The Resistance…
We are told who to become long before we understand that becoming was ever a choice.
Be useful.
Be productive.
Be employable.
Be respectable.
Be reasonable.
Be grateful.
Be legible.
The world gives us names, roles, schedules, measures, identities, and obligations. Some are necessary. Some are imposed. Most become so familiar that we stop noticing where they end and we begin.
This is where capture starts.
Capture is not always a locked door. Sometimes it is a paycheck. A title. A diagnosis. A duty. A reputation. A category. A definition repeated often enough that we begin repeating it ourselves.
Eventually the guard does not need to stand beside us.
We become the guard.
We measure our own usefulness.
We punish ourselves for resting.
We mistake exhaustion for virtue.
We turn our lives into projects of endless improvement.
We ask whether our time is productive before asking whether it is ours.
Feral Pursuits begins with refusal.
Not refusal of society.
Not refusal of responsibility.
Not the fantasy that we can become untouched by the world.
It is the refusal to believe that what formed us must therefore own us.
There is always a remainder.
Something that does not fit the job description.
Something that cannot be translated into productivity.
Something that does not need to justify its existence.
A curiosity with no practical purpose.
A pleasure that produces nothing.
An anger that will not become polite.
A desire no institution assigned.
A silence that refuses explanation.
A self that exceeds its category.
This is the feral.
Not savage.
Not pure.
Not outside civilization.
Uncaptured.
Feral Pursuits asks how power enters the self, how obedience becomes habit, how systems persuade us to reproduce their demands, and how we might recognize the voice of authority when it begins speaking in our own voice.
We are interested in formation, capture, internalization, resistance, and remainder.
We are interested in the moment someone realizes:
I have been taught to call this freedom.
And in the moment after that:
What else might I become?
The aim is not escape.
The aim is to leave something uncolonized.
Something useless.
Something unmeasured.
Something that cannot be made entirely obedient.
Something still capable of saying:
No.
And something still capable of asking:
Who was I before I learned what I was supposed to be?
