Object- and Event- Oriented
Understandings of Meaning
Making: Pluralism and Meaning
Making Practices
“There is emerging a planetary spirituality of the interstices. No locality can be located
apart from its interrelations. Close and alien, intimate and systemic, they add up to the
whole.” (Keller, God and Power, 130)
Whitney A. Bauman
IRAS 2014
wbauman@fiu.edu
 What do I mean by “Religion”?
Religion: Re-ligare/legere (to bind fast
/ re-read)
Religion as Human (Human’s are
meaning-making creatures and
created by meaning (Heidegger))
Religion and Function (Durkheim)
Religion as Environmental History
(Merchant, Cronan, Glacken)
Religion as Western Construct
Lifeways, cultures, practices, etc.
 What do I mean by “Science”?
Science/ scientia
(knowledge/knowing; root scire:
to separate one thing from
another)
Focus on material-energy flows
Includes chemistry, biology,
physics, neuroscience, ecology,
cosmology (Dilthey)
Includes relationship between
data and theory (Philosophy of
Science)
Includes technology (medical,
Factors of the Post-Colonial,
Planetary Context:
Globalization and Climate Change
What does Globalization mean?
Creation of the Space-Time Crunch
The Glocal
Assemblages
Contextualization of Meaning-Making
Hybrid Identity Formation
Globalatinization
What does Climate Change mean?:
End of ‘Nature’
End of Mastery
Social Natural, Bio-Historical, NatureCultures
Resurgence of Unknowing
Two Epistemological Models:
Globalization vs. Planetarity
 Globalatinization is the continuation of the logic of domination
 Christianization
 Enlightenment / Secularization (Reason)
 Development/ Bretton Woods / Green Revolution
 This is the imposition of one truth regime over the face of the
planet and it relies on some type of transcendent reality:
God, Revelation, Nature, Reason.
The Post-Colonial, Planetary
Context
 “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition
of the same system of exchange everywhere…If we imagine ourselves as
planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather
than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our
dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away.” (Spivak,
Death of a Discipline, 72-73).
Epistemological Implications of
the Planetary Context
 Multiperspectivalism
 paticcasamuppada
 Anekantavada
 Creature among Creatures (Perspectivism)
 Viable Agnosticism
 Existential: in between spaces of unknowning
 Syadvada
 Apophasis / Negative Thought
 The “secularizing” moments of religions (John Cobb)
 Deconstruction
Epistemological Implications of the
Planetary Context
 Polydoxy
 Hybrid Identities
 No closure/Orthodoxy
 Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Queer
Theory, Environmental Hermenetics = There has never been One
interpretation
 Silk Road, Convivencia, Colonial Era, Tributaries to “Modern
Science”
 Identity in and through difference, otherness; connecting the terrains
of a planetary context.
New assumptions for meaning-making
in a Post-Colonial, Planetary Context
 We have never been modern
 Beyond Narratives of Progress and Development, or Decline
 Beyond Self / Other divide
 Relational selves
 Beyond Organism / Machine (Cyborgs)
 Beyond Human / Rest of the Natural World: creaturely
assemblages
 (e.g: paper)
 Beyond Religion / Science to meaning-making practices
Planetary Truths
 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty vs. Bohrs Indeterminacy
 Self-Organization, Poesis, Emergence, Non-Equilibrium




The science of something more, from nothing but
The science of non-reductive physcialism
The science of the New Materialism (Vibrant Matter)
Ideas Matter, Matter Imagines
 Regimes of Truth
 Lines of Flight
 Planetary Becomings
 The point is that there are multiple possible ways of becoming;
we are not necessarily living any more or less Real than peoples
1000 years ago or 1000 years from now, just under different
truth regimes.
The Emergence of Planetary
Pluralism: Between Absolutism and
Relativism
 “Pluralists are not relativists in the first instance because our
image of culture encourages us to embrace certain things in
this particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of
others, and to fight militantly against the continuation of yet
others.” (William Connolly, Pluralism, 41).
 There is no Omni-God/Telos/Ultimate Reality (that we have
access to)
 Scientific laws are loose approximations and incomplete
summaries
 There are more agents than humans in the world
Globalization and Climate Change: Thinking
with our Hybrid, Evolving, Trans Context
Wicked Problems (Rittel and Weber)
Hyper-objects (Morton)
Object-Oriented Ontologies (Harman)
Event-Oriented Ontologies (Whitehead;
Deleuze and Guattari)
The Ethics of Movement
 Nomadic Ethics
 Journey over abstract arrivals; Intergenerational
 Polyamory of Place
 Multiple loves vs. monogamy of place
 Trans and Post Humanisms
 Ethics beyond the reification of the human species; Cyborg
Ethics
 Ethics of Pace over Ethics of Place
 Are our dreams, imaginings fossel-fueled and outstripping
the carrying capacity of the planet?
 Beyond Precautionary Principles: At what pace should we
move?
The Ethics of Uncertainty
 “To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be
given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its
meaning is never fixed, it must be constantly won.”
(Simone de Beavoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 129)
 Unknowing at the Edges
 Deconstructive Ethics
 Iconoclasm
 Trickster Ethics
 Etc.
The call for planetary Ethics
 Spatial Analysis vs. Temporal Analysis (Nixon)
 Navigating multiple possibilities for becoming (D&G)
 Recognizing that we are co-response-able organisms emerging with many
other organisms toward multiple possibilities for becoming
 Taking seriously the possibilities of a trans-human future (Haraway, et al)
 Imagining multiple “lines of flight” for possible futures to become toward
 Collecting toward certain ways of becoming in recognition that no way will ever be final
or complete (Bruno Latour)
 Keeping our eye on those things which get left out of any one way of organizing
the emerging community of life so that those others can re-open the collective
at a later date toward a different way of becoming.
 Performativity and Abjection (Queer Theory and PostColonial Theory: Beyond Identity
Ethics and Ethics of “Imagined Communities”)
Ganjuran Church, Javanese Jesus:
Planetary Religious Identities
• Hybrid Identities and
Planetary Flows
 Colonization
 Catholicism
 Javanese Traditions
 Hinduism
• New Meaning
Bumi Langit Institute: Making Meaning in a
Planetary Context (Iskandar Waworuntu)
-Eco-Halal
-Environmental Pesantren
-Sulawese-Catholic, Dutch-Jewish / Hippie / Balinese
turned Muslim (via Sufism)
- “In order to be Halal today, you must be an
environmentalist”
Lapindo: The mud disaster (Planetary
Ethics for Planetary Problems)
• Ethical Responses
• Fossil Fuels
• Geology
• Evolution
• Economics
• Politics
• Nationalism
• Ecology
• Anthropocentrism
• Human Rights