Relational Praxis: Action as Worldmaking

1 What Is Praxis? From Agency to Co-Agencement

If epistemology asks how we come to know, and desire asks how we come to want, then praxis asks: how do we come to act?

Praxis is not simply the execution of a plan or the carrying out of a will. It is not reducible to behaviour, movement, or even choice. The term has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, where praxis meant action that arises from ethical reflection — not action upon the world, but in and with the world, grounded in a view of what it means to live well.

In this relational frame, we begin with a different premise: that action is never solitary. It is never just mine. To act is always to act with — with others, with histories, with contexts, with ecologies, with forces and affordances that exceed and include the self.

From Agency to Co-Agencement

Modern notions of agency often carry a deep residue of individualism: the agent as a bounded subject, a sovereign chooser. In this view, action is a form of imposition — something an agent does to the world. But this framing is insufficient for the kind of entangled reality we actually inhabit.

In relational thought, we shift from agency to what Deleuze and Guattari called agencement — not agency as possession, but as arrangement or assemblage. Agencement is not what one does, but what comes together to make action possible. And when this assemblage involves multiple parties — human and nonhuman — it becomes co-agencement: the relational configuration through which something happens.

Thus, in place of the image of an isolated agent acting on the world, we have a web of interdependent forces — bodily, social, material, historical — that coalesce to make action happen. Action, then, is not what I have, but what we emerge into together.

Praxis as Situated, Participatory Knowing-Doing

Praxis, in this sense, is always:

• Situated — It unfolds within particular relational and material contexts. There is no abstract action, only action somewhere, with something.

• Participatory — It arises through involvement, not detachment. To act is to enter into relation.

• Worldmaking — Every act helps shape the world we co-inhabit. Even inaction is not neutral.

This also means that every praxis is a kind of knowing-with — an epistemological moment in itself. When I participate in the making of something (a protest, a ritual, a shared meal, a new form of care), I am not merely acting; I am coming to know differently. I am coming to feel differently. Praxis is an epistemology in motion.

Why This Matters Now

In a world marked by ecological degradation, social fragmentation, and institutional collapse, the question of how we act — and with whom — is more urgent than ever. The old metaphors of control, mastery, and intervention are failing us. What we need are ways of thinking and doing that honour entanglement, vulnerability, and co-becoming.

Relational praxis offers not a blueprint, but a posture: a way of leaning in, of being responsive, of attending to the openings that emerge in the cracks of systems.

It is not heroic. It is humble, grounded, and collective.

And it begins, always, with the question: Who and what am I acting with?

2 Acts Are Never Alone — Meaning as Co-Enacted

If praxis is action as worldmaking, then each act is not a solitary event but a node in a dense network of relations. Actions ripple outward, entwined with the intentions, responses, histories, and materialities around them.

Action as a Co-Enacted Process

When we act, our deeds don’t float free. They are embedded within—and shaped by—the webs of relationships that surround us. Consider a simple gesture, like offering a cup of tea. This act:

• Involves the relationships between giver and receiver,

• Draws on cultural meanings around hospitality,

• Relies on material objects and their affordances (the cup, the tea),

• Resonates with histories of shared moments.

The meaning of this act is not fully contained in the one who acts. Instead, it is co-enacted — brought forth in relation, through interaction and interpretation.

From Intentionality to Distributed Meaning

Traditional views of action emphasise intentionality: the idea that meaning and purpose reside in the actor’s mind. But relational praxis invites us to see meaning as distributed across the acting assemblage.

The act is not a static “thing” with fixed meaning, but a dynamic event whose significance unfolds in the relational field. This includes:

• How others respond,

• The cultural and social contexts,

• The material environment,

• The historical moment.

Meaning is not carried by the act as a “package,” but emerges in the relational process.

Meaning as Emergent and Multiplicitous

This means an act can have multiple meanings, depending on who participates and how. A protest march can be:

• An expression of solidarity,

• A site of political conflict,

• A performance of identity,

• A moment of collective joy or grief.

Each of these meanings is real and enacted through participation.

Implications for Responsibility and Ethics

Because actions are never isolated, responsibility also becomes a shared and ongoing negotiation. To act is to enter a field of co-responsibility — with people, environments, and histories.

Ethics, then, is less about adherence to fixed rules and more about attuning to the complex relational dynamics and their effects. It is about listening, responding, and being accountable to the world one acts within.

3 Action as Language — The Grammar of Doing

If relational praxis reveals action as a co-enacted process of meaning-making, then it follows that our actions have a grammar — a systemic organisation that shapes how doing communicates meaning in the world.

Actions Are Structured Like Language

Just as language is more than words strung together — it has grammar, syntax, and patterns — so too do our actions have an underlying structure. This “grammar of doing” guides how acts relate to each other, how sequences unfold, and how meanings are realised.

Consider everyday actions:

• Greeting someone with a smile,

• Offering a handshake,

• Sitting down to eat a meal.

Each of these is patterned in culturally shaped ways that others understand and respond to.

Processes and Participants: Roles in Action

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is analysed in terms of processes (verbs) and participants (nouns). Similarly, actions have:

• Processes: The kind of doing — giving, receiving, moving, creating, destroying.

• Participants: The actors and objects involved in the act.

This framework lets us analyse actions for their functional meaning: who is doing what to whom, with what effect.

Actions as Meaningful Choices

Just as speakers choose words from a system of possibilities, actors choose how to perform their actions within a system of cultural and social norms. This choice:

• Shapes how an act is interpreted,

• Influences its relational effects,

• Creates potential for new meanings and worldings.

From Individual Acts to Social Practices

Over time, repeated patterns of action become social practices — shared ways of doing that structure collective life. Social practices are the grammar of collective worldmaking, shaping how groups co-create meaning and shape reality.

Implications for Transformation

Understanding action’s grammar empowers us to:

• Become more conscious of how our actions “speak”,

• Recognise the patterns we inhabit,

• Explore new ways of acting that can shift relational fields and create new possibilities.

4 The Materiality of Action — Bodies, Environments, and Tools

If action is the grammar of doing, it is not a disembodied grammar. Action always unfolds somewhere, through someone, with something. Its medium is the material world — and its meanings are entangled with bodies, environments, and tools.

Bodies: The Lived Ground of Praxis

Every action is bodily, even the most “mental” of acts. Speaking requires vocal muscles. Thinking quietly often involves posture, breath, gaze. Our bodies:

• Constrain what is possible (we cannot fly unaided),

• Extend our capacities (a gesture can embrace or reject),

• Remember patterned actions (habits, muscle memory, choreographies of work and care).

The body is not a container of meaning but a medium of meaning — a living site where relation takes form.

Environments: Action Is Situated

We do not act in a vacuum. We act with and within environments:

• A conversation in a quiet garden feels different than one in a crowded subway.

• Walking barefoot on moss elicits different movements than walking on concrete.

• Cultural, architectural, and ecological environments invite and inhibit forms of action.

In relational terms, action is always a co-response to a setting that is itself partly shaped by previous actions. We are shaped by the worlds we co-shape.

Tools and Artefacts: Mediated Action

Tools are not neutral extensions of the body. They participate in meaning-making:

• A pen guides the gesture of writing differently than a keyboard.

• A smartphone mediates attention, pace, and tone.

• Ritual tools — chalices, incense, drums — infuse action with affective resonance.

Tools stabilise certain possibilities while closing off others. They are materialised memory, carrying histories of use and the intentions of their makers.

Material Semiotics: Matter Means

To speak of the “materiality” of action is not to reduce it to physics. It is to say that:

• Matter is semiotic — it helps make meaning,

• The material world is not mute but responsive,

• Knowing and doing emerge from this entanglement with the real.

In relational praxis, action is never merely symbolic or spiritual. It is always also material — and therefore consequential, embodied, and grounded.

5 Action and Temporality — Rhythm, Repetition, and Change

Action always takes place in time, but it does not merely occur in a neutral temporal container. It shapes time as it moves through it. In this post, we explore how action carries and creates temporalities — through rhythm, repetition, and transformation.

Action Is Rhythmic

No action is isolated. It pulses. It returns. It syncopates with other actions.

• Walking has a rhythm: step, step, step.

• Conversation has a rhythm: turn-taking, pause, reply.

• Cooking dinner, chanting in protest, brushing teeth — all are temporal patterns.

These rhythms are not trivial; they coordinate life. They bind us to shared worlds, linking inner tempo to social time.

Repetition: The Time of the Usual

Much action is repetitive. This is not failure — it is fidelity.

• Habits form through repetition, and so do skills, roles, identities.

• Shared rituals rely on repetition: lighting candles, bowing, saying grace.

• Political and cultural norms are enacted again and again, stabilised by the repetition of action across time.

Repetition is how meaning becomes durable. But repetition is never mechanical — it is always relational. We repeat differently depending on context, intention, feeling.

Transformation: The Time of the New

Every repetition holds the possibility of variation. Even the most familiar act may shift:

• A habitual gesture may take on new meaning in a different situation.

• A repeated phrase may suddenly be heard differently, provoking reflection or rupture.

• A tool used in a new way — a fork as a lockpick — can break expectation.

Through subtle or dramatic variation, change emerges from the inside of repetition. This is how action makes time not just cyclical, but historical — it builds toward difference.

Kairos and Chronos: Multiple Temporalities

Action unfolds in chronos (clock time), but also in kairos (opportune time):

• A protest at the “right moment” shifts a public conversation.

• A word said “too soon” or “too late” misses its mark.

• A kiss, a refusal, a revelation — all live or die by timing.

Praxis is not merely what we do, but when we do it — how we sense the moment, how we respond with attunement or dissonance.

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In relational praxis, action is not a point on a timeline. It is a shaper of time — rhythmic, recursive, and responsive. Through action, we create the temporalities by which we live.

6 Power and Responsibility — Acting-with vs Acting-over

All action is entangled with power. But not all power is the same. In this post, we explore how relational praxis reframes power not as dominance, but as participation — and how responsibility flows from this shift.

Power-Over: The Legacy of Control

In many traditions, power is imagined as power-over:

• The power to command, coerce, or control.

• The ability to enforce outcomes unilaterally.

• A model of agency rooted in separation and superiority.

This is the power of the sovereign, the CEO, the coloniser — the one who acts on the world, not with it.

But power-over fractures relations. It alienates the actor from the acted-upon. It suppresses the unpredictability of response. It treats others — human and nonhuman — as tools or obstacles.

Power-With: Relational Agency

Relational praxis shifts the frame: from power-over to power-with.

• Power emerges not from domination, but from coordination.

• Agency is not located in the isolated individual, but in the relation itself.

• Influence happens through dialogue, resonance, co-creation.

A conductor has power not by silencing the orchestra, but by playing with its potential. A skilled facilitator empowers action not by imposing vision, but by making space for emergence.

This is a power that does not diminish others but amplifies mutual becoming.

Responsibility Is Response-Ability

If power is relational, so is responsibility. It is not simply a duty to uphold fixed rules, but a capacity to respond well in entangled situations:

• To feel what the moment calls for.

• To listen before acting.

• To anticipate consequences not just for oneself, but for the shared field of life.

In relational terms, to act is always to involve others, and to be answerable to the worlds one helps shape.

Responsibility is not a burden imposed from without. It is the ethical contour of agency in a relational world.

Ethics as Worldmaking

Relational ethics is not rule-following. It is world-forming. Every action is a wager:

• What kind of relation does it enact?

• What kind of future does it make possible?

• What values are embodied in the way the act is performed?

Power-with and responsibility-with are not idealistic opposites to realpolitik — they are the conditions of sustainable becoming in a more-than-human world.

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Relational praxis understands power not as control but as participation, and responsibility not as guilt but as attunement. To act well is to respond well — and to craft a world in which others can, too.

7 Praxis as Poiesis — Making the World With(in) Us

The journey through relational praxis has brought us here — to a view of action not as intervention in a passive world, but as an act of worldmaking. In this final post, we bring the threads together by reclaiming an ancient word: poiesis.

Poiesis: The Making That Makes Us

In classical Greek, poiesis meant “to make” — but not just to fabricate or produce. Poiesis referred to a generative kind of making, one that brings something into being. A poem is not simply written; it is brought forth. A new friendship is not engineered; it is cultivated.

In relational praxis, all meaningful action is poietic:

• It does not just act on the world, but participates in its unfolding.

• It does not merely shape external reality, but transforms the actor themselves.

• It does not assume a finished self, but co-emerges with the world being made.

To act, then, is to be made — not just to make.

The World Within the Act

Every act — no matter how small — carries a worldview:

• The gesture of a hand either welcomes or excludes.

• The tone of a voice either dignifies or diminishes.

• The design of a system either enables or obstructs.

There is no neutral action. Every doing is a kind of saying. Every saying carries a grammar of value. To act is to perform a stance toward the world — and to make that stance real.

Co-Making, Co-Becoming

In this sense, praxis is always with:

• With others, whose responses shape and reshape what action means.

• With histories, which echo in our patterns and inheritances.

• With futures, which are seeded in the affordances we create or foreclose.

Relational praxis calls us to be craftspersons of possibility. To act not for dominance or display, but for resonance. For co-flourishing. For the patient shaping of more livable worlds.

An Invitation

We end this series not with a conclusion, but an invitation:
To see your next act — however ordinary — not as a unit of productivity, but as a poietic gesture.

What world will it bring forth?
What relation will it renew?
What self will it call you to become?

The answer is never yours alone. It is made with, and always in the making.