WIE — the gesture that merges without dissolving

§0 — Fissure

The trap of the I and the trap of the WE

There are two symmetrical traps that lie in wait for anyone seeking to live a meaningful life in a devastated age. The first trap is that of the I — the libertarian hyper-individualism that mistakes itself for a tribe. You make your way alone. You defend your choices against social pressure. You build your radical autonomy. You tell yourself that no one can tell you who you are. And at first, this stance saves something — it protects you from dilution into a collective that would erase you. But in the long run, it isolates you. You end up alone in a room, at 47, wondering why you have 5,000 contacts on your phone and no one to weep with.

The second trap is that of the WE — the dissolution into a fantasised collective. You join a community that promises you belonging. You take up its language. You marry its certainties. You stop, slowly, asking yourself whether you agree. You tell yourself your disagreements were egoic resistances to overcome. And at first, this stance saves something too — it pulls you out of radical solitude, it gives you a sense of belonging. But in the long run, it erases you. You end up in a collective that no longer knows how to welcome your singularity, that asks of you sacrifices you never saw coming, that makes you feel guilty when you disagree.

These two traps are the two faces of one and the same grammar — the one that sets the I and the WE as an exclusive alternative. Either you are an individual, or you are a community. Pick your side. This grammar is precisely what the INFUSE cosmogony refuses. The sign WIE — the graphic fusion of I and WE — is the gesture that opens a third way. Neither libertarian hyper-individualism. Nor sectarian dissolution. AND, not OR.

Glissant and opacity — why the fusion that erases is a violence

Édouard Glissant — Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher, born in 1928 in Sainte-Marie, died in 2011 in Paris — spent his life thinking through what it means to meet the other without reducing them. His thought was born of a precise experience: that of the creolised Caribbean peoples, who were violently assembled by the transatlantic slave trade, who composed a new culture within that violence, and who refused both assimilation to the French metropole and an essentialist identitarian retreat.

His philosophical answer holds in two concepts. The first: Relation. Not communication, not exchange, not dialogue. Relation, with a capital R, names in Glissant the open totality — non-totalitarian — that weaves itself between opacities that recognise one another. The second concept: opacity. And one must hear this word in its Glissantian sense, which has nothing to do with ordinary opacity. Opacity is the refusal to be reduced to what can be understood. It is the persistence of a non-negotiable singularity, even at the heart of the densest Relation.

This thought is precious for the gesture WIE. It says: you can be fully with someone without having to give yourself over entirely. You can be fully engaged in a community without having to erase your disagreements. You can be fully a member of a movement without having to take up its most contentious certainties. The opacity you keep within you is not an obstacle to Relation — it is its condition.

And conversely, the opacity others keep within themselves is not an obstacle to your knowing them — it is what keeps the encounter alive. When you claim to understand someone entirely, you reduce them. You reduce them to the version of themselves that your grammar can absorb. Glissant calls this the thought of transparency, and he criticises it with a precise sharpness: « the thought of transparency is precisely the one that founded colonial slavery — it reduces the other to an object of supposedly exhaustive knowledge ».

Haraway, oddkin, and the Compost Community

Donna Haraway — American philosopher and biologist, long a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz — published Staying with the Trouble in 2016. The book offers several pivotal concepts, two of which resonate directly with the gesture WIE. The first is oddkin. The second is the Compost Community — which she unfolds in the Camille Stories, the speculative fiction that closes the book.

Oddkin translates poorly. « Strange kin ». « Odd family ». The idea: our true relatives are not only those who share our genes. Our true relatives are also all the beings with whom we compose our life — humans who are not like us, animals whose space we share, plants that feed us, microbes that dwell in our gut, ancestors who haunt our dreams, living futures we carry without knowing it. The extended family is the real family. The family narrowed to blood is a recent, and limited, convention.

The Camille Stories go further. Haraway imagines five future generations in a post-collapse world where humans willingly choose, from birth, to be genetically bound to a particular non-human species (a Monarch butterfly, in Camille's case). This genetic binding means that Camille's health depends on the Monarch's health, and vice versa. Survival becomes relational in the strong sense. Identity becomes sympoietic — composed with others, rather than made alone.

Eisenstein, the gift, interbeing

Charles Eisenstein — American author whose work Sacred Economics (2011) and then The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013) shaped the thinking of a generation of people in transition — offers a frame that completes Glissant and Haraway. For Eisenstein, humanity lived for five thousand years in what he calls the Story of Separation. This story says: you are a separate individual, the world is a set of separate objects, the aim of life is to optimise your individual survival in a fundamentally hostile universe.

And he proposes that another story is emerging — which he calls the Story of Interbeing. This story says: you are a knot in a vaster fabric, the world is a community of subjects in relation, the aim of life is to serve the mutual flourishing of the beings you coexist with. The transition between these two stories is not a change of opinions — it is a change of cosmology. And it is, according to Eisenstein, what is happening to humanity, in the pain of the civilisational transition.

The precise application of this thought, in Eisenstein, runs through the gift. In Sacred Economics, he distinguishes the gift economy from the market economy. In the market economy, you give to receive. The calculation is immediate and symmetrical. In the gift economy, you give because you have received — without calculation, without immediate symmetry, in the trust that the circulation will continue. It is the grammar of human societies for most of their history. And it is, on a very small scale but truly, the grammar INFUSE tries to hold with its Allié·e Programme, its named sourcing, its relationship to producers, its relationship to ambassadors.

Mitakuye oyasin — the Lakota and the sacred hoop

Black Elk — Lakota Oglala medicine man born in 1863, witness to the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, died in 1950 — passed on to John Neihardt in 1931 a vision he had received at nine years old, and had kept to himself for fifty years. This vision, told in the book Black Elk Speaks published in 1932, contains a phrase that circulates the world over today: mitakuye oyasin. All my relations.

This phrase is repeated at the close of most Lakota ceremonies — sweat lodge, sun dance, sacred pipe. It is also spoken as a blessing at the beginning and end of a meal, an encounter, a day. Its meaning reaches far beyond the literal translation. It says: I recognise that I am woven with all the beings that make up this world. Not only humans. All beings. The animal peoples, the plant peoples, the mineral peoples, the ancestral peoples, the peoples to come.

In his vision at nine, Black Elk had received the image of the Sacred Hoop. The sacred hoop is what holds the unity of a nation, of a community, of an individual being. When the hoop is whole, life circulates. When the hoop breaks, sickness begins. Black Elk's vision had shown the Lakota hoop broken by the arrival of the wasichus (the Whites), and had promised that it could be mended — but not by war: by memory, by transmission, by the mitakuye oyasin kept alive across the generations.

This Lakota grammar is precious for the gesture WIE because it roots the weaving in a living ceremonial practice, not in a philosophical concept. Mitakuye oyasin is not a theory — it is a ritual phrase spoken aloud, in precise contexts, with a precise intention. It is, in the indigenous grammar, a somatic practice. And it is precisely what the INFUSE cosmogony wants to hold: not one more concept, but a practice that transforms perception.

The gesture WIE in daily life — four applications

How, concretely, does one practise WIE in daily life? The INFUSE cosmogony offers four applications. Not a rigid protocol. Four points of attention which, practised over time, transform perception.

First application — writing and speech. When you write or speak, replace the formulas of possession with the formulas of relation. Not « I had some cacao » but « cacao was my company this morning ». Not « my plant » but « the plant I live with ». Not « my body » but « the body I inhabit ». These grammatical shifts, which may seem the affectations of a stylist, slowly transform perception. After a few months, you begin to feel the difference between owning and keeping company. It is a tiny and powerful act of disenchantment.

Second application — the decision. When you decide something that commits you — a change of work, a break-up, a move, an investment — ask yourself the WIE question. Does this choice strengthen my I without destroying the WE? Does it strengthen the WE without dissolving my I? If one of the two is sacrificed for the other, it is not WIE. It is either libertarian hyper-individualism (the I that erases the WE), or fusional sacrifice (the WE that erases the I). Neither is tenable in the long run.

Third application — the calling. When you feel a call — a vocation rising, a project that wants to be born, an intuition that will not let you go — weave it. Don't charge ahead alone. Don't dilute yourself into the group. Hold your call AND invite to the table those it concerns. Ask for opinions. Honour the opacities of others. Let them tell you no, and truly listen when they do. WIE is an ethics of deciding with — not deciding for, not deciding against.

Fourth application — doubt. When you doubt, lean on the pivotal symbol of the sign WIE — the « ?! ». The astonishment (?) that becomes affirmation (!). The question that turns into an act. You can not-know and move forward anyway. You can have no guarantee and weave anyway. This is precisely the definition of the Sovereign of the Ruins (cf. Pillar 1) — and it is the deep cosmological gesture of the courageous weaver. Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet and contemporary of Lorca, wrote it in 1912 in Campos de Castilla: « Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. » Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking.

WIE as a principle of INFUSE governance

WIE is not only an individual principle. It is also a principle of governance. And it orients the way INFUSE builds itself as an organisation. No isolated founder deciding everything. No community absorbing the founder. The founder keeps their I — their vision, their own voice, their authority. The INFUSE community — ambassadors, allié·e·s, readers of the manifestos, producers, partners — weaves its WE.

Strategic decisions are taken neither by founder's diktat (which would be the hyper-I) nor by majority vote (which could be the hyper-WE). They are taken by what Glissant calls reciprocal presupposition — a mode of decision that assumes every opinion counts without every opinion being of equal weight. It is a fragile balance, one that asks for patience, and that produces, over time, decisions more just than either extreme.

WIE also orients the editorial grammar of INFUSE. The INFUSE voice 70/20/10 — 70% clarity, 20% animist poetry, 10% ethical edge — is itself an application of WIE. The 70% clarity serves the accessible WE (the reader can understand without needing a specialist dictionary). The 20% animist poetry serves the embodied I (the singular voice that does not erase itself into corporate transparency). The 10% ethical edge serves the WE that refuses and the I that takes a stand. This balance is not a compromise. It is a weaving.

RÉ-UNION — the cosmos-word

The pivotal word of this pillar is ré-union. Break it down phonetically, as Fulcanelli did with old words: RÉ — again, anew — UNION — the state of being one. But the union here is not fusion. The union here is what weaves itself when irreducible opacities recognise one another and choose to walk together. To re-make the union is not to erase the differences. It is to honour what was never truly separate.

Because that is it — the great revelation that contemporary science confirms and that indigenous peoples have always known: we have never been separate. Separation is a recent cultural myth — about five hundred years old, in the European colonial grammar. Before that, in most of the planet's human cultures, the separation between the human and the non-human was not a relevant category. Lynn Margulis, the American biologist, showed that even at the cellular level separation is a myth — our mitochondria are ancient bacteria that merged with our single-celled ancestors two billion years ago.

Re-union is to remember — in the strong, somatic sense, in the body one inhabits — that one has never ceased to be woven. It is, perhaps, the simplest and most radical cosmogonic gesture there is. It asks for no elaborate ritual. It asks only that you breathe, knowing that your breath passes through your mitochondria, which are ancient bacteria that became you. It is as simple as that. And it is as vertiginous as that.