1.

Consider the term “livestock.” With one word, a sentient animal with a full emotional life and a unique personality becomes a unit of stock, and then simply “meat.” Nothing about the animal has changed. What changed is how we are permitted to perceive it and treat it. The word did the work before the knife did, as calmly as a clerk stamping a form.

This is what I call conceptual overdetermination: letting how we interpret something stand in for what we encounter, mistaking the map for the territory, and then operating from that mistaken orientation. Rooted in encultured perception and ideologically charged cognitive models, it tends towards acts of semiotic violence against the so-called objects of perception, circumscribing them and inducting them into the service of human interests. Most languages are more than capable of this kind of thin-slicing reduction.

It also cages the one who does it. A cage built of concepts and dogma gathers experience into default perceptions and algorithmic decisions. By entrapping themselves in doxa this way, people fail to perceive, adapt to, or appreciate what is occurring around them and within them. They move through their days like passengers in an airport lounge, soothed by the signage, while the runway outside quietly subsides.

My claim in here is that the cage has become dangerous. We live in an age of consequence: institutions are faltering, norms are dissolving, and the biosphere is degrading. Thought that can only run on its inherited categories cannot adapt to that. We need thought that has been through domestication and come out the other side. I call it feral.

2.

I have been thinking about this again thanks to two posts by Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects, which gave me tinges of an old excitement: the free exchange of half-baked ideas and irreverent attitudes that animated the theory blogosphere in the late 2000s, a time of intellectual orgies and useful stupidities. In “Domestic Objects/Wild Things” Bryant returns to a notion he and I discussed nearly a decade ago (see here): a “wilderness of being.”

We live in a world of entropy. The things about us, whether they be vehicles, roads, homes, computers, or kitchen cabinets, are perpetually threatened by entropy. Driveways and walls crack, grass grows in the seams of sidewalks, coffee cups get chipped, cars get scratched and dented, decorative bushes in yards get overgrown and grow wildly in all sorts of different directions, and the doors of kitchen cabinets come off of their hinges. Everywhere domestic objects harbor anarchistic and insurgent wild things within them, constantly threatening to emancipate themselves so as to become free for their own adventures.

Anyone who has walked through a dead shopping mall knows this is true. The escalators stand frozen like fossil vertebrae, ferns colonize the food court, and the car park returns to the weather. The domestic objects of everyday experience, Bryant argues, are a synthesis of the symbolic and the material:

The domestic objects that make up our everyday experience in our concernful dealings with the world consist of a unity or synthesis of the symbolic and the material. The symbolic is like a net thrown across the earth, lacerating it and structuring it. It transforms the analog into the digital, the continuous into the discrete, or the smooth into the striated….

But the net never holds, and Bryant refuses to say what slips through it:

What, then, is the wild thing? If I gave an answer to this question, I fear I would undermine the entire point, for then I would transform the thing itself into the thought-thing, and thereby domesticate the wildness of the wild thing. I would involve myself in a performative contradiction.

I wonder how many different ways these kinds of statements have been issued by philosophers over the years. How many scholars have implored their readers to avoid the traps of foundationalism, reification, ideology, mythic givens and formalizing structures? Bryant restates the point eloquently: far too many intellectuals fail to acknowledge and give voice to the relative autonomy and vibrant potency of non-linguistic materials and systems. They mistake their conceptions and descriptions, what Bryant calls their “thought-things,” for the reality of things themselves.

Reality is always more than what we think or can think about it. The myriad real things and processes without and within us both overflow and underflow our conceptions of them. Any configuration of elements organized enough to enact causal effects does so through its own determining properties, relations and depth of organization. This amalgam, which I call assemblage-relations, expresses relatively independent embodied capacities, or what Jane Bennett has called “thing-power.” Matter is potent. To put it more philosophically, noumena are indeed fanged: possessed of independent causal force, and capable of acting upon us and the planet in ways unencumbered by what humans believe or say about them.

And they bite. Assemblage-relations cut through our casual caricatures and certainties, disrupting the comfort of habitual expectation, often in ways that generate sensations of weirdness, eeriness and horror, and sometimes significant trauma. A flood does not consult the floodplain map. It arrives in the cul-de-sac at three in the morning and rearranges the furniture.

As philosopher S.C. Hickman writes:

Reality cannot be reduced to Mind, Language, or Scientific description. Reality is an open in indefinable ever-changing realm of metamorphosis within which we are but one among many entities, each impinging upon the other in a carnival of existence. The point of this is that the Real exceeds our explanatory explanandum, and cannot be reduced to any description whatsoever. Instead it needs a speculative aesthetics, a poetry of existence – at once inventive, trope ridden, and empowered to lure what is hidden and unknown out of its dark places.”

Or, as philosopher Katerina Kolozova frames it in Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism:

The real is not necessarily a physical exteriority. Rather, it is an exteriority in the sense that it is outside the reach of our linguistic intervention, appropriation and re-invention. The real is an effect that is experienced as violence (as the implacable limit to our signifying automatism), as a linguistically non-negotiable limitation, as that which Lacan would call the tuché that happens to the (signifying) automaton in the form of trauma.

Kolozova’s qualification is crucial. The real is no remote country beyond the border of language. It is a limit we collide with from within, the thing that will not negotiate. Hold on to that; I return to it below.

3.

In a second post, Bryant recounts a student’s challenge:

“Professor Bryant”, he said, “throughout your talk you’re very critical of philosophy and how it converts the thing into the thought-thing or replaces the thing with the thought-thing. But isn’t the conversion of the thing into the thought-thing a good thing? Isn’t that how we know things? If we can’t convert the thing into the thought-thing, doesn’t that entail the ruin of philosophy and science?”

It’s a perceptive question, and it cuts right to the crux. Bryant’s response is equally insightful and ultimately instructive:

This is a very difficult point to articulate because I am essentially trying to indicate or allude to something that is outside of language, even if it is entangled in language all sorts of ways. When I make the claim that the cardinal sin of philosophy (and many other forms of theory besides) consists in converting the thing– in its materiality –into the thought-thing, I am trying to articulate the way in which the thing is replaced by the signifier. Any attempt to explain this is necessarily doomed to failure. It simply cannot be done because I am attempting to point at something that is outside of discourse, outside of language, outside of conceptuality; yet, in the very act of doing this, I bring the thing into language, discourse, and conceptuality.

The student is right. There is nothing we can say about potent materialities that doesn’t already entail a kind of capture, or domestication, by the very semiotic means humans use to register and make sense of experience. Our interpretations and classifications, our stories and poetics, all function to bring the wilder world of causal and sensory interaction into practical understanding, and thus partially to tame and control it. Everything we say or write about things, assemblages, flows and processes is a series of useful descriptions and caricatures, conjured to navigate a dynamic, multi-potent reality, or what Cornel West has so eloquently called “the funk” of life.

For West, “the funk” refers to the raw, messy, painful, and authentic reality of human existence taking place in the mix of things, with all it’s non-conceptual bodily suffering and struggle that ordinary language and society often tries to sanitize or hide. West argues that you cannot fake the funk; engaging with truth means confronting the often harsh realities of biophysical existence, decay, poverty, institutional wounds, and personal grief rather than living on the surface of ideological comfort. Drawing on humanist and prophetic traditions, living authentically means staying “funky, bloody, concrete, and corporeal”—wrestling with the mess of history with courage and compassion.

Yet even when people methodically open themselves to the wider richness of reality, reality continues to elude us. The objects of our attention remain more than they seem, even as they are entangled with the circuits of language and gesture that animate our all-too-human concerns. Their material properties and constituent relations stay resistant to the pretensions of conceptual domestication.

So wild thinking is not on offer. No one thinks from outside language. Every expedition into the wilderness of being sets out from a furnished room, carrying its vocabulary like a packed lunch.

4.

Here is where I part ways, in a friendly spirit, with Bryant’s framing. The trouble is the picture of an inside (language, thought) and an outside (the real). Kolozova has already given us the clue: the real is not a place beyond us. It is a limit met from within. There is no outside. Words, concepts and maps are not a screen between us and the world. They are things in the world, made by bodies, doing work among other bodies. The map is a piece of the territory. It can flood too.

If that is right, the alternative to domesticated thought is not wild thought. It is feral thought.

A feral animal is not a wild one. It was domesticated, and then it got out. Think of the dogs that inherit an evacuated suburb: they still know what a door is, and they no longer wait at it. A feral creature carries its breeding with it and must make a living anyway, in conditions no one arranged for its benefit. Robyn Ferrell’s manifesto says it exactly: feral philosophy is “thinking that was domesticated but has gone wild.” It matters that it was domesticated first. Feral philosophy is often unfinished, but it is not untutored.

Feral philosophy is therefore post-domestication, in the same sense that some thinking is post-conventional. Conventional thought takes its inherited categories, norms and authorities as simply the way things are. Pre-conventional thought has never learned them. Post-conventional thought has learned them thoroughly, knows them as conventions, and can therefore use, bend or abandon them as the situation demands.

This dissolves Bryant’s performative contradiction. We do not need to say what the wild thing is. We need to change how our thought-things behave: kept on a loose tether, exposed to weather, expected to earn their keep in practice, and dropped when they don’t.

5.

None of this is merely poetic. In recent decades a significant body of research has converged around a cluster of scientific theories often called “4EA,” and it explains both why thought gets domesticated and why domesticated thought fails when conditions change. Following Mark Rowlands (2010), cognition is:

• Embodied: it involves bodily structures and processes, and not the brain alone. Bodies register a changing world before concepts do.
• Embedded: it functions only in relation to an environment. A way of thinking is always tuned to some particular set of conditions.
• Enacted: it consists in what an organism does. Knowing is a practice and a performance.
• Extended: it runs through the organism’s surroundings. We think with tools, records, routines and institutions.
• Affective: it is steered by emotional attunement, by salience thresholds that mark what is inviting or threatening, and what matters at all.

Together these propose an alternative to dualist philosophies of “mind,” emphasizing how brain, body and ecosystem are inseparably intertwined and work together to co-create, or “bring forth,” semiotically rich experiential worlds. As early pioneers Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) write:

“the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems …this domain does not exist ‘out there’ in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination.”

Years later, Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher (2014) put it more sharply:

“Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems…participate in the generation of meaning …engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.”

This changes what a concept is. A concept is a habit of sense-making, laid down by past couplings between bodies and their surroundings. Domestication, then, is no mere philosopher’s error. It is what happens when such habits settle into a stable niche. For a long time our niche was unusually stable: a mild climate, durable institutions, norms that mostly held. Habits tuned to it worked so well that they stopped looking like habits and started looking like reality. That is conventional thought: a mind climate-controlled to the temperature of its own assumptions.

Now run the list again with that niche coming apart:

• If cognition is embedded, thought tuned to conditions that are disappearing misfires. It keeps solving yesterday’s problems.
• If cognition is extended, then when institutions falter our thinking falters with them, because much of it was never in our heads.
• If cognition is affective, then categories like “resource” and “livestock” do more than mislabel. They set what is allowed to register as mattering, and so they numb us to the signals we most need.
• If cognition is enacted, we cannot think our way out first and act later. New understanding comes only through new practice.
• If cognition is embodied, the body’s unease before a degrading biosphere is evidence that the concepts have yet to catch up with.

In “Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency” (2005), Ezequiel Di Paolo names what is at stake: adaptivity, the capacity to sense that one’s own regulation is drifting toward breakdown and to change it. Domesticated thought has lost this capacity. It reads every novelty through the old categories, like a pilot who trusts a painted horizon over the tilting view from the cockpit. Closing ourselves off through conceptual overdetermination pre-limits our ability to intelligently navigate, adjust, collaborate or, perhaps most importantly, adapt. Feral thought is adaptivity recovered at the level of concepts. To be feral is to keep one’s schooling while losing one’s enclosure.

There is an ethical side as well. If we are in mutually impacting, co-determining relationships with other embodied agents and material systems, then imposing our specific mode of being, relating or knowing on others hampers every attempt to become intimate with, learn from, and form ethical relations with the multitudes at play in the cosmos. To obtain a fuller awareness of the conditions we share, we must find ways to remain open, conceptually as well as existentially, to the ways that more-than-human realities exist and express themselves.

As eco-theorist David Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996):

“Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more- than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of the wolves and the honking of the geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

6.

Shaun Gallagher (2014) has pointed out that embodiment and enaction suggest a type of pragmatist philosophy and orientation to life and thought that explicitly rejects conceptual overdetermination. He argues that pragmatism can even be understood as a forerunner of embodied, enactive and extended approaches. This fits my own understanding of both.

John Dewey wrote in 1916 that “the brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it.” And neo-pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom (2008, p. 178) has commented:

“a founding idea of pragmatism is that the most fundamental kind of intentionality (in the sense of directedness towards objects) is the practical involvement with objects exhibited by a sentient creature dealing skillfully with its world.”

Taken together, 4EA research and pragmatism converge on an interpretation of intellectual activity as a derivative and emergent capacity, following from the material and energetic interplay between brain, body and world. Reality is not something the brain imposes or merely constructs. It is a relationship that brains, bodies, objects, flows and forces are having, on relatively equal footing as causal factors. Communication and intellection become less about mobilizing ready-made conceptions or transcendental Truth claims, Bryant’s “thought-things,” and more about the pragmatic coordination of ecologically embedded sentient bodies performatively navigating situations and worlds. Conceptuality is one aspect of a much thicker and mostly non-linguistic relational process: a series of existential games that particular kinds of bodies play among other bodies and forces.

Ludwig Wittgenstein gives us the linguistic version. Words acquire meaning only through use, and use is inexorably tied up with what people do together. The classic example is the “builder’s language” of §2 of Philosophical Investigations (1953):

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

What is important here is that the builder and his assistant use acknowledged signifiers in order to do something in the world: namely, collaboratively build. Nothing more is needed, because the words are part of the building. The speaking of a language, Wittgenstein concluded, is part of an activity, a form of life. The meaning of a word is found in the pragmatic use made of it by actual people in the stream of life.

And language-games never sit still. They evolve as people use and reuse phrases, framings and arguments in new and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. Linguists call this semantic drift; I call it semiotic mutation. It renders philosophical thinking, and all discourse, always already provisional and revisable. Language, in other words, is already feral at the edges, slipping its leash in every schoolyard and chat window. Domestication is the effort to pretend otherwise.

It is this provisional and intrinsically open, yet embedded and entangled, character of language and cognition that I believe philosophers and theorists ought to lean into. Doing so mitigates conceptual capture (dogma) and overdetermination (doxa), and allows the potency of bodies, systems and flows to show up for us more earnestly in the many negotiations that constitute daily life.

7.

What should be clear by now is the call for more relational, embodied and open philosophical approaches that axiomatically oppose conceptual domestication in order to gain increased intimacy with the realities within which we exist. Such approaches echo anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s call for a “permanent decolonization of thought,” in which we maintain intellectual and affective openness to the ontologies and orientations of different peoples on ethical and practical grounds.

To accomplish such openness entails first and foremost a feralization of philosophical thinking that habitually refuses dogmatic self-sufficiency in favor of wildly pragmatic and critical descriptions, classifications and communicative exchanges. It requires a methodical deflation of the human tendency to over-determine reality according to all-too-human categories and concerns.

My proposal is that the loosening of domesticated thought begins with a practice of axiomatic negation: an intellectual protocol and cognitive cue for auto-deflating habitual and dogmatic tendencies and closures within thought itself. It is a dispositional logic of refusal: a refusal of closure and certainty, and a refusal to be captured by institutional or idiosyncratic ideologies. It says nothing about what reality ultimately is. It is a standing reminder attached to every concept, like the warning stencilled on a wing: this is a tool, and the world is not finished with you. Practiced among others, it becomes a kind of epistemic diplomacy: engaging different ways of knowing without appointing oneself judge of which is real.

Such cognitive adjustments, in Marilyn Strathern’s words, allow us “to create the conditions for new thoughts” (1988: 20).

As I have written elsewhere:

What rests beneath our zombie delusions and mythologies are countless sensuous bodies. What is revealed is a world composed of material entities in energetic interactions that exist within a vast mesh of ecological metabolism. Bodies jostle and exchange in, against, across and through one another in what we could conceive as transcorporeal (‘across-body’). What is of value in this view is that while our cognitions are unreliable, shot through with myth-making, we nonetheless have our embodied sapience, the wisdom of bodies that are practically engaged in a world structured and coordinated by and as assemblages of other bodies.

Instead of continuing the habit of over-coding, we can start to understand our everyday encounters as consequentially entangled, embodied, enactive and pragmatic dances within mixed material-energetic life conditions.

Oh so meta, I know. But not even “meta” can escape the corrosive yet liberating effects of axiomatic negation. What remains in its wake is the need to re-prioritize embodied practical encounters and skillful perception, and to cultivate an openness to the relative autonomies, surprises, patterns and overt materiality of worldly existence. This openness enacts a perpetual unsettling of the privilege and control that language, logos, ideology and culture have been granted, or have violently installed.

What might evolve from these shifts and refusals are new species of abstractions: feral philosophies that thrive on auto-reflexivity and are animated by deeply pragmatic concerns, nosing through the wreckage of the seminar room for whatever still works.

8.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next” — Ursula K. Le Guin

To accept and operate from the inherent limitations and mutability of language and thought is to make explicit the productive character of the unknown, that which always exceeds capture by conceptuality. Tarrying with perpetual uncertainty activates our creativity by opening our thinking to unexplored terrains of possibility.

As sociologist Andrew Pickering puts it:

What if the unknowable was not simply a blank to be filled or a defect to be rectified, but instead, an inescapable facet of everyday existence, which continually regenerates itself as we attempt to know and interact with the world?

In an age of consequence that question is practical. Ideas are now judged by what they do, and the biosphere is doing the grading. Economies that treat rivers as “resources” and forests as “inventory” are running on domesticated thought, and the fanged world is answering. Institutions built for a stable planet keep issuing the old commands, like a builder calling “slab!” on a site that has already washed away. Their control rooms are still lit, the dials still read normal, and the reservoir behind the dam is a bed of cracked mud.

How many of our personal and social problems are the unpleasant result of a dogmatic adherence to some ideology or prior belief? How many of us stunt our learning and ability to adapt by interpreting our experiences through default positions and habitual reference?

The feralization of thinking is an opportunity for reprioritizing our concerns and for behaving in less dogmatic and less ideologically programmable ways. An appreciation for the unknown and the undomesticated anchors epistemic humility and, with this, intensifies and expands our curiosity. It is with humble curiosity that most of the dazzling creativity and innovation found throughout the planet has been brought into being. It is also a form of solidarity with life: an openness to the potencies of other beings that refuses to make them relative to human thought, even as human thought interprets them.

As Bryant suggests:

We cannot dispense with theory and theorization– here I think my student is absolutely right –which strives to grasp the thing in thought, but we must theorize in such a way that our thought perpetually marks the difference between the thing and the thought-thing, that refuses the substitution of the thing with the thought-thing, and that calls on us to place us in a space of encounters that require us to encounter the other of thought and that challenge our conceptual encounters. Like the psychoanalyst who exposes themselves to the midden pit of the analysand’s speech, we must open ourselves to encounters with materiality of all kinds that challenge the reduction of the thing to thought and the false sense of mastery that the thought-thing brings.

Let’s perpetually mark that difference, again and again. And in doing so generate new species of abstractions with which we can philosophize in more embodied, relational and ecologically sane ways.

Feral philosophy is aspirational, but very well become a survival skill.

○● coda ○●

Feral Philosophy

feral philosophy is real philosophy, only wilder.
feral philosophy is thinking that was domesticated but has gone wild.
feral philosophy began as academic, scholarly, studied, but turned surly, stoic, comedic, poetic. It became wild and unkempt through neglect or lack of care. It ran off, chastised, tail between legs. It was driven off because it was not thought attractive to tidy minds. It escaped captivity, desperate to breathe fresh air.
feral philosophy can be pungent, awkward, stand-alone, weather-proof. It can be skewiff, cantankerous, skittish, even fugitive. It isn’t well-tempered or pragmatic. It sniffs out conventional or received wisdom.
feral philosophy is often unfinished, but it is not untutored. It matters that feral philosophy was domesticated before it went wild.
It shouldn’t be confused with marketing, new age or eastern philosophy. Its roots are in western philosophy, gone wild on the vine. Its pedigree goes back to Heraclitus, not Confucius. It’s a descendent of Aristotle, not Buddha. It is neither resigned nor layback. It is ‘old age’ as opposed to ‘new age’.
feral philosophy is an aspiration.

– Robyn Ferrell