Keri Facer (00:01)
So, hello everybody and welcome back. Today I'm delighted that we have Arturo Escobar joining us. Professor Arturo Escobar is an activist researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, post-developmentalist and post-capitalist transitions and ontological design. Arturo was Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is now working closely with the Universidad de Valle, Cali, Colombia. Escobar's work is internationally known and widely influential. His most well-known work, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, laid the intellectual foundations for challenging the linear temporal concept of development and led to an explosion of critiques of this sort of thinking and its consequences for the global South. Arturo's most recent works, Designs for the Pluriverse and Pluriversal Politics, build on that critique of universalizing, homogenizing modernity and make positive propositions about how we might both make visible and recover a world of many worlds. Arturo's critique of the blindness of discourses of modern industrial development to the contemporary coexistence of multiple ways of living and to the damage that arises from that is central to many of the critiques that we hear of linear time today. Arturo, we're delighted to have you here on this podcast where we're exploring the relationship between time and justice and sustainability transitions. Welcome.
Arturo Escobar (01:31)
Thanks for the introduction, Keri. I must say that the whole project and the podcast questions that you sent me in advance have made me think about time and temporalities in very new ways for me and very interesting ways. So, I really, really appreciate that as well. So, I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Keri Facer (01:50)
Yeah,Thanks Arturo. It's great to have you here. So, I'm going to start with a simple question, which is just to tell us a little bit about your own relationship with time. Has it changed over time? What is your relationship with time?
Arturo Escobar (02:05)
Yes, I mean, I was thinking about that and this is simple and at the same time it's not. And it's simple because I would say that my relationship with time can be divided into two main phases. The first phase is all the time that I wasn't aware of time, really. When I was aware of time, but that awareness did not reflect actively into my practices, my embodiment, the ways I lived in the world. And the second phase, which is more recent, is developing an acute awareness of time and temporality, how that impacts my life, and how then asking the question, how can we, or I in particular, live in time in a different way? And, so, let me talk a little bit about the second phase, because the first phase will come up probably later on in the conversation, especially when we talk about development. So, this second phase is, as I said, it's related to developing a more acute awareness of how time is so important in our lives. And why have I arrived at this realization? For different reasons. Life cycle, I'm sure. I'm 73 now. It's one of them. The second one is illness and being much more aware of my body, and what my body is asking of me at this point in my life. The third is the project itself, that has some tools that were new tools for me to think about time. The fourth, which is very important for me, has been very important for about a decade at least, is doing a kind of meditation that I would call insight meditation, it's mostly Buddhist meditation, that is centered on time. And finally, the activism, working more closely with activists over the past 10 years at the community level as well, not just with activists that are in the cities, but also in rural communities and also in communities in the city of Cali, are maybe newly aware of time. So, I would say that I am in a transition myself, in a transition to a different kind of awareness about time in my life. And it's a transition that might be a bit playful. I will define as needing a timeout from time, needing a timeout from modern time, living, being able to develop a different way of living in time, living in my body, living in my place. I have declared myself to be in a post -academic phase. And what do I mean by that? That phase of hurrying from place to place, from topic to topic, from article to article, from book to book is no longer what I want to do or what I need to do. I will continue with my commitment and my passion for what I do, my commitment to life and to people, but in a very different The other reason why I am becoming more aware of time might be a little bit too esoteric. And it has to do with these ideas from Buddhism about emptiness, from some spiritual teachers about the lack of existence of time and how we are trapped in time and temporality. And because of that, we can no longer be present to the moment, present to the now, present to the place where we are. And then writers like Borges and Calvino, whose paradoxical writing about time has been also very interesting to get back to.
Keri Facer (05:48)
Thank you for that, Arturo. It's a beautiful combination of both your personal experience, but also your intellectual engagement with this issue. I mean, what I notice you saying when you're talking about time out from time and also a shift to a post-academic phase, it almost sounds as though you hear time as something that pulls you out from or away from life or being in the world. I mean, is that where you're landing with this?
Arturo Escobar (06:21)
Yes and no. It's just shifting my commitment to life to a different place, a different register. It's not escapism. I'm not escaping into what people imagine to be retirement. It's a concentration on a few things, but that I can't do well. It is slowing down. It's attempting to live in a slow time. Sometimes I say to people, including my partner, that I'm now in slow motion, but I'm trying to move and be in slow motion. So, this is an extension of the slow movement in many different domains. But also because, and this is the most important part for me, which is preparing for death as well, preparing for my transition. And in the sense that we will prepare for that transition, the final transition requires a different attitude of life. Slowness, attention, refocusing, re-embodying, inhabiting the places to inhabit in different ways, maybe building a refuge more than I did before, both intellectual, spiritual, and physical refuge, which we are doing now in Cali with my partner. We're trying to do that still in Chapel Hill, but eventually we're going to be returning to Columbia. And why return to Columbia? Because we grew up here. Even if I lived in the U.S. more than half of my life, I always maintained the connection to Columbia, always spent time in Columbia. And the landscape calls me as well, which is very interesting. It's the mountains I grew up with. I could show them to you right here out the window. I grew up with the rivers and friends from when I was little that we still have from college. My connection to the US was very strong when I was in the Bay Area doing my PhD because I was very happy there, then shifted to more of an intellectual connection with the Academy.
Keri Facer (08:31)
That sense of that deep connection to land and relationship. I can hear you talking about a deeply entangled way of being in the world with a place. One of my favorite writers, who's a storyteller, Martin Shaw, he talks about being claimed by a land and it's not a choice. One is claimed and one is connected and... I find it interesting that opposition between that deep relationality with land and time and space and the framing of academia, as you've talked about it, which almost feels that sort of rootless shifting, that moving from one thing to the next, the search for what's new. Is it post academia or is it a different way of doing it that you're moving into now?
Arturo Escobar (09:15)
Maybe a different way of doing intellectual work. The academy is one way of doing intellectual work. But there are many other spaces where we obviously do intellectual work, including in our own personal lives and relationships. They also have intellectual work. It's not just hanging out with somebody. Maybe some people say it's a deep hanging out. It's a profound hanging out with somebody. But that involves intellectual work. It's the mind and it's embodied. And that's what is so difficult to do in the academy. The academy is, as you will say, uprooting. It's an uprooting experience. Although, for me, academic work has always been embodied and visceral. I feel it when I write. I feel it when I teach. But nevertheless, it's very disconnected from locality, from place, from community. It's like you feel a community that is a different kind of community maybe with some colleagues, with students in particular. I was having important relationship with both undergraduates and graduate students. But yes, the shift is from uprooting to rerouting, to reattachment to place and landscape, to doing writing, embodied writing, writing in place, intellectual work that is deeply connected to that ongoing flow of life, but it happens in place.
Keri Facer (10:36)
That's a wonderful image of that deep connection to the ongoing flow of life. I think that's something that resonates deeply with me. So, maybe we'll do a little bit of time traveling to start off with. We'll go backwards in time. I first came across your work through your book, Encountering Development. And this was a very clear critique of the dangers of allowing one time story to dominate others. And I can hear your arguments there of many worlds coexisting. The book has become wildly popular, wildly cited, and I would like to invite you just to do a bit of time traveling and look back on that book now and maybe have a think about what still feels important in the arguments you are making there and what the story was about time in that book, seen through the lens now where you've become very reflective about time. What feels important about that still?
Arturo Escobar (11:29)
Yes, that's an important question for me, Keri, because development and the critical development discourse, as I call this, the critique of the development narrative, linear narrative of progress, was the first main important area of my life. And the areas of my life, in my intellectual life, I have gone through many different areas, but they are all intertwined. That's what I find these days. And that's just a quick reference for people who might be interested in this. There's a wonderful short text and TED talk, I think, by this wonderful Nigerian writer, Shimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story. It's beautiful. In many ways is the danger of development as a single story. So, I would say that what I started to discover when I was doing my PhD dissertation on the history of development, is that there were so many different things, especially in the history of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But I slowly discovered that there is a basic core, like an action that underlies all development narratives from then until today. And the narrative or the question is very simple and it goes as follows: In order to reduce poverty, we need development. Because in the 50s, there was the discovery of poverty of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the so-called discovery. All of this is in quotation marks. Second part of the question... To achieve development, we need economic growth. So, the emphasis on growth and growth is linear already. All of these have linear implications, temporal implications. The third part, which is the synthesis in a way, is that growth plus development equals modernization, progress, abundance, happiness, good societies, good societies in the image of the West or the developed countries of the world. The implication was also that if that's the case, we can and need to sacrifice everything else to the goal of development and growth. Very ancient cultures, the earth, the environment, people, equality, rights, all had to be sacrificed in the name of development. And that's how it was said in the 50s and 60s, literally. So, how else was time present in those discourses then and today? First, is temporal implications, special temporal implications that the third world, the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, had to replicate the history of the West. That included going through the times of the West. The second, the modern divide became very clear and very strong. The divide between us and them. The ancient divide between the barbarians and the civilized, or the primitives and the civilized became the divide between the anti-development and the developed. Was the arrow of time always there, the teleology of development. And if you'd read the modernization theories of the 50s and 60s, but it's still today is there, then you have a before, which is characterized by societies that were poor, ignorant, malnourished, unable to feed themselves, unable to do themselves what needs to be done to become modern. There were some tropes that were used. The trouble of darkness was very clearly present. So, it's a movement from darkness into light, from the darkness of underdevelopment to the light of the enlightenment, the light of development. So, all of these are present there. And what was the end result? The end result was that this project of development that became little by little capitalist globalization, little by little destroyed many worlds. But that's part of the impact. The other part of the impact is that there are many forms of resistance. Not everything became developed. Not everybody became kind of a clone of modern ways of being. And even if most countries still are trying to continue with the dream of catching up and developing with the West. So, on the one hand, the idea that this modern way of being, modern way of making the world, was a destroyed world, the modern West became a world that destroys worlds, but also at the same time, there's an ongoing trench resistance. And even in the same engagement with development, many communities worldwide were trying to do other things and be other ways.
Keri Facer (16:37)
Yeah. Thanks Arturo. And it's been such an important critique that you've offered there. I mean, I know sometimes it can oversimplify. You've said, you know, this is a discourse that produces an us and a them and that that us and them is produced through a temporal framing of a before and an after. And there are many people critiquing that around the world now as well, following your lead and also coming from other traditions. So, we think about people like Kyle White, for example, Zoe Todd, Eve Tuck and others doing important work to challenge this concept of people being located on a single temporal development narrative. I mean, those of us who've been working in education see this in education all the time as well. So, you know, the concept of the singular development of the child and the fact that the multiple ways of being are profoundly eradicated and used as a justification for a particular sort of intervention. I suppose what I'd like to do is shift to your point about resistance, though, and the fact that many worlds exist. And I know that you draw on Gibson Graham as well, that sense of seeing the abundance that exists rather than just reifying oppositions. So, would it be a good time now to talk about your work in the Cauca River Valley, if I'm pronouncing that right, is that the Cauca River Valley, and the work that you're doing there on transition projects? How does that work connect to this desire to make the many worlds visible?
Arturo Escobar (17:57)
Yes. Let me start by saying that this concept of a world of many worlds is an emerging concept. It's a concept that has been emerging in the last couple of decades maybe from many different sources. And in Latin America, one important reference is the zapatista movement in Chiapas that emerged in 1994. And one of the things they say very clearly and loudly is that they didn't want inclusion into the globalized neoliberal world. They wanted a world where many worlds fit, a world where many worlds could be and coexist in some sort of harmony, tension, but also in harmony. And I did find it actually interesting, in the book that you recommended, Keri, thanks for recommending it, by the Anishinaabe scholar, Leanne Simpson, The Theory of Water, I found that there are so many concepts there. It's beautifully written. It's an amazing book. So many concepts there that are resembling the pluriverse. She doesn't use the concept, but she's talking about that. This is a quote on page 123: " from Anishinaabe,the way we live makes the world." And that's a statement of the pluriverse. So, everywhere we are, we make our world. Especially for people who are living in territories, who are living in place, who are embodied in place, embedded existence. It is that modern tribe, to give it a name, that decided that the making of worlds in place wasn't important. You needed to transcend that. You needed to delocalize yourself. You needed to universalize the project. So, the problem was that the modern project of building the world alone, rational, instrumental, dualist, capitalistic lines became sort of universal project at the expense of many other worlds that were possible or that were emerging or that were already there. So, let me try to download that into our work in our region, the Cauca River Valley. And our project has been going on for about seven years now. Started slowly and it picked up in the last three years in particular. We were able to get some funding. At the beginning, we were not focusing on time. So, this is relatively recent and we're beginning to pay attention to time. So, this is work in progress, but it's been very enriching this process of reading the bio region and what we do in the bio region through temporal lenses. To begin with our slogan, that principle that came up for our project is, "Río Cauca, muchos mundos; One Cauca river, many worlds." So, the Cauca river is indeed the main river, but there are many other rivers and forms of water and landscapes in this large bio region that has been colonized and occupied, occupied ontologically and physically by sugar cane monoculture and by an economic development project based on sugar cane monoculture that has benefited mostly small white elite and the middle class at the expense of most of the other people, largely black people, indigenous peoples, poor people, at the expense of the ecosystems and so forth. So, that 'One Cauca river, many worlds", it's a way for us to highlight the fact that we need a transition in our bio region from this single narrative of progress based on sugar cane monoculture to a pluriversal region that is inhabited by many different worlds with many different ways of building the world in space and time. So, to give some specific samples, there are three areas in which we are focusing now in terms of temporality as well. The first one is farming. The second one is water. Everything that has to do with water. And the third one is our project itself. How do we read our project in terms of time and temporalities? So, in terms of farming, you can probably imagine many of these things. On the one hand, there is a clear critique of the monoculture of sugarcane, the fact that it's linked to accumulation and speed and racism and capitalism. The fact that that model has also deep connections now with the other big monoculture that has emerged in the southern part of the region, which is coca cultivation. So, the illicit economy of coca is also having a huge impact on the region and breaking down not only the long standing farming practices by black, indigenous and peasant communities, but also pushing them out of the land, pushing them to work for the drug business and so forth. So, but especially on the side of the long-standing traditional farming, what we discover is that time is so central to every single activity. I mean, it is central to sowing, to growing the food, to seeds, to the knowledges of the farms, of the farmers, the traditional knowledges, to the rituals, to the temporalities. And many of them are marked by rituals. But the rhythm of this kind of farming is totally different from the rhythm of working in the sugar cane plantation for almost very little wages. It's a very hard labor, especially done by black men and black women. So, farming and the movement that is growing in the region to retrieve, regenerate, and recreate traditional forms of farming, which are not monocultures, but are polycultures, which are not yet only to the market, but that also has importance for production for the market, which are more communally based than just individual farms. All of that is taking on more importance and also becoming more attunded to time.
Keri Facer (24:50)
This question of farming as a practice in time. Actually rivers, we know they're also constituted in time. They only exist if there is time. If there is no time, if there's no movement, then there is no river. So, all of these practices, you're saying, are deeply in time and embedded in time. When you're setting that opposite to the kind of sugar cane narrative... the sugar cane narrative is in some ways trying to escape from time. It's almost the opposite of what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation, that they're trying to extract themselves from this deep embodied, entangled temporalities to a sort of a time of no endings. I mean, this also goes back to your point earlier about the different framing as one moves towards death. I wonder whether, you know, the modernist temporality that you're associating with these monocultures are temporal frames that seek the concept of endless growth, that have a problem with recognizing endings, that have a problem with recognizing deaths. So, I wonder whether there is something about death and endings and how we treat them that matter for these two different ways of being in the world. And I can see Michel waving his hand for a second, then Arturo, what do you take on that? And then maybe Michel, what's your view on it?
Arturo Escobar (26:05)
Yes. Okay, yes, that's great, Keri. Two things on the one hand, what you say, we're trying to get back into time and to really dwell and dwell in a different way, and inhabiting landscape, place, inhabiting the earth in different way requires a very different relation to time. One that takes into account the slow rhythms as well as the fast times in which we live today. You have to articulate both times. But the capitalist time doesn't articulate with any other time. It's the time of speed. It's the time of efficiency. It's the time of rationality. It's the time of accumulation. So, in a way, you're right, escaping from time. Modern time escapes from a deep concern with time. Modern times escapes from relationality, from relational time and adopts only one single kind of time, but same time. So, the connection to death, I think that's very interesting. Now, Keri, I remembered reading, I think this is a Brazilian, a wonderful, wonderful person whose name is Ailton Krenak. And he does say, one of the main problematic aspects of modern societies is that they no longer understand death, that they are escaping away from death always. In a sense, we find this idea in some philosophers, like Heidegger and Foucault. What Foucault called the analytics of finitude... He says modernity is characterized by these analytics of finitude in which we finally face death, but we really don't face it. We face it because we feel that death will come hypothetically in the future, like in some economic theory or population catastrophes, but we really do not engage with death.
Keri Facer (28:13)
And it's a relationship with death that desires to avoid it or to transcend it or to get beyond it, as opposed to a relationship with death that recognize this as the kind of basis for our permission.
Arturo Escobar (28:19)
Yes.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (28:25)
There is really something fascinating in what you're describing, Arturo, because you started talking about the book you've wrote on development and going back to the discourses from the fifties, showing how basically the logic of development was a response to poverty. And you are getting in your argument into something where we are now, I mean, another form of poverty come from the monoculture and the rationalization of agriculture imposed on by capitalism. So, in a way, your argument is that there is a form of poverty that is produced by the reduction of diversity of rhythms and temporalities and activities and way of living. And, so, what I hear and what you're saying is that there is actually something to embrace about the richness of not only our ways of being in the world, our ways of cultivating earth and the land, but also the way to nurture the diversity of the rhythms that compose of our lives. That really resonated for me because in a way you are reversing the paradigm where richness comes from the rationalization and the one way fit-it all in a way of thinking that comes with the instrumental dimensions of capitalism and the capitalist way of working. And what you are doing is basically reversing that saying, no, actually richness comes from the diversity, from the plurality of ways of living, including the rhythms and temporalities that compose the way we change and evolve. And I think that's really a crucial point I think that you are making there.
Arturo Escobar (30:12)
Yes, that's great, Michel. Thank you. That reminds me of one of the early books of Vandana Shiva, this wonderful Indian feminist ecologist and scientist. One of her first books was called Monocultures of the Mind. And she analyzes a monocultures of forestry in particular, eucalyptus forestry which is a monoculture. And from there she shifts to how there's a connection between that kind of monoculture and the monocultures of the mind. Monocultures of one way of thinking, one way of thinking about life, one way of being. And this all goes together. I mean, we don't have narratives on the one side and practices and infrastructures on the other. Narratives are infrastructures, are ontologists, are infrastructures and designs and practices and bodies. So, we are already discovering the crucial importance of analyzing narratives, not as ideologies or superstructures or secondary to the material, but narratives are so foundational to everything we become, everything we do, and hence should be foundational to how we transform the world. But again, since the narratives are deeply embedded in practices, in designs, pathologies, bodies, infrastructures, infrastructures of everything we do, and also languages are narratives in educational systems. So, yes, definitely that's the case.
Keri Facer (31:47)
It just, it strikes me that what you're developing here, that we have a concept in a lot of time studies of the idea of time poverty, which in modern framings means not having enough time of a single sort, if you like. It's sort of how many hours have you got in a day? And that's how it's understood. And that's how quite a lot of studies of what counts as equality gets worked out. It's do you have enough hours in a day? But what you're talking about Arturo and you're pointing to Michel is a completely different conception of time poverty, which is a lack of access, I think, to the different rhythms of life, to being able to be slow when one needs to be slow or fast when one needs to be fast, to a rich abundance of time that is deeply entangled with place, relations, that allows us to encounter the time of the mountain and the time of the mayfly at the same time. This to me feels like a completely different ontological basis for understanding what time richness and time poverty might be.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (32:50)
I think there is also a connection with the normativity that was raised earlier, meaning that the parallel I see, and you mentioned that Keri, is that ⁓ when we work in education, there is all the norms in the way we understand the development of kids. And even working in adult education, for me, is the same. There is some kind of expectation of normal way of developing throughout the lifespan. And, so, what we observe for the last 50 years, which has to do with the change in the world, is that there is a much more diversity in the way people develop themselves and evolve throughout their life. And that's the way also I hear Arturo's point about the importance of recognizing the richness of the ways we developed. But that raises a question that is how do we learn to negotiate the different temporalities of our lives or the different rhythms that compose our lives? And that's also for me a question that I have for you Arturo about how do we learn collectively to negotiate temporalities that are heterogeneous once we accept the idea that there is no longer one way of conceiving what normal development means?
Arturo Escobar (33:59)
Yes. Okay. Quick comment with the beginning of this part of the conversation, and then I'll try to answer the questin. Time poverty, I assume the implications in modern thinking is that we need time abundance. And I've seen that discussion about, especially about poor women have time poverty. So, they need time abundance, but time abundance to do more of the same. Time abundance usually in capitalism is to do more, to accumulate more, to have more income, to be more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. But the kind of time abundance that Michel and you Keri are talking about is a different ontology of time indeed. It's time abundance to do otherwise, to do something different, to take time out from modern time, to dwell in time in a different way. So, now onto the question that Michel asks, which is also very important. There are two parts of the questions, I think, to me. The first one is can we make agreements? And this came out in the discussion of in our project as well. Agreements across different constellations of time, across different ways of thinking about time, being with time, inhabiting time. And how those agreements would be like? And one of the things in our project, for instance, is some of those agreements will need to be around the use of land, the use of water, for instance, and those agreements with urban life, agreements with capitalist life, agreements with communal lives, communal usages as well. So, this is a very concrete way in which these constellations of time that can exist in a more coordinated fashion can begin to arise in our region. So, the concept that emerged in our project was temporalities as a pluriversal agreement. How do we begin to move the discussion about time in a pluriversal way? Because that's the prerequisite to think about temporal coordination and constellations of different kinds of being with time. In Astrid Uyua's work, that's the way you struggle, to some extent it's about that. It's about resisting the temporal violence, what she calls the temporal violence and temporal imposition from destructive energy transition technologies, especially wind energy. Those technologies don't take into account the multiple forms of time or the YU community, including the time of the wind, the temporalities of the communities, pastoralism, the different ways of being. So, there has to be like a temporal coordination among these different kinds of time. Now, for me, going beyond that is much more difficult. And this has to do with how do we create collectives of multiple territories inhabiting time in a different way? It is connected with two great open questions that I see in both critical social theory and activist practice. The first question is, what is systemic change? How do we go beyond localized changes to something larger? What in the old Marxist tradition used to be called systemic change, maybe even revolution or revolutionary change. I don't think we have good answers to that anymore. The way of thinking about systemic change from liberal philosophy, it never worked and it will never will. And I can explain what I mean by that. And that the way of thinking about systemic change, in Marxist work and struggles, hasn't worked, or at least has been insufficient and has sometimes been counterproductive. Then what are we with that question? The second question is, what is a genuine transformative alternative? How do we know when somebody, a group is doing something on the grassroots, that that's actually going, let's say, in a counter-hegemonic way, in a pluriversalizing way, in the way of relationality and not only reproducing or engaging superficially with capitalism to do something different?
Keri Facer (38:51)
One of the most influential pieces of writing I read in recent years was a brilliant paper by Sharon Stein. And she talks about the relationship between, if you like, a diagnosis and a response. And she talks about three ways of thinking about a response or a change. She talks about the reform framing. She talks about the revolution framing. And then she talks about what she calls beyond reform and she and the rest of the gesturing towards decolonial futures collective operating in that space. So, the reform frame is really modernity. It's kind of we tweak things to keep the system going. Revolution is, you know, if we just get the right people in charge, you know, if we sort of switch it all over, it'll all be the same. But the critique that they make is that both of those leave, if you like, the ongoingness, the current systems and structures effectively intact. And, so, they promote what they call a beyond reform perspective, which to me has a couple of elements. On one level, it's giving up on this vision of a future that you achieve, that you know that you can achieve and that you're kind of working towards. So, it's got that sort of temporal element. It's a gesturing towards possible futures rather than a kind of program of working towards this known plan. But the other thing that it seems to invite for me is the sense of working in the ongoingness, the working inside. And the risk to that is always, well, it just means you're working at a local level. How does that connect? But to me, there's something actually about trust in there that is also tied into questions of how systems heal, which is that actually the belief that working in a small way won't work is a barrier to actually believing that transformation is possible. The way I land with that Arturo, when you ask me what is system change, is something about opening up the possibility, what gets released as an energy and an activity and a practice if one does work where one stands in the confidence that others will also act where they stand, and that at some point we reach out a hand and somebody else's hand is reaching towards us and I know others talk about that. So, that's where I land around that, which is also very temporal. It's a renunciation, if you like, of a known future utopia that we're working towards and much more of a working inside. So, that's where I land on that. I don't know, Michel, whether there's anything you want to say or respond to.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (41:22)
Yeah. When you asked the question about how do we conceive systemic change if we let go of the revolutionary kind of system shift perspective, for me, it really raised the question of what are the representations we have of drastic changes happening over time? I mean, if it's not a disruption, how do we perceive it? And to go back to the temporal imagination that Keri, you're talking about, also, and to the work I'm doing on metaphor, what are the metaphors that we are also mobilizing to represent changes that are drastic, but that may eventually unfold through different form of temporalities? And for me, the connection here is with Henri Lefebvre and the fact that, as a Marxist who was critical about Marxist theory, we had to re-envision change and transformation at another temporal scale. And for him, it was the everyday life. Instead of wanting to change the macro structure, it was all about changing the way we behave and the temporalities and the rhythms that compose the everyday life. So, that's how it resonates for me to listen to you. And I'm curious about how do you envision the temporalities of this kind of deep changes?
Arturo Escobar (42:28)
Yes. That's great. So let me make some, start with some comments on what you just said. Throughout history, we have many other ideas about change and radical change, but that were discarded or were not listened to obviously by liberals, by Orthodox Marxists, by technoscientific solutionism, by all these different, more hegemonic narratives. And we can go back to the archives of modern theory, we can go back to archives of non-Western discourses about change, and we'll probably find lots there. For instance, there is a Quechua Aymara from the Antian indigenous regions especially in Bolivia and Peru concept of radical transformation, which is called Pacha Cuti. Pacha is mother earth and cuti is transformation. This is relatively well known in Latin America, Pacha Cuti. Pacha Cuti is a complete translocation. That word doesn't exist in English. A complete overhaul of the ways of being and doing and thinking of a particular period that become turned over and turned around into a different way of being that do not come from, let's say Marxist genealogy or any other genealogy, but are sort of indigenous. So, that is very important. And second, I didn't know Sharon Stein's work, but sounds great. I think what you describe of her work is where we are at in many different ways. If we don't want just reform, if we accept the fact that reform of the system as it exists today is no longer an option. And yet we know that we need to engage with that system as it is today to get someplace else, but someplace else that is not more of the same, but something else that is radically different because it has to be. Because what is today is destroying us and destroying the earth. Beyond reform, taking into account the ongoingness, I like that. The rethinking of possibility. How do we rethink possibility? I think that's a key question. And to rethink possibility, we need to rethink what we think the real is. We're trapped within the narrow understanding of the real. The real is concrete. The real is discrete. The real is temporally bound. The real belongs to the realist property. The real is what the law says, et cetera. But it's not open to this ongoingness and open-ended uncertainty and possibility of many worlds that come. Some people find in the Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the virtual, which is a very interesting notion, the virtual as a field that involves both the real and what can be realized, but because it's also present within the real, but we don't see it, we don't feel it, we don't touch it, but it's always there. So, there is all these possibilities in Western philosophy as well. The notion of inmanence, I think from Spinoza and beyond, process thought from Whitehead. So, these are the new heroes in a way in modern social theory that are re-emerging today for very good reason to draw that other archive that has existed, that dissenting archive, if you wish, or dissenting imagination in some strands of modern philosophy that had a different idea about change because they have a different idea about life, about what life is.
Keri Facer (46:35)
The person also that comes to mind for me when you talk about this is Ernst Bloch and this sense of the not yet. And Bloch talks about the longing and the desire for the yet unachieved homeland and that it will never be achieved. What I find interesting about Bloch's work is that sense of the longing for another future also sends you back to the present to look at the present differently, to see the unrealized within the real. So, he goes back to deep mythology and the folklore and the unrealized. I mean, the reason I end up talking about time and futures is because it feels to me so foundational to this perception of possibility. And to me, there's a difference between, particularly when we talk about social transformation, this sense of achieving this other world that is out there, that exists in another space, as opposed to the idea of feeling into the longings, the desire for a different world, to give permission to that longing as a way for them coming back, and to look into the present, to see where that's already in emergence.
Arturo Escobar (47:43)
What we are finding in this conversation now about that question of systemic change is that there are many archives for rethinking and thinking anew about systemic change. I would say that there is a pluriversal archive. When you were talking about Bloch, what came to mind is the concept that we use in our project as well, but it's a concept from Ghana, from Ashanti groups in Ghana.
Keri Facer (48:08)
Mm-hmm. Sankofa.
Arturo Escobar (48:08)
which is the concept of Sankofa. Yeah. It's very similar to sort of retrieve from the past what you have forgotten to actualize it and to bring it into fruition for the contemporary context. In our work, black communities use a lot the concept of ancestrality, but ancestrality not as something that happened in the past that exists in the past. Ancestrality not as a longing to go back to the past. That's a total misreading. But ancestrality as an effective force that is alive today. And then we need to drink from that source to be able to move ahead in a direction. And here comes the transformational alternative, an alternative that genuinely transforms and not reforms in a direction, so, we move from ancestrality in a direction that at least has some possibilities and reasonable possibility that is not going to go the hegemonic way, that is going to go the relational way, that is going to reweave, braid relationality, relational walls. I really like the metaphor also that Simpson uses, The Theory of Water, of sintering. I think it's the process where snowflakes are formed, how crystals are never the same, but how they begin to coalesce. And eventually she gets to this concept that she calls constellations of core resistance. That's in many ways what systemic change is going to be like. It's like beyond reform, constellations of core resistance, convergences across genuinely transformative alternatives and the convergences are being described today with these biological metaphors as rhizomes from Deleuze and Guattari but also from other sources. Mycelia, I mean, there's a lot of talk about mushrooms and mycelia and how in forests, how trees communicate through the roots, through the mycelia, the mycorrhizae. And, so, that the tree is not a single standing tree, but it's a whole organism. And, so, we need to move in that direction as well. How all of these small so-called localized, recommunalized alternatives are always connected with each other or kind of, and the political project comes here. How we can foster those convergences among these alternatives, not by building hierarchical structures like in the past, but self-organizing non-hierarchical networks or meshworks or mycelia or rhizomes or coalitions of co-resistance and co-reexistence across them? And there are some groups that I've seen in the world that are devoted to bringing about those convergences. One of them is called the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, GTA. And with all the disagreements and tensions among the it's moving ahead in that direction.
Keri Facer (51:31)
Thank you, Arturo for that, for the images and the metaphors that you're offering us to think with and the ones that you're pointing us to as well. There's a phrase from your book where you say, ⁓ "We are all summoned to the task of repairing the earth and the pluriverse, one stitch at a time, one designer at a time, one loop at a time." And I think you've been speaking to that in this picking up Simpson's concept of sintering and the rhizomes. From a temporal perspective, we can often hear people saying, I mean, particularly in the environment sector, it's like, that will be too slow. You get that language that that's going to be too slow. Particularly when we have politicians who are working very fast to break a lot of things, to really try to disrupt, to remove practices of care left, right and center. I wonder if I could just invite you, as a last reflection... What do you think the timings or the temporalities are of those more horizontal rhizomatic sintering practices? Do you think frankly that they're fast enough, as some people would say, to tackle the sorts of challenges that we're living in today?
Arturo Escobar (52:44)
Yes, somebody says the following: "Times are urgent, let us slow down." That's this wonderful Nigerian Bayo Akomolafe. At the same time, we are faced with catastrophic climate change, while faced with the impending millions and millions of climate refugees and millions and millions more displaced by this awful globalizing model imposed by the new right now with even more cruelty and brutality as ever before. And, so, times are urgent at the same time. But we shouldn't let the urgency play at the service of the reforms, the reform solutions, the solutionisms, the quick fixes, the geoengineering, the AI-driven kind of solutions, or the sustainable development kind of solution because there are no solutions at all. So, we have to push beyond that and beyond the temporality of fastness as we know it to arrive at the different coordination of times. And the communities know well that tension. And this came out in our project as well. And the way in which somebody put in our project is as follows. She said: "We don't have time to think about time because we're always activists and always doing so much and so many things at the same time that they cannot slow down." So, in our project, we have this distinction between what we call the objective and project. The objective is the path, the ongoings, the open ended project of just transition for the region. The project is the time bound year by year project with deadlines, with goals to achieve, with communities to work with. And the tension is always there. And the communities refuse. So interesting. The communities refuse being placed under the fast track of times, even if they are the ones who are trying to survive in this world. But they said they know that we lead them nowhere. They know that we'll just leave them with the option of working for bigger wages in some capitalist non-formal sector. We moderns are much more impatient than people who are trying to survive on the ground. Indigenous peoples in particular, they know we are here for the long haul. And we don't need quick transitions. We don't need quick solutions. We are here 500 years and more and we're still going despite the genocide, despite the massacres. And I think people in the Palestinian struggle, know that as well. And they are in such an awful, awful difficult situation now because of what is going on, with the genocide in Gaza and beyond. So, those temporalities on the ground from struggles, I think can be a guide for us to think about temporality otherwise. When even me, I found myself in a meeting, we have sometimes two day meetings. Nothing starts on time. Everything has a ritual at the beginning that go on and on. But they don't want to speed it up. They don't want to make it more rationalized. Most foreigners that come to Latin America, more academics, get really frustrated.
Keri Facer (56:46)
I love this. Thank you Arturo. What that leaves me with is a deep sense of hope with the time of relationality, the time of relationships and that if we're working towards that and we're working with that, then we have something that is stronger than anything else. So, well, with all of that, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us from
Arturo Escobar (57:02)
Yes. Yes. Thanks to both of you.
Keri Facer (57:12)
It's great to have you here and I look forward to talking more with you again in future. So thanks Arturo.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (57:13)
Thank you. ⁓ Thank you very much.
Arturo Escobar (57:19)
Thank you. Thanks so much to both of you and to the audience.
