When Being isn’t Enough: Doing, Making and Becoming as a Design Move

• In Event: Re-thinking And Experimenting With Participatory Research Practices And Design Through The Speculative And Ontological Turn - III: Environmental / Multispecies

Abstract

As Danholt and Wilkie argue (4S call, 2021): the ontological turn should not be merely the replacing of Western ontology with sociomaterial interwovenness, but rather a move to plurality and even to “overthrow ontology”. Yet, accepting plural worlds, while sensitive to difference and the need for socio-ecological justice, offers the spectre of situating humanity in a hall of ontological mirrors, where everything is fragmented. In this philosophical scenario, rapid material progress to un-liveability is hastened by the impossibility of joint action to respect the shared planet. Alternatively, we must find a meta-story, a narrative that allows for the turn itself and for motion distinct from the totalising stories of western modernity and progress. To do so requires us to consider temporal dimensions, not only of speculation, but of worlding as an enactment and the performance of transformations. Without this appeal to collective doing, making and becoming (however diverse), all designing, participatory practice and other potentially restorative engagements that attempt to embrace plural ontologies will be subtly co-opted by fatal neo-liberal processes that already fragment through hierarchies of difference.

I once explored the détente of making political tools together as a form of strategic essentialism (2019). Now I am asking how acknowledging ontological tensions and cutting plurality with other heterodoxies can enable fellow-travelling.

Light, A. (2019) The Détente Model of Managing Divergent Values in the Maker Sphere, in (eds) Jeremy Hunzinger and Andrew Schrock Making Our World: the Hacker and Maker Movements in Context, New York: Peter Lang

Author

• Ann Light, University of Sussex