Object- and Event- Oriented Understandings of Meaning Making: Pluralism and Meaning Making Practices

Whitney A. Bauman

IRAS 2014

wbauman@fiu.edu

“There is emerging a planetary spirituality of the interstices. No locality can be located apart from its interrelations. Close and alien, intimate and systemic, they add up to the whole.” (Keller, God and Power, 130)

What do I mean by “Religion”?

Religion: Re-ligare/legere (to bind fast / re-read)

Religion as Human (Human’s are meaning-making creatures and created by meaning (Heidegger))

Religion and Function (Durkheim)

Religion as Environmental History (Merchant, Cronan, Glacken)

Religion as Western ConstructLifeways, cultures, practices, etc.

What do I mean by “Science”?

Science/ scientia (knowledge/knowing; root scire: to separate one thing from another)

Focus on material-energy flowsIncludes chemistry, biology,

physics, neuroscience, ecology, cosmology (Dilthey)

Includes relationship between data and theory (Philosophy of Science)

Includes technology (medical, agricultural, energy, etc.)

Factors of the Post-Colonial, Planetary Context: Globalization and Climate Change

What does Globalization mean?

Creation of the Space-Time Crunch

The Glocal

Assemblages

Contextualization of Meaning-Making

Hybrid Identity Formation

Globalatinization

What does Climate Change mean?:

End of ‘Nature’

End of Mastery

Social Natural, Bio-Historical, Nature-Cultures

Resurgence of Unknowing

Two Epistemological Models: Globalization vs. Planetarity

Globalatinization is the continuation of the logic of domination Christianization Enlightenment / Secularization (Reason) Development/ Bretton Woods / Green Revolution

This is the imposition of one truth regime over the face of the planet and it relies on some type of transcendent reality: God, Revelation, Nature, Reason.

The Post-Colonial, Planetary Context

“I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere…If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away.” (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72-73).

Epistemological Implications of the Planetary Context

Multiperspectivalism paticcasamuppada Anekantavada Creature among Creatures (Perspectivism)

Viable Agnosticism Existential: in between spaces of unknowning Syadvada Apophasis / Negative Thought

The “secularizing” moments of religions (John Cobb) Deconstruction

Epistemological Implications of the Planetary Context

Polydoxy Hybrid Identities No closure/Orthodoxy Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Queer

Theory, Environmental Hermenetics = There has never been One interpretation

Silk Road, Convivencia, Colonial Era, Tributaries to “Modern Science”

Identity in and through difference, otherness; connecting the terrains of a planetary context.

New assumptions for meaning-making in a Post-Colonial, Planetary Context

We have never been modern Beyond Narratives of Progress and Development, or Decline Beyond Self / Other divide

Relational selves Beyond Organism / Machine (Cyborgs) Beyond Human / Rest of the Natural World: creaturely

assemblages (e.g: paper)

Beyond Religion / Science to meaning-making practices

Planetary Truths

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty vs. Bohrs Indeterminacy Self-Organization, Poesis, Emergence, Non-Equilibrium

The science of something more, from nothing but The science of non-reductive physcialism The science of the New Materialism (Vibrant Matter) Ideas Matter, Matter Imagines

Regimes of Truth Lines of Flight Planetary Becomings

The point is that there are multiple possible ways of becoming; we are not necessarily living any more or less Real than peoples 1000 years ago or 1000 years from now, just under different truth regimes.

The Emergence of Planetary Pluralism: Between Absolutism and Relativism

“Pluralists are not relativists in the first instance because our image of culture encourages us to embrace certain things in this particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others, and to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others.” (William Connolly, Pluralism, 41). There is no Omni-God/Telos/Ultimate Reality (that we have

access to) Scientific laws are loose approximations and incomplete

summaries There are more agents than humans in the world

Globalization and Climate Change: Thinking with our Hybrid, Evolving, Trans Context

Wicked Problems (Rittel and Weber)

Hyper-objects (Morton)

Object-Oriented Ontologies (Harman)

Event-Oriented Ontologies (Whitehead; Deleuze and Guattari)

The Ethics of Movement

Nomadic Ethics

Journey over abstract arrivals; Intergenerational

Polyamory of Place

Multiple loves vs. monogamy of place

Trans and Post Humanisms

Ethics beyond the reification of the human species; Cyborg Ethics

Ethics of Pace over Ethics of Place

Are our dreams, imaginings fossel-fueled and outstripping the carrying capacity of the planet?

Beyond Precautionary Principles: At what pace should we move?

The Ethics of Uncertainty

“To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, it must be constantly won.” (Simone de Beavoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 129)

Unknowing at the Edges

Deconstructive Ethics

Iconoclasm

Trickster Ethics

Etc.

The call for planetary Ethics Spatial Analysis vs. Temporal Analysis (Nixon)

Navigating multiple possibilities for becoming (D&G)

Recognizing that we are co-response-able organisms emerging with many other organisms toward multiple possibilities for becoming

Taking seriously the possibilities of a trans-human future (Haraway, et al)

Imagining multiple “lines of flight” for possible futures to become toward

Collecting toward certain ways of becoming in recognition that no way will ever be final or complete (Bruno Latour)

Keeping our eye on those things which get left out of any one way of organizing the emerging community of life so that those others can re-open the collective at a later date toward a different way of becoming.

Performativity and Abjection (Queer Theory and PostColonial Theory: Beyond Identity Ethics and Ethics of “Imagined Communities”)

Ganjuran Church, Javanese Jesus: Planetary Religious Identities

• Hybrid Identities andPlanetary Flows

Colonization Catholicism Javanese Traditions Hinduism

• New Meaning

Bumi Langit Institute: Making Meaning in a Planetary Context (Iskandar Waworuntu)

-Eco-Halal-Environmental Pesantren-Sulawese-Catholic, Dutch-Jewish / Hippie / Balinese turned Muslim (via Sufism)- “In order to be Halal today, you must be an environmentalist”

Lapindo: The mud disaster (Planetary Ethics for Planetary Problems)

• Ethical Responses• Fossil Fuels• Geology• Evolution• Economics• Politics• Nationalism• Ecology• Anthropocentrism• Human Rights