I WISH TO SPEAK a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil,— to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization.1
In the spirit of Thoreau, I wish to speak a word for wildness, for unruly complexity and the unfolding potentiality of systems, against a reductive “realist” conception of nature. The realist concept of nature, an object-oriented one situating it primarily as other to the human, dominates public discourse and is a symptom of biophobia, holding us back from thinking the depth of unruly ecological complexity. A revealing example of this conception’s hold over the cultural imaginary is the 2012 documentary A Fierce Green Fire,2which begins and ends its selective history of the environmental movement with claims to the effect that if humans do not act now we are at great risk of losing what is left of nature. The understanding of nature expressed here is exemplary of a romantic realist conception that situates nature as a kind of lost object outside of the human, in need of being protected, and to which one must reconnect.3 In what follows, I argue for a continuing critique of the concept of nature to reveal the concept’s ideological underpinnings and insufficiency for thinking the complexity of ecological systems. As an alternative to the concept of nature, I develop a concept of wildness that conveys more adequately the unruly complexity of ecological systems, reveals our epistemological limitations as corporeal beings within such systems, and aids us in understanding the need for nurturing ecological consciousness in this time of ecological crisis.
We are never outside of what nature is meant to indicate, needing to reconnect, as in romantic ecology’s melancholic desire to regain the lost nature, to hear again its song and live according to its rhythms. The phenomenological and post-structuralist tradition has long been attempting to think the human immersion in the world, where mind cannot be separated from body and body from world; the three are different facets of an unfolding, dynamic, holistic, system, not a collection of objects understood from an external vantage point of presumed objectivity. In this way, may Derrida’s4statement that there is no outside of text be understood as asserting not the absence of a real world beyond the human but rather the human’s inextricable immersion within symbolic systems, outside of which one may not step to understand or ground them in some extra-symbolic knowing.5 In this same way, we would do well to resist the realist impulse, driving much ecocritical thought and nature writing, to understand the word nature as having a stable referent external to the human, as, in other words, not only a word but an object that can be lost, controlled, reconnected with, and can nurture, bring solace, act with fury, etc. As a term, nature is, as Raymond Williams has outlined,6 extremely vexed in how it is understood and so vexed, too, are the ways in which humans act in accordance to these complicated understandings and misrecognitions of word and (non)referent.
Thinking in terms of wildness will facilitate ecocritical theory of all kinds to extend inquiry beyond the restrictive bounds established by the concept of nature and the traditional practices of thought supporting it, while placing in question the very notion of stable boundaries between concepts and things. Wildness is a good complement, for example, to Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence. Nixon’s example of the slow violence at work within Lawrence Summers’ plan to shift toxicity to the third world illustrates the dominant logic of nature as a fixed board within the game of capitalism. Within this game, movements of pieces on the surface are dictated by economic and political factors that view borders as real boundaries (most importantly, in this case, ecological boundaries), even as the practices of global capitalism increasingly reveal borders as primarily symbolic fictions considered permeable to free flows of trade and unilateral flows of toxic waste, but resistant to the free movement of people and toxicity. In a time in which something as seemingly innocuous as a piece of micro-plastic functions as an ecotone for microorganisms, allowing them to make transoceanic voyages, thinking wildness as unruly complexity rather than nature as an object-oriented externality allows one to critique the assumptions behind Summers’ plan of shifting toxicity like game pieces on the risk board of nature. While depositing toxic waste in Africa may place it out of sight and so out of the first world mind, toxicity works according to the dictates of wildness rather than of political and economic expediency, bleeding out slowly and invisibly beyond the borders believed to conceal it and to protect first world stability from it.7Correspondingly, our inability to see beyond the surface of what we call nature focuses our attention on the tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster and makes it difficult to understand the full complexity of the invisible, radioactive creeping death that continues to spread outward from Fukushima through the planet’s biosphere. The apocalyptic potentiality resonating in Fukushima8 and all acts of toxic slow violence exemplify the need to think beyond a naïve reconnection with nature to our complex immersion within the wildness of ultimately uncontrollable systems, to endeavor to view the invisible through the imaginative capacity of ecological consciousness.9
The agency of the invisible and what it reveals about our permeable bodily being and the complexity of the unseen world of which we are inextricably a part has long been a source of anxiety and one given figuration by the genre of horror. As a sub-genre of horror, apocalypse narratives have functioned predominantly as a containment strategy promoted by the belief that there can be an end to nature.10 I argue that the apocalyptic preoccupation with the end is tied to the realist concept of nature and the biophobia that supports it: in expressing a vision of the end, apocalypse unites the visual dimension of ecological crisis, and wildness more generally, with the invisible. The apocalypse genre attempts to give shape to the invisible,11 and in doing so, exposes the need for the revelation of the wildness of ecological complexity and the development of ecological consciousness as the imaginative ability to understand what resists our thought. Nature as a concept is inextricably linked to the representable and visible, as with the sublime and picturesque appreciation of the surface of phenomena, but wildness as a concept facilitates the thinking of the invisible interrelationships and unruly complexity beneath the surface, which takes emphasis away from what can be ordered, like a landscape, and places it on the limits of all mastery through imposed order. I begin, then, by considering the significance of apocalypse as concept, narrative, and event for facilitating an understanding of biophobia and what it reveals about wildness.

Every Day Is a Little Apocalypse

It is my contention that we are in the midst of, or rather living after, the apocalypse. “After” could mean in this case either “subsequently to, at the conclusion of, in pursuit or desire of, in conformity with, or in spite of.” In the present case, all of these senses of “after” apply except for “at the conclusion of.” Rather than something over or to come, the apocalypse is an event that continues to unfold, forcing us to live in accordance with its dynamic and even in spite of its consequences. As Frederick Buell has pointed out, “The world […] has not ended; eco-apocalypse hasn’t happened. Yet people today also accept the fact that they live in the shadow of environmental problems so severe they constitute a crisis” (Buell ix). The idea of apocalypse at work in what Buell is discussing is that of a catastrophic terminus, but within the currently unfolding ecological crisis, every day is a little apocalypse, in which the symptoms of crisis offer a chance to understand the wildness they express.
If we are living within the unfolding of an apocalyptic event without discernible end or discrete beginning, it is necessary to be clear about just what the term apocalypse entails. The word “apocalypse” comes from the prefix “apo” meaning “off, from, away,” and the Indo-European root Kel, the second derivative of which, meaning “to conceal, cover, save.” According to the OED, its earliest usage was in reference to the revelation of St John of Patmos, titledApokalypsis in the Ancient Greek and stemming from the Greek wordApokalyptein, meaning “to uncover.” This religious usage led apocalypse to be used more generally to refer to any revelation or disclosure through the nineteenth century, when, increasingly, it began to be used to refer specifically, in both religious and secular discourse, to the destruction of the world, leading the OED in June of 2008 to add definitions specifically noting this usage, one of which reads: “a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm.”
I would like to linger a moment on the possible significance of this emphasis on the cataclysmic, on the end of days that has taken such a hold on the sense of the apocalypse as word and concept. The emphasis on the destructive potential of the apocalypse evident in the contemporary use of the word indicates a general rejection of the revelatory potential denoted by the word as something offering knowledge that has the capacity to save or preserve. This rejection could, then, indicate a growing desire on the part of users of the word for the destructive release from anxiety each use of the word reveals as something that is feared. In fact, it is a fear of the apocalypse, grounded in what I am calling biophobia, and the modes of avoidance that such a fear engenders that have brought it about as a threatening actuality, in such a way that the positive potential of the apocalypse is lost in a complex fascination/aversion.
It is no surprise that we are a society obsessed with apocalyptic possibilities. We entertain ourselves with apocalyptic media programming geared toward helping us believe that, though it will happen, it is not yet under way, that humans will persist even within, and in despite of, a massively degraded world. We will just find ways to cope, for instance, with the loss of the honey bee—a loss that is already calculated in advance as one of economic value. Despite the ostensibly universal appeal of the apocalyptic, the apparent drive to consume such media is split between a desire for a comprehensive narrative of history and an exhausted desire for history to end. Scholars of apocalyptic media are quick to remind us that the genre is a reflection of our anxiety in regard to change and the unknown and to point out that the vast majority of apocalyptic media has a Christian eschatological vision organizing it, providing it such motifs as the savior/sacrifice and New Jerusalem, which order the apparent complexities of historical process into a clear narrative of suffering leading to revelation and redemption.12 Despite the dominance of the eschatological apocalypse narrative, there are apocalypse narratives that follow a more secular logic in which the end of the human world is simply an ending. Such apocalyptic visions—let’s call them dark apocalyptic—function less to ameliorate our anxieties by providing a solution, such as in a detective narrative, that resolves all the mysteries of the narrative in a tidy and affirmative manner, restoring order and certainty via the closure of the ending, than to throw us back on to the dynamic situation that we live as temporal beings unfolding in and through a history for which all endings are merely provisional. The revelation of such dark apocalyptic narratives13 has to do with the recognition of the fundamental contingency, and thus uncertainty, of life itself, its fundamental wildness. These narratives are about an apocalypse that is not in its essence about an end providing closure but rather about an ending that draws out at variable speeds,14 denying the possibility of anything but imaginary closure.
The traditional apocalyptic narrative reasserts an eschatological time that renders the temporality15 of life sensible in its dynamism by inscribing it within a linearity capped by a teleological terminus. As a result, the passage of time is understood nontemporally as a uniform flow affixed to the time of the clock, calendar, and ultimately human timescale. The world that ends in such apocalyptic visions is a human world situated in a timeframe that makes sense of all time via the timeline. The logic of such a time is the movement from dispensation to dispensation, culminating in an end vitiated of its traumatic potential by its redemptory quality as less a pure end than a passage to a new and better world post-revelation. What such narratives give us is the apocalyptic, eschatological version of the happily ever after of the fairy tale. These biblically infused apocalyptic visions make the uncertainty of a world lived as a temporal unfolding of wildness into a safe fairy tale penned by a divine hand.16
The cost of such a narrative re-containment of that which disturbs our tranquil quotidian daydream is the loss of the understanding of the complexity of what it means to live in the world. It would be better to embrace complexity and its wildness, despite the inevitable shudder regarding what it reveals about our corporeal fragility and epistemological limitations, to navigate the wildness of our currently unfolding apocalyptic situation. Such an embrace would move from the head averting denial of the happily ever after to the production of a future now in which actually existing people may find a modicum of well-being.
Eschatological apocalyptic thinking looks toward the end, viewing the present as a necessary means to that end. If we think temporally, a different vista opens in which there are no discrete events with beginnings and ends but rather a fluid unfolding. Likewise, the apocalypse is not a discrete event somewhere off in the past or future but is unfolding all around us in the contemporary period; the shift to the Anthropocene, the fruit of modernity, signaled the opening of an apocalyptic moment in which every day is a little apocalypse.17 The truly apocalyptic, as revelatory potentiality, breaks the frame of the timeline because its temporality is a matter of the opening up of the eternal within the mundane.18 This irruption of eternity into the time of the world presents the potential for revelation regarding what it means to dwell in the world as a temporal being. The apocalypse is not to come but is happening right now, and the end, which is no end at all but only an ending, comes but slowly and with increasing intensity. Every day of our ecologically disrupted and disturbed world is a moment in an unraveling crisis that is like the vibration of an electric current heard and felt in the background, its resonation increasing in pitch with each passing day.19
Just as history is not a simple linear narrative but rather a complex conjunction of polysynchronous processes interwoven and happening at varying rates and intensities, so too is the time of the apocalypse on both the individual and social levels. In a world in which we are all living after the apocalypse, the main function of the mainstream apocalyptic narrative is to alleviate the anxiety of our apocalyptic moment by re-containing the apocalyptic energies within a tidy narrative structure.20 It is as if the representation inscribes the reality within a protective force field of repression and denial, making sense of it so as to stave it off. The destruction of the world is captured within the timeframe of the apocalyptic narrative and ejected into a future that is not yet and always to come. As a result, such narratives are haunted.
The specter of the repressed knowledge of the instability inherent to the world as a result of a global capitalist mode of production predicated on infinite expansion and unlimited resource extraction and consumption haunt these soporific apocalyptic fantasies. The currently unfolding apocalypse has serious potential to bring about the end of history Francis Fukuyama theorized as the result of liberal capitalism, but not in the manner he believed, even if because of the logic he espoused. This end will come if that which is revealed by the apocalypse is ignored out of fear and the desire to avoid the unpleasant, the abject, the horrible, an avoidance facilitated by our prevailing concept of nature.
If we accept that we are living after the apocalypse, within its daily unfolding, then those of us concerned with the environmental humanities are obligated to reflect upon the theoretical approaches we take to our studies and to question their likely material implications. Much excellent work has been produced recently in the attempt to bring new approaches to old literary questions and new ecological issues. Serpil Oppermann, Dana Phillips, Tim Morton, Timothy Clark, and McKenzie Wark have made important contributions, bringing post-structurally informed theory into the ecocritical mix. In particular, Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality and Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant matter have helped bring the intermingling flesh of the world into greater focus. This work contains great potential for productively complicating our ideologically charged understanding of concepts such as nature, object, and environment and would benefit from even greater dialogue with critical materialism and affect studies. Such work reveals that things are wilder than we may have imagined. In what remains, I present a revived concept of wildness that will aid in moving beyond a realist, object-oriented conception of nature, so that we will have a better chance of thinking the unruly complexity of ecological systems.

Dark Enigma: Tracing the Meaning of Wildness

Much of the blame for why we are in such an ecologically disastrous predicament lies with the way we understand what the term “nature” signifies. Many attempts have been made to torture the word into a more adequate set of semantic valences given the problems with having one word that refers, seemingly, to everything that exists, whether coming into existence with or without human intervention. This semantic maneuvering is often accomplished through qualifying the term in some way, such as with the distinctions wild or first and second. In so doing, theorists get caught in the defile of first and second nature, as if we should consider nature, again, as a series of objects not produced by humans, and those produced by humans are, then, a kind of nature 2.0. It is not too difficult to see the implied prioritization inherent in such categorization. Alternately, attempts to resort to the Latinnatura naturans and natura naturata21 are both wholly unsuitable for general usage and have the tendency to focus on the naturata at the expense of thenaturans, a symptom of the reified origin of the thought of nature from which such a splitting of terminology results. It is no mistake that much attention is given to the product of nature and much less to the force of its productivity. Even when its productivity is considered it tends to be in a reified manner as so many kilowatt-hours of power and the like; it, like all else, is subsumed within the objectifying logic of quantification. Kate Soper’s work on how we understand the word nature22 contains much of value, including her discussion of the realist conception of nature as the causal forces that place limits on human activity. But, in the end, she places too much emphasis on the difference between what she calls the metaphysical, realist, and surface conceptions of nature, while privileging discussion of the metaphysical and surface conceptions as more pertinent to ecological practice and politics. The problem with this choice on her part is that it perpetuates the assumption that ecological thought and politics necessitate thinking a nature that is separate from the human and reduced to the status of the object. What all of these attempts to think nature as a practical concept share is the prioritization of the object status of nature’s referent. As Tim Morton has argued, nature becomes a word denoting an endless list of things occurring in the world. As a result, the word nature and its referent become implicated in an objectifying logic that places all that exists as things over against the human, as objects in a world to be managed and manipulated for human ends.
It is an unfortunate byproduct of this way of thinking that even attempts to convey the significance of human impact on ecosystems, such as McKibben’sEnd of Nature, presuppose that humans have acted as a kind of external agency disruptive of the balance of this so-called nature rather than as a very specific wildly developing force, generated by the sum total of human organisms acting in the world. Take for example Timothy Luke’s claim that “Nature increasingly is no longer a vast realm of unknown, unmanageable, or uncontrollable wild nonhuman activity. After becoming completely ensnared within the megamachinic grids of global production and consumption […] Nature is turning into ‘Denature’” (195). This kind of rhetoric supports the idea of a separation between a wild and tame nature and the human, while also situating nature as an object that can be changed in its substance by human activity.23 If we were to think in terms of wildness rather than nature, we would understand that complex systems are always in dynamic process, capable of reaching critical points in which their general integrity unravels and in doing so generates a new dynamic stability. Understood in this way, ecosystems are always unruly and wild regardless of the degree to which an agency within them, such as the human, attempts to manipulate and control them.24
The focus of the valence of “nature” on the products rather than the productivity, which if considered is reduced to a kind of object too, serves the very specific function of averting attention away from the potentially traumatic potential of the raw productivity of the natural world. When it refers to life, nature thought as a metonymic chain of products facilitates the reduction of the abundance of life and its activity to manageable objects of analysis and manipulation. The writhing and seething of life in all its energetic splendor and complexity, like the snakes seen by the Ancient Mariner, is conceptually contained and tamed, locked in stasis like butterflies pinned in taxonomic eternity. From our way of thinking in terms of nature, it would seem that people would rather not face the true wildness at the heart of the world. Nonetheless, if we are to survive and thrive, we must face what wildness entails and overcome our anxiety about it.
E. O. Wilson writes that humans have an innate biophilia, or as he says, “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes” and “that to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development” (1). A biophilic tendency does exist, the nurturing of which is an important key to human survival. However, it is deeply ironic that this idea comes from an entomologist who studies and is fascinated by what to most modern people is abhorrent. In addition, his amazing descriptions of the ecological complexity of the forests of Surinam essentially present a view of the ecological system as a fecund womb inexorably spewing forth life into a gaping maw, consuming that life to nourish the womb.25 The brute fact of the decay, corruption, and death necessary for the continuance of life is something that modernity is designed to repress, with its supermarkets, sanitation obsession, and plastification of everyday life. Humans have an innate biophobia in addition to a biophilia and these two tendencies are in perpetual interplay; as a result, one or the other may become the predominant mode in which a society organizes its activity in the world and its supporting ideology.26Modernity has a strong tendency toward biophobia and the concept of nature we have inherited is essentially biophobic. In addition, the dominant logic of apocalypse narratives and their contemporary proliferation are symptomatic of biophobia.
To counter this biophobia and shift the balance in favor of biophilia, we need a different term that is more suited to promoting a deepened ecological consciousness. I believe the term wildness has the potential to aid in this work. Wildness was a key term for Henry David Thoreau, and it is remarkable, given his importance for environmentalism and ecocritical thought, that this term has been left in neglect. Jack Turner points out that, “Wildness as quality, and its relation to other qualities, are now rarely discussed” (108). If wildness is a quality, as Turner tells us Thoreau saw it, then it becomes clear why it languishes either without theoretical attention or is used simply as a reference to an otherness that resides in wild places.27 Theoretical discourse neglects it because “to take wildness seriously is to take the issue of control seriously” (113). The desire for control underlies and supports the entire ideological project of the hegemonic instrumental reason of modernity. Anything that places in question the project of control threatens to reveal the anxiety that is at its basis. So, when Thoreau says “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” he is requesting what a biophobic civilization based on the desire to control is organized around repressing (644). He is also giving us a look into wildness, a glimpse that contains the potentially traumatic.
Anxiety about wildness is at the core of biophobia and the reason why it is important that wildness become an important term in regular usage; it is only in facing such an anxiety that it can be overcome and progress made in expanding ecological consciousness. Even those who champion wildness could go further in theorizing it. The furthest Snyder goes beyond discussing it as qualitative is when he suggests that “as the process and essence of nature” it “is also an ordering of impermanence” (Practice of the Wild, 5). Jack Turner tells us that “Thoreau understood wildness as a quality,” but that it was also connected for him with freedom and life but not as “mere existence, but vitality and life-force” (107). Insofar as wildness is understood only as quality, it will continue to participate in the substantive function of signification. However, as that which denotes the life-force in all its vitality, it moves in the necessary direction. While calling for a new wilderness ethic, Turner says that Thoreau “noted that ‘wild’ is the past participle of ‘to will’: self-willed” (111). The understanding of wildness needs to move further in the direction indicated by this etymology.
The path to a deeper conception of wildness may be prepared if it is remembered that our word nature comes from the Latin translation of the ancient Greek physis. I will now explore the significance of this word and do so by beginning with a consideration of the figure of Artemis and her relation to speech via the story of Acteaon because this myth illustrates well the ancient Greek insight into what I am calling wildness, as well as the disconnect between our contemporary concept of nature and what the Greek’s calledphysis. Running in the background of this discussion, I would like to keep the crucial insight of anthropologist Michael Taussig that,
Wildness […] raises the specter of the death of the symbolic function itself. It is the spirit of the unknown and disorderly, loose in the forest encircling the city and the sown land, disrupting the conventions upon which meaning and the shaping function of images rest. […] Wildness is the death space of signification. (Taussig 219)
I focus on the myth of Actaeon because it combines the gaze and voice in a powerful way to convey a message contained within much Greek myth. The Greek understanding of metamorphosis expressed in their mythos is the imaginary expression of the dynamic understanding contained in their termphysis, and helps reveal the sense of that word and its revelation of the limits of language.28
As Ovid recounts it, Actaeon has been hunting all day and wanders off from his friends. Significantly, he has chanced upon a valley sacred to Diana/Artemis where, even more significantly, “Hidden within it/Was a cave untouched by art, yet Nature’s/Craft had simulated art, had made an arbour/Of moss-grown rock and delicate sandstone,/And from its side bright waters gushed and glimmered/Into a shallow well where grass came round it” (89). Into this sacred womb of the goddess, Actaeon inadvertently blunders. He has the (mis)fortune of seeing the goddess bathing in the nude, embarrassing her with his unsanctioned gaze. Her serving maids unable to conceal her, she splashes water in his face “and through his streaming hair/Foretold his fate: ‘If you can talk, then speak,/Say you saw Diana in undress’” (90). He is then metamorphosed into a stag, retaining his mind but not his speech, and subsequently torn apart by his own hounds.
What is such a myth if not a warning? Artemis is the Greek figure of the Mother or earth goddess hypothesized to have been the dominant figure of pre-patriarchal religious systems. Robert Harrison tells us that, “In her round biosphere, life, death, and rebirth recurred eternally, like the cycles of the moon or menstruation. She revolved the seasons and gave the grain, replenished the herds and took the dead back into the safekeeping of her cosmic matrix” (19). She is the dea silvarum, the lady of the forests, of the wild, the virgin goddess, who is “invisible, intangible, enigmatic, cruel, reigning over the nonhuman reaches of the wilderness,” whose “habitat proper is the dark side of the visible world” (24, 25). What the gaze of Actaeon penetrates, then, is the mystery behind the phenomenal appearances of the world; he enters the sacred womb and views the goddess of the wild, of the creative principle of nature, in all her nakedness. Her virginity is connected to the purity and chastity of her figure and of that which she figures, but it also indicates the potentiality of fecundity and the self-generational power within what we call nature. The unsanctioned gaze violates the sanctity of her sanctuary and strips her bare. The human gaze is not meant to penetrate that which she figures and thus the transgression of the gaze results in the loss of the voice. The voice of the logos is the accomplice of the masculine gaze that seeks to classify, configure, dominate, control. The myth warns us that if we seek to violate the sanctity of the world with a gaze that reveals without sanction, in a manner that forces penetration of the goddess’s chastity, we shall suffer the consequences; the world is not an objectified “nature” there for our manipulation and use. It also reminds us that we humans are of the same materiality as the rest of creation and must understand our position within such a world without attempting to step out of it in a way of forgetting and mastering.
This myth and the figure of Artemis can teach us much about wildness, specifically through its association with the unspeakable. In his discussion of the myth, Harrison argues, quite correctly, that the point of the myth is the assertion of a primordial unity of all things within and as the matter that they are, come from and to which they must return. He asserts that this wisdom can only be communicated indirectly through mythos and that the problematic disconnection between mythos and logos has led to a forgetting of this matter and a privileging of form as that which is intrinsic to nature. According to him, the privileging of form arose with the fixation on the logos, logic, and speech beginning with thinkers such as Aristotle. Being a grammarian and taxonomist at heart, Aristotle argued that there was an important distinction to be made between morphe and hyle, form and matter, though neither could exist independently of the other. In opposition to the pre-Socratics who argued that matter was primary, he argued that it is form that determines the nature of a thing (26–28). As Harrison puts it “Form is the telos, or goal, which governs the physis of natural substances. Physis is nothing other than the movement of things into their natural forms” (28). Aristotle reasons away matter as that which may not be spoken of logically. Harrison deconstructs Aristotle’s privileging of form by paying close attention to the semantic resonance of the word hyle, which he tells us meant “forest” prior to Aristotle’s use of it for “matter” and that its Latin cognate was silva not materia as the Romans translated it from Aristotle. Harrison uses these resonances, including the connections of materia to “wood” and “mother” to assert that Aristotle’s dependence upon and privileging of the spoken and that which may be spoken covered over the significance of the materiality of nature, disconnecting the speaking being from its world (27–28).
As productive as it is for understanding physis, Harrison’s analysis only takes us so far in understanding the full significance of the term and its connection to wildness; his project is to investigate the role of the forest in cultural history, and thus he rests his analysis with the exposure of the logocentric covering over of the materiality of nature and its connection to the forest as figure of primordial unity. He questions the priority of form over matter only to reassert the primacy of matter, but his above quoted statement that “Physis is nothing other than the movement of things into their natural forms” contains the seed of a more radical understanding of physis and its connection to nature, wildness, and Artemis. If we understand Artemis as the figure for the womb of nature, of nature as ever-productive generational process, and accept the linguistic connection of nature with physis, then we must reconsider that connection to understand Artemis as physis and thus what the word wildness most radically reveals.
Physis should not be understood merely as the primordial unity of matter but rather as “nothing other than the movement of things” as things. To facilitate this analysis, it will be beneficial to look at Heidegger’s discussion of physis.29For “if, as is usually done,” Heidegger says,
physis is taken not in the original sense of the power to emerge and endure, but in the later and present signification of nature; and if moreover the motion of material things, of the atoms and electrons, of what modern physics investigates as physis, is taken to be the fundamental manifestation of nature, then the first philosophy of the Greeks becomes a nature philosophy, in which all things are held to be of a material nature. (15)
Physis does not denote materiality in motion at a subatomic level; it is indicative of the movement of things as things emerging and enduring and of the condition of possibility of the movement of emergence and unfolding. For Heidegger, the translation of physis as natura, meaning being born, obscures the original meaning of physis, redirecting attention away from that which allows birth to that which is born (13). For Heidegger, physis “denotes self-blossoming emergence […] opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it” (14), which still sounds as if he is situating it within the phenomenal. However, he continues:
Physis as emergence can be observed everywhere, e.g. in celestial phenomena (the rising of the sun), in the rolling of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of man and animal from the womb. But physis, the realm of that which arises, is not synonymous with these phenomena, which today we regard as part of “nature.” This opening up and inward-jutting-beyond-itself must not be taken as a process among other processes that we observe in the realm of the essent. Physis is being itself, by virtue of which essents become and remain observable. (14)
Heidegger separates physis from phenomena and reveals it to be a Greek word for being. If we consider nature as everything that exists, then physis should be understood as that power by which that which exists comes into being, arising as a presencing. Heidegger connects this power to make present, as “self-sufficient emergence” (101) to truth as unconcealment, aletheia, claiming that: “Truth is inherent in the essence of being” (102). Physis, then, is connected to the engendering power of the womb represented by Artemis and the truth engendered there as coming to presence; however, this conception fails to take into consideration the figure of the goddess as she who does not appear as she is to our vision. Heidegger completes his conception of physis by bringing in the dimension of concealedness. He says that “Because being,physis, consists in appearing, in an offering of appearance and views, it stands, essentially and hence necessarily and permanently, in the possibility of an appearance which precisely covers over and conceals what the essent in truth, i.e. in unconcealment, is” (104). Physis is the power of self-generational unfolding of all that is, which in disclosing itself through this power conceals itself as that power; hence, all phenomenality is the expression of an engendering power that abides within and as it but never reveals itself as such. Actaeon stumbled upon a glimpse of this power in its full naked truth and was destroyed by it, and the physicist who probes ever further into the subatomic simply sees infinitely smaller versions of its concealing expressions.
Speech seeks to put it into words, but like Actaeon, we lose the power of speech in the moment of disclosure. The taking of the breath away, intrinsic to the moment of dumbstruck wonder, out of which philosophy is said to have arisen, is an instance of speech coming up against what resists being spoken. Wildness is often understood as the site of such a moment of wonder, but wild places are only a specific expression of the unfolding of a wildness that resists signification; the moment of loss of speech is a dramatization of the more general limits of language in grasping the unruly complexity I am calling wildness. There is a deeper connection between wildness and this conception of physis that Heidegger reveals beneath the accretions of language.
Our adherence to calculative and instrumentally rational thinking is connected to a conception of logos as speech and discourse. The logos that drives us long ago effaced its connections with physis and works through separation, particularization, and organization to control physis, situating it as a problematic necessity. Physis, as inter-relationality and dynamic unfolding, is considered external to the human and logos, a kind of wildness in need of managing and ordering. According to Heidegger’s research into the earliest Greek thought, logos and physis were not separate but rather unified; however, unity is not necessarily identity, rather “unity is the belonging-together of antagonisms” (138). Logos and physis were, then, antagonistic moments of the same that gradually emerged as two facets of a unity that then broke into an overt opposition effacing their intimate connection. If we follow Heidegger’s etymology:
[…] originally logos did not mean speech, discourse. Its fundamental meaning stands in no direct relation to language. Legō, legein, latinlegere, is the same as the German word “lesen” : […] in the strict sense, which is: to put one thing with another, to bring together, in short, to gather; but at the same time the one is marked off against the other. (125)
The final line is incredibly important as it indicates that which is gathered together by and as the logos is at the moment of gathering also put into a structure of relationships of difference. In the self-engendering revealing ofphysis, that which is revealed reveals itself within and as a network of interpenetrational relationships of difference, which is the activity of logos as that which gathers and binds. Heidegger claims that, “Physis and logos are the same. Logos characterizes being in a new and yet old respect: that which is, which stands straight and distinct in itself, is at the same time gathered togetherness in itself and by itself, and maintains itself in such togetherness” (130–1). The eventual disassociation of physis and logos resulting from their connection as polemos or antagonism had already emerged in the time of the ancient Greeks with the connection of logos to speech. The concept of wildness developed here seeks to convey this primordial unity of logos and physis as related in antagonism. Understood in this way, wildness denotes both the contingent, unruly emergence and unfolding of things and the systems that endow them with a form and a pattern. Wildness entails that while things have a pattern and a form and systems have apparent laws, the differential complexity at work in their unfolding promotes contingent developments that continually drive the development and alteration of the patterns and systems. Karen Barad uses the concept of diffraction as a means to explore the unruly complexity of systems and the workings of what I call wildness. For Barad, “there is a deep sense in which we can understand diffraction patterns—as patterns of difference that make a difference—to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world” (72). Diffraction is at the core of wildness and places in question logocentric, calculative ways of thinking and the realist, object-oriented concept of nature that serves them.
The logocentric project of the privileging of speech as presence is a direct expression of the western concern to contain and control the chaotic forces of the world and to deny mystery, death, and the embedded, earthiness of our existence as beings within a complex, interdependent ecosystem. The longing for pure presence is the longing for solid ground, foundations, certainty, permanence, discrete and dependable discriminations, and boundaries between things, in effect, for stability and order. The wildness that physis helps us to glimpse shatters all dreams of order and stability and resituates them on a radically other foundation, a foundation without bottom and devoid of ground. The trouble with the wilderness and the reason for its long cultural history as a place of terror and trauma is that it is viewed as other than society in a radical and fundamental way that places the individual and society in question; it is the place where wildness most clearly reveals itself because it is the place where the power of the wild as that aspect of physis that is beyond human penetration remains most unconcealed by the activities of humanity’s desire for order.
However, one need not go into the wilderness to approach the wild. Derrida’s critique of the logocentrism of western metaphysics and his attention to the privileged position of speech within the metaphysics of presence offers us one of the most penetrating assaults upon the kind of thinking that seeks to eradicate wildness. His work also offers us a powerful means for conceptualizing wildness as that which is not just of the “wild,” untamed physical spaces set over against human civilization, but rather as that force at play in everything, including language, that is the very condition of their existence. Hence, wildness is everywhere and always around and within us—in fact, it breaks down the very notions of “around” and “within.”
Reconceiving wildness along the lines of Derrida’s discussion of the trace,30 for example, can aid in thinking it as more than simply a quality associated with an external and pristine nature. Thinking wildness in line with the trace31undermines dualistic thinking, blurs the boundaries between things and concepts, and reveals wildness as at play within and as all things. Language is a bridge between the physical and psychic; it combines thought with matter, breath with intellect, and as a binding, reveals the articulation of that which is bound, making visible the binding itself. The trace reveals itself as always already receding from view in the spacing of the articulated as well as in what is articulated, just as Artemis is the goddess who is ever receding from view, only glimpsed as she rushes through the forest on her hunt and never meant to be directly perceived. The trace is beyond phenomenal and intellectual discriminations and as Derrida tells us, “the trace whereof I speak is not morenatural […] than cultural, not more physical than psychic, biological than spiritual. It is that starting from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with it all the ulterior oppositions between physis and its other, is possible” (Of Grammatology 47–48). The thought of the trace is an attempt to think the unthinkable by following its disappearing traces—like tracks rapidly filling with water that were never there. The trace offers us another way to understand how phenomenality conceals its very conditions in its unfolding, how the perceived depends on the imperceptible and the spoken on the unspeakable.
Calculative thinking is made uncomfortable by such talk of that which slips away before it is ever grasped but yet allows us to grasp. Calculative thinking would prefer to make tangible that which is not and explain it away as a structure underlying what is or as a state of affairs that we only need the proper equipment to penetrate. But as Derrida asserts, “The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure” (Of Grammatology 51). For the mind seeking purpose and order, even if it may admit that, such as at the subatomic level, everything is in constant motion and thus nonstatic, the nonstatic is made to fit into an explanatory structure that gives it parameters of sense and purpose. What Derrida is arguing, in regard to language here, is that the trace reveals to us the inner and essential purposelessness, lack of final motivation, of dynamic systems. The order of structure inherent within a complex system is the product of its operational status at any given moment and contains, as a consequence of its wildness, a fundamental contingency, exemplified by mutation within genetics, that undermines the stability we associate with order.
Wildness understood as analogous to trace, then, undermines ideas of stable structure ordering the world or of a natural balance that nature longs to return to after its disruption. Rather, conceiving wildness as an analog of Derrida’s trace attempts to think it as the radical potentiality of all that generates itself out of itself. It is the origin of all that is but only insofar as there is no origin as such—there is only the interminable situational unfolding, the becoming actual of the potential, of everything as interwoven aspects of complex, interdependent systems. Wildness as trace puts in question the very notion of origin and thus of the pristine, original purity of the world before the human. There is only the world as it is now, and for humans the attempt to understand the present situation through thinking the past as a way to determine how best to proceed to promote a viable future.
Wildness is the dynamic vitality and unruly complexity that can only be seen as a trace within its expressions, and everything is an expression, and so a trace, of it. The trace is always a trace of itself as trace—the further we attempt to move beyond that which appears the further the horizon of its appearing recedes. Wildness consists in the pure movement Derrida calls the trace; it is the differánce opening all appearance and signification. It is the force that drives all things, that is not merely a physical force to be dissected and controlled by science. If we remember Harrison’s statement that “Physis is nothing other than the movement of things into their natural forms,” we should think wildness as the movement of things into their forms, in which this movement is inseparable from that out of which it emerges. In thinking this productive movement, we must remember that,
It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign […]. (Of Grammatology 62)
Wildness, as trace, is the condition of possibility of a plenitude, the pure movement (the condition of movement as such) of differánce, continually producing diversity and diversification. Thinking wildness in line with the trace moves it out of its seclusion in the places we have deemed wilderness, brings it close in its uncanny familiarity, revealing it as at play in all we are, do, and find ourselves in, as, and of. Wildness is that which is most intimate to us even as it is most foreign to us; it is akin to what Lacan called extimacy.32 Wildness thought as trace helps us to reconceive our relationships because it forces a thought of absorption, interpenetration, transcorporeality, process, diversity, etc. that runs counter to the dominant modes of thought of the western tradition. The mode of thinking that relegated wildness and the wild to a place made other, which sought to partition it off from the human, viewing it as antagonistic to civilization, must come to terms with its fundamental immersion in wildness. Wildness is that which binds physis and logos in their fundamental antagonism and the logos needs to recuperate its participation in wildness for us to develop ecological consciousness and overcome its aridity of thought, which it reproduces, all too efficiently, in its world.
Humans consider themselves as the animal with speech, as the rational animal, and live in irrational flight from that which is beyond speech and reason. The consequences of such a flight are appearing in our environment like specters haunting our somnolence. In reconceiving wildness in its extimacy, we can facilitate the work of curing the obsessive drive to order, separate, and control. This work entails dealing more effectively with biophobia and so finding ways, such as in the field of bio-mimicry, to work with wildness to produce what is necessary for our well-being, without disrupting the systems supporting the conditions of well-being for all species.
The Chinese have a great term for what the ancient Greeks called physis: Tzu-jan or occurrence appearing out of itself. Translated more poetically, though, tzu-jan means “self-ablaze” (Hinton 279). Embracing wildness means entering a life in which one may become “self-ablaze,” a life in which one embraces the wildness one is, nurturing it as the creative principle capable of giving birth to ecological consciousness. Nietzsche’s mouthpiece, Zarathustra, tells us that “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and agoing under” (14–15). The path over the abyss that we walk as a bridge is that of exploring our wildness as humans and our possibilities for existing in the world; the possibilities we create for our future and that of our world depend upon whether we walk the rope with eyes closed in fear of the danger and denial of the abyss or with open hearts facing the terror of the wild. It is a difference between opening to the revelatory potential of apocalypse or choosing the dead-end of thinking apocalypse as the cataclysmic.
Wildness will persist despite our attempts to master it; nevertheless, we should do the work necessary to limit, if not stop, the destruction of contemporary ecosystems and their constituent species because, as Gary Snyder put it, “it is a matter of character […] and it’s a matter of style” (GS Reader, xx). It is also a matter of how we think the human and our immersion in the world. The legacy we leave for those beings who come after will be determined by how well we decide to engage the real work of living as sentient beings.

Notes

1 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Walden and Other Writings, edited by Brooks Atkinson (Modern Library, 2000).
2 The same logic can be found in more popular documentaries such as Planet Earth.
3 This realist conception also situates nature as a quasi-mystical object beyond the human, such as when referring to it as “Mother Nature.”
4 While this article makes use of the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Heidegger, it is not Derridian or Heideggerian per say. Rather, I prefer to think with Foucault of theory as a kind of toolbox full of useful material for critical thought and not as a repository of ready-made methods. The present inquiry follows the critical spirit of these thinkers but is more broadly poststructuralist, if we understand that term to mean any theoretical practice influenced primarily by a continental tradition in philosophy extending back to Hegel. The concepts of biophobia and wildness, as well as the critique of the concept of nature presented here, are just as indebted to psychoanalytic theory and complexity theory in the sciences, especially ecology.
5 Serpil Oppermann argues to this effect in her essay, “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice,” see esp. 112ff. This way of conceiving nature as a lost object to be regained is not unlike the mystical longing for suprarational unity with the divine.
6 In his entry on “Nature” in Keywords: A vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford UP, 1976).
7 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2011). Summers is like Prince Prospero in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” in thinking that the agency of the invisible can be contained and controlled by human imposed boundaries. The measures taken to contain wildness are merely a postponement and reorganization of its manifest effects.
8 Fukushima is no longer only a word for a place but has become a term for a symptom of what is wrong with human systems of knowledge, energy production and economic privatization, institutional planning, and governmental management of risk, crisis, and catastrophe.
9 Ecological consciousness is inherently imaginative because it is a developing awareness of the complex interrelationships of ecological systems that are often not available to the senses and their synthetic extensions. As I am arguing, an important aspect of the conception of wildness is its recognition of the limits of knowledge to grasp and order the deep, unruly complexity of systems and their contingency.
10 As a containment strategy, apocalyptic cultural production contains two key moments: the assertion of the human dependence on an external nature, which ironically places in question the purported separation between the two, and the fundamental hope that the human can solve the problem and fix it, thus placing the human as superior to nature and master of its processes.
11 For example, apocalypse films often embody an invisible force, such as mutation or climate change, through a particular creature that represents the activity of mutation or dynamic and destructive manifestations of climate shifts rendered on a temporal scale much faster than the norm.
12 See Teresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (U of Toronto P, 2008); Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (SUNY Press, 2007).
13 Early examples of this genre are Byron’s poem “Darkness” and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.
14 An ending understood this way is an unfolding of continual, often gradual, change, punctuated by moments of greater intensity of change and rupture as the result of the contingent emergence of events.
15 In the phenomenological sense of one’s experiential unfolding as a temporal being.
16 A particularly good example of this is the 2007 Francis Lawrence film I Am Legend. The great thing about this film is that, while following an eschatological structure on the surface, it contains elements within the narrative undermining this structure, elements that suggest a dark apocalyptic reading in which the film is not about redemption so much as the wildness of mutation as a driver of genetic evolution, the fluidity of species, and the risks of scientific meddling with unruly complex systems.
17 Contemporary attempts to make this everydayness of a geologic timescale of incremental but variable change and the consequences of our everyday actions visible to us are of the utmost importance for nurturing the revelatory potential of apocalypse. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Neil deGrasse Tyson’sCosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey are both excellent popular attempts to make the global extent and temporal scale of species extinction and climate change visible to us, so that we may glimpse the wildness of the systems of which we are a part and which our everyday practices affect in their unruly unfolding. Of course, Kolbert’s subtitle reveals a fundamental problem with the dominant view of species extinction as unnatural given the understanding of nature critiqued in the present essay. Human influenced climate change and species extinction have nothing unnatural about them. Human activity is an expression of wildness and the basic dynamics of complex ecosystems; in this, we are no different than the other factors, such as off-gassing bacteria, which contributed to previous extinction events.
18 Frank Kermode has shown that the modern concept of crisis comes out of the suppressed strain of eschatological thinking that conceived of the end as inherent in every moment. He writes that the predictive apocalypse, which places the end in a future to come at a specific point on the timeline, is blurred by the continual failure of it to arrive on schedule and that as a result, “eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the end is present at every moment, the types always relevant.” The Sense of an Ending (Oxford UP, 1967), p. 25–26.
19 Of course, like all background phenomena, the environmental crisis is filtered out of perceptual awareness and only gains entry through specific localized effects that jut out of the background, forcing entry into awareness, but which often help occlude the bigger picture.
20 As Elizabeth K. Rosen points out: “The promise of apocalypse is unequivocal: God has a plan, the disruption is part of it, and in the end all will be made right. Thus is suffering made meaningful and hope restored to those who are traumatized or bewildered by historic events.” Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and The Postmodern Imagination(Lexington Books, 2008), p. xii.
21 These terms may be loosely translated as “nature naturing” and “nature natured” respectively, or in other words, nature as active force and nature as object.
22 See her What is Nature? Esp. p. 155ff.
23 A different version of this problem is presented by Steven Vogel in his Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory. Vogel presents a non-naturalist concept of nature as social through and through and so in need of critical theory to understand this sociality of nature to allow us to take responsibility for it. But, like the belief in a nature as an external object outside the human, this version of the social construction of nature remains a theory of the object status of nature—the crucial difference resides in that object’s relation to the human. Where Vogel admits to espousing an anthropocentric theory, my concept of wildness is designed to retain both the sense of complex systems as incorporated within our knowledge and practice while also always in excess of what we can know and make of them. Rather than place the object outside or inside the human as its social product, I want us to think the blurring of such distinctions.
24 Peter J. Taylor’s Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement is a good source for understanding the functioning and consequences of ecological complexity.
25 It is important to note that Wilson’s conservation ethic is completely anthropocentric and views the preservation of living diversity as valuable because it is not “possible to imagine all the uses to which each species can be put” and “Each of the millions of species can be visualized as a book in a library” and “No matter where it originates, it can be transferred and put to use elsewhere” (133, 135).
26 Erich Fromm makes a compelling argument in The Sane Society that a society may be considered either sane or insane depending on whether it is able to maintain a healthy understanding and acceptance of the vagaries of life and avoid viewing everything in terms of objectification.
27 The concept of wildness developed here must be severed from any use of the term as a qualifier within the conceptual constellation around the term nature. Wildness is not something to be found only in so-called wild places or preserved in wilderness areas. The ideas of wild places and wilderness areas are products of the problematic concept of nature and help reveal its limitations.
28 The instability of language is directly connected to the shifting boundaries of the signifier investigated by post-structural thought and is analogous to the fluid boundaries of beings expressed through the idea of metamorphosis.
29 Despite criticisms of the value and politics of Heidegger for ecocritical thought, for example Greg Garrard’s attempt to make Heidegger disappear in “Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism,” I believe that, like John Claborn argues in his response to Garrard, “Toward an Eco-ontology: A Response to Greg Garrard’s ‘Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism,’” there is much of value to be gained from taking seriously the work of one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. Additionally, despite Garrard’s offhand rejection of Heidegger’s practice of etymology, Howard Eiland and Matthew King have made compelling arguments for its value. In addition, while most ecocritical work dealing with Heidegger focuses on his later work, reading it as promoting a kind of chthonic dwelling in place and so a more authentic connectedness to nature, I prefer to avoid an appropriation of such a version of Heidegger in favor of his earlier work and its engagement with ontology through a trenchant attention to the workings of language as our human mode of knowing our unfolding as Being. In fact, I would argue, against the dominant view of Heidegger within ecocriticism, that his work on dwelling does not support a fantasy of reconnection but rather is part of his ongoing investigation into the limits of knowing through signs, and rather than regaining what is lost, is about thinking the unfolding that we always already are. Gerald Bruns’s Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings is very good on this issue of the radical theory of language developed in Heidegger’s later work. It is in the tracing of the abyss of signification that we see Derrida’s affinity with Heidegger and Heidegger’s profound influence on Derrida’s thought.
30 Until recently, ecocriticism has had little to do with Derrida despite Animal Theory’s productive use of his ideas, prompted by the gaze of his cat, outlined in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” The essential insight that Derrida offers us in regard to the gaze of the animal is an extension of the basic preoccupation of his thought from the beginning, where he developed the notion of the trace to facilitate his critique of beginnings, among other things originary and present. The abyss that opens for him in considering his being seen by his cat is another in a long series of permutations of the attempt to trace the limits of the concept through creating concepts, such as differánce and trace, designed to undermine the stability of conceptualization. It seems strange to me that Derrida would find so much influence in Animal Theory and so little in ecocriticism. More importantly, I think it’s important to realize that what he has to say about the animal is of the same warp and woof as what he says about the human animal’s knowledge and being through language, for “deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.” For more on the continuity of Derrida’s thought as an endeavor to encounter the impossible while escaping systematization, see his essay “Deconstructions: The Im-possible” in French Theory in America, edited by Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen (Routledge, 2001).
31 But not necessarily as identical to it; I am not suggesting that wildness and the trace are the same thing, but rather that Derrida’s discussion of the trace may aid us in understanding wildness as a concept that by its very nature places in question the work of the concept.
32 See Seminar VII p. 139ff.

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