This document discusses alternative conceptions of politics, knowledge, and reality that challenge dominant Western assumptions. It presents perspectives from social movements and theorists that envision politics as occurring through diverse local practices and networks rather than universal logics. These alternatives emphasize multiplicity over unity, conceptualizing change as emerging from below rather than through vanguard parties or state-led development. The document also examines how ontologies and political cultures are enacted through everyday practices rather than preceding them. It critiques binary thinking and evaluates different understandings of knowledge, politics, and the subject.

2. Networked Realities/
/Unexpected Parallels?

4. BEYOND UNIVERSALIZING GLOBALITY
‘The struggle against capitalism which cannot be
reduced to the struggle against neoliberalism, implies
practices of multiplicity. Capitalism has invented a
single, one dimensional world, but that world does
not, ‘in itself’ exist. It requires our submission and our
agreement in order to exist. That unified world is
opposed to the multiplicity of life. It is opposed to the
infinite dimensions of desire, of imagination and of
creation to justice. That is why we believe that every
struggle against capitalism thatis trying to be global
or all-encompassing remains trapped in the structure
of capitalism itself, that is, globalism. Resistance
should start from and develop multiplicities…”
- Inaugural Manifesto, Network for Creative Resistance, Miguel Benasayag

5. PLACE-BASED GLOBALISTS:
Speaking in myriad voices, they use languages hard to
translate into our current political lexicon:
(1) They work locally, in the everyday, and in the present
connecting in intricate networks to build new worlds
globally;
(2) They move in the micro- political terrains of culture,
subjectivity, and modality, employing myth and
multiplicity to make it impossible for the macro-
political to dominate them;
(3) They evade and work against all tendencies to
universal or global logics spatially, temporally and
conceptually in order to make possible a truly global
space for freedom and justice.

6. GLASSES OF MODERNITY?
?

7. “We will walk then the same path of history, but we will
not repeat it; we are from before, yes, but we are
new.”
– Subcomandante Marcos, The Fourth Key, 2001

8. “…like a bolt of lightening capable of illuminating
subterranean molecular cooperation, hidden by the
everyday inertias that are imposed in time and space
through domination and subordination.
To take lightening—insurrectional—moments as
epistemological moments is to privilege the transience of
movement and above all its intensity, in order to
encounter what lies behind and below the established
forms. During the uprising, shadowed areas are
illuminated, albeit fleetingly.”
(Zibechi, 2006: 11)

9. Since no revolutionary war machine is at present available and there is no
way to get a good grip on reality, the collective subjectivity is so to speak,
tripping: from time to time it has the “flashes.” It sees things, and then it
stops. There was the autonomist movement in Italy… and then we pass on
to other things. But it’s all going to come back. All these flashes don’t mean
that there is a total incoherence in the subjectivity but simply that an effort
to is being made to perceive something which is not yet registered,
inscribed, identified. I believe that the forces which today rally around the
peace movement are the same which, in other phases will rally around the
ecologist movement, around regionalist movements, around ex numbers of
components of what I call the molecular revolution. What I mean by that is
not a cult of spontaneity or whatever, only the effort not to miss anything
that would help rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society
(Guattari 1996:90) .

10. Nuestra lucha es epistémica y política (Luis Macas,
CONAIE leader).
The social movements in Bolivia are about “the total
transformation of liberal society” (Aymara sociologist
Félix Patzi Paco, Chapel Hill, November 17, 2005).
“The buen vivir is not only social and economic … it is
also epistemic. … The buen vivir opens up the
possibility to conceive of life, and live it, in an other
manner, una manera ‘otra’”… concebida desde la
diferencia ancestral pero pensada para el conjunto de
la sociedad”.

11. DEFINING ONTOLOGY
*) Any way of understanding the world must make
assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about
what kinds of things do or can exist, and what might
be their conditions of existence, relations of
dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of
being and their relations is an ontology. (Scott and
Marshall 2005 qtd in Blaser 2011, 3).
2) “Ontologies do not precede mundane practices, but rather
are shaped through the practices and interactions of
humans and non-humans…Hence, ontologies perform
themselves into worlds—thus I use the term ontologies and
worlds as synonyms.” (From ANT) (Blaser 2011, 3)
3) “ Ontologies must be understood as the total (i.e. including
discursive and non-discursive) enactments of worlds. In this
sense, myths are neither true nor false; they engender different
worlds which have their own criteria for defining truth” (ibid :3).

12. ICT DEFINITIONS OF ONTOLOGY
An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need
to share information in a domain. It includes machine-
interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and
relations among them.
Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the
reasons are:
· To share common understanding of the structure of
information among people or software agents
· To enable reuse of domain knowledge
· To make domain assumptions explicit
· To separate domain knowledge from the operational
knowledge
· To analyze domain knowledge

13. UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS AND COGNITION
(WINOGRAD AND FLORES, 1986)
Every questioning grows out of a tradition—a pre-understanding that opens
the space of possible answers. We use the word tradition here in a broad
sense, without the connotation that it belongs to a cohesive social or
cultural group, or that it consists of particular customs or practices. It
is a more pervasive, fundamental phenomenon that might be
called a way of being. ...It is not a set of rules or sayings or
something we might find catalogued in an encyclopedia. It is a way of
understanding, a background within which we interpret and act. We use
the word tradition because it emphasizes the historicity of our ways of
thinking—the fact that we always exist within a pre-understanding
determined by the history of our interactions with others who share the
tradition . (Winograd and Flores : 1987: 7).

14. POLITICAL CULTURE
Every society is marked by a dominant political culture …a
political culture is the particular social construction in every
society of what counts as ‘political.’…political culture is the
domain of practices and institutions, carved out of the totality of
social reality, that historically comes to be considered as properly
political (in the same way as other domains are seen as properly
‘economic,’ ‘cultural,’ and ‘social’). The dominant political culture
of the West has been characterized as ‘rationalist,’ universalist
and individualist.
(Alvarez and Escobar 1992: 8).

15. BEYOND BINARY THINKING
It seems that the making of a new political imaginary is
underway, or at the very least a remapping of the political
terrain. Coming into being over the past few decades and into
visibility and self awareness through the internet, independent
media, and most recently the World Social Forums, this
emergent imaginary confounds the timeworn oppositions
between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition
and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It
is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful,
but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap
and intertwine. This conceptual interpenetration in radically altering
the spatiotemporal frame of progressive of politics, reconfiguring the
position and role of the subject, as well as shifting the grounds for
assessing the efficacy of political movements and initiatives
(Gibson Graham 2006: xix).

16. FOUR MAIN CULTURAL PRACTICES DEEPLY SHAPED
BY THE “RATIONALISTIC TRADITION” :
 The belief in the concept of science
 The autonomous individual
 The naturalization of ‘the [dis-embedded] economy’
 The belief in ‘objective reality’ (seeing ourselves as modern
subjects in control of an objective world we can manipulate).
Knowledge is best gained from detached distance.
 The unquestioned belief in development, progress, growth,
linearity.
These elements constitute ‘the default setting’ of modern life (David Foster
Wallace: an ego-centered worldview). They are most profoundly naturalized in
our culture. Like fish swimming in sea water.

18. From Arturo Escobar 2012

19. From Arturo Escobar 2012

21. Being Becoming
Molar Molecular
Majoritarian Minor
Macro-political Micro-political

22. DELEUZE VS GRAMSCIAN KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS
The revolution clearly needs a war machine, but that’s not a
State apparatus. It also needs an analytic force, an analyzer of
the desires of the masses, absolutely—but not an external
mechanism of synthesis. …The most important thing is not
authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming:
desires in the neighborhoods, schools, factories, prisons, ..Its
not about a make-over or totalization, but hooking up at the
same plane at its tipping point. As long as we stick to the
alternative between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and
the hierarchical and bureaucratic encoding of a party
organization, there can be no liberation of desire.
(Guattari qtd in Deleuze 2004: 267).

23. ASSUMPTIONS IN MODELS OF THE POLITICAL
 Future orientation. Teleology. Change is
progressive.
 Scientistic: Formulaic: dogmatic.
 One. Universalist.
 Ends over Means.
 State distinct from Social.
 Hierarchical Order versus Dispersal
 Culture distinct from Politics/Power.

24. HACKER ETHIC?
Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the
world. Not always great things, or even good things, but
new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture,
in any production of knowledge where data can be
gathered, where information can be extracted from it,
and where in that information new possibilities for the
world produced, there are hackers hacking the new world
out of the old.
(Wark 2004, 21).

25. A NEW THEORETICAL PRACTICE?
“Thought lags behind nature” (ATP 5).
“…the categories with which reality is thought of and
reflected on remains, with a few exceptions,
Eurocentric" (Zibechi 2012: 11).
“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in
trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us
suffer too much…Nothing is beautiful or loving or
political aside from underground stems and aerial
roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.” (ATP 15).

26. THANK YOU!
Many thanks to all those who comprise the assemblages and multiplicities—
knots of nodes of nets of relationships– that have produced this talk.
Arturo Escobar in particular!
I take full responsibility for any of its shortcomings.