1.4 Starting anew with radical and subversive imagination

This Manifesto is thus intended as a response to Cornelius Castoriadis’¹ invitation to start anew with ‘radical imagination’, radicalism applied to our approach for living well together where organizational and institutional frameworks are based in local territoriality and close-knit communities. Also, we must work collectively to define what it means to live well, as pertains to decolonized cultural parameters,². solidarity, democracy, alterity, inclusion, ‘Peircean doubts’, ‘critical reflexivity’, ‘epistemological justice’ and ecology.

The new organizational and institutional framework that must be established will need to be respectful of an ‘ethical and aesthetic re-enchantment’ and promote ‘social and environmental justice’.

This framework will depend on a re-enchantment of the ‘institution’ of ‘labour’, in the Arendtian³ sense of the word. We will have a “job” to do together with the aim of collectively building human futurity⁴ as a logical function of ‘ethics’ and ‘aesthetics’ inspired by the continuous expansion of nature and of the universe.
These organizational and institutional frameworks will have the advantage of being inspired by proposals for change from critical studies carried out in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, as presented by Boaventura de Sousa Santos⁵ They will aim to build a plurality of worlds, in the way that Arturo Escobar⁶ invites us to imagine a constructivist approach with a scaffolding that relies on local territories as a ‘project’, and for which diversity of form and rights is recognized and respected.

What unites these critical studies in the South and in the North is not only their intention to understand and to support the transformations toward social and ecological sustainability that civil society has induced, but also their epistemological foothold. (Koop, 2021, p. 122⁷)

There is an interesting convergence between certain philosophical, biological and Indigenous peoples’ narratives in asserting that life entails the creation of form (difference, morphogenesis) out of the dynamics of matter and energy. In these views, the world is a pluriverse, ceaselessly in movement, an ever-changing web of interrelations involving humans and non-humans. It is important to point out, however, that the ‘pluriverse’ gives rise to partial coherence and stability of given practices and structures through processes that have a lot to do with meanings and power ; in this way it can be seen in terms of a multiplicity of worlds. (Arturo Escobar, 2012, p. 47^[8]⁸)

Next section : The Foundations of the Manifesto

Notes

1
Castoriadis, C. (1975). L’institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, Seuil.
2
Serge Latouche (2003). Décoloniser l’imaginaire. La pensée créatrice contre l’économie de l’absurde, Paris, Parangon
3
In The Human Condition (1961, [1958]), Arendt defines work in terms of three tightly woven notional spaces : labour (private realm), work (social realm) and action (public realm).
4
The concept of futurity comes from John R. Commons (1934) and can be summed up by the idea that humans anticipate the future with their actions in the present. Anticipating the future signifies an ability to control it through a choice of good deeds, behaviours, ideas and values with the aim of instituting them within an ensemble of rules or with the help of convention. (Gislain Jean-Jacques (2002). « Causalité institutionnelle : la futurité chez J. R. Commons », dans Économie et institutions, n°1, 2^e semestre.)
5
De Sousa Santos, B. (2016) Épistémologies du Sud. Mouvements citoyens et polémiques sur la science. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer.
6
Escobar, A. (2016). “Thinking-feeling with the Earth : Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South”, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, vol 11, no 1, pp:11 – 32 DOI : 10.11156/aibr.110102e.
7
Koop, K. (2021) Changer le monde, changer de mondes. Pour une géographie des transformations sociétales par le bas. Mémoire pour l’obtention de l’Habilitation à diriger des recherches. Université Grenoble Alpes.
8
Escobar, A. (2012). “Beyond Development : Postdevelopment and Transitions Towards the Pluriverse,” Revista de Antropología Social, 21, 23 – 62.