Hannah Wilder

Date of Award

2024

First Advisor

Em Rooney

Abstract

This is a manifesto. This manifesto is based on the concept that philosophical frameworks of knowing and aesthetics form a particular culture from which sociopolitical ideology is made. Given the political agency of visual and philosophical culture, I will propose an alternative contemporary way of knowing to critique systems based on reason, hermeneutics, observation, and plurality. What I am arguing for is ferality: a reinstallation of wildness. In doing so, transitively, I will propose an alternative to the sociopolitical ideologies that formed from philosophical traditions based on perception and binary. I propose an alternative, because, as I will lay out in this paper, deductive, pluralistic, and reason-based ideologies are used to justify genocide, colonialism, and systemic oppression. This is a proposed ideology rooted in the wild and abject. When I describe ferality I am referring to the embrace of wildness and abjection through a study of literal decomposition as well as figurative or philosophical disassimilation of binary matrix between the self and other, signifier and signified, and part and whole. I will pinpoint the root of abstraction of aesthetic and philosophical abstraction in abject, absence, and mingling. I will then suggest a reframed ideology in opposition to hermeneutic and observational systems of knowing in order to cut into violent and oppressive sociopolitical systems.

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