CONCEPT
Relationality
Escobar's ontological principle — central to his pluriversal framework — that entities do not exist first and then enter relationships, but come into being through the relationships that constitute them. The principle that AI's decomposition-based architecture cannot accommodate.
Relationality, as Escobar uses the term, is not the observation that things are connected. It is the deeper claim that things come into being through their connections — that the relationships are ontologically prior to the entities they relate. The river is not first a river and then in relationship with the forest, the fish, the communities that fish it; the river is constituted as what it is by these relationships, and without them it is something else. This ontological principle, drawn from indigenous Andean and Amazonian cosmologies and from the feminist and ecological traditions, stands opposed to the atomistic ontology that underlies most Western thought and that is encoded in AI's architecture.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Escobar's recent work has emphasized relationality as the key to what he calls livable worlds: 'the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of