UCL STS Seminar series: Dr Saurabh Arora, SPRU, University of Sussex

Transforming What? Sustainability and Decolonisation

Abstract:

Through this work in progress – a collaboration with my colleague Andy Stirling – I am interested in grasping the target political formation that must be transformed for sustainability. Our current efforts to name this formation point to colonial modernity, which is temporally deeper and spatially wider than capitalism and more circumscribed configurations like economic growth and sociotechnical regime. Over the last five centuries since the first genocides unleashed by Europeans in the Americas, colonial modernity is made and done in many alternative cultural forms across regions and nations from Alaska and Araucanía to Israel and India.

In recent decades, as part of the so-called ontological turn, it has become commonplace to use ontology to define what is deeply and pervasively distinctive about modernity across its alternative forms. Research on political ontology, for example, focuses on modernity’s one-world world that is enacted through the separation of nature from cultures, human subjects from nonhuman objects, and scientific facts from political interests and values. Constituted centrally by this categorial ontology, practices spanning governments, markets and innovations are seen to privilege modern knowledge as singularly objective science revealing ‘universal’ reality, while subordinating or marginalising diverse Indigenous and vernacular ways of knowing from other worlds.

Contrasting research in STS is critical of ‘one-world world’ takes on modernity. Building on arguments of ‘ontological multiplicity’ from the late 1990s, this work foregrounds socio-material assemblages where ‘multiple realities’ and ‘micro-worlds’ are heterogeneously enacted. The resulting ‘fractiverse’ of heterogeneous worldings, even of a single entity like Cumbrian sheep or sewage pipe, is not restricted to modernity but can be extensive across Indigenous and vernacular ways of knowing, being and becoming. As valuable as such arguments are, particularly in attempting to avoid reification of ‘one-world world’ metaphysics, they are also transcendent. At worst, they risk reproducing – and at best, failing to confront – colonial relations that constitute modern worldings to damage radical alterities and immanent multiplicities of Indigenous and vernacular worldings.

Learning from these literatures among others, we propose ideas of political topology. We argue that topological insights can expand and deepen the scope of many conventional understandings of sustainability and decolonisation, even in self-consciously critical traditions such as political ontology and degrowth. To see this, it is crucial to observe the implications of what we call topology. In mathematical terms, topology is “rubber sheet geometry” – addressing changes that go beyond mere stretching or squeezing of existing forms. Building on artisanal traditions, political topology may involve grasping socio-material relations that constitute worlds through knots and weaves. For example, weaving in textiles is done in scores of different styles including plain, twill and satin. Woven cloth can be trimmed or grown (in size), folded or bent in shape, and dyed or faded to change colours – all without transforming the underlying style of weaving. It is this underlying style that is topological about weaves. 

Mobilising such insights, we are developing conceptualisations of political topology to help: a) describe deeply constituting (colonial) relations that are entangled and pervasive across alternative modernities, even as the latter change in cultural material shapes and in political economic scales; and b) appreciate radical alterities and multiplicities of extant and possible worldings. Topological conceptualisations – we argue – can be useful as tools in struggles to transform multiple alternative modernities away from their constituting coloniality. If decolonisation is approached as an inherently topological struggle where colonial modernities are confronted and transformed, then such conceptual tools may help grasp constituting relations that are otherwise invisibly normalised and ruinously performed in realising ‘sustainable’ local and global futures.