Relational Canon
This will be an inarticulate post. I hate the metaphor of a web, but there’s this thing in my head. Its kind of a constellation of thought that has yet to be formally drawn in the real world. It’s there in my mind, and I can’t unsee it. The institutions that it enmeshes are each in a way their own cult-like like vortices that promise similar flavors of secular salvation. Each set of institutions, or better yet, “schools of thought,” have their own totemic heads who are, in some cases, their founders, inventors, or champions.
These schools (and their totemic leaders) include the Santa Fe Institute (Cowan), the Plurality.Institute ⿻ (Tang, Allen), the Policy Science tradition (Lasswell), the Regenesis Group (Reed, Sanford, Mang), the Permaculture community (Fukuoka, Mollison, Holmgren), the symbiosis people (Margulis, Lovelock), the social ecology/anarchism folks (Bookchin, Chomsky, Scott), the old pragmatists (Pierce, James, Dewey), the relational sociologists (Simmel, Emirbeyer), the actor-network theory crowd (Latour, Stengers), and the Anthropocene crew (Haraway, Tsing, Chakrabarty). The most obvious way to draw a line around these things is to just say that they are things that I’ve been into at some point over the past fifteen years.
Another perspective, though, is that they constitute some vague but really unified emerging philosophical shift. Each, in their own unique way, pitches the world as “more complex than you think,” pitches the world as “more dynamic than you think,” and is attempting to revise the issue of scale, or the relationship between smaller and larger pieces in this world—whether individual-community, human-ecosystem, or community-globe. None of these are pessimistic movements in the way that postmodernism is generative of a world of irreconcilable difference. Each of these schools sees difference as fundamental and working positively across real difference as the primary political task. Each stands outside of rather than inside of difference.
Its an odd constellation. Some place a lot of power in individual agents (ANT, anarchism), others place a lot of agency in systems (SFI), networks (relational sociologists), or wholes (Regenesis, Permaculture), and others in some economic equilibria between the two (Plurality). Some are techno-positivist (Plurality), and others are techno-pessimist (Permaculture). But each admits some kind of dynamism, is interdisciplinary, and centers relationships over things. The way in which relationships are described, though, varies greatly.
There is feedback, predation, mutualism, equilibrium, intimacy, material, formal, efficient, final, nested, management, consumption, constraint, cheating, maximizing, parasitism, commensalism, ammensalism, care, presence, focus, violence, diplomacy, worship, identification, friendship, jealousy, and competition. Although it is hard, the task of sociology must be to describe the relationships between relationships. It is a leap of faith to believe that processes beget processes. Its even harder to make sense of these relationships. But this is the challenge of explanation. What is the relationship between jealousy and violence? Between competition and friendship? Between voting and worship?
The vocabulary of a relational worldview is vast, and yet we struggle to give causal power to these processes. Things still do things. I hike the mountain—ascension. Does my running up the hill invoke the infinite myths of modernity, of progress, of human conquest over the enemy, the wilderness, and the unknown? Or is it my relationship to the mountain? Is there any drama without the hill? Is there any life without food? Any jealousy without three people? Is there any natural science without the ongoing drama of life?
The two stupidest ideas known to man are both numbers. The first is zero. There is very little evidence for nothingness. The second is one. There is very little evidence of singularity. Everything is born of association.
Okay, cutting myself off.