On Pluriversality

By Walter D. Mignolo

The piece below was written in response to a question formulated by Arturo

Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser. Marisol, Mario and Arturo
are starting a project investigating the various uses of the concept of
¨pluriverse.¨ They asked me how I stumbled into the concept and how I used
and use it. In responding to them I ended up writing a sort of auto-biographic
op-ed on pluriversality.
Here it is:

The first time I used the concept of pluriverse was in a series of

conferences between 1996 and 1998 , which was finally published in 2000 in
Binghamton REVIEW, the journal of the Fernand Braudel Center , in the title
of ¨The Zapatista´s Theoretical Revolution. Its consequences historical,
political and epistemological.” It appeared as a chapter  slightly revised, in
The Darker Side of Western Modenrnity, 2011. Which means that during the
14/5 years span  the concept of pluriversality was used in many instances of
my work. I heard about it during the early years of the Zapatista’s uprising.
Franz Hinkelammert and Enrique Dussel were using the term and it fitted
perfectly well perfectly well with the idea of  “pluritopic hermeneutics” I
borrowed from Raymundo Pannikar and became a crucial concept in The
Darker Side of the Renaissance. (1995 ).

Hermeneutics, in Western genealogy of thoughts, names a type of

reflection on meaning and interpretation within one cosmology, Western
cosmology. When you have to deal with two or more cosmologies, as i did in
The Darker Side of the Renaissance, you need a pluritopic hermeneutics. Why?
Because you are dealing with a pluriverse of meaning and not onli with a
universe of meaning. Pluriversality became my key arguments to call into
question the concept of universality, so dear to Western cosmology. How so?
Western epistemology and hermeneutics (meaning Greek and Latin
languages translated into the six modern European and imperial languages)
managed universalize its own concept of universality dismissing the fact that
all known civilizations are founded on the universality of his own cosmology. 

There is no reason to believe that the Bible is universal and the Popol
Vuh is not. The universalization of universality in the West was part of its
imperial project .So then a key idea in  Local Histories / Global Designs
(2000/2012) was ¨ pluriversality as a universal project.”  That is the universal
can only be pluriversal, which also matched the Zapatista’s idea of a world in
which many world would coexist.  We, in the planet, had arrived at the end of
the era of abstract universals, that is of one universal universality. 

Pluriversality is not cultural relativism, but entanglement of several

cosmologies connected today in a power differential. That power differential
is the logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity.
Modernity is a fiction that carries in it the seed of Western pretense to
universality.Expanding on that line of reasoning, it was necessary to
introduce a concept that capture the “/” of modernity/coloniality, that is, the
“/” of the entanglement and power differential. And that concept was
rendered as “border thinking, border epistemology, border gnosis.”
 If a pluriverse is not a world of independent units (cultural relativism)
but a world entangled through and by the colonial matrix of power, then, it a
way of thinking and understanding that dwells in the entanglement, in the
borders, is needed. So the point is not to “study” the borders, very fashionable
today, while at the same time “dwelling” in a territorial epistemology, would
imply that you accept a pluriverse some place out there that you “observe”
from some place else outside the pluriverse.

To do so it is necessary to maintain the territoriality of the disciplines

grounded on the imperial epistemology of modernity. Thinking pluritopically
means, instead, to dwell in the border. Dwelling in the border is not border-
crossing, even less looking and studying the borders from the territorial gaze
of the disciplines. Today “border study” became fashionable, even in Europe.
Scholars studying borders are in general not dwelling in them. Who dwell in
the border are the migrants from Africa, West Asia and Latin America, mainly.
That’s what I learned from Anzaldú a. Chicanos and Chiacanas are migrants
and queers, migrants or not, are always dwelling in the border.

I think the impact that Local Histories / Global Designs was writing in
inhabiting the border not just observing and describing it. I revealed in the
preface to the second edition (2012) that the argument was a rewriting of
Hegel’s philosophy of history inhabiting the border. So that border
epistemology became the way, as in Buddhism, or the method, as in Western
sciences, social or not, of decolonial thinking and doing.  A key point to move
away from the trap that distinguishes theory from praxis. Reflexive praxis is,
instead, the motu at Amawtay Wasi. Why, because the very education project
is built on border epistemology. The overall world-sense is Indigenous and
Andean cosmology, not rejecting Indigenous European cosmology but em-
bodied it in Andean cosmology.

Border thinking is why take the effort to combine the body with
writing, writing with the body and not just in the body, combine the heart
with the mind, senti-pensar (feeling-thinking) as they say in Ecuador .In
the In the Darker Side of Western Modernity i returned to the idea of
pluriversality connecting it with the idea of multiverse in Humberto
Maturana’s epistemology. The multiverse is for Maturana a world of truth in
parenthesis while the universe is a world built on truth without parenthesis.
Uni-verality is always imperial and war-driven. Pluri and multi verses and
convivial, dialogical or plurilogical. Now pluri- and multi-verses exists
independent of the state and the corporations and it is the work of the
emerging global political society, e.g., the sector of society organizing
themselves around specific projects once they/we realize that neither the
state nor the corporations have room for multi- or pluriverses.

While “multi and pluriverses” characterizes the making of the global

political society, in the realm of the state and the corporations the vocabulary
is that of “multipolar world.”  The multi-polar world of today has been opened
up by the economic growth and political confidence of China’s inter-state
politics, together with the BRICS and the growing economies and politics of
Indonesia and Turkey, the Latin American states in Mercosur following the
leadership of Brazil, member of BRICS countries. When Vladimir Putin “stole”
Barack Obama menace of invading Syria, it was evident that the unipolar
world that made possible the invasion of Iraq is not longer in place. And it
seems obvious also that Putin’s chess move was possible because of the
support of BRICS alliance of which he is the current chair. Thus, I would like
to use pluriverse in the sphere of decolonial projects coming from the global
political society (deracializing and depatriarchalizing projects, food
sovereignity, economic organization of reciprocity and definancialization of
money, decolonization of knowledge and of being, decolonization of religion
to liberate spirituality, decolonization of aesthetics to liberate aesthesis, etc.,
etc., etc.) and multi-polarity in the sphere of politico-economic
dewesternization, lead states projects.

Two expressions are used today to underscore the disintegration of

Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is synonymous with Westernization (Serge
Latouche, L’occidentalization du monde, 1982): one is multipolarity and the
other pluriversity. Eurocentrism was the partition of the globe by European
institutions and actors to the benefits of Europe and core Western states. The
US followed suit after WWII. By 2000 the signs of the end of Westernization
were clear. Not only that there were no more places to expand; the re-
emergence of the disavowed was clear and loud. On the one hand the struggle
for decolonization during the Cold War (and the Bandung Conference of
1955), were eloquent signs of the end of an era (1500-2000). On the other
hand, the return of China after the humiliation suffering during and after the
Opium War was sending signs for whoever were paying attention.

Now we, in the planet, are experiencing the consequences of

decoloniality after decolonization and of dewesternization after the Cold War.
(http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/05/02/delinking-decoloniality-
dewesternization-interview-with-walter-mignolo-part-ii/) Dewesternization
(China, Russia, BRICS, Iran) has already mapped the multipolar world of the
21st century. The multipolar world is capitalist and decentered. That is why
the US seconded by the European Union is having more and more difficulties
to impose their own will and desires to the rest of the planet. Strong states
have emerged whose leaders refuse to have bosses and to receive orders (cfr.
Ukraine, West Asia—still named the Middle East--, China development bank
and BRICS bank; China and Russia military affirmation, etc). Therefore, the
multipolar world is coming out from the conflicts between dewesternization
and the responses to it from the West: rewesternization, the efforts not to
loose the privileges acquired in the past 500 years

Westernization was a coherent set of global designs. Intramural wars

(30 years war, WWI and WWII) emerge from intramural conflicts in the
process of Westernization. Dewesternization is a heterogeneous set of
responses disputing the unipolar management of the world population and
natural resources. Thus, if Westernization was unipolar, dewesternization is
multipolar. Unipolarity was successful in enacting global designs.
Multipolarity cannot longer be controlled by global designs. Indeed,
multipolar processes are de-designing. Dewesternization is de-designing
Westernization.

Decoloniality, on the other hand, is not competing with

dewesternizaiton and rewesternization but aiming to delink from both, that is,
aiming to delink from State-form of governance, from the economy of
accumulation and from ego-centered personalities that both enacted and
reproduced Westernization: the modern-subject forcing the formation of
colonial-subjects. Decoloniality is not a master plan or a global design. It is,
above all, a diverse horizon of liberation of colonial subjects by colonial
subjects themselves. There cannot be a decolonial global design, for if that
were the case, it would be the reproduction of ego-centered personalities
who have the master key of decoloniality. Decoloniality start from the
transformations and liberations of subjectivities controlled by the promises
of the State, the fantasies of the Market and the fears of Armed Forces, all tied
together in the messages of main-stream media.

However, while ego-centered personalities and modern-subject are

subjectivities formed in and by process of Westernization and Eurocentrism,
decolonial processes emerge from the analysis and awareness of the
promises of modernity and the disenchantments of coloniality. If then
dewesternization is forcing the formation of a multipolar world order,
decoloniality is opening the horizon of pluriversity. Pluriversity, contrary to
de- and re-westernization doesn’t focus on the state, the economy or the
armed forces, but on delinking. Decolonial delinking, however, should benefit
from the dewesternization in the sense that dewesternization is cracking the
ambitions of Westernization of which process neo-liberalism was its last and
final attempt (http://rhodesforum.org/dialogue-of-civilizations/616-de-
secularization-as-a-condition-for-the-dialogue-of-civilizations) Modern ego-
centered personalities are driven by competition; decolonial and communal
personalities are driven by the search of love, conviviality and harmony
(http://people.duke.edu/~wmignolo/InteractiveCV/Publications/ManyFaces
Cosmo.pdf) That is why decoloniality cannot aim to “take the state” as it was
the aims of decolonization movements during the Cold War. And that is also
why decoloniality delinks also from Marxism.