Orientation
Feral Relations Acts Collectives Futures
—Feral
Becoming connotes the recurrent act of deconstructing boundaries between bodies, constructing malleable new edges in which both identities exist simultaneously—a continual performance of immanence and difference. As performance artists and editors of this series, we sense hope in repositioning our energy towards care for our human/other relations. The BECOMING series enacts this by moving away from sentimentality and eco-appreciation and towards the obscure, critical, and oppositional manifestations of becoming after the end of the world. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects,¹ we start by shifting our attention from the panic of ever-coming catastrophe towards a strategy for living and dying on a planet in need of maintenance and repair. This premise is not rooted in doom and pessimism but rather in an acknowledgement that we cannot be eco-saviours and undo our ending (and the endings of millions of other species). Instead, we must enact our present and future with compassion and integrity, dedicating ourselves to caretaking practices that too often remain invisible as we work to mend through thoughtful practices of deconstruction.
In November 2020, we put out an open call for submissions to becoming—Feral, the second in the BECOMING series. We envision becoming—Feral as a book of beasts (bestiarum vocabulum) based on bestiaries of the Medieval period that contained accumulative and malleable collections of entries. Yet, we intended to veer away from centering Western moral allegories around descriptions of animal habits or characteristics to instead use this format to investigate the complex relationships between human/other-animals and the shifting categories of wild/feral/domestic.
Across this so-called book of beasts, we have listed all entries by the common name of the animal in the language chosen by the contributor. For the purposes of disambiguation, however, we have also included the scientific taxonomy in Latin. We recognize that scientific taxonomies are problematic epistemological practices that have (and continue to) contribute to the colonial and capitalist projects of domestication, dominance, and extractive exploitation.² Thus, we hope our attempt to centre common names helps us celebrate the more mundane and vernacular forms of knowledge of other-animals including those of popular media and non-western knowings which tend to be ignored or devalued in mainstream science and philosophy. Further, by using language that is more flexible and particular to an author, place, or moment in time, this collection aims to support alternative-knowings that are responsive and response-able to the particular people and places that need refuge and caretaking. While all entries are in English, we have included each entry in the contributor’s preferred version of English, the most prominent being British or American English. As we, the co-editors of the series, live in the U.S. and Scotland, respectively, this orientation is written in both.
By February of 2021, after receiving numerous submissions, the managing editors selected 72 contributions from across a range of media, genres, and disciplines for this print publication and digital collection. In addition to working with our longtime collaborators Chessa Adsit-Morris and Rebekka Saeter, we were grateful to welcome three contributing editors. Through the Feral Worlds research group, funded by the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Addie Hopes, emery jenson, and Sabrina Manero joined our team. That the seven of us came to this work from divergent perspectives and interests contributed to the variety of styles and expressions encompassed in this print and digital collection.
In many ways, the habitualisation of virtual communication over the 2020/2021 COVID-19 pandemic created a new standard for fluid personal communication between editors and contributors. Coming from a curatorial vantage, each editor worked closely with the contributors to amplify their unique voice and ideas, eschewing an overarching style for how to craft an entry. We routinely met with contributors via video conferencing or phone calls to develop concepts, conduct interviews, and gather in different configurations to energize the contributor’s voice, enhance our critical engagement, and discuss the many theoretical, artistic, and practical ways we were grappling with the provocation of becoming-feral. As we worked on and with these contributions, we began to articulate four themes that provided a useful mechanism for categorizing the entries that you will notice in this collection. As we have come to understand, feral defies clean delineation and as such the categorisation of entries is raw, uncertain, and at times contentious. The entries in this collection do not provide definitions nor answers but nodes from which to move towards a postmodern temporality of zones, prisms, and multiplicities; becomings beget rhizomes.
Feral Relations
Haraway asserts that “Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible.”³
As articulated by our collaborator emery jenson, pieces that fall into the category of Feral Relations demonstrate how ferality can generate precisely from the interface of different species. Through the generation of new ecological relationships, the refiguration of existing ones, and the rearticulation of ongoing ways humans and animals relate, the pieces in this section demonstrate the making of oddkin and the need to be response-able—to replace a list of rules with inquiry. Haraway’s conception of response-ability is an invitation to cultivate an approach to ethics as an ongoing practice of inquiring with each other about how to respond to the complexities that we non-optionally find ourselves to be part of. While feral relations are not always chosen nor wanted, examining these multispecies entanglements—from the heartwarming to the tragic—can contribute to the cultivation of response-ability to other bodies, including baby bodies, water bodies, plant bodies, and animal bodies.
Feral Acts
Hopfinger posits “the enactment of performance itself—its liveness and actuality—might do our unavoidable entanglements with dynamic more-than-human vibrant matter and processes.” She asks, “can performance expose human-nonhuman entanglements through its practices and modes of doing?”⁴
Feral Acts presents entries that enact ferality, dedomestication, or (be)wilderment in their own unique performative ways. The postmodern view of ‘performativity’ does not recognise ‘performance’ as intrinsically artistic or theatrical, but as action that pervades the fabric of the social, political, and material world. It is an inalienable part of what constitutes embodied and lived knowledges and ways of being. That said, in this section, artistic practice—both still and time-based—takes central focus as we attempt to answer or activate Hopfinger’s question on performance’s potential to do the ecological beyond observation and speculation. Through this section, we aim to highlight acts that blur the lines of separation between human and other-animals, activating an urgent messiness between the problematic divides between wild/feral/domestic.
Feral Collectives
“A becoming-animal,” Deleuze and Guattari say, “always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity.”⁵
The entries aligned within Feral Collectives are concerned with the complex, historical, and dynamic practices of multispecies collaboration and cooperation (i.e., sympoeisis). These entries touch on the interconnectedness of humans and wider-animal ecosystems and the collective structures that arise in more-than-human life despite, or in spite of, human involvement. Collectives are not always harmonious, with humans and other-animals sometimes forced into combinations whose impacts can range from beautiful to terrorizing. The entries in Feral Collectives cautiously approaches a horizontality in which other-animals show their agency within human-oriented events. By categorizing these entries as collective actions, we aim to question, provoke, and suggest a dismantling of human-exceptionalism through cross-species collaboration. Beyond its complications, this section playfully and cheerfully approaches collective movements as embodied ecological philosophy that is enacting allied possibilities.
Feral Futures
Ramírez and Ravetz propose that “attending to feral futures means letting go of the labels and distinctions that become attached to both types of futures we are accustomed to dealing with—predictable futures and unpredictable futures, and especially desirable and undesirable prospects.”⁶
Feral Futures encompasses a wide range of works tackling the intricacies of temporality. Speculation, imagining, and (re)imaging become ways to think through interdependent evolutions while also activating possible pasts and past futures as fluid moments of (re)action. Media and technology act as tools of the future by capturing, mediating, and processing new modes of being for humans and other-animals, playing a significant role in our collective becomings: becoming-cyborg, becoming-digital, becoming-extinct. Becomings in their essence are future-oriented, and here we ask you to turn into the past to reach forward.
In becoming—Feral, we propose that a book is not a static mode of communication but can be a performative and embodied engagement with printed materials. Thus, throughout the publication you will need to shift your orientation, disrupting the book’s initial proposed orientation. Some pages suggest you encounter them vertically, while the Feral Futures section asks that you turn upside-down and thumb pages backward to disrupt the quiet notion of a linear and progressive future that moves in right-left horizontality. As we open collaborative, cooperative, and collective ways of being, we orient ourselves to different directions simultaneously. As such, we were also keen to publish dynamic and time-based art and action through the digital collection. The becoming—Feral Digital Collection can be found here on becoming.ink, which houses multimedia and extended entries of video art, audio/music, interviews, and photographic essays.
We move with (and have been moved by) the orientations of the entries and invite you to do the same.
Josh Armstrong
Series Editor, BECOMING
Objet-a Creative Studio
& Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
—Glasgow, Scotland
Alexandra Lakind
Series Editor, BECOMING
University of Wisconsin–Madison
—Chicago, Illinois, USA
Endnotes
1. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
2. See Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,” Third Text 32, no. 2-3 (March – May 2018): 163-175.
3. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
4. Sarah Hopfinger, “Doing the Ecological Through Performance,” Studies in Theatre and Performance (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2020.1757319.
5. Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1987).
6. Rafael Ramírez and Jerome Ravetz, ” Feral Futures: Zen and Aesthetics,” Futures 43, no. 4 (May 2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.005.