'Onto-Justice'—When Our Maps Fail the Territory (Feral Wisdoms Collection)

What if the deepest crisis of our time isn't primarily political, economic, or even ecological — but ontological? What if the frameworks we're using to understand and respond to reality are themselves part of the problem?

In this reflection, transformation practitioner, healer, and former legal scholar Anna Grear introduces the concept of onto-justice — the idea that justice—real justice—requires an adequate account of what is actually here. 

Drawing on systems thinking, assemblage theory, rhizomatic thought, and the philosophy of Karen Barad, Anna explores what it means to open toward complexity rather than contract away from it — and why that opening is not merely intellectually interesting but urgently necessary.

Along the way she introduces original theoretical concepts including the idea of 'ontic thickening' — the way certain patterns accrete material weight and gravitational pull over time — and 'intra-lapping', a way of holding apparently opposed structures (rhizomatic and arboreal, complex and causal) as mutually constitutive rather than competing.

This is a reflection about fear, rigour, humility, and what feral wisdom might actually look like in practice.

Topics include: ontology and justice · systems thinking · assemblage theory · Deleuze and Guattari · Karen Barad · complexity and politics · ontic thickening · embodied healing · chronic fatigue · new materialism · onto-justice

To find out more, visit https://www.youtube.com/@BodyGuru-AGx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

My name is Mr. Gray and I welcome you to explore. Meditation. Sound music language we are. Imagine if we are something is at stake right now that it's very hard to name. And I think the difficulty of naming it is itself part of what's at stake. We're living through an inflection point politically, ecologically, culturally. And the dominant frameworks being brought to bear on it are, I want to suggest, not just inadequate, but ontologically inadequate. They're failing, not merely because they lack the right policies or the right values or the right leaders. They're failing because they're operating with an impoverished and counterproductive account of what's actually real, of what's actually here. And this poverty in human mapping, it's not new. It's arguably always been at stake. It runs beneath the surface of every political failure, every legal system that cannot hold the complexity of living bodies and living worlds, every healing framework that mistakes the map for the territory. What's new is the urgency. What's new is that consequences of getting what's actually here wrong are now arriving at a speed and scale that makes looking away harder and harder. I want to think with you today about what I'm calling onto justice. It's a term I'm proposing carefully, not as a kind of jargon, but as a pointer to something that I believe is genuinely vital. The idea that justice, real justice, not procedural justice, not justice as formality, but real substantive justice requires an adequate account of reality. That's how we understand what exists. That's how we understand relationships, causality, agency, and time. And it's never separable, none of those things are separable. This view of reality is never separable from what we're able to do justly in the world. I come to this from a somewhat unusual angle. I'm a transformation practitioner in Heleb. I'm also a former legal scholar trained in critical legal theory and jurisprudence, in philosophies that ask what law actually is and what it actually does. And for much of my academic life, I found myself at the edge of what my discipline might hold. Because the questions I was most drawn to kept opening out into ontology questions about the nature of reality, about what counts as real and why, and about who and what gets to matter, and in what ways, with what implications and effects. And those questions don't stay comfortably inside any single field. They are by their very nature feral, which is perhaps why they belong here, in his collection on feral wisdoms. Let me begin where I think the trouble actually starts. Not with bad ideas, but with fear. When we encounter genuine complexity, when reality resists our models, when the world won't stay still, when causes are distributed and effects are nonlinear, and the thing we thought we understood turns out to be entangled with fifty other things we hadn't accounted for, then there's a very natural, very human response. We contract, we simplify, we reach for a frame that makes complexity manageable, that gives us a lever, that promises us if we just pull hard enough in the right place, something will move, and it'll move in ways that help us out, that are sort of vaguely predictable. Now that's not stupidity, it's not even necessarily wrong. There are times when a simplified model is exactly what's needed, when you need to act, when the complexity can be bracketed for long enough to do something that turns out to be useful. The capacity to simplify under pressure can be a genuine cognitive gift. But it can become limiting, even counterproductive, when the simplification hardens into an ontology, which then becomes a politics. When the simplified model stops being a useful tool and starts being taken as a description of what's actual, what's real, when complexity becomes not something to be navigated wisely, but something to be denied or controlled or eliminated. And I see this everywhere right now, in contemporary political discourses that can only hold binaries, us and them, order and chaos, strength and weakness, in economic thinking that continues to treat the market as a system with knowable inputs and outputs, as though it weren't a seething, distributed, multiply entangled assemblage whose behaviour is irreducibly complex. I see it in legal frameworks that atomise persons and rights, that cannot hold relationality, that cannot think with the more than human world. In healing paradigms that locate disease in individual bodies, rather than in the field of relations, those bodies are living within fear contracts, and contracted thinking, however sophisticated it appears, is nearly always working with less of reality than is actually here. So what does it look like to open towards complexity rather than close away from it? I want to walk through some of the thinking that I find most generative here, not as an academic survey, but as a genuine attempt to say, hmm, here are the kinds of thinking that help me see more of what's actually here. So systems thinking, that was a radical opening when it emerged. To say that things are interconnected, that feedback loops matter, that you can't change one element of a system without affecting others, this was genuinely countercultural against the dominant reductionist paradigm. Systems thinking gave us ecology, gave us the capacity to think about unintended consequences, gave us a way to hold the body as something more than a collection of parts. But systems thinking carries within it a residual tendency towards closure. A system in the classical sense has a boundary, it has inputs and outputs, it maintains itself against perturbation. There is still quietly a sense that if you could map the system fully enough, you could understand it, predict it, manage it. The complexity is real, but it is, in principle, graspable, at least. Assemblage thinking, particularly as it develops through Deleuze and Gatori and into the work of thinkers like Manuel Delander, takes a further step. An assemblage isn't held together by a unified function or a governing logic. It's a temporary, contingent coalescence of heterogeneous elements, human and non-human, material and semiotic, organic and inorganic, that cohere not because they serve a whole, but because of what each element can do with and to the others in their specific encounter. An assemblage doesn't have a boundary so much as it has gradients of intensity. It can always be disassembled and reconfigured, and crucially, it's never fully graspable from any single position, because its capacities only emerge in relation, in the actual encounter, not in the model. Rhizomatic thinking, also rooted in Delozen Gatorade, extends this kind of thinking further, attending to the horizontal, decentred, multi-entry character of how things actually grow and spread and connect. The rhizome has no privileged point of origin, no trunk from which everything else branches. It propagates laterally, finds unexpected connections, appears where it wasn't expected. I find all of these frameworks genuinely generative, and I also want to resist the temptation, which is very real in post-Delezian thought, to valorise the rhizome over the arboreal, the assemblage over the system, as though complexity were always more true than structure. But I think that would itself be a kind of binarisation. The philosopher Karen Barad, whose work I return to again and again, insists on something that I find ethically as well as theoretically important. But we must attend to what is actually here. If there are arboreal structures, genuinely hierarchical, genuinely organized along lines of descent or command or developmental sequence, then attending to those is not a theoretical regression. It's fidelity to the actual, to our best, if contingent and limited, understanding of what's actually here. What I want to propose is something I think of as intra-lapping, and it's a word I'm using deliberately rather than overlapping. Overlap implies two distinct things that happen to share a region. Intralapping, a term I'm borrowing in spirit from Barad's idea of intraaction, catches something different. It catches the mutual constitution that happens within an encounter itself. Systems and assemblages aren't two kinds of thing that happen to coexist. They're produced in and through each other's operation. An assemblage can develop systemic patterns, regions of stability, consistent feedback, recognizable regularities that are genuinely real and not just imposed by an observer. And a system can harbour internal assemblage turbulence, places where the regulatory architecture of the system breaks down, where heterogeneous elements resist integration, where something exceeds the system's capacity to hold it. The same goes for rhizomatic and arboreal structures. Trees contain rhizomatic processes in their root systems, in the mycorrhizal networks that sustain their apparently autonomous verticality. Rhizomes can develop arboreal tendencies under conditions of sufficient intensity and repetition. Certain paths become more canalised, more heavily travelled, more structurally weighted. The arboreal and the rhizomatic aren't opposites, they're inlapping registers of the same material actuality. I also want to hold a place for causal thinking here, because I think it's sometimes too quickly dismissed in complexity discourse. A causal chain is real, even if limited as an account of what's work at work in any given situation or phenomenon, but it is a thread, one with genuine directionality intention, running through the weave. It doesn't exhaust the event, but it runs through it. The weaving metaphor is useful. A thread is genuinely a thread, even though the textile is not reducible to any single thread, and even though the thread's own properties are partly effects of the weave rather than prior to it. Causal chains are real, worth tracing, but always embedded in a weave that exceeds them. And there's something else I want to name, and it's perhaps the most speculative thing I'll say today, although I experience it as deeply practically real. When a trajectory, a pattern, a path, a tendency becomes sufficiently established in a field, something happens to the materiality of it, to the density of its entanglements and expressions. More relations are drawn in, more capacities become engaged, more consequences ramify outward. The trajectory begins to accrete what I want to call ontic thickness. It isn't just a habit or a probability, it's a kind of densening of material implication. The field itself becomes asymmetrical around it. Other elements begin to orient towards it, not because they're commanded to, but because the weight is there. And crucially, hello, Western minds in particular, this thickening is prior to any observer noticing it. It's not conferred by some kind of retrospective gaze or account. The trajectory doesn't become thick because someone later identifies it as significant. The thickening is happening in the material weave itself. We may later notice it, trace it, name it, but the noticing is downstream of the thickening, not its cause, although it is also true that the noticing and the naming, particularly the naming, thickens the thread. We humans can reality tunnel around a thread until the thread is all we see. This connects, I think, to something we can all sense about temporality. Time itself doesn't always feel the same weight. Some moments are heavy with implication, dense with consequence, carrying the gravity of much that has accreted around them. Others are light, genuinely open, lightly canalised, still holding multiple forward orientations. And this isn't just a subjective feeling of time varying. It's the field's own temporal texture. Heavy temporality is where ontic thickening is greatest, generally speaking. Light temporality is where the weave is still loose, where genuinely new trajectories remain materially available. I find this has immediate practical relevance. In the healing work I do with people living with chronic fatigue and other long-term conditions, this difference between ontic heaviness and lightness is something we're working with all the time. A pattern that's become so thickly sedimented in tissue, in cellular patterns, mitochondrial tides of contraction and energy generation in nervous system flexing or rigidity in our relational fields, in the stories we tell. All that carries its own gravitational pulse towards repetition. And the work is partly about finding or creating the conditions under which that weave becomes light enough that something genuinely new can canalise forward. In fact, we can even destabilize a repetition pattern so that the lively assemblage of the human body being generates a new way forward, often in a completely nonlinear way, even a surprising way. Suddenly we find that our commitment to believing that what we see is all there is, and that how we see it is how it is, is dislodged for that wonderful possibility of a new seeing, being, thinking, becoming, that takes us into a more expansive, adaptive way of being. So back to where we began, ontojustice. If justice requires an adequate account of what's actually here, if our capacity to act justly is shaped and limited by our ontological assumptions, then the poverty of dominant ontologies is not a philosophical problem confined to seminar rooms. It's a practical, political, bodily problem. It's a problem with immediate consequences for who and what gets to count, for which bodies matter, for which relations are recognized as real, for which kinds of harms are even legible within the frameworks we use to seek redress. And we're seeing that now day after day in the news at this really powerful inflection point between those able to open to complexity, inclusion, and future-facing hope, and those committed to contraction, to us and them, to patterns of privilege from the past, to modes of attempted top-down control and suppression. And isn't it in so many ways complexity around which this control attempts to suppress? Isn't it partly the fear of complexity and change that drives the fear underlying the contractive impulse itself? Those committed to contraction, to the brittle defense of privilege around race, class, gender, sexuality, and more are in a very precise and painful sense trying to hold on to one particular sedimented trajectory, to reassert it, to hold it in place against the pressure of a field that is moving. A legal system operating with an atomized individualist ontology cannot hold distributed harm very well. It can't think very well with ecosystems, it can't really account for the way that certain bodies bear disproportionate ontic thickening, the weight of accumulated, structurally reproduced disadvantage that isn't reducible to any single cause or any single moment of injustice, but is real, materially real in the tissue of those lives. A politics operating with a linear causal ontology, one where complex crises are always imagined to be traceable to a single origin, always imagined to be amenable to a single intervention, those kind of politics will keep producing counterproductive interventions that miss what's actually happening and worse, compound problematic dynamics. Not because the politicians are necessarily stupid or malicious, although sometimes they are both, but because the ontology, the view of reality they're working with cannot hold the actual texture of the problem. Onto justice asks, what would it mean to do justice from within a richer, more adequate account of what's real? From within an ontology that can hold distributed agency, that can attend to omtic thickening without reducing it to individual culpability, that can think with the more than human world, that can hold the interlapping of structures without forcing a premature resolution to whichever one its methods are equipped to see. That can stay with the idea that all our knowing is provisional, contingent, and open to new information, to deeper ways of knowing than our present ones. I don't have the answer to that question. I'm not sure anyone does or will. Perhaps the point is that no one individual or path is up to the complexity of the times. Perhaps the point is that we now need a more inclusive coalition of engagement, community-level, distributed, situated, inclusive approaches, marked not by hubris, but by humility, openness, the willingness to learn together with the capacity to stay with the discomfort of staying with the trouble. I think it's the right question, this question of how we hold distributed agency, how we think with the more than human world, how we hold intralapping structures and how we open to multiple perspectives genuinely. I think it's the right question. And I think the urgency of the moment, the inflection point we're living within, and the convergence of crises that our existing frameworks keep failing adequately to address makes those not merely challenging philosophical questions, but vital ones. Not only vital, but now, as we see, in fact, increasingly urgent. I said at the beginning that there's something at stake right now that's very hard to name. This term onto justice is an attempt at partial naming, a way to hold the at stakeness open in a way that lets us think together about what's actually here. The appropriate mode of engagement with ontic thickening, with the material weight of what is accreted, isn't a distant theoretical gaze. The appropriate mode of engagement is a participatory attunement, a willingness to work with the actual texture of what is here, rather than a simplified model of what we wish were here. It calls for a willingness to move beyond simplistic binaries, and certainly beyond projections of us and them. It calls for a willingness to let go of fear-based contraction in the face of complexities, and to work to develop the kinds of capacities that enable us to be relaxed, open, flexible, adaptive, inclusive, thoughtful, and yes, just that I think is what a feral wisdom might look like in practice. Not a retreat from rigour, but a rigor that's honest enough to follow actuality wherever it actually goes. Thank you for thinking with me today.