Relationality
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 AI Story
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 the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists.' The formulation is ontological rather than merely ecological. It does not claim that we should recognize connections between things that exist independently; it claims that the things themselves are produced by their connections, and that treating them as independent is a conceptual move with material consequences.
AI, built on decomposition, classification, and optimization, operates from the opposite premise: that the world consists of discrete entities whose properties can be measured, whose relationships can be modeled, and whose behavior can be predicted. Both premises produce useful knowledge. Neither is universal. The imposition of one as the default — the construction of the world-as-data as the world itself — is the epistemological equivalent of the construction of the world-as-GDP that development discourse performed.
The traditional healer's diagnostic practice exemplifies relational knowledge. The healer assesses the patient not through isolation of symptoms but through reading of relationships — between the patient and her family, between the patient and her community, between the patient and the land, between the patient and the spiritual forces the community's cosmology recognizes. The assessment integrates information from multiple registers simultaneously, and the integration is the knowledge. Decompose it into data points and the knowledge disappears, not because the data points are wrong but because the knowledge lives in the relationships between them.
Relationality has specific implications for AI design. A relational AI would not be a better version of the current decomposition-based architecture. It would require different foundational commitments: tools that work with rather than against the relational structure of the knowledge they engage, evaluation criteria that reward capture of relationship rather than accuracy of classification, training paradigms that include forms of knowledge the current paradigm cannot recognize because they exist only in relationship rather than in propositional form.
Origin
Relationality has been a theme throughout Escobar's work but received its most systematic articulation in Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) and Pluriversal Politics (2020).
It draws on the ontological turn in anthropology, particularly Marisol de la Cadena's work on Andean relational ontology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Amazonian perspectivism, and the broader tradition of indigenous relational thought.
Key Ideas
Relationships are prior. Things do not exist first and then relate; they come into being through the relationships that constitute them.
Against atomism. The atomistic ontology of Western thought — discrete entities with specifiable properties — is one ontology among many, not the universal structure of reality.
Relational knowledge. Forms of knowing that live in relationships, not in propositions, cannot be captured by decomposition-based tools.
Implications for AI. A relational AI would require different foundations, not better versions of the current architecture.
Ethical dimension. Cultivating awareness of fundamental interdependence is the key to constructing livable worlds.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2018).
- Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020).
- Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Duke University Press, 2015).
- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (Univocal, 2014).