Divergence and Diplomacy as a Pluriversal Rhetorical Praxis of Coalitional Politics

ABSTRACT

Coalitional politics have largely been examined across social and cultural differences that serve shared political commitments, and the rhetorical force of situated and material locations remains an open question. To provide a theoretical analytic for these excesses, I offer pluriversal and rhetorical understandings of divergence and diplomacy for coalitional politics. I demonstrate these concepts through a rhetorical analysis of a community organization from San Antonio, Texas, and their coalitional politics, which partially emerge as a response to extreme weather events and urban development. The upshot reveals that rhetorical approaches to divergence and diplomacy can help capture the material obligations and constraints across heterogeneous yet interdependent worlds. Such theoretical tools will be increasingly important for coalitional rhetorics and politics responding to climate breakdown.

KEYWORDS:

• Coalitional politics
• decoloniality
• ecology
• environmental rhetoric
• rhetorical theory

Notes

¹ Klinenberg’s research shows that it is the presence of a social infrastructure in a neighborhood that turns out to be a major predictor of who lives and dies during extreme weather events, in communities both rich and poor, where “neighbors are the first true responders.”

² “Climate breakdown” is a term coined by George Monbiot in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s release of AR4 to describe how the climate variability, extreme weather events, and general climate conditions that fostered human/nonhuman evolution on this planet is now undergoing a collapse. See Monbiot.

³ In this sense, Stengers version of oikos is related to Grecian farms as a basic unit of the agricultural economy, which was also dependent on slavery. Although that relation is not necessary. By insisting that ethos and oikos are inseparable and share relationships, they can function as speculative heuristics for alternative developments and transitions.

⁴ Cosmopolitics is not Kantian. Cosmopolitics is also not cosmopolitanism. The relationship between cosmopolitics and cosmopolitanism is outside the scope of this analysis, but for useful examples see Watson.

⁵ As Watson has identified, Stengers’s life-long project is to show how what we characterize as “the modern sciences” were never modern at all. To do this, Stengers highlights the constraints of scientific practice, and how its truth-claims emerge out of a specific configuration of material systems that have no universal bearing on other worlds without those configurations. Thus, Stengers delinks the practice of science from its colonial/modern claims to universality. In analyzing scientific practice and its institutions with an overtly political language, and in emphasizing divergence not contradiction, Stengers “opens up the possibility that ostensibly contradictory scientific programs or metaphysical systems can coexist peacefully, affirming their independent logics of composition and knowledge production” (Watson 87).

⁶ I’d like to thank Caroline Gottschalk Druschke for bringing my attention to the work of de la Cadena. See Gottschalk Druschke, “Trophic.”

⁷ First defined by Aníbal Quijano, coloniality of power describes systems that preference and privilege Eurocentrism through social hierarchies of labor, gender, and race—all of which have consequences for knowledge-making, history-telling, and the fostering of Eurocentric cultural norms through state and economic institutions. Coloniality of power explains why racial and patriarchal social orders perpetuate long after colonial contact, even in majority-minority places like San Antonio. In the Mignolo quote here, nonmodern scholars might hear a resonance with Latour’s thesis that we have never been modern.

⁸ Although it’s beyond the scope of this analysis, delinking and divergence clearly have some overlaps. But a beginning distinction between them would acknowledge their different histories and potentialities. In the context of this analysis, delinking is more of a theoretical concept about onto-epistemologies that are otherwise, while divergence is radically immanent.

⁹ Wanzer-Serrano and others have noted a significant alignment among decolonial analysis and social movements. From rhetorical scholarship, this relationship has been most fully articulated by Wanzer-Serrano who used decolonial theory to rhetorically analyze the Young Lords in New York City during the 1960s. Decoloniality and environmental/climate justice movements are not completely compatible. Their genealogies are quite different.

¹⁰ The University of Texas, San Antonio was created in 1969 because of a successful lawsuit by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) who argued for the campus based upon the need for Chicano/as access to Higher Education. The state reluctantly created the branch campus, but sited it thirty minutes from the city center in the middle of a majority Anglo and middle-class suburb.

¹¹ COPS is founded on three closely intertwined mediating institutions: first, the family—whose primary concerns are good jobs, a clean and healthy environment to live and play, and a quality education for their children; second, the neighborhood—whose concern was quality of life, affordable housing, and an identifiable culture; third, the church—whose obligation is to promote social justice for the poor, and in the tradition of liberation theology, to protect family and neighborhoods from poverty (Sekul 177). COPS has an elaborate structure designed specifically to keep a check on powerful individuals.

¹² For these reasons, COPS can be appropriately situated at the intersections of multiple areas of rhetorical study—classical rhetoric, rhetorical pragmatism, Chicano/a rhetorics, social movements, religious rhetorics, and environmental rhetorics.

¹³ I thank Catherine Chaput for bringing my attention to the concept of fleshy subjectivity.

¹⁴ The story of the APA began when the San Antonio branch of the League of Women Voters grew increasingly concerned about how suburban development would negatively affect water quality. They asked one of their members, a woman by the name of Fay Sinkin, to start an organization that could help protect San Antonio’s most precious resource—it’s fantastically clean source of water, the Edwards Aquifer. It’s worth noting that as organizations, the League of Women Voters and the Communities Organized for Public Services had similar profiles—both were activist, grassroots, and nonpartisan organizations that focused on molding political leaders by informing citizens, and obtaining results on specific issues of public concern.

¹⁵ The local experts I have talked with all agree the APA could have done more on this point, but they also point out that COPS typically did not work with any other organizations, especially single issue-driven organizations like environmental groups.

¹⁶ As one of the most effective pieces of federal legislation ever enacted in the United States, it is worth thinking of the Voting Rights Act as a human-centered version of the pluriversal—it attempts to mitigate the violence creation of one world (whites only), it empowers a plurality of situated public discourse (no literacy tests; bilingual ballots), and so on.