[[ from BOGNA KONIOR & YVETTE GRANATA ]] 

Philosophy-in-the-wild is an ongoing, collaborative, multimedia and multi-platform non-philosophy project, devoted to re-wilding philosophy beyond its institutional (decisionist, androcentric etc) limitations. Conceptually, it operates at the intersection of Laruelle / Schmid non-standard method, de-colonial theory and the ontological turn, as well as feminist philosophy. By means of both artistic and academic research, it utilizes text as well as performance and new media art to unveil an underdetermined wilderness of thought.

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What would it mean to have a wild epistemology of the threshold?

In thinking about borders movable and immovable, we propose a ‘holding-of’ and ‘staying-with’ the threshold, which becomes a mutable passage of realist invention. ‘Wild’ philosophy, a question of collaboration across the nature / culture divide, presents a model of artistic research that is also a non-standard epistemological practice. A practice of thought and bodily motion that is rather about ‘unveiling’ the already present divergence of epistemologies, rather than speculating about ‘new’ concepts.

Wild epistemology is an integrative approach, rather than a synthesis: it does not fool itself in seeking unity, where there is none. In a multiple world that perpetually scatters itself into diverse ontologies, a synthesis of epistemologies is a dream tinted with nightmarish undertones. Rather than seeking to subsume knowledges and ways of knowing into an overdetermined block, philosophy-in-the-wild advocates for an integrative threshold, which is able to ‘hold’ different epistemologies together without forcing them into a melting pot. A threshold allows a ‘staying-together,’ but not a mapping or a delineation. A threshold is not a border, it prevents the synthesis that maps allow. A wild threshold is not a synthesis of all existing discourses and contexts of the threshold, but a multi-dimensional object that allows a “hold” of both sides locked in a predatory mimesis.

Unlike borders, thresholds are not inherently oppositional, even though both operate on inherently spatial terms. A wild threshold assumes a non-wilderness somewhere, posing questions about how dominant epistemologies construct its excluded ‘others.’ Capitalist, industrial, colonial, modernist, and patriarchal epistemologies have been vigilant in delineating their borders of civilization and wilderness, reason and unreason, humanity and bestiality, positioning one as the realm of cultural representation and social discourses, and the other as a conceptually mute space from which resource and representation can be extracted, but which can never on its own act philosophically. Erecting a wild threshold is a matter of undoing this border. A wild threshold melts into its territory like a parasite, sinking its teeth into knowledges that need to be brought together in a patient practice of co-presence, rather than understanding.

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