The Wilderness of Being?

One well-known pattern that continually astonishes me is how often we are subconsciously drawn to people and ideas that seem to confirm to us what we had been thinking and feeling all along. This is the well-known 'confirmation bias'. Jung talked about a synchronicity at work when seemingly disparate insights and activities come together. I’m too much of a skeptic to entertain the notion of the presence of unverified cosmic laws, but it does make me wonder how certain things seem to arrive at the same place and at particular moments.

The impetus behind this musing is the latest burst of insight from Levi Bryant: the notion of wilderness ontology.

Here are a few extracts from the original post:

Wilderness ontology or thought would consist of a radical posthumanism wherein philosophy no longer begins from the standpoint of anthropocentrism, humanism, or the subject-object, nature-culture couplet…

As an ontological concept, “wilderness” should not be taken to signify the opposition between civilization and nature, but rather two distinct ontological orientations: the vertical ontologies of humanist, correlationist thought where being is a correlate of thought versus posthumanist orientations of thought advocated by flat ontologies or immanence. In a “wilderness ontology”, humans are not sovereigns of being, but are among beings with no particularly privileged place…

[W]ilderness ontology should not be conceived as the absence of humans, but rather in terms of a flat plane of being where humans are among beings without enjoying any unilateral, overdetermining role. Just as the fur trappers of the early European Americas brought culture and civilization along with them while dwelling in an alien nature (what Morton-Badiou would call a nature populated by “intensely appearing” strange strangers) humans dwell in the wilderness without the wilderness being reduced to a correlate of thought or a vehicle for human intentions, meanings, signifiers, concepts, norms, etc. Civilization is a part of the wilderness. Culture is a part of the wilderness. Nature is a part of the wilderness. The subject is a part of the wilderness. The difference is that there is, in a wilderness ontology, no categorical distinction between the natural and the cultural, the human and the natural…

There is so much more so go read Bryant’s post in its entirety: here.

Besides the many interesting points Levi raises, what really knocked me for a loop was the fact that Levi arrived at the exact same set of conceptual resources I have been working on in private for years: the idea of the wilderness of being. I have only ever posted on this notion once (here), but failed to develop it in any way as powerfully and coherent as Levi now has.

I cannot emphasize enough how important this conception is in my theoretical repertoire. That Levi has now articulated what I was never willing to, and in a manner I am probably incapable of doing, is both alarming and liberating. It is alarming in that some of my deepest concerns have been generated from a subjectivity not my own; and it is liberating in through the confirmation that comes from knowing there are brighter souls out there coming to near identical conclusions. Perhaps I may not be as fundamentally delusional as I tend to assume. 

Below is extracted from statements I made in August of 2010:

What this latest trip really brought home, however, in just how much a need to think through and develop my central theoretical project: the pragmatic implications of an ontographic approach to the wilderness of being. As entities 'thrown' into the world we must find and make our way in a world full of wild, uncanny and strange beings and environments. We are confronted on all sides by forces, objects, flows and contexts which exceed our control, overflow our understandings and often try to destroy, devour or entangle us. Yet, there is also an abundance to Being that affords us the conditions from which we can build our lives. The rich flora and fauna of Being is simultaneously our mother, our matrix, and our calling. And everything hinges on how we explore this vast and intimate wilderness and what we can enact within it.

This manner of framing is at the core of everything I say, write and do. And I hope to develop my thoughts further whenever possible.

I can’t help but directly relate much of this to Heidegger’s early attempts at tracing out a “fundamental ontology”. In this context, “wilderness” is a particularity apt term for thinking the spaciousness, ‘wildness’ (precariousness, chaos) and only partially knowable nature of existence.

The Heideggerian nuance here is that ‘Being’ does not signify some all-encompassing absolute but, rather, it is a term deployed to prompt us to apprehend the transcendental structure of the background conditions which allow beings (actual entities) to exist and be disclosed in the first instance. And, for me, the process and practicality of reconsidering the raw vicissitudes of reality is decidedly cosmo-political. Without a developed ontographic imagination how are we going to be capable of engaging and exploring - and therefore intervening or adapting to - the realities of power, agency and change?

For me the notion of “the wilderness of being” evokes an deep ecological and anarchic sensibility at the core of material and existential life. Investigating the world through wild-thinking is essential for a pragmatic reconfiguration of everything hitherto assumed by our decadent and dying civil society.