Tentacular Vision: What Can We Learn from Fascists, Mushrooms, and Women Who Care?

• In Event: Left Perspectives on State- and Post-Socialism II: Ghosts of Revolution: Post-Soviet Resentment and the Rise of the Right

Abstract

As Polycrisis, Deglobalization, and the Conservative Turn reshape global politics, emancipatory movements struggle to build and sustain solidarities. Co-opted by neoliberalism, identity has been weaponized as a tool of exclusion and division rather than connection. Fueled by politics of hate and resentment, populism has channeled economic disillusionment into toxic nostalgia and exclusionary subjectivities—offering rigid hierarchies and patriarchal certainties in response to precarity and dispossession.

This paper calls for a shift from essentialist identity politics toward tentacular webs—networks that embrace relationality, fluidity, and interdependence to resist the commodification of subjectivity, neocolonial extractionism, and xenophobic nationalism. Drawing on affect theory, new materialisms, and ecofeminist ethics of care, this emergent politics—rooted in situated, embodied, and decentralized resistance—moves beyond old divisions and conventions, offering symbiotic models for dismantling hierarchical power.

Rather than seeking fixed purity—ideological, ethnic, or ontological—tentacular vision foregrounds the messy, co-constitutive entanglements of life, from sprawling mycelial webs to the microbiomes composing the body. Focusing on post-Soviet contexts, this paper explores how assemblages of queering human-nonhuman matter can counter exclusionary mobilization and reweave the social and ecological fabric toward a politics of situatedness, reciprocity, and mutual transformation. Instead of reinforcing division, learning with nature, vibrant bodies, and each other becomes essential—imagining new ways of co-becoming in a polarized world.

Author

• Anatoli Ulyanov, UCLA