Deeply rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom, Wan-wu(萬物), translated as “myriad happenings” or “ten thousand things”, is a way of experiencing the world. Linguistically, “Wan” means ten thousand, and “Wu” indicates objects, things, happenings,...
moreDeeply rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom, Wan-wu(萬物), translated as “myriad happenings” or “ten thousand things”, is a way of experiencing the world. Linguistically, “Wan” means ten thousand, and “Wu” indicates objects, things, happenings, phenomena, among others. From a Daoist perspective, “wan-wu” does not simply limit itself within the quantitive account of objects and things. The figure of “Ten thousand” rather refers to “manifold”, “particular”, “manifest”, “emergent”, and even a bit “miscellaneous.”1 Such ambiguity and in-between-ness, often flowing in traditional Chinese language, give space to wan-wu’s interpretation and place it as an open sphere which encompasses every single existence that vibrates in (and in
between) the cosmos. Within this context, if the human creatures are but one of these ten thousand things, or even if each human is only one of a myriad of always emergent objects, things, or phenomena, there are new possibilities of entanglements which enable us, the modern human creatures, to re-consider our relationships with, and among non-human creatures, and to further imagine new ways of living and relating to the one and many vast, unbounded, infinite worlds of wanwu.
In this light, this essay attempts to create a pataphysics of Ars for Nons from the perspective of Wan-Wu. Starting with the simple question of What is Ars for Nons to possible imaginations of what Ars for Nons could be, this essay questions about who is enacting the “Ars” for whom? And what could be considered as the “Nons”? It argues that nonhuman entities shall not be overly romanticised, just like nature shall not be overly romanticised, just like the ‘global south’ shall not be overly romanticised. Because in either ways, such romanticisation out of guilt (be it innocent or not) might ultimately lead to the danger of re-producing and re-enforcing anthropocentrism. Instead, drawing from the practice of wan-wu, this essay suggests that perhaps what we need is simply a certain embodied care and awareness towards the existence of “ten thousand things”, the “myriad happenings”. It proposes a process of unlearning about what one might believe one knows; a process of decomposing the dominate hegemonic anthropocentric understanding of the so called “nature”, “animal”, “technology”...a process of cultivating sensibilities towards our mutual shared differences (from gender, racial, physical differences to species differences, technological differences, material differences...). In this way, this essay argues that Ars for Nons might be a path way, a tunnel, an in-between space that channels the moment where we, the modern human creatures involved in various global catastrophes due to our own ignorance, are standing right now to pulsate futures where live many entangled worlds, the worlds of ten thousand things, the worlds of myriad happenings, the worlds of Wan-wu.
* Based on my own practice of wan-wu and interspecies communication, this essay might also propose some exercises for the readers to practice, as an experiment of a piece of “embodied writing”.
