Interrogating Social Imaginaries from a Post-Development Perspective

As an island of communities and narratives we occupy that position of “in betweenness” of which Seamus Heaney wrote[1] . 

If dialogues on a wellbeing economy are to participate in and draw from the richness of Irish imaginaries, they must begin with a certain fidelity and, perhaps, risk-taking that opens up stories that even precede and exceed narratives of the nation and its fractures. Country, note Kearney and Gallagher[2], is a different concept from nation and marks a commons of earth and elements: a shared ecology of lands and waters: 

- But if a country marks a space before the nation, there’s also a space beyond it – and it goes by the name of cosmos. This is a site that transcends all frontiers – a fifth province of mind that exceeds the four provinces of north, south, east and west. It is the Finistère of hope where all pilgrimages lead, going back to the navigations of ancient Irish monks – diasporas of risk allowing for new possibilities of thought. Such a migrant cosmos was, we believe, a catalyst of the great cultural enlightenment that ignited a whole revolution of ideas in the extraordinary generation of 1916. [3] 

Field Day[4] writers, dramatists, and activists have worked hard to remind us of the influence of the significance of the’“Cultural Revolution’ within Irish history in the 19th Century. Brian Friel, in particular, wrote to remind us that the colonial imperative is to destroy all memory of what went before, for the new colonial order is always founded on amnesia. And central to the project of erasure is language. 

Michael Cronin picks up where Field Day left off but embarks on an entirely new chapter and journey too: an ecological and linguistic one. In his wonderful Irish and Ecology-An Ghaeilge Agus An Éiceo- laíocht (2019), Cronin reconnects questions of colonialism, forced amnesia and political ecology. He notes that language situates people in their environment in terms of both description and narration – telling you where you are and what’s around you and where you come from – so the project of removing the Irish language from public life has – as one long-term consequence – been the alienation of people from their own surroundings. Cronin cites Brian Friel’s play, Translations (1980), which explores the experience of a displacement and exile when agents of colonialism impose English translations of Irish place names. The play’s school master cautions “that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape….of fact.”[5] Cronin adds that it can also happen that a people can find themselves imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape tout court:

The population shifts to a language which bears no relationship to the environment in which they find themselves. The ecological consequences are profound in that the connection to place and history – a sense of which is central to the creation of a sustainable and resilient localities – is seriously fractured.[6]

Transitional discourses are inherently preoccupied with the realm of the in between…the question of what is passing and what is to come, and how. The island of Ireland’s transition is multi-layered, replete with double fidelities and even the tantalising prospect of a new constitutional moment of birth. Cronin captures this dilemma for the post-colonial Republic of the in between in an observation by Palmer, Baker and Maley[7]: 

We may imagine ourselves at an angle to the Anglosphere, basking in our guilt-free positioning as both recovering colony and third richest country in Europe, but we have little countervailing sense of what exactly the absence that haunts our modernity might be. 

For Cronin, it is the absences from this past that are now coming back to haunt Ireland’s present in terms of our relationship to the environment. The English Tudor experiment in (language) extinction and (territorial) extraction made Ireland the ideal laboratory for a form of ecological dispossession that would be replayed endlessly in various corners of the Empire. For Sharae Deckard[8], Ireland’s historical development has been profoundly shaped and continues to be shaped – not only by its colonial history – but by its role as a politically weak and unevenly developed semi-periphery within the European economy and the capitalist world system. Deckard draws on the work of Jason Moore, a leading theorist who attempts to integrate ecology into our understanding of world capitalist systems[9]. In Moore’s environmental history of capitalist cycles of accumulation, the capitalist world-system is constituted not only through periodic reorganisation of geometries of power and economy but through the remaking of socio-ecological relations. In other words, world hegemonic systems of capital did not merely organise and re-organise resource and food regimes, these systems were also socio-ecological projects. 

As such, the capitalist world-system does not merely possess an ecological dimension but is inherently constituted by ecological regimes and revolutions that periodically reorganise and renew the conditions of accumulation to allow intensified appropriation of ecological surpluses.

The territory of Ireland played a significant role in the emergence of these different cycles of systemic accumulation as a laboratory for new forms of expropriation, from 16th century plantation to 21st century neoliberal austerity. Ireland functioned as a frontier and testing ground for new techniques and imaginaries that were crucial to the formation of the Atlantic economy and to the expansion of the capitalist world-ecology. 

For Deckard[11] the island served as a geographical stepping stone for transatlantic settlement and as a laboratory in which to trial techniques of privatisation and expropriation. Immanuel Wallerstein[12] went so far as to suggest that it was as if Ireland were the blueprint for America. Those most engaged in the colonisation of Ireland – Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Richard Grenville – were also those who took a leading part in the planting of the first colonies in Virginia. Deckard[13] notes that the radical simplification of nature can be clearly seen in the context of the Irish plantation, where mass deforestation fundamentally transformed the ecology of Ireland, accompanied by radical forms of dispossession of indigenous populations and targeted destruction of non-human species and flora, including wolves and broad-leaf trees, in order to facilitate the importation and production of exogenous crops and commodities for export, and to eliminate the social and cultural bases for the reproduction of pre-capitalist forms of life. She adds that the significance of land and agriculture is almost overdetermined in Irish historiography, yet it is crucial to understand the transformation of Irish environments not merely as a product of colonialism but rather in relation to the larger early modern revolution in capitalist accumulation: “The reorganization of Ireland’s biologically diverse bogs and forests into rationalised sites of capitalist monoculture was crucial to the erosion of Irish self-sufficiency and the integration of the island into capitalist world-ecology.”[14] The infamous annals of Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca.1598), composed at Spenser’s 3000-acre settlement in Munster, not only captured tales of Irish insurrection, tactical famine, conquest, and plantation, but of “the ecological plenitude of Irish nature, conveniently emptied of its indigenes, [is] released for capture as ecological surplus,”[15] marking a historical shift from a feudal to capitalist mode of production, embodied in conceptions of abstract social nature as “tabula rasa” ripe for social re-engineering. Spenser dedicates an abstract mathematical part of his work to the imagination of a scheme for English plantation, with plans for a grid-like remapping of the island. 

Mercier and Translations 

For Sinéad Mercier and her co-authors[11], Brian Friel’s Translations is a parable of how high modernist ideology disrupts local metis and knowing, detailing the impact of a major topographic survey on the fictional rural Irish speaking community. The play is based on the colonial mapping of the island of Ireland in the early 19th century – the first such exercise in a British colony – in what Mercier describes not only as an economic and scientific campaign, but as ‘Lawscaping on an imperial scale.’[12] In the play, Friel describes how Gaelic place-names are recorded with anglicised names or clumsy phonetic translations. In the process, the survey, for Mercier, legitimises these corruptions and distortions in a way that served to undermine the local sense of place and being-in-the-world. Through the resulting distortion of language and place, the land is withdrawn from its inhabitants; from the communities that have lived there for generations. In the word of one character in the play, the translations are experienced as a kind of exile. Mercier describes how the process of translation, as captured in Friel’s play, achieves the three essential features of modernity: rationalising and categorising all phenomena, optimising knowledge to instrumentalist ends; reducing pre-Enlightenment beliefs to mere superstition; and partitioning Nature from humans in order to better mould and instrumentalise it for the separatist ends of humans in power.[13]

Mercier observes how systems of knowledge, such as the law, codify these processes of modernity – largely in the form of capitalist social relations, part of an outworking of what James Scott[14] attributes to the European Enlightenment and its outworking in a high modernist ideology that sought to create civilian populations from people, and resources from nature. Friel’s Translations foregrounds this process of State-enforced legibility through quantification and calculation, resulting in the withdrawal from communities of landscapes and their intimate ties, meanings and relations, including landscapes of meaning. A kind of exile. 

The Pluriverse 

In many ways the work of Field Day, Friel and others anticipated or pre-figured the emergent politics of the pluriverse: a challenge to the closures of colonial systems of knowledge and practice, now given expression in new post-development movements in the Global South. Post-development is a critical school of thought in development studies that situates our dominant economic narratives within a rich critique of Euro-modernity and patriarchy, thus extending our horizon of critique beyond the confines of political economy. The focus of post- development scholarship is on a critique of modernity or Western dominance and its close association with enabling histories of colonialism, patriarchy and ecological destruction; while scholars engage with indigenous and social movements offering diverse local alterna- tives based on their own “Epistemologies of the South”[15]. Some important figures associated with this critical movement are Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, Serge Latouche, Majid Rahnema, Silvia Federici, Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies. 

For Escobar[16] “Epistemologies of the South” is one of the most compelling frameworks for social transformation to emerge at the intersection of Global North and the Global South, theory and practice, and between the academy and social life, in many decades. Advocates do not claim to have arrived at a fully formed general theory but have sought to outline trajectories for “thinking otherwise:” 

….precisely because it carves a space for itself that enables thought to re-engage with life and attentively walk along the amazing diversity of forms of knowledge held by those whose experiences can no longer be rendered legible by Eurocentric knowl edge in the academic mode, if they ever were.[17] 

Escobar suggests that Epistemologies of the South might be useful to those who have been at the receiving end of those colonialist categories that have translated their experiences, turning them into lacks, or simply rendered them utterly illegible and invisible. 

Escobar’s work on’“the pluriverse’ can support a new conversation about the wellbeing economy by shifting the horizon of our imaginative encounter with these concepts (“wellbeing” and “economy”) to our contested histories and legacies of European modernity and colonialism (or incorporation into the modern world-ecological system of capital and accumulation). This would be both an act of solidarity with other colonised territories, including indigenous communities, but also an act of solidarity with our own past insofar as it has become a container of silences and absences.[18] 

For Escobar[19], while the occupation of territories by capital and the state implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological and often armed aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological: it is built on specific assumptions about the very nature of existence. From this perspective, what occupies territories is a particular ontology, “that of the universal world of individuals and markets that attempts to transform all other worlds into one single world.” It is from this position that we derive the Zapatista dictum and counterpoint: “A world where many worlds fit.” Political ontology refers to the power-laden practices involved in bringing into being a particular world or ontology. 

For Escobar, a crucial moment that helps us to understand the persistence of occupying ontologies is the conquest of America, considered by some as a point of origin of our current modern/colonial world-system. He notes that the most central feature of the single-world view doctrine has been a twofold ontological divide: a particular way of separating humans from nature (the nature-culture divide); and the distinction and boundary policing between “us” (civilized, modern, developed) and “them (uncivilized, underdeveloped), those who prac- tice other ways of worlding (the colonial divide). Escobar adds[19]: 

These (and many other derivative) dualisms underlie an entire structure of institutions and practices through which the single world is enacted. Many signs, however, sug gest that the globalized world so constructed is unravelling. The growing visibility of struggles to defend mountains, landscapes, forests, territories, and so forth, by ap pealing to a relational (nondualist) and pluri-ontological understanding of life is a manifestation of this crisis. The crisis thus stems from the models through which we imagine the world to be a certain way and construct it accordingly. 

This conjuncture and the questions it raises define a rich context for Escobar’s approach to political ontology and the pluriverse. On the one hand he seeks to understand the conditions under which the idea of a single globalised world continues to maintain its dominance (the dominant economic narrative). On the other, he seeks to engage with, record and support the emergence of projects based on different ontological commitments and ways of worlding. For Escobar and his colleagues, the pluriverse is a tool for making alternatives to the one world plausible (to those of us living in the “one world” narrative), and second, for providing resonance to those other worlds that are interrupting the one-world-story, including some that are already emergent in Ireland (e.g. experiments in commoning).Is this not also a worthy project for a Community of Practice dedicated to the inflection of a particular experience, an experience of the ‘in-between’ worlds located at the interface of Euro-modernity and as host to the early colonial project with all of its legacies and residues - not least in the sphere of political economy - on the island of Ireland. 

The notion of the pluriverse has two main sources, according to Escobar. The first is theoretical critiques of dualism and “post-dualist” trends in scholarship associated with the so-called ontological turn in social theory. The second is the perseverance of nondualist philosophies (or cosmovisions) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life, such as Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa, and Pachamama or Uma Kiwe among South American indigenous peoples. Relational ontologies are also current in Buddhist philosophies and practices of mind-body. Movements in Europe to restore practices of commoning, energy transitions and the relocalisation of food are also linked to foundational critiques that push back against the dominant narrative of capitalist modernity. As we have investigated in other parts of this ‘Call to Action’, there is also an opening to these alternative ontologies and epistemologies lingering in the Irish language and wider mytho-poetic traditions. 

Designing Futures 

Buen Vivir and the Politics of the Pluriverse 

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!” ― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake 

A central premise of this paper is that new and old knowledges produced in struggles for the defence of “relational worlds” are often the most farsighted and appropriate to the present conjuncture of modern problems. And there is none more problematic than our dominant economic narratives, as the one percent - the structural embodiment of exclusion, crude accumulation and plunder - have seized not only the means of production but the means of installing their preferred narratives [and obfuscation] at the heart of expansive technologies of communication and consumerism, to the point of colonising dimensions of subjectivities. 

In South America, for example, notions of Buen Vivir (“Good living”) or collective wellbeing in accordance with culturally appropriate ways and the rights of nature have emerged as living practices. Buen Vivir implies an alternative philosophy of life that enables the subordination of economic objectives to the criteria of ecology, human dignity, and social justice. This relational approach to wellbeing is expansive, embracing relations not only with other humans but with the more-than-human (Nature) and with the constitutive relationships of interiority or relations with the self. Deep attention to those relations with the self help integrate the quality of our “self-care” to the integrity of our relationships to other beings. In the words of the Zen practitioners, the “way out is in.” 

Escobar notes that debates about “degrowth”, the commons and Buen Vivir are “fellow travellers,” constituting important areas of research, theorisation, and activism for both Epistemologies of the South and for political ontology. To think about wellbeing or Buen Vivir in the register of the politics of the pluriverse, navigating new ontological horizons, is to have two thinks at a time (at least two): wellbeing is no longer confined to the notion of the human or the collective but is caught up immediately in considerations of our entanglement with fellow beings and communities. It is no accident that Ireland is among the first European Union states to seriously entertain the incorporation of the Rights of Nature in her constitution. 

The pluriverse is not a template nor a decisive or pre-determined outcome but an orientation, inspired by the Epistemologies of the South, and informed by an acceptance that we are facing modern problems for which there may be no modern solutions, as they are limited by the closures and blind spots that have been part of the ontological investments of Euro-modernity. Ontologically speaking, Escobar continues, one may say that the current crisis is the crisis of a particular world or set of world-making practices with origins in the European enlightenment. Transition implies a movement towards the opposites or alterna- tives, posited as a multiplicity of worlds (the pluriverse)…a multiplicity of possibilities that have not been exhausted by the Eurocentric experience or imagination. A world of “both- and”, a world that is both European and open to thinking and being otherwise, not least as an act of epistemic and ontological solidarity. On the island of Ireland that solidarity is not limited to a relationship with others but is a deep act of solidarity with an opening to our own past, an opening to an undoing of our coloniality where that experience has been one of closure. 

Ontologically, Escobar continues, the invisibility of the pluriverse points to a sociology of absences: what does not exist is actively produced as non-existent or as a noncredible alternative to what exists, notably relational ways of being. The colonial attack on the Irish language and attempt to erase memory was one example of these attempts to actively produce the “non-existent.” Writers such as Cronin, Kirby and Manchán Magan are deeply engaged in excavating and recalling deep patterns of thought and relationality that remain part of our linguistic heritage.

1. Seamus Heaney (1987), “Terminus”

2. Kearney and Gallagher (2017), pp.41-43.

3. ibid (2017), p.42.

4. See www.fieldday.ie/about/ 

5. Brian Friel, 1980, Translations, p.43. 

6. Cronin (2019), p.14.

7.  Palmer, Baker and Maley (2019), p.15.

8. Deckard, S. (2016).

9. Moore, J. (2011), pp.108-47

10. Deckard, S. (2019), p.148.

11.  Mercier, S. (2020), p. 7.

12. Lawscaping refers to the role of law in imposing a modern grid of calculation and abstraction on local landscapes, rendering them for conversion to the universal languages of transaction and private property.

13.  Ibid, (2020), pp.8-9.

14. Scott, J. (1998).

15. Santos, B. (2014).

16.  Escobar, A. (2020), p.67-68.

17. Escobar, A. (2020), p.67.

18. Escobar, A. (2020), p.73

19.  Escobar, A. (2020), p.73.