Reiter, Bernd. 2018. Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge. Duke University Press.

Notes

In-text annotations

"The West’s universalizing tendency was nothing new, but it claimed a superior position for itself." (Page x)

"The pluriverse consists in seeing beyond this claim to superiority, and sensing the world as pluriversally constituted. Or, if you wish, pluriversality becomes the decolonial way of dealing with forms of knowledge and meaning exceeding the limited regulations of epistemology and hermeneutics." (Page x)

"Pluriversality as a universal project is aimed not at changing the world (ontology) but at changing the beliefs and the understanding of the world (gnoseology), which would lead to changing our (all) praxis of living in the world." (Page x)

"Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived as a unified totality (Christian, Liberal, or Marxist, with their respective neos) in order for it to make sense, and viewing the world as an interconnected diversity instead, sets us free to inhabit the pluriverse rather than the universe. And it sets us free to think decolonially about the pluriversality of the world rather than its universality." (Page x)

"Modernity—the Trojan horse of Western cosmology—is a successful fiction that carries in it the seed of the Western pretense to universality." (Page x)

"Universality is always imperial and war driven. Pluri- and multiverses are convivial, dialogical, or plurilogical. Pluri- and multiverses exist independently of the state and corporations. It is the work of the emerging global political society—that is, the sector of society organizing itself around specific projects, having realized that neither the state nor the corporation has room for multi- or pluriverses." (Page xii)

"Now we, on the planet, are experiencing the consequences of decoloniality after decolonization and the consequences of dewesternization after the Cold War (Mignolo 2012b). Dewesternization (led by brics, Iran) has already mapped the multipolar world of the twenty-first century. This multipolar world is capitalist and decentered. As a result of this decentering, the United States, seconded by the European Union, is having more and more difficulty imposing its will and desires on the rest of the planet." (Page xiii)

"Strong states have emerged whose leaders refuse to have bosses and receive orders (e.g., Ukraine, West Asia, the China Development Bank and the brics bank, and China and Russia’s military affirmation). Therefore, the multipolar world arises out of the conflicts between dewesternization and the response to it being mounted by the West: namely, rewesternization, the effort to not lose the privileges acquired over the past five hundred years." (Page xiii)

"Westernization was defined by a coherent set of global designs. Intramural wars (the Thirty Years’ War, World War I, and World War II) emerge from intramural conflicts in the process of Westernization. Dewesternization, on the other hand, is a heterogeneous set of responses disputing the unipolar management of the world’s population and natural resources. If Westernization was unipolar, dewesternization is multipolar. Unipolarity was successful in enacting the global designs associated with Westernization. Multipolarity, on the other hand, can no longer be controlled by global designs; it fractures them, by definition. Indeed, multipolar processes are processes of de-designing. Dewesternization is the de-designing of Westernization." (Page xiii)

"Modern ego-centered personalities are driven by competition; decolonial and communal personalities are driven by the search for love, conviviality, and harmony" (Page xiv)

"If we take the critique of the coloniality of knowledge and power seriously (Quijano 2000), then all knowledge production must henceforth be partial, context specific, and limited, leading us away from parsimonious schemata that explain the (social) world toward a much more complex and mosaic construction of the bases of different and competing scientific knowledges." (Page 2)

"Science, however, is the structured and systematic production of knowledge—and by that account, all societies and all groups, everywhere and anytime, are engaged in scientific endeavors, even if not all of them are institutionalized to the same degree" (Page 3)

"Colonialism, however, erased many local scientific traditions by declassifying them as primitive and folklore and substituting what was perceived as Southern superstition with Northern science." (Page 3)

"In postcolonial times, this situation of Western, or Northern, colonial hegemony lived on as political elites from the Global South continued to send their offspring to be educated in London, Paris, Leiden, Brussels, Berlin—and, after World War II, in New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. The educational meccas erected in these places continued to reproduce the colonial traditions they inherited from the former colonizers, and the students trained there returned to their homelands—if they returned at all—with European, and later American, mind-sets." (Page 3)

"Ramón Grosfoguel (2013) has made a similar claim, showing, in more detail, how European colonization has destroyed not only people and their cultures, but also their diverse knowledge systems." (Page 4)

"Genocide thus went hand in hand with “epistemicide” (Santos 2014)." (Page 4)

"First, Adésínà takes on the idea that the social sciences need to produce nomothetic knowledge, showing that all knowledge is bound by the place, time, and positionality of the knowledge producer and hence ideographic." (Page 5)

"Reification might be the biggest hindrance to scientific advancement. Reification refers to the act of attributing ontological status to epistemological and analytical tools. Put simply: we cannot know with certainty that the world truly is the way we think it is. Even worse: what we think is real certainly is not the only reality out there, as different people access the same reality from different places and thus either see, or experience, a different slot of the same reality, or they perceive a different reality altogether." (Page 7)

"To think that the European way of explaining the world is somehow closer to the way the world really is is naive." (Page 7)

"this book is not trying to identify and promote a new Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Emile Durkheim, simply because I believe that the universalist claims these authors formulated are part of the problem we face today" (Page 9)