The Horror and the Splendor
Considering the origins of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project and the outcomes of its first phase in order to better envision its next phase.
The (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project was conceived out of feelings of profound anguish, despair, and outrage.
I had just completed a sprawling and ambitious genealogy of human sociality, spanning the approximately one hundred millennia between the birth of our symbolic species and the naming of the Anthropocene, and I had emerged from this immense intellectual and emotional journey finally able to fully recognize, for the first time in my life, a horror that I had been too loath to fully recognize before.
The horror that I had come to recognize was this: emerging some five centuries ago out of the crucible of the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the New World and the forced migration and enslavement of peoples out of Africa, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy — a power formation initially constructed by Europeans frustrated by their position on the periphery of a “pre-modern world system” — has been progressively devaluing and devastating the great abundance and diversity of landforms, lifeforms, and lifeways on our planet at an ever increasing pace, and the “modern world system” that now prevails over the entire Earth is hurtling towards planetary ecocide.
This horror is, of course, no secret to anyone. Like the nakedness of the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Emperor's New Clothes”, this horror is unfolding in plain sight for all to see. And yet, as in Andersen’s tale, the “mature” adults in positions of responsibility who can see the horror unfolding before them and enveloping them are refusing to recognize and name the horror. The only ones who are presently calling it as they see it are weyward children and adults “immature” enough to affirm the insights and intuitions of their own weyward inner child.
If we lived in healthy communities or in communities that aspired to health, a day would not go by in which all adults claiming positions of responsibility did not gather to honestly contemplate and earnestly conspire to confront the profound horror unfolding before them and enveloping them. The terms ”ethnocide” and “ecocide”, or alternative terms of comparable force and consequence, would be on the tips of our tongues, at the tops of all of our news broadcasts, listed as hot topics on every meeting agenda of import, and featured in all critical commentaries on the most esteemed projects in the arts and letters of our time. The fact that this is not the case is part and parcel of what I like to call, following Amitav Ghosh, our “great derangement”.
In our great derangement, we have come to embrace terms of far less force and consequence than “ethnocide” and “ecocide”: we speak circuitously about struggles to achieve “diversity”, “equity”, “inclusion”, and “sustainability”, and we conceive of these struggles as running up against “(under)development”, “financialization”, “globalization”, “industrialization”, “modernization”, “social alienation”, “structural inequities”, “systemic injustices”, etc. In so doing, we only attend to symptoms of the ethnocidal and ecocidal projects of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its rivals and would-be successors.
Having finally become attuned to our great derangement, I have been attending deeply to the manner in which my conversations with family, friends, and fellow intellectuals work to avoid any explicit and sustained mention of the fact that a planetary ecocide is being advanced by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs, their proxies and redeemers, and their rivals and would-be successors. I have been marking how little time I spend conversing with others about how we are experiencing the unfolding ethnocidal and ecocidal horror, and I have been marking how little time I spend conspiring with others to counter the ethnocidal and ecocidal forces that are devastating life on our planet. Attending to and marking all of this is what led to my profound anguish, despair, and outrage.
You see, I have come to believe that laughter, love, and fellowship should serve as stimulants to heighten our experience of the horror and to enhance our capacity to counter the ethnocidal and ecocidal forces that are perpetrating and perpetuating the horror. Sadly, however, I have found that laughter, love, and fellowship have been perverted in order to serve as anesthetics — they too often serve to numb us to the horror and to enable us to overlook our complicity with the forces of ethnocide and ecocide. Anguished, despairing, and outraged at this deathly reality, I have been seeking to alter it somehow.
My instincts and conditioning are such that my strongest impulse has been to write about the horror. Hot on the heels of completing my genealogy of sociality, I published Other Related Matters and my Four Essays on Reparations, two collections of texts that ask their readers to recognize the horror and to consider the ways in which they might confront it. Then, following the publication of these texts, I conceived of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project as a periodical provocation to my family, friends, and fellow travelers to conspire with me to counter the ethnocidal and ecocidal forces perpetrating and perpetuating the horror.
The first phase of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project has mostly been about conceptualizing and communicating a vision of what it means to counter the forces of ethnocide and ecocide. Let me recount some of the highlights from this phase of the project.
I began the project by affirming a “radical everydayness”, by agitating for the “overturning of humanism”, and by entreating my readers to think “beyond disciplines” and to conceive of themselves as “world-makers”. I then proceeded to attend to the problem of “countering power” and “multiplying confluences”, doing so generally at first but turning quickly enough to the specific problem of countering imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy by multiplying confluences of creolizing, queering, and communizing processes. I reflected deeply on my own personal history in order to discuss the pitfalls of countering ruling and disciplinary powers by submitting matters to greater administrative controls, and I proposed that we ought to counter the normalizing and optimizing powers that presently prevail over us by practicing the art of “fugitive planning”. Next, taking matters a few steps further, I outlined the four projects in fugitive planning that I consider to be pivotal to countering today’s prevailing power formations: the project of “planning to flee from schooling”, the project of “planning to flee from financing”, the project of “planning to flee from calendaring and clocking”, and the project of “planning to flee from profiling”. Lastly, and in the midst of it all, I also wrote a series of dispatches that sought to encourage my readers to recognize and name the ethnocidal and ecocidal horror of our time; this series of dispatches included the following: “A Case in Point”, “Ecoregionalism“, “Late Davosian Holocausts”, “Proxies and Redeemers”, “Three Freedoms”, “The War on Terra”, “The Great Derangement”, and “Putting the Pandemic in Context”.
It was difficult for me to devote so much time and energy to recognizing and writing about the gut-wrenching horror of our time without any institutional support and while maintaining a job that demands my dissociation from the horror and leaves me with too little time to properly care for my own loved ones. And yet I feel as if this first phase of my project may turn out to have been the easiest phase. All that I really had to do during this first phase was write down things that I had already discovered and recognized to be true. By contrast, the next phase of this project, as I am currently conceiving of it, will demand that I make myself more vulnerable by putting theory into practice and attempting to make new discoveries thereby.
I will continue to contextualize and theorize the horror of our time in and through these dispatches, but the next phase of this project will be about engaging in and documenting the splendid failures and successes of a practical initiative in world-making: the Urban Guerrilla Permaculture Campaign.
I invite you to follow the link above to learn more about this world-making initiative. Suffice it to say here and now that I imagine it to be an appropriable and scalable initiative “to make artful reparations with respect to and for Mother Earth.”
Whereas the first phase of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project focused on the horror of our time, the second phase of the project will, hopefully, focus on the splendor of enabling untimely becomings for people(s) seeking live and love in spite of and against the horror of our time. It will be difficult to make this phase shift but, I am finding hope in some words that Rilke wrote to raise the spirits of a young poet, “We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; […] that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”
