"As we move towards the future, a relational ontology that envisions persons as persons-in-community is crucial, because a person can never be without being in relation to other terms and persons in the world. If I live in a city that makes it illegal for a tent city to be on public land (as my city of Baton Rouge recently did here in Louisiana), then the city is trying to make poverty illegal. Poverty is an ever-present result of designing social and economic hierarchies as we do, and so it becomes a performative contradiction to make the result of our economic relations illegal (in the form of tent encampments in parks and under highway overpasses, in this example) despite the processes and relations sorting a spectrum of haves from have-nots. We design and participate and thereby renew practices that result in degrees of wealth and poverty. And yet if we acknowledge that this is how we envision these social and economic institutions, should we renew, participate, and reconstitute this as our vision for what economies should do? For these institutions deflect any talk of reform under the guise of individual freedom, and that freedom is never reflected in the relational way we experience our world, but in the interpretation of human beings that emphasizes the atomic individual only—the atomic individual devoid of standing in relation to any one person. According to James, the individual is merely a reification of a set of unfolding relations at a specific time."
epochemagazine OP t1_irw37cn wrote
Reply to The Democratic Importance of William James. An essay about how pragmatism can serve both as a critical tool to evaluate today's politics and as a guide for our own politization by epochemagazine
From the essay:
"As we move towards the future, a relational ontology that envisions persons as persons-in-community is crucial, because a person can never be without being in relation to other terms and persons in the world. If I live in a city that makes it illegal for a tent city to be on public land (as my city of Baton Rouge recently did here in Louisiana), then the city is trying to make poverty illegal. Poverty is an ever-present result of designing social and economic hierarchies as we do, and so it becomes a performative contradiction to make the result of our economic relations illegal (in the form of tent encampments in parks and under highway overpasses, in this example) despite the processes and relations sorting a spectrum of haves from have-nots. We design and participate and thereby renew practices that result in degrees of wealth and poverty. And yet if we acknowledge that this is how we envision these social and economic institutions, should we renew, participate, and reconstitute this as our vision for what economies should do? For these institutions deflect any talk of reform under the guise of individual freedom, and that freedom is never reflected in the relational way we experience our world, but in the interpretation of human beings that emphasizes the atomic individual only—the atomic individual devoid of standing in relation to any one person. According to James, the individual is merely a reification of a set of unfolding relations at a specific time."