To What is Unspoken and Unseen. 
A Speculative Glossary as Worlding Treat. 

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Anne Faucheret
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Outro of the publication • ParaCIR • 2025 

"how to unravel, understand a new language? 

to what is unspoken and unseen"

– Para CIR, a treatise on fugueology, 2015

"La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent,

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

 – Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,

Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,

Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens."
– Charles Baudelaire, Correspondances – Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857

"When words leave our bodies and become material. When they sweep into the light, they are still anchored in the silence, in obscure darkness. ‘To write, you have to be humble’, says Hélène Cixous, ‘because the world overwhelms us. The world is unknown. We live in the unknown. We cannot say anything about tomorrow. That is why we write into the darkness.’ Writing saturates surfaces from there. Like a mole, it raises bulges. Writing is always material. Always connected with the earth, with something from our planet. Clay, iron, aluminium, silicone, rare earths. There they rest, the ghostly traces of future words. The layers and watermarks, the invisible rivers, the trajectories, rills in stone, digital points of light on the screen, ink on paper. Like this I enter into a contact with the world that shapes us above all. It is perhaps this contact, this material assurance, of oneself, via the encounter with the other, becoming other, that drives this search, this form of touch, again and again. Cixous says: ‘writing is my double’."
– Sabina Holzer, Record of liminal thoughts and other movements #2, 2022

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a treatise on fugueology sounds at the same time promising, mysterious, and impossible. Putting all title’s words in lower case is a stylistic and programmatic decision by the collective author ParaCIR. Intentionally fleeing orthographic norms, it also gives all words the same graphic and semantic relevance. a treatise. The title begins with the indefinite article “a”, not with the main substantive. In doing so, ParaCIR downplays their treatise as one among many others, warding off the authority of the unique and supposedly exhaustive. A treatise is a written work dealing systematically and logically with a subject. Sharing a common root with the word “treat” – deriving from it – a treatise takes care of its subject matter. A treat. Maybe the way Edouard Glissant understands his Treatise of the Whole World. Careful gestures, loving protection, reciprocal attention and repairing intention – but also exercise of control – may be involved. These imply labor/work, affects/affections, and ethics/politics.

“Care is everything that is done (rather than everything that ‘we’ do) to maintain,

continue, and repair ‘the world’ so that all (rather than ‘we’) can live in it as well as

possible. That world includes . . . all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining

web (modified from Tronto 1993, 103).”

– Maria Puig della Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, 2017

The matter of care of this treatise is “fugueology”. Fugue evokes a musical piece composed around the counterpoint technique, a temporary flight from an unbearable situation, an episode of psychological disambiguation. Adding the suffix –logy inscribes the word into Academia, even if ironically, and transforms it into a “discipline”, or plays with the process of scientific legitimizing. Still, this does not make the subject matter “fugueology” more graspable. It rather opens a (rabbit)hole within the word itself, a hole that is even widened by the relationality announced between “treatise” and “fugueology”. 

"Il y a plus de choses entre le ciel et la terre (c’est bien la place des oiseaux) que notre philosophie n’en explique aisément."
– Vinciane Despret, quoting Etienne Souriau, Habiter en Oiseau, 2019

The neologism irresistibly reminds of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “nomadology” – a concept they use to explore how state power insinuates in bodies and what they call “schizophrenic lines of flight”. The title a treatise on fugueologyheralds a flight that is to come. Its cryptic dimension unlocks a mode of reading which does not seek to capture an already set meaning but rather sways with words, let them resonate in each other, weave unsuspected relationships, and convoke swirling worlds. The text itself follows dispersed, fragmentary, eclectic pathways from lines to clouds, from gaps to holes, from words to maps, from archipelagoes to gorges, from bodies to landscapes – across poetry, storytelling, introspection and description. These pathways are psycho-geographic dérives, sensorial-fantasmatic journeys, carto-poetic practices, undertaken as collective and polyphonic study, watched over by friendly ghosts, and welcoming mysterious correspondences between the experimental, the spiritual, the poetic, and the political. This study shakes ontological certainties, fixed meanings, and welcomes knowledge as transformation and transformation as knowledge. 

"We are brought together by what follows, by what we let follow us, collect us. We are brought together in study by these studies. And to be brought together in study is to let oneself be collected. It is the act of allowing oneself to be collected. This is the act of study."
– Stefano Harney, What Collects in a Collective?, 2016
 

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, truth, belief – and justification – and is concerned with how humans acquire knowledge and understanding, how they make sense of the world around them. It considers knowledge more broadly than science, which is just one way of knowing. It examines the definitions of knowledge, the places, frameworks, formats, processes and norms through which it is produced, circulated and (per-)formed. a treatise on fugueology is a study which refuses to know where it's going to lead, while questioning, at every turn, the epistemological framework within which and over which it is written, and through which it calls the world. 

"L’inconnu qui est en jeu dans la recherche n’est ni objet ni sujet. Le rapport de parole où s’articule l’inconnu est un rapport d’infinité ; d’où il suit que la forme dans laquelle s’accomplira ce rapport doit d’une manière ou d’une autre avoir un indice de « courbure » tel que les relations de A à B ne seront jamais directes, ni symétriques, ni réversibles, ne formeront pas un ensemble et ne prendront pas place dans un même temps, ne seront donc ni contemporaines ni commensurables. Problème auquel on voit quelles solutions risquent de ne pas convenir : par exemple un langage d’affirmation et de réponse, ou bien un langage linéaire à développement simple, c’est-à-dire un langage où le langage même ne serait pas mis en jeu."
– Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien Infini, 1969

The treatise formally bears some hallmarks of the (scientific and artistic) academic canon, while short-circuiting it. Even if it is built on a tripartite fractal structure (3x3x3) implying the idea of an argumentative development, it does not proceed systematically nor analytically nor objectively but poetically, performatively, subjectively and rhizomatically. Each part begins with a short introduction about a notion, which, instead of setting bounds to it, weaves a semantic and associative fabric around it, and situates ParaCIR’s relation towards it. Referring to geography, geopolitics, philosophy, ecology, myths, or artistic topoi, notions and concepts are invoked and then played with, arranged and entangled in different ways. The intricating appears on several levels, from the graphic layout to the very fabrication of the text. Several voices speak in the text and figures from different kingdoms appear. They speak in descriptive, instructional, poetic, and fictional fashion at once. 

"The difference between cartography and cartopoetics is that one is a writing of places by men and in the eyes of humans, while the other is a listening by humans to the word of places, which is often confused with the word of the gods. One is a prescription, the other an interview (in Creole palé ba'y, both to speak with and to speak for). As a result, cartography often appears as an oblivion of place and the world it sets up, in many ways a subterfuge, a disposition (place by separating, putting in order), a superimposed image of human discourse rather than a composition, when cartopoetics is all about the near and the very near. The former reflects and betrays an obsession with appropriation, delimitation, demarcation and development, all of which are supposed to guarantee security, conservation and "enhancement", while the latter calls upon places in its speech to listen to them sing."
– monchoachi, LaKouZémi #1, 2007
 

The same way, the maps are at once guides, games, traces – not visualizing a knowledge that is there, but accompanying a process of inquiry, not crystallizing an order on a page but calling for a collective practice to come. If cartography and geology are invoked, it is to transform them from instruments of domination and fixation (the power of making visible or invisible, and the power of classification and extraction) into tools of transformation. Methods and concepts are de-territorialized from “continental thought”, reclaimed, and re-territorialized in ParaCIR’s “archipelagic thought” and imaginary, full of islands, lands, isthmus, water bodies, dams, wetlands, rivers, transit zones. 

"Another form of thought, more intuitive, more fragile, threatened, but tuned to the chaos-world and to its unforeseen events, is developing, perhaps tied to the conquests of the human sciences, but derived from a vision of the poetic and the imaginary world (…) I call this thought archipelagic thought, that is to say a non-systematic, inductive thought, exploring the unforeseen of the totality-world and granting writing to orality and orality to writing."

– Edouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, 1995

Nevertheless, the investigation is initiated with the ground. Ontology of the Ground. “A ground is where you start from. Earth and Soil. Territory of the mind, territory of the given. A ground is a Grund; a reason to deploy a spine in axis with the sun.” The ground is a supportive structure to situate oneself and to get lost. ParaCIR developed physical, sensorial and speculative practices on / across / from / with the ground. They require to get dressed up and get ready to go for a walk, to spend time, to scrutinize the mud, to caress the grass, to touch stones, to smell leaves, to glean branches, and maybe, collectively, to read the dark thickets, to go back in time, to imagine the subsoil. They prevent the reduction of the ground to a humanly visible surface, of the soil to a mere resource, reveal their thickness and agency and recognize their caring capacities too.

"The land, in other words, is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meaning determinate that we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. (…)"
– David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1997
 

They invite to reduce the (objectifying) distance between the observer and the observed, to leave the comfort-blanket of the classic “participant-observation”, the objectifying hegemony of vision, and to enrich the scopic impulse with other senses. Touch confounds subject-object distinctions by flowing in both directions—what we touch touches us as well. Touch turns knowing into a mutual project. It produces caring knowledge, and inflects other ways of knowing, including vision. ParaCIR does not abandon vision but calls for a “touching vision”, a form of seeing that is sensitive to its own vulnerable, subjective and relational grounding, revealing a world constantly done and undone through encounters. At the antipodes of the distant, “rational” positioning of dualism which prefers to organize, classify, hierarchize, separate, reify, master (and colonize), it is about being caught, being affected by earthly movements, storied matter, animal traces, a condition to submit to enter the endless, collective, more-than-human knowledge production-chain. The matters of fact become matters of concern. 

"[T]he critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. (…) Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality? To put it another way, what’s the difference between deconstruction and constructivism?"
– Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, 2005

"La psycho-géographie se proposerait l’étude des lois exactes, et des effets précis du milieu géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus. L’adjectif psycho-géographique, conservant un assez plaisant vague, peut donc s’appliquer aux données établies par ce genre d’investigation, aux résultats de leur influence sur les sentiments humains, et même plus généralement à toute situation ou toute conduite qui paraissent relever du même esprit de découverte."
– Guy Debord, Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine, 1955

ParaCIR’s practices and their continuous translations occupy a space where theory and practice are not separated, nor spirituality and politics. They are psycho-geographic experiences, sensorial-synesthetic and speculative exercises. The walking and the touching are crucial as well as the writing, drawing, tracing. Having no precise aim, committing to the uncertain, these exercises are practices of constant translation, memorialization, inscription, and expansion of stories and times. 

"This requires that we release thinking from the grip of certainty and embrace the imagination’s power to create with unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions, which Kant (1724-1804) postulated are inferior to what is produced by the formal tools of the Understanding. A figuring of The World nourished by the imagination would inspire us to rethink sociality without the abstract fixities produced by the Understanding and the partial and total violence they authorize – against humanity’s cultural (non-white/non-European) and physical (more-than-human) “Others.”"
– Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability, 2016

Echoing feminist materialism and speculative storytelling, the treatise speaks in a diffracted way, through multiple voices and porous bodies, and at multiple scales. It thwarts the idea of nature as inert and passive, as regular and steady – and the idea of nature at all. The text itself transits through diverse textures and channels and carries further the dispersion and fluidity of vibrant matter and its several names. There is a maintained confusion between narrative instances and their embodiments, constantly transforming themselves and each other. The “I” is an island, is a human body, is a land. Elsewhere, a piece of wood is a rose hip is a beaver. A river is a body. A scar is an inscription is a valley is a site. From geological metamorphism to atmospheric evaporation to human metabolism, phenomena and bodies are connected through desires, affects, games and stories.

"Wherever there is ground, three things must be present: first, earth; second, air or atmosphere; and third, beings living, growing and moving around. The ground, then, is a coming together of these three things: earth, atmosphere and inhabitants. The question of the ground evidently turns on how they act upon, or suffer under, one another. Thinking this through, I recalled an ancient children’s game. Originating in China, it is at least two thousand years old but is now so widespread that I am sure it will be familiar to readers everywhere. The game is called ‘scissors paper stone’. (…) The beauty of the game lies in the fact that not one of its characters is all-powerful. (…) Could it be the same with the three things that come together to make up the ground? Suppose that we substitute the inhabitants for scissors, earth for paper, and atmosphere for stone. What happens? First, inhabitants, as they move around or grow, inscribe marks or paths or weave trails into the fabric of the earth. Second, the earth, wracked by massive geomorphological forces, erupts into bends, buckles, folds and cracks. And, third, the atmosphere with its weather – its winds, storms and rainfall – erodes the surface of the earth, wiping out the tracks and trails of its inhabitants. Or in short: inhabitants trump the earth, in the course of inscription; the earth trumps the atmosphere, in episodes of eruption; and the atmosphere trumps the lines of inhabitants, in processes of erosion."
– Tim Ingold, Correspondences, 2021
 

Follow the Water. Accompany the water where it flows and where it stays, where it dives in the ground, where it connects land, where it submerses land, where it writes on land. Following a body of water is a journey in space and in time. It means following memories – from elemental memories up to erosion memories up to dwelling memories. Following the water is also an ontological journey: it means becoming water, becoming vapor, becoming fish, bird, or beaver. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal" describes a movement in which a subject, through practices of constant flight from capture and stabilization folds into a “nomadic mode of existence”, a state of dis-articulation, dis-figuration, dis-identification. Fugueology helps acknowledging the nomadic flow that traverse bodies, helps them refusing to be reduced to the skin’s borders, to the socius’ imagination, to the gravity law.

"Crucial ethical and political possibilities emerge from this literal “contact zone” between human corporeality and more-than-human nature. Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.” It makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background for the exploits of the human, since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin. Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the “environment,” which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings, with their own needs, claims, and actions. By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human. But by underscoring that “trans” indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality opens up an epistemological “space” that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors. Emphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world, and at the same time acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capacious epistemologies, allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend with             numerous late-twentieth-century/early-twenty-first-century realities in which “human” and “environment” can by no means be considered as separate: environmental health, environmental justice, the traffic in toxins, and genetic engineering, to name a few."
– Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature, 2008

In the contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature, trans-corporeality opens ethical and political possibilities of care, on diverse modes: “thinking-with”, “dissenting-within”, and “speaking-for”, as Donna Haraway suggests, and also sensing-with. Unfolding Landscape/Entering Fuguescape. “We understand unfolding landscapes as entering fuguescapes : connecting both sides of gaps, mountain peaks, islands and beavers.” The proposed flight-while-being-there is not an escapist one, leaving the scene to hide in the landscape, but one that (re-)connects. It is a relational redescription of spatial practices, philosophical concepts and ecological thinking. The experience and performance of relationality, mutuality and interdependency inform a collective ethics that does not require explicit intentionality, nor fixed principles, but which emerges in a speculative way, in the everyday. Fugueology is a proposal for an ecology of relations that reshuffle semantic, scientific, political and ontological certainties, “stays with the trouble” and “takes response-ability”.

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"What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imagined each existent (human and more-than-human) not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces, but rather as singular expressions of each and every other existent as well as of the entangled whole in/as which they exist? What if, instead of looking to particle physics for models of devising more scientific or critical analysis of the social we turned to its most disturbing findings – such as nonlocality (as an epistemological principle) and virtuality (as an ontological descriptor) – as poetical descriptors, that is, as indicators of the impossibility of comprehending existence with the thinking tools that cannot but reproduce separability and its aids, namely determinacy and sequentiality?"
– Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability, 2016

"Tiresias is blind and hence cannot see the horizon's line. (…) S/he does speculate what the future might look like, as the future manifests to Tiresias in the form of shivers, whispers, strong smells, itches, and caresses. His/her view is embodied, in the sense that Tiresias sees the future from within, rather than from without. (…) What does Tiresias see? Well, that's the point. Tiresias does not see, or not in the literal sense of the word. With closed eyes, s/he can perceive and experience the world: touch its texture, feel its consistency, taste its juiciness and bitterness. (…) Tiresias's embodied visions, however, are no less objective than the vision of those endowed with clear sight. As Tiresias never stops reminding the community, objectivity is rooted in the knowledge of the body, of the material and affective conditions that shape our surroundings, rather than in some grand theory in the service of any ordering power that defines what counts as knowledge. For Tiresias, knowledge is not an accumulation of notions but a series of life experiences and experiments that change who we are."
– Federica Bueti, In the Present Tense, 2018

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Link to the book
https://www.isbnbooks.hu/books/a-treatise-on-fuguelogy/