The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 5 Power, Exclusion, and the Policing of Worlds — The Violence of the Universal

If translation is the art of sustaining difference, then power is the machinery that seeks to erase it. The Enlightenment dream of universality — one reason, one nature, one humanity — became the template for a project of ontological consolidation. Under its influence, plurality was not only ignored but actively suppressed: worlding was recoded as deviation, superstition, or error. What had been a polyphony of construals was refashioned into a single, regulated discourse of the real.

To universalise is to police the play of worlds. The modern concept of “the world” emerged through this very exclusion: a totalising imaginary in which one mode of construal — empirical, objectifying, secular — declared itself the measure of all others. Within that framework, alternate ontologies were rendered immature or primitive, to be educated or erased. Colonial epistemologies extended this logic globally, converting relational ecologies of sense into extractive grids of value, territory, and resource. The violence of the universal thus lies not in its intent to unify, but in its refusal to listen.

In relational terms, this policing operates through constriction of potential. When the conditions for multiple ontological grammars are narrowed to a single authorised syntax, the ecology of sense begins to starve. Worlds that cannot be translated into the dominant register are silenced or absorbed — their rhythms overwritten by the tempo of power. The resulting homogeneity produces a profound ontological impoverishment: the loss not only of cultural diversity but of the very capacity to imagine differently.

Resistance to such policing does not lie in multiplying “alternative worlds” as if they were options within a shared market of perspectives. It lies in reclaiming the relational ground from which worlds emerge — the field of possibility itself. A decolonial or feminist epistemology, for instance, does not merely add voices to the chorus; it detunes the very system of harmonic order that decided which notes could be heard. Power, in this sense, is not merely an imposition from above, but a modulation of relational resonance — it shapes which relations can form, and which cannot.

To counter such modulation is to practise world-care: the maintenance of plural construals as living, coexisting possibilities. This involves not only critique but creativity — reanimating forms of knowing, sensing, and being that the universal had exiled. Art, storytelling, and ritual often lead this reclamation: they keep the wounds of exclusion open enough for new sense to grow through them.

The policing of worlds is thus never total. Every attempt at closure reveals its own fractures — the leaks where suppressed meanings return, refracted through irony, rebellion, or myth. Power can constrain the field, but relation will always exceed it. The task, then, is not to abolish universals but to universalise differently: to recognise universality itself as an emergent property of relation, not its negation.