Introduction: Coming Up against the Nonrelational 1. Rethinking and Reweaving the Web of Life: Relationality in Four Dimensions 2. The Epistemological and Political Failures and Promises of Theories of Relationality 3. Sources and practices for Relational Living 4. The Political Activation of Relationality 5. Designing Relationally: Enacting Pluriversal Forms of World-making Conclusion: Making (a Relational) Reality into a Reality

To contend with the scale and intractability of the multiple and interacting crises that are threatening to engulf us is to have to change how we think of both thought and acting. The separation of critical thought and technological and economic acting-in-the-world has eviscerated the ability to bring together theory and practice for anything other than merely instrumental. At the same time, neither the human sciences—which historically have feared intervention—nor models of acting that eschew depth understanding can alone suffice to redirect disaster. One consequence of these failures is that they cause us to lose sight of other objective possibilities for the world. Envisioning the latter must be the real subject of thought and practice today. Working at the intersections of designing-acting, the arts and cultural observation, politics-philosophy and the biological and technical-economic sciences, books in the Beyond the Modern series explore configurations of thought, material practices and politics that can potentially realize transformative possibilities in the world. Recognizing that a key challenge of our time is to invent new alternatives to modernity that can effectively redress capitalism’s blind march toward greater social and natural disasters they focus on teasing out what is immanently possible within what-now-is. In so doing they help lay the groundwork for an ontological shift toward the commons, and for the new imagination(s), desires, capacities and forms of politics—the egalitarian configurations, at once material, collective and symbolic—necessary for beginning to control our own destiny.