Towards Generative Relational Governance: Discussion I

This discussion reconsiders governance from the standpoint of a generative relational ontology, and it proceeds as a delineation of a problem space rather than as the presentation of a theory. Its premise is that if being and knowing are generative, governance too may have to be understood as a generative process rather than as the administration of a stable structure. On this premise the received framings of governance, oriented toward the allocation of resources, the distribution of power, the design of institutions, and the sources of legitimacy, become insufficient, since they presuppose a structure that holds still while a generative field does not. The commons literature is taken as the point of departure, for it has shown that value arises from relation; the discussion extends it by observing that relation generates power in the same movement by which it generates value. From this observation two difficulties are assembled. Generation produces power that tends toward stabilization, structure, and finally an attractor, so that generation tends to terminate its own generativity. And the remedy of oversight upon oversight runs into an infinite regress that liberal constitutionalism, socialism, and the commons all encounter alike. Both difficulties may be artifacts of taking structure, rather than generation, as the object of inquiry. Since relational practice is inescapably multi-scale, carried on at the scales of intimacy, organization, community, and international order at once, the inquiry further requires a bridge across scales, for which renormalization is named as an open intuition rather than a result. The questions that follow are set out as a four-phase research program, running from the definition of generativity, through its dynamics and its transformation across scales, to the governance of generativity itself. No theory is established and no institutional design is proposed. The contribution is a proposal that the object of governance may have been misidentified, and that its primary object is generativity rather than structure.