Wilding Consciousness: Towards a speculatively Tentacular Thinking-With

Abstract

For Donna Haraway, a tentacular life is relational and sticky, a moving-creating-living-with that is at heart sympoietic and entangled. Wilding, as a speculative pragmatic and tentacular practice, involves thinking about the world in ecological terms – that is, neither a world of objects or one of fixed and separated subjects with a distanced perspective of the world. Instead, wilding involves a tactic of embracing an entangled and multi-storied approach to thinking. In this article the question of the possibility of ecological rather than individualized consciousness is speculated upon through the tentacular. Drawing on William James’ impersonal conception of consciousness and contemporary biology’s insights into the relationality of life and thinking, this paper asks: what would a sympoietic concept of consciousness mean? How would this shift the valuing of intelligences towards activism and allow us to learn from those, human and nonhuman, traditionally denied intellectual value? Article received: April 28, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper