itself (e.g. the current hierarchy in which modernity is able to posit itself as the only world) is shifted or reconstituted (possibly toward a dehierarchialized, pluriversal order in which other worlds as worlds are made equal).

To help demonstrate, consider, for example, the following pluriversal encounter. In March 2017, the Whanganui River was recognized by the New Zealand state as the ancestor of the local Māori tribe of Whanganui in the North Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand). This recognition was won after 140-years of struggle to protect Whanganui by the Māori, and means that legally, the river must be granted the same rights and protection as a human (Roy, 2017). This conflict between two worlds (the world of the Māori and the modern world which is co-constitutive of the New Zealand state) can easily be conceived of in the terms just outlined: the Māori’s assertion that their relationship with the river (which was unthinkable from the perspective of the modern world, from the partition of the perceptible of the modern “police”) is equally valid as any other relation can be thought of as a radical assertion or demonstration of contingent egalitarianism, which led to a political moment and a reconfiguration of the partition of the sensible, such that a river as kin is now thinkable (and even institutionalizable via legal human rights frameworks). On the face of things, such a theoretical framework may prove useful for analyzing (and perhaps even navigating) other ethical dilemmas in the pluriverse. However, despite the usefulness of this language to describe such a scenario, there are a few important critiques that have been raised vis-à-vis Rancière’s work that make me less confident that this orientation can help us contemplate political-ethical horizons in/for the pluriverse.

First, there appears to be a distinct temporality, one that overly privileges instantaneous rupture and newness, involved in Rancière’s theory that I believe renders this approach somewhat problematic in the pluriversal context. Badiou aptly captures this temporality when he refers to Rancière’s equality as “a lightning bolt of meaning” (2009: 50; quoted in Bassett, 2016: 282) which only appears during sporadic moments of fleeting politics. Myers (2016) describes this in a slightly different way when she illustrates how Rancière’s equality is both a revealing and a concealing. On the one hand, equality is a momentary event, made evident through politics; on the other hand, it is a hidden—albeit ever present—condition (Myers, 2016: 54), continually concealed and reconcealed by the police (which is [re]instantiated—even if in a different form—in the political moment). This has a limiting effect on the normative potency of Rancière’s equality; “the prospect of creating lasting relations of equality [. . .] seems to be foreclosed” and serves “to deny the possibility of a socio-political order even partially characterized by relations of equality” (Myers, 2016: 55). As a result, police—in whatever historical variant, but always the name for unequal and regulated society—“verges on the universal and timeless” (Myers, 2016: 55). And while it is worth noting that Rancière does indicate in passing that there are better and worse police logics (1999: 30–31), Myers counters that very little attention is paid to such a distinction in his work; instead, police marks continuity rather than variation (2016: 56).

The nature of the police takes on an added significance, I think, in the context of the pluriverse. It would seem to me that in Rancière’s schematic, what I have called onto-epistemologies, or worlds, would each be different forms of police. What does it mean for two police orders to conflict or contest ethical dilemmas from a Rancièrean perspective? Can this be politics at all? My claim here is that we would have to return to a one-world assumption for Rancière’s theory to carry any explanatory, let alone normative, value.

To illustrate this point, let us turn again to the case of the river Whanganui. I contend that this example can be read as a political moment in which radical equality is demonstrated only if one begins from the premise that the Māori world is not a world; the Māori must constitute the part that has no part. Such a reading is logical from the “perspective” of modernity, which, as the pluriversal literature asserts, conceives itself as the whole of the real. From this vantage point, the Māori, as the part that has no part, made visible that which was invisible—their relationship with the river, and the world that this relationship in part enacts—and, accordingly, there was a political moment. However, if one begins from the premise of the pluriverse—that is, from the assumption of a matrix of connected yet distinct worlds—then the world of the Māori is not the part that has no part; it is already acknowledged, visible, and speakable (a socio-symbolic order, an onto-epistemology, the realm of the police).

That is, while I am of the opinion that the very notion of the pluriverse can be considered a political moment in the postfoundational sense, as it shatters the socio-symbolic order in which modernity is conceived of as the only world, one is left wondering what happens when we commit to a decolonial ethics, to building a pluriversal ethics—a commitment which begins in the aftermath of this moment. “Decolonial global ethics rejects universality in favour of ‘pluriversality’” (Dunford, 2017: 380), and thus inherently recognizes multiple worlds; such an ethics necessarily emerges within a socio-symbolic, or police order, in which this notion is thinkable and speakable. Yet to reduce differently situated worlds to competing police logics—and therefore outside the realm of the political—feels reductive, especially when one considers the limits of knowing across worlds. Might there always be something unspeakable or unknowable between worlds? Is that not the very point of the pluriverse, where some differences are so deep and pervasive that they are, to some degree, unknowable (constitutive of different worlds)? Surely one of the normative challenges of an ethics for the pluriverse is grappling with the extremely difficult task of thinking and speaking something that you cannot truly think and speak. For instance, the ethical dilemma of how to protect the river Whanganui requires people in the modern world to speak and think Whanganui as kin (it is in speaking and thinking this that the modern world comes to concede that Whanganui has a legal personality), when of course, we do not speak or think Whanganui as kin (by which I mean, this is not an ordering principle of our onto-epistemology).

This leads to a related concern. One could respond to this point by noting that much of the modern world does not, in fact, “think” or “speak” the pluriverse—a fact I would not deny. However, this raises an alternative question regarding Rancière’s understanding of politics (and equality): How does one know when a political moment has truly occurred, in the sense of reorganizing police? As just mentioned, in the pluriverse, I may now speak and think Whanganui as kin, but this is not a fundamental reordering of my socio-symbolic world (modernity certainly continues to be premised on an ontological distinction between Human and Nature (Rojas, 2016)). So, speaking Whanganui as kin, it seems, cannot constitute a political moment, although I am uncomfortable with the idea that the successful struggle for Whanganui’s protection by the Māori people resides solely in the register of “the police.” As scholars working on the question of decolonial ethics highlight, it is likely that we will not be able to incorporate elements of decolonial critique, or “translate” attempts at decolonial ethics and theory, directly into our existing and familiar frameworks (e.g. Odysseos, 2017; Zembylas, 2020); we “need to create a new language” (Zembylas, 2020: 3). I believe that this discussion supports this important point: the very inflection of “speakable” and “thinkable,” for example, is fundamentally changed when operating in the pluriverse, where different worlds are at play.

The question of how to know when the political moment has occurred can also be critiqued in a similar vein but from a “non-pluriversal” perspective. The political moment, for Rancière, is when something unintelligible is made intelligible. Yet, as Sparks (2016: 432) asks, “intelligible to whom?” Sparks demonstrates this point skillfully by departing from Rancière’s (2006: 61) discussion of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, which he puts forth as an example of his understanding of politics:

[. . .] casting Rosa Park’s refusal to move and the subsequent boycott as a Rancièrean moment of disruption that produced the protestors as newly intelligible political subjects again prompts a question – newly intelligible to whom? The act of refusing to sit in segregated sections on buses was already utterly intelligible as a challenge to the extant logic of domination to most if not all African Americans living in southern U.S. states. Parks’s act and the yearlong boycott it inspired instead made the African American community’s challenge to the white supremacist logic of domination intelligible to many whites who had neglected or refused to confront the issue before. [. . .] These are not new ‘wrongs’ to the communities of colour experiencing them; it’s just that they could never be seen by whites before. (Sparks, 2016: 432)

This way, Rancière’s theory veers dangerously close to recognition politics, where recognition is granted to a subaltern or marginalized group by a dominant group, a circumstance which “prefigures its failure to significantly modify, let alone transcend, the breadth of power at play in colonial relations” (Coulthard, 2014: 31).

Perhaps, in response to this critique, one may argue that the point is that, in addition to making this equality intelligible and speakable to whites, Rosa Parks’ actions allowed her to enact her equality and thus served as a process of subjectivation. It was through her act of disobedience that her existence as an equal was brought to the consciousness of her oppressors. Yet, there are two issues worth highlighting in response to this proposition. First, as Sparks (2016: 432) illustrates, there were other African American women in Montgomery who disrupted segregation on city buses, including Mary Louise Smith and Claudette Colvin, and who were arrested for their actions before Rosa Parks’ stand. Were they not enacting a subjectivation as politics? Was this not an “act of performatively staging equality” (Swyngedouw, 2011: 374)? And if not, why not? Why were Rosa Parks’ actions different? Further, might there not be some relation between Smith and Colvin’s actions and Parks’ own actions, as well as a relation between these earlier attempts to disrupt bus segregation and the ways in which Parks’ action was intelligible to African Americans (and others)? Does not Rancière’s account “discount and sometimes even [. . .] dismiss any form of subjectivation that works by slow accretion, reiteration, and citation rather than surprising rupture” (Sparks, 2016: 430)? If we consider this point in light of the case of the Whanganui River introduced above, a similar reading could be made: it was only the final enactment of the equality of the Māori’s world that counts, and this privileging of the (final) moment in which the Māori world’s existence as an equal was brought to the consciousness of the world of the New Zealand Government separates, invisibilises, and renders “unpolitical” the struggles that unfolded over the preceding 140 years. Second, but relatedly, within Rancière’s framework, as Woodford (2015) notes, it is always the oppressed that must bring about the political (e.g. Rosa Parks’ enactment of her equality; the Māori’s fight for recognition of Whanganui as kin). Yet, this stance may serve to absolve oppressors or those who benefit from relations of power (e.g. those in/of dominating worlds) of any moral responsibility to amend ethical issues resulting from a police order. If this framework is to be deployed as an ethical orientation, ² it would seem that only the oppressed can be moral subjects, which also places the full burden of progressive political change on those who are marginalized and oppressed.

Alternatively, maybe the issue is that the distinction between police and politics is not so clear cut. Chambers (2011) makes this exact argument, writing that there is no such thing as “pure politics” in the Rancièrean sense; politics is always enacted within a police order, and therefore it cannot be taken as external to it (see also Jaeger, 2014: 223). In this way, one could explain that Parks’ action was “political” while Smith and Colvin’s were not due to the particular police order in which they occured, and the ways in which police and politics are impure and tied. Yet, as Myers compellingly shows, this seems in thorough opposition to Rancière’s own work, where he reiterates that while “politics may signal a ‘disturbance’ within the police order, [. . .] the egalitarian presupposition that animates the disturbance ‘has no place’ in the police configuration. ‘Politics is specifically opposed to the police’” (2016: 55; quoting Rancière, 2010: 36).

Ultimately, I think that what these concerns collectively point to is the “lightning bolt” issue I mentioned earlier. The political moment, in some ways, has no rhyme or reason; it is an abrupt rupture; it can only be identified retrospectively, when something that was unfathomable becomes “speakable” and “thinkable” (but again to whom? and to what degree?). Politics seems to occur out of nowhere in Rancière’s work, and as a result, it provides very little to go on from a normative standpoint, other than to posit radical equality and infinite possibilities. As Woodford writes, Rancière says as much when he emphasizes that “a reaction to a staging of equality cannot be guaranteed, since a break of the sensory order ‘can happen anywhere at any time’ but ‘can never be calculated’” (2015: 819; quoting Rancière, 2008: 12). Rancière’s vagueness on this point, I contend, results in a dual normative stance, which could go one way or the other. On the one hand, there seems to be no ethics—as the political moment of contingent egalitarianism is based, in some fundamental way, on chance. This reading aligns with Marchart’s (2007) claim that the political is a sphere distinct from morality; in its radical negativity, the political has no (positive) ethics. On the other hand, it seems that one could argue that almost everything or anything can be political in so far as it deconstructs existing foundations, and then all such acts are potentially normative, in that they may rupture an unjust order. This second pathway is apparent in the works of scholars, like Caraus (2015, 2016a, 2016b), who equate the political with any normative vision that deviates from the existing order. For example, Kalonaityte (2018: 523) uses Rancière’s framework to valorize a variety of acts because they may result in political moments, in so far as they challenge and “transcend the taken-for-granted divisions and categories of the order of the police”; such acts include insurrectionist movements, alliances, protests, art, scholarly, literary, and artistic work, and processes of litigation. ³ While perhaps some such acts may result in a political moment, as the above discussion has highlighted, it is entirely unclear which ones will, and when, and under what circumstances.

Arguably, Chambers provides a more tempered middle ground, in terms of positing a Rancièrean orientation to ethics. Rancière’s theory, according to Chambers, orients us to hope, “not the hope that politics will save us, but that democratic politics will change what is, will alter what is given” (2011: 318, emphasis in original). Change, disruption, and newness, resulting from politics, becomes that which to hope for, that which to orient ourselves toward. But the concerns highlighted above continue to haunt this approach when thinking ethically in the pluriverse. Change for whom? The wholesale “valorization of newness” (Sparks, 2016: 431) and disruption seems less clearly desirable to me in a pluriversal context, where we need to think about newness and disruption for whom and in what ways. Many onto-epistemologies, as Conway and Singh (2011) point out, are striving to protect what they are: their practices, ways of knowing, their socio-symbolic order. Of course, I am in no way attempting to suggest that certain onto-epistemologies are inherently “static” or “unchanging,” nor am I suggesting that members of certain onto-epistemologies uncritically wish to be “unchanging” or “unchangeable.” I am simply pointing out that maintenance and reproduction is also of ethical import, especially in the pluriversal context.

For instance, within the capitalist-patriarchal-racist-colonial power relations that currently configure the pluriverse, members of certain worlds are concerned with “seeking to reground their communities in their own traditions” (Conway and Singh, 2011: 700). Again, the Māori struggle to protect Whanganui can be understood along these lines: their motivation was to protect what is, to resist interventions that might cause changes that would disrupt their world, to create the conditions under which their existing relationship with Whanganui can be reproduced and maintained through time-space. In such cases, certain disruptions, ruptures, or reorderings to these onto-epistemologies may not be normatively desirable. In the context of the pluriverse, constituted by partially entangled worlds (which are themselves relational unfoldings), there are scales of change that are significant, but perhaps not always perfectly aligned. That is, the pluriverse, I argue, involves layers of “politicality.” On the one hand, the pluriverse, as a meta-world of many worlds, is susceptible to political moments, in which the hierarchies or relations between worlds are fundamentally re-ordered. At the same time, however, each world within the pluriverse is also constituted by its own socio-symbolic order, its own onto-epistemology, which delimits and enables what is thinkable, doable, and speakable, and which defines what counts as politics within that world. Given that these worlds are intertwined and interacting with other worlds as well, a political moment is thus also an ever-present possibility from the vantage point of particular worlds.

The ubiquitous potential for a political re-ordering at multiple levels (i.e. within a single world, or at the level of the pluriversal matrix more broadly), as well as across multiple worlds, has some unique implications when contemplating the nature of the political moment(s) that may arise in the pluriverse. There may be times, for example, when a change in the pluriversal matrix (i.e. a change in the relative positions and configurations of worlds) may be morally desirable precisely because it helps to preserve the “internal” consistency of a world, and thereby enhances the ability of said world to reproduce. (I say this without precluding the possibility that a change in the relations between worlds may necessarily change the relations which comprise a particular world. As should be evident, my goal is just to demonstrate the complexity of categorically valorizing disruption and change in the context of multiple onto-epistemologies). Or to put it slightly differently, the political moment in the pluriversal context may necessarily—and perhaps paradoxically—be a simultaneous moment of rupture (in which the pluriversal matrix is reconfigured and ruptured) and a moment of entrenched grounding (in which a world within that matrix is better able to reproduce, perhaps in part because its relations to other worlds have shifted), depending on where one is located within the matrix. More simply, the disruptive and grounding dimensions of the political may not be equally distributed in/across all worlds involved in a political moment.

In such a scenario, the disruptive dynamics of the political moment are not so clear cut. Is it disruptive if it affirms a police order (an actually existing world)? Disruptive for whom? From the pluriversal meta-perspective, perhaps this is disruptive, in that the relations between worlds are shifted. But from a specific localized perspective, the disruption may not be a disruption at all—it may instead further secure the continuation and maintenance of a particular world (the reproduction of “a police” or socio-symbolic order). What part are we valorizing (and valuing) in such a case? The disruption to the matrix or the continuity of a police order that this disruption facilitates/results from? ⁴ While Rancière’s theory is definitively not in opposition to pluriversal thinking, I also feel that it is not quite aligned. The language in Rancière’s work has certain intonations that leave me with lingering questions as to what may be lost or obfuscated if one were to use it to contemplate political-ethical horizons in the pluriversal context.

Pluriversal conclusions: The ethico-political significance of care

As I have argued, the dominant conceptualization of the distinction between politics and the political (or in Rancière’s theory, the police and politics) must be rethought and expanded in the context of the pluriverse, and as I have outlined here, especially in directions that include considerations for the significance of caring for, maintaining, and reproducing multiple distinct yet connected onto-epistemologies or worlds. As currently theorized, the concept of the political seems implicitly tied to a one world assumption (one police, one socio-symbolic order) which, as I have shown above, leads to an over-privileging of newness and rupture at the expense of foregrounding the importance of the maintenance of worlds. By extension, this concept can only offer limited theoretical utility in the context of the pluriverse, where there are many worlds being enacted in, through, because of, and sometimes in spite of, relations with one another. More precisely, this one world assumption is problematic for two reasons. First, in the context of postfoundational political thought, this one world assumption strikes me as odd, given that this body of work is largely concerned with the ways in which the impossibility of any final grounding also creates the conditions in and through which many (often unknowable and unforeseeable) differences can emerge. To remain committed to a one world assumption seems to deny the radicalness of the possibilities implied by the theory itself (i.e. that different worlds could exist). Second, if we are to move in decolonial directions—directions in which modernity no longer has the hold on the real, and in which other onto-epistemologies can flourish as worlds in their own right—then we must begin to think pluriversally, and shed ourselves of the limitations of one-worldism.

Moving in such pluriversal directions, as I hope this argument illustrates, also means that there is a scalar component at play that must be taken into account. Worlds, which are themselves sets of unfolding relations, are related (partially and in fluid ways) to other worlds. The enactment of worlds, and the interconnections between worlds that alternatively facilitate or disrupt such enactments, means that a world is never instantiated as such. Rather, worlds must be established and, importantly, reestablished in the face of one another. From this vantage point, reproduction can be—indeed, often is—political. As evidenced by the Māori struggle to protect (care for) Whanganui, caring for worlds, tending to them, maintaining them—that is, reestablishing them in/through encounters with other worlds—can and does operate in the register of the political. Moreover, paying attention to the power relations in and through which certain worlds are able to reestablish themselves, or in and through which the reestablishment of certain worlds is rendered precarious, is an important political task in the pluriverse (see, for example, FitzGerald, 2021). An understanding of the political which valorizes newness and rupture while relegating considerations of care and reproduction to the sphere of politics/the police obfuscates the layered politicality of the pluriverse. By extension, it fails to offer us theoretical tools that can trace the political significance of how different worlds are alternatively disrupted and maintained (and often unvenly so) in/through the relations of power which tie them together in intricate, yet never totalizing, ways.

As a final note, this task of tracing the unequal consequences that arise from the layered politicality of the pluriverse, I believe, is also ethical all the way down. Questions of which worlds we hope will be ruptured, which ones we want to maintain, and how we adjudicate between these two paths are ethical questions that center on the complicated task of considering the merits of a variety of forms of moral life, and the types of lifeways we want to build (Walker, 2007). While it is beyond the breadth of this article to tackle this issue more fully here, centering questions of care in this reconceptualization of the political is crucial in that it orients us toward this difficult yet pressing work.