We can’t theorize without an image of the world

Heterogeneous, Relational, and Planetary Social Totalities

The late Charles Mills suggested in The Racial Contract that we cannot theorize without a picture or image of the world. The latter provides the frame of reference or paradigm—as well as the ontological assumptions and material grounding^[i]—we use to interpret and position ourselves existentially within that world. In short, our “worldview” establishes a particular vantage point to comprehend the social reality of which we are a part. That is to say, the images we construct of the world help us situate ourselves within a historically specific phenomenological horizon. Similarly, Mbembe (2021) writes that “[t]heory is always a particular theory of the world” (p. 19, emphasis added). In other words, all theories are historically situated and located in a particular space. However, a theory’s particularity or historically specific locus of enunciation is not always made explicit, especially when the universal aspirations of dominant perspectives are seriously taken into consideration. In the last instance, what are dominant discourses, narratives, myths, and regimes of truth without a setting or an image of the world—a founding myth—that serves to anchor their universalizing claims. Various perspectives, which gained traction primarily after World War II, have articulated contrapuntal critiques against systems of domination and the universalizing perspectives legitimating said systems. In distinct yet interconnected ways, these critiques have addressed the onto-epistemological, geopolitical, and ethical implications of situating thought and praxis within particular contexts while avoiding the provincialization of thought.

Intellectuals drawing on phenomenological, ontological, and psycho-existential perspectives (e.g., Fanon, Wynter, Dussel) have situated their philosophical discourses within historically and geopolitically specific contexts (liberation and anti-colonial movements are of particular interest when situating decolonial thought and praxis). One could even argue that the decolonial turn in theory constitutes a spatial/geopolitical turn. This may seem obvious, but it is often left unsaid when theoretical discourses are abstracted from sociohistorical contexts and consequently emptied of their geopolitical content, ethical implications, and praxis-orientation. Without an image, picture, or figure of the world, the concepts we deploy as researchers and scholars would not have a concrete place to be anchored. Our theories would not be rooted in reality, and our concepts would become empty signifiers floating in the solipsistic air of abstraction, with no possibility of con-figuration. In turn, this would leave us unable to comprehend what surrounds us, reflect upon the meanings of our experiences, and communicate our understanding of the world with others (ethical dimension). Images of the world thus inform how we interpret social reality and interact within historically shaped or configured institutions, particularly the matrices of power linked to colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

To speak of images, figures, prefigurations, configurations, social arrangements, or frames of reference, one must begin with a discussion of social totality. It is from one’s notion of social totality (or totalité-monde as Glissant preferred to describe it) that one begins to construct theories and concepts to understand (or better yet, comprehend) the underlying assumptions we have of how the world is configured, which includes relations of power and systems of knowledge, as well as spatial/temporal, geopolitical, historical, and historiographical dimensions. The institutions in place and the intersubjective relations that constitute them may vary from nation-state frameworks (see, e.g., critical race theory and settler colonial studies (Meghji, 2020; Mendoza, 2020, Moreton-Robinson, 2015)) to a broader planetary social totality conceived in heterogeneous terms (see, e.g., dependency theory, world systems, decolonial thought). The ontological assumptions underlying the images and concomitant conceptions of the world function as the central axes around which theoretical discourses and interpretations revolve, not to mention the world-making practices these assumptions enable. How else do we make meaning of the world without already having an image, perception, and conception of said world? I explore this question throughout without intending to answer it in absolute terms.

For now, I would like to turn to the concept of social totality and heterogeneity to add content to the image of the world as illustrated by decolonial theory and philosophy of liberation. I draw on Enrique Dussel’s concept of modernity/exteriority and Anibal Quijano’s concept of historical-structural heterogeneity and modernity/coloniality (discussed below) to illustrate how they inform one another. It is the image of the darker side of modernity—exteriority and coloniality, in this case—that makes more explicit the planetary frame constructed by decolonial theory, which assists in conceptualizing the social, political, economic, cultural, and epistemic arrangements as heterogeneous configurations of the modern/colonial world system. Heterogeneity, as I explain in more detail in the full article, makes visible dominant structures of knowledge and power and also sheds light in the ways in which alternative modes of resistance/re-existence, knowing, and relating persist despite the incalculable violence of coloniality.

The philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, begins to create a distinct image of modernity as early as the late 1960s within the context of decolonization and liberation movements, in particular after the Cuban Revolution and decolonization struggles in Africa. Before him, Fanon, Césaire, and Mariátegui had also critiqued the myths of modernity and its deceptive promises of progress and salvation. Dussel builds upon Levinas’ ethical-transontological contributions and Fanon’s critique of colonialism to paint the forgotten contours of modernity, which Western philosophies downplayed or outright ignored. He uncovers the systematically negated side of modernity, conceptualized as exteriority, and assigns geopolitical content, meaning, and signification to Levinas’ use of the concept (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). The semantic resignification of exteriority enabled Dussel to think from modernity’s excluded geographies, histories, and struggles.

Through the elision of the “darker” side, Eurocentric philosophers could make the universalist claim that modernity was indeed an endogenous European process, one that seemingly occurred naturally in the region and subsequently diffused elsewhere. Castro-Gomez (2005) would refer to this hubris as Eurocentrism’s zero-point epistemology, which, according to him, ignored how the colonization of the so-called New World, the enslavement of Africans, the genocidal displacement of Indigenous peoples, the extraction of material resources, and the appropriation of knowledges were constitutive of modernity. These broad strokes paint a dark picture without getting at the finer details depicted with gruesome effect by many scholars such as Todorov’s The Conquest of America and De Las Casas A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

Certainly, Dussel was not alone in unveiling modernity’s darker underside, since he was just one expression of many dependency theories (Quijano, 1965, Frank, Cardoso), theories of under-development (Rodney), and theories of liberation articulated at the time (see, e.g., pedagogy of liberation, sociology of liberation, theology of liberation (Casanova, 1965; Fals-Borda, 1970; Freire, 1968; Torres-Restrepo, 1963). These theories also initiated a spatial/geopolitical turn as they sought to sketch out the contours of a planetary system of domination and exploitation that had been reconfigured after World War II, namely with the ascension of the US as a world power, which would reach its hegemonic position with the fall of the Berlin Wall. These political committed intellectuals advanced concepts such as center-periphery, internal colonialism, intellectual colonialism, and exteriority, all of which pointed to different spatial scales, varying from the global and planetary (center-periphery) to the national (internal colonialism) to the institutional and individual (intellectual colonialism). By tracing these intellectual genealogies and varying scales of analysis, I am also seeking to paint an image that illustrates the longue durée of coloniality and the ways in which different intellectuals responded to specific historical conjunctures by articulating concepts that would critically interrogate modernity’s colonially and heterogeneously configured social totality. These conceptualzations were also advanced a by scholars such as CLR James, Cox, Williams, Césaire, and Fanon who had painted a picture of colonialism in relation to capitalism’s and modernity’s distorted promises of progress and development (Cox’s world system and Fanon’s Manichean world of being and non-being). In Africa, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere made similar critiques as they advanced the notion of neocolonialism and the systematic underdevelopment of Africa. These critiques were not uniform, nor were the images of modernity identical, since some the myths of modernity (e.g., linear notions of progress and development) were not always disregarded.

In the following sections, I first discuss how concepts enable one to “read” or view the world in a particular way. The emergence of new concepts is always already situated within a geopolitical site that either upholds or seeks to interrogate the problematic space in which concepts are articulated. Subsequently, I explicate two interrelated images of modernity: 1) Modernity’s Totality and Exteriority and Modernity/Coloniality; 2) Modernity’s Historical-Structural Heterogeneity (Quijano). I then examine the synergies that may be constituted between distinct yet interconnected theoretical frameworks. I conclude the article by discussing the concept of planetarity (Pratt, 2022), as opposed to global, to maintain a relational perspective (Glissant, 1997) that makes more visible the heterogeneous social totality Quijano illustrated.

The full article thus aims to make the images concepts project more explicit when drawing on distinct theoretical discourses and their frames of reference. I have divided this paper into four sections to sketch the conceptual contours of thinking with particular images of the world. Part one explicates the geopolitical and ethical implications of articulating new concepts. In this section, I draw on the work of those who take as their theoretical point of departure the ontological assumptions and materiality of concepts. Part two delineates decolonial theory’s images of the world concerning modernity, social totality, heterogeneity, and coloniality of power—figures and concepts that enable the interrogation of the social arrangements (configurations) within and between “societies” (for an economy of expression I use this term though the image it projects also limits our understanding of the world in terms of thinking of planetary entanglements). Part three argues that theoretical points of convergence or, better yet, synergies (Meghji, 2020), may be articulated between seemingly different theories. I specifically make the case that decolonial, critical race, and settler colonial studies have varying frames of references (historical, geopolitical, economic, colonial) yet can find commensurability without collapsing the political differences at hand. By recognizing we are advancing similar work yet using distinct images of the world that are historically situated, this article seeks to avoid the academic tendency to hastily invalidate discourses and practices that should otherwise be working in synergy, like Meghji (2020) suggested when bringing into dialogue critical race theory and decolonial theory. This section aims to foster an onto-epistemological dialogue between perspectives examining the categories of race in relation to colonial domination and capitalist exploitation. This will hopefully reveal the different yet no less valid frames of reference, albeit varying in scale. Part four gestures toward thinking with a planetary frame of reference—a horizontal and thus ethical image of the planetary that unsettles the naturalized conception of the global. Combined, these different sections assist in situating our theorizations/interpretations within a heterogeneous social totality.

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^[i] Charles Mills critiqued the tendency of dominant perspectives that hide their locus of enunciation. He asserted that this mode of theorizing does not only tend to be abstract and detached from the concrete realities of racial domination and exploitation, but that it also operates without an awareness of the images of the world it build through its abstraction and universalization. It simultaneously negates the experiences that underlie the social relations of domination. If our modes of theorizing the world are not grounded in the geographies, histories, struggles, and racialized experiences, then out abstracted way of knowing will only negate the cruel reality of colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.