For The Wild - DR. BÁYÒ AKÓMOLÁFÉ on Ontological Mutiny ⧸338

00:00:00.140 To listen to the extended version of this episode, support us on patreon.com slash for the wild.

00:00:10.980 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Bayo Okomalafe.

00:00:20.820 We're faced with an invitation for new and powerfully potent frameworks that might invite us to shapeshift.

00:00:31.460 What's called into question here is our rectilinear posture, is how our bodies are embodied, is how our paradigms have coddled us and kept us safe.

00:00:41.760 And we've been invited to story new ideas, to story new tensions, to libate those vexed grounds and to ask new questions about what it means to be alive now.

00:00:53.920 bio komalafe phd rooted with the yoruba people in a more than human world is the father of

00:01:03.060 aletheia and kaya the grateful life partner to ej son and brother a widely celebrated

00:01:10.760 international speaker post-humanist thinker poet teacher public intellectual essayist and

00:01:18.260 author of two books, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's

00:01:24.200 Search for Home, North Atlantic Books, and We Will Tell Our Own Story, The Lions of Africa Speak.

00:01:32.820 Bayo Komalafe is the founder of the Emergence Network and host of the post-activist course

00:01:38.680 festival event, We Will Dance with the Mountains. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate

00:01:44.900 Institute, California. He sits on the board of many organizations, including Science and

00:01:50.300 Non-Duality and Ancient Futures. In July 2022, Dr. Komalafe was appointed the inaugural Global

00:01:58.120 Senior Fellow of University of California's Berkeley Othering and Belonging Institute.

00:02:04.540 He has also been appointed Fellow of the New Institute in Hamburg, Germany,

00:02:09.140 and visiting critic-in-residence for the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

00:02:14.900 He is the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit in 2022.

00:02:31.540 Oh, Bio, I'm so happy to have this time with you.

00:02:36.360 I know I'm in for a wild ride.

00:02:39.300 So thanks for being here and sharing with us.

00:02:44.160 It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me again.

00:02:47.200 There's so many ways to start off and so much we could untangle and retangle together.

00:02:53.620 I want to start with diving into exploring crisis and narratives around crisis because they seem to consume the modern mind and perhaps even freeze us within this crisis mode.

00:03:09.340 I'm wondering, might the idea that we are in crisis be getting in the way of making meaningful change?

00:03:18.280 Thank you for that, Yana.

00:03:21.380 I think there is a very powerful, at least for me, a powerful sense in which one might say,

00:03:30.180 One might theorize that moral fields, ethical landscapes, what they do is they produce crisis, they produce problems that to be embodied is to have excluded something, is to have lost something in some sense.

00:03:53.760 I'm speaking about what Karen Barad might think of as a complementarity.

00:04:01.180 If you materialize with a machine, light as particulate, as a bunch of particles, then you've lost, you've constitutionally excluded the phenomenon of light as wave.

00:04:16.700 And if you produce light as wave, then you exclude light as particle.

00:04:21.960 So that, you know, in a sense, to live, to breathe is to exclude something.

00:04:28.380 Something is lost, in a sense, if you will.

00:04:32.640 Modernity is the production of the individual.

00:04:36.940 It's the production of the separate self.

00:04:40.140 speculate that its most feverish production its desire is to encircle reinforce and nourish the

00:04:52.580 idea of the citizen the citizen subject as a thing unto itself as an essential fundamental thing

00:05:01.680 What that leaves out is the possibility, the performance of a world, not just a theoretical abstraction, but the performance of a world and our relations with it, a world that is alive and intelligent and agential and active and thoughtful and risky and more than human.

00:05:26.880 I think the crises that we are producing as a civilization is embedded in the tensions of modernity.

00:05:37.820 It's how we're making do with being alive.

00:05:41.760 It's virtually stitched into the fabric of our everyday.

00:05:47.020 So in a sense, you might say that even if we found a solution to a problem like a wicked problem,

00:05:52.300 like, say, climate chaos, right?

00:05:56.600 Even if we found a solution,

00:05:58.820 this particular nature culture

00:06:01.040 that we are co-performing

00:06:03.660 will find some way to reinvent the challenge, right?

00:06:10.980 We will secrete this problem in a different way.

00:06:15.140 We'll find another way to create

00:06:17.000 or touch the other tensions

00:06:18.980 that inhabit the idea

00:06:21.320 that we are separate from the world.

00:06:24.720 So the solutions are not enough

00:06:27.060 because solutions are just as much part and parcel

00:06:30.300 of the economy of intelligibility, of modernity.

00:06:35.020 I know that's an unwieldy statement, but there you go.

00:06:38.480 Solutions are part of how problems are reinforced.

00:06:44.520 So what we need then is not just solutions

00:06:48.760 and not to dismiss precious work around the wicked problem of climate chaos.

00:06:55.220 What we need is more than just solutions.

00:06:57.960 What we need is some kind of an ontological mutiny, I like to say.

00:07:02.560 A break away from the sensorial monoculture that leaves us intact as citizen subjects.

00:07:12.260 I love exploring this because I find myself frustrated, even a bit angry, exhausted,

00:07:23.080 dismissive of solutions that are popping up all over the place in regards to climate change.

00:07:31.640 So I do want to tease out a bit more of how does one start to embody something other than the formula that's given to us to work through this crisis?

00:07:49.260 I think we would need formulas that are not formulaic, if that makes sense.

00:07:55.620 One wouldn't want to drop into a trap of repeatability.

00:08:00.580 The world is too promiscuous for final answers, right?

00:08:08.120 And yet, having said that, we are a cartographical species.

00:08:13.740 We would need to find our way and we would need patterns.

00:08:17.580 We would need abstractions.

00:08:19.480 We would need theories.

00:08:20.940 We would need to speak with each other.

00:08:22.860 We would need to keep silent.

00:08:25.400 We would need to fall apart together.

00:08:28.160 In my sense of things, given that our bodies are not isolated Newtonian Cartesian machines, given that the story of the individual is heavily burdened, stressed, and haunted by the idea that we've never really been individuals per se.

00:08:52.180 We are concretizations of multiple influences, of agencies crisscrossing each other.

00:08:59.540 We are crossroads.

00:09:01.500 So there isn't some getting it all together, even our view of politics as enshrined in

00:09:08.540 the voter, you know, or the idea that if only we can get people to get their act together,

00:09:16.960 then, you know, by giving them more and more data about what's wrong, you know,

00:09:21.960 Those practices seem to leave out the idea that individuals are not, you know, they're not atomic, is not a question of ignorance here.

00:09:33.320 Our politics has to be a lot more generous than an information spilling machine, right?

00:09:39.500 It has to be a lot more practical than going to the voting booth.

00:09:44.460 It has to be a lot more generous and hospitable and spatial.

00:09:49.320 The aesthetic of it must go beyond speaking truth to power.

00:09:54.700 And my sense of things is that it begins with loss.

00:09:59.020 Loss is the most prolific and most fervent creation of the universe.

00:10:07.960 The universe is too, you can say the constant thing in the universe of change that it produces is movement.

00:10:16.680 It's loss. Bodies spill into these frames, get composted. Paradigms enjoy demise. You know, our cells fall to the ground. We spill into dust so that we are murmurations of becoming.

00:10:36.280 I had a dream recently, and I came out of the dream with a sentence.

00:10:41.740 I don't want to bore you with the other details of the dream, but I remember before I went to sleep, I had a question that I posed to whatever forces, whatever parliaments of hands and hearts and heads and limbs are responsible for stitching dreams together.

00:11:01.960 I said, help me ask new questions, help me gain new insights, let's have a conversation.

00:11:10.100 And I'm not exactly sure who I was intending that communication for, but I said it anyway.

00:11:15.040 And I went to sleep and then caught right to the part where I woke up and I heard distinctly

00:11:20.500 in my mind, the formulation of a sentence.

00:11:23.900 And it was in the geometry of the exquisite, loss is important.

00:11:31.960 Something like that, you know, or yes, this is it. This is exactly what it said. In the geometry of the exquisite, the lines never connect, right? And my interpretation of that was that loss, you know, is what I'm saying about loss now.

00:11:47.900 The idea that everything is only partial, that politics is partial, that we can only think of a partial response to a world that can never be revealed, so to speak, or can never show up fully, seems to be the insight in that sentence.

00:12:07.200 And so back to my configuration of things, it's this, I think it begins with loss. I think it begins with disability. That if we take it for granted that our bodies are landscape making assemblages, then it's possible for us to get stuck in that landscaping ritual.

00:12:32.920 It's possible for ants to go around in a pheromonic trance

00:12:36.540 and die in exhaustion,

00:12:38.700 believing that they're making progress, right?

00:12:42.380 So the thing to look out for are breaks.

00:12:45.640 Breaks are signified or figured in,

00:12:50.200 you know, the spaces or the sites,

00:12:54.580 the crippled places,

00:12:55.960 what some scholars would call cryptistemology,

00:12:58.940 ways of knowing that is not yet trapped in ableist circles of knowing, right?

00:13:06.480 So I think of disability as a site of excess, as a site of possibility,

00:13:12.180 especially a politics of the exquisite, of the transformational, of the transversal, 0.98

00:13:17.420 as a surrounding of that mark, of that break, of that crack in the surface,

00:13:26.300 a surrounding, a sitting with, a sharing with, right?

00:13:31.140 So just to cut the spiel shorter than usual,

00:13:36.080 I would say that I think it begins with ornamenting and libating cracks.

00:13:41.360 It begins with that.

00:13:43.260 And somehow I sense that when we do that long enough,

00:13:47.720 when we share new cartographical possibilities instigated by cracks,

00:13:53.480 then new directions are rendered possible are made available

00:13:59.800 yeah i love that theme throughout your work and i also want to recognize you know for probably

00:14:11.480 most of us listening that the construction of narratives around climate change are often

00:14:16.980 distinctly Western and even specifically of a U.S.-based context. I'm thinking about your

00:14:23.680 experience living in India and how might we turn to other ways of understanding what is called

00:14:30.780 climate change outside of the dominant Western, even U.S. narrative? Climate change, whatever term,

00:14:41.340 It's often difficult to even choose what term one would adopt what day of the week.

00:14:52.580 But climate change is wide stability.

00:14:58.200 It's not just weather patterns, gone or all.

00:15:05.640 It's not just errancy.

00:15:09.560 it's

00:15:11.420 you know, this is a relational

00:15:14.200 phenomenon

00:15:16.540 this is, let me put it this way 1.00

00:15:18.640 that the inrush of an

00:15:20.680 ocean wave, the crashing

00:15:22.800 of a wave on the shore

00:15:24.240 on

00:15:25.260 perhaps on a sandcastle that one

00:15:28.560 has built, is a rather

00:15:30.500 different

00:15:31.280 phenomenon from

00:15:34.260 an ocean wave crashing

00:15:36.200 on a

00:15:38.600 phallic steel tower, right?

00:15:41.740 To, in the former image,

00:15:45.460 you know, sand castles are meant to be composted.

00:15:48.800 They're meant to fade away.

00:15:51.460 Part of the joy of building it is to see it crumble.

00:15:55.120 But to a steel tower and its performances of permanence,

00:15:59.820 anything that comes from without is a possible threat.

00:16:04.420 And yet the ocean waves are the same.

00:16:06.560 Without trying to diminish the escalating consequences of industrial activity, what I want to stress here is climate change is, in the words of Frederick Apfel-Marglin, climate change is eco-metaphysically true. 0.89

00:16:28.680 It is true and effectual within an assemblage, within a particular way of noticing and seeing the world, which is white stability. 0.91

00:16:41.240 The reason why climate change is spreading fast is because whiteness is globally relevant. 0.99

00:16:48.540 It's escalating as well. 1.00

00:16:51.600 And so we are faced with a crisis, not just of weather patterns.

00:16:56.300 We're faced with a deeper onto-epistemological crisis.

00:17:01.100 By onto-epistemological, I mean a crisis of becoming, a crisis of being.

00:17:07.560 What does it mean to be human?

00:17:10.260 How do we know things?

00:17:12.240 What does our knowing enact?

00:17:14.420 What worlds die as a result of our rituals of coming to know the world, right?

00:17:19.620 All of these are called into question as storms dance outside of our windows and sometimes through our buildings.

00:17:30.380 We are being invited to ask questions about how we build our lives, how we build the city.

00:17:37.020 Everything is called into question here.

00:17:40.240 So the Anthropocene is, you know, that's often articulated as this global narrative.

00:17:49.620 This planetary cautionary tale, warning everyone to have their hands on deck or we might lose our lives.

00:17:58.360 Of course, what that leaves out is that the world is uneven, not just uneven in terms of how we are producing the conditions for this crisis,

00:18:11.960 Not just uneven in how this crisis is blowing like smoke across the planet, but also uneven in how we see it.

00:18:26.800 And so you're right there. We're faced with more than just a simple request for techno-bureaucratic responses.

00:18:35.460 We're faced with an invitation for new and powerfully potent frameworks that might invite us to shapeshift, right?

00:18:47.220 What's called into question here is our rectilinear posture, is how our bodies are embodied, is how our paradigms have coddled us and kept us safe.

00:18:58.120 now that safety you know has had its endorsement withdrawn by the planet so to speak and we've been

00:19:07.020 invited to story new ideas to story new tensions to libate those vexed grounds and to ask new

00:19:16.160 questions about what it means to be alive now the Yoruba people have wonderful I live in India but

00:19:21.360 I'm deeply in touch with the Yoruba lessons and the Yoruba stories that have transmuted

00:19:30.580 into black scholarship and Afro-diasporic spiritualities and slave narratives and how

00:19:38.200 they're inviting us to behave in the midst of capture, how they're inviting us to behave

00:19:44.020 when a god, a wild god, comes visiting.

00:19:49.240 And I think that's the story that I tell around the world,

00:19:53.400 especially to climate scientists,

00:19:55.920 especially those who write IPCC reports

00:19:58.220 and are not exactly sure how to frame hope or hopelessness

00:20:02.640 in a time when the nation-state paradigm

00:20:05.060 doesn't seem able to rise to the challenge.

00:20:08.960 I think a descending is more appropriate

00:20:11.020 as a responsible thing to do now.

00:20:41.020 Riverwood, Riverwood, I will always remember, Riverwood, I can't believe you.

00:21:08.020 That was, I don't know how to describe it, but I really felt attached to the words you were

00:21:28.700 speaking. And I do see this clinging that whiteness brings, even when I think about 0.73

00:21:37.180 building materials. The metaphor of the sandcastle really sparked in me the poisons we use 0.95

00:21:45.240 here, especially in the United States, to keep our buildings from rotting. They're formaldehyde

00:21:50.980 in our bodies to keep our bodies from rotting. We don't want to let go. And the desperation to

00:21:58.840 cling shifts the whole way we experience the world. And of course, climate change and change

00:22:05.060 in general. And I want to ask about how we nurture through the rupture. In welcoming to the wandering,

00:22:13.300 winding way of the wound for science and non-duality, you discussed just how difficult

00:22:18.940 it is to live with rupture, how difficult it is to have your world upended. I'm wondering how do

00:22:25.960 we provide care and nurturing through rupture so that we can bear them and embrace shifts rather

00:22:31.960 than just running back to the concrete and not allowing the rupture to grow and change

00:22:37.940 us.

00:22:39.320 Wonderful.

00:22:41.140 Recently at the University of Massachusetts, I, speaking with architects and urban planners, 1.00

00:22:48.220 I said, blackness is dis-architecture, or rather, blackness is the end of architecture. 1.00

00:22:55.660 And I had to quickly add that it's all right, though, you can relax because their bodies 0.99

00:23:01.080 immediately became stiff and I needed to explain what I meant by blackness as the end of 0.82

00:23:07.360 architecture. Architects hate decay, right? The pride of an architect is to see one's art

00:23:16.360 thriving, is to see it last long, right? Is to have the integrity of the building or the structure

00:23:25.300 praised, you know, for decades to come. And so they try to build in a way that protects the

00:23:35.220 integrity of the structure so it doesn't decay. In a sense, architecture is a conversation with

00:23:43.180 loss. It's a conversation with decay and with flailing edges, right? It's an ongoing conversation

00:23:50.840 about what do we give up

00:23:52.480 and what do we let live or stay or abide permanently

00:23:56.900 if we can manage that prospect.

00:24:00.940 And architecture is not just building.

00:24:02.520 Architecture is how experience is designed.

00:24:08.140 Think about the architecture of cities.

00:24:10.880 Think about what certain buildings want us to feel, right?

00:24:17.940 Like, what kind of feeling is evoked when you see the White House?

00:24:25.060 What does it arouse?

00:24:27.460 What does a mountain arouse?

00:24:29.460 What does the White House arouse?

00:24:32.220 What does the Pentagon arouse?

00:24:34.600 What does the Statue of Liberty arouse?

00:24:36.640 So we're not just little dots moving through Euclidean empty spaces.

00:24:44.620 We are arousals.

00:24:46.440 We are meeting concatenations of arousals, right?

00:24:50.680 We're subjects of unspeakable arousals, erotic crossroads.

00:24:57.440 And architecture is part of that, partially.

00:25:00.800 You know, it co-produces these experiences, right?

00:25:04.600 We might not understand why we feel happy all of a sudden when we're surrounded by certain furniture.

00:25:10.800 But there is some support.

00:25:14.660 I don't want to say evidence.

00:25:15.920 It seems more anecdotal at this point, but there is some compelling narrative that suggests that our feelings, our capacity to respond, which is affect, you know, is not domiciled in our bodies.

00:25:34.260 It is a question of ecological transferences.

00:25:40.160 You know, it's a matter of atmospheric, you know, exchanges.

00:25:44.540 so we are not separate from architecture. 0.73

00:25:49.720 What do I mean then when I say blackness 0.61

00:25:51.780 is the loss of or the death of architecture?

00:25:54.600 I think of blackness not just as the identitarian thing,

00:26:01.400 not just as the how certain bodies appear,

00:26:06.280 which veers closely and coincides closely

00:26:09.720 with colonial imaginations of identity, right? 0.64

00:26:13.260 I'm not just thinking of blackness as a form of capture, as a passenger concept on this, you know, in the paradigm of whiteness, constantly at odds, constantly seeking diversity, constantly seeking a space at the table. 0.87

00:26:31.680 Right. Constantly prosthetic, but constantly seeking to be a real boy like Pinocchio. 0.96

00:26:38.860 You know, I'm not speaking about that blackness. 1.00

00:26:41.140 I'm speaking about a different blackness. 1.00

00:26:43.560 I call that a small b blackness, right? 1.00

00:26:47.000 It's ungrammatical. 1.00

00:26:48.340 It's fugitive.

00:26:49.660 It's geological.

00:26:51.520 It's how things become. 0.97

00:26:55.300 You know, Yoruba people might call it ashe, right? 1.00

00:26:58.440 It's the ongoing flowing disruption of any claims to stability, right? 1.00

00:27:05.500 It's how things lose their edges. 0.78

00:27:07.380 it's loss right it's the maternal matrix spill it's spillage and this blackness i speak of as

00:27:17.240 spillage is constantly haunting every claims to every claim to to stability it's constantly

00:27:26.320 pulling at the threads so that we might become something different it denies us any claim to

00:27:34.620 eternity. It says, here's where you fall down, right? I think in such a time we're in,

00:27:42.500 the materials of our ritualizing flatness have amassed or come together in such a way

00:27:52.560 that it's now almost inescapable to push the dust under the carpet. Like the dust under the carpet

00:27:59.980 it is now a mountain. And so there's no place to hide now. So, you know, we're witnessing,

00:28:08.100 witnessing, you know, this ongoing decay. It's like decay on steroids. And we're going to

00:28:16.600 experience that not just in the loss of ecological integrity, not just in the loss of trust in

00:28:23.020 governance. We're in such a time where trust in democratic institutions is at an all-time low.

00:28:29.380 We're going to witness that not just in that institutional decadence, not just in what we have pathologized as corruption.

00:28:37.340 We're also going to witness how we are showing up experientially, right?

00:28:42.560 I think we're not just in a global pandemic of viruses.

00:28:47.380 I think we're also in a pandemic of depression, of despair.

00:28:54.340 And this despair will push us to do things.

00:28:56.860 it would push us to to ask new questions to push us to the streets it would enhance our

00:29:03.900 it would burden our voices with a different pathos and we would wonder isn't there something

00:29:10.980 more so this is where your question comes in after offering that framework that scaffolding

00:29:16.240 conceptual scaffolding that as white stability fades we will need a politics that does more than

00:29:23.840 just, you know, help people get back into productive cycles. We would need something

00:29:30.940 like a midwifing. We would need to catch people where they fall. This is what I call making

00:29:38.640 sanctuary. You know, even white people, you know, I often say whiteness is not white people. 0.67

00:29:45.380 whiteness also captured white people right but even the all ways of privilege will seem

00:29:54.240 emptier and hollower and hollower and it would seem like what's there to this after all so 0.64

00:30:02.940 whiteness isn't even stable itself whiteness is like an amoeba it's organic it's spilling

00:30:09.880 and it's also becoming something else, right?

00:30:12.840 It's not a property.

00:30:14.140 White identified people don't own whiteness, right? 0.99

00:30:19.340 Whiteness is an arrangement 0.83

00:30:20.640 and it's an arrangement that can change.

00:30:23.360 It's an arrangement that can also migrate and travel,

00:30:27.620 right, like a murmuration.

00:30:30.140 So as that happens, as cracks emerge,

00:30:35.340 as monsters sprout through flat surfaces

00:30:38.580 and in sterilized places as the enemy creeps up within, so to speak, as the wilds show up in our

00:30:48.200 living rooms. We would need something more than chasing them away. We would not need psychotherapy,

00:30:53.900 I think. We would need ab therapy. And for me, ab therapy, just my construction, is away from

00:31:01.140 therapy. I'm not speaking about healing or justice, and those are specific concerns. I cannot

00:31:07.520 universalize or generalize the need for that. But I think collectively, we might need something that

00:31:13.680 looks like walking away from the couch. We might need something more than healing. We might need

00:31:19.380 a collective communitas, you know, an enterprise, an assemblage that allows people to lean into

00:31:28.260 these spaces of rupture that supports people as they go through this. And this is what I call

00:31:36.580 Making Sanctuary.

00:32:06.580 Thank you.

00:32:36.580 Beautiful.

00:32:55.060 I would now like to turn our conversation to your recent essay,

00:33:02.700 Black Lives Matter, but to whom?

00:33:04.900 We need a politics of exile in a time of troubling stuckness.

00:33:10.080 And in the essay, you write, quote,

00:33:12.540 I'm writing to say that while Black Lives Matter deploys an identitarian approach to make its demands and claims about Black experience legible to the public, 0.68

00:33:23.340 it inadvertently contributes to the ongoing manufacturing of the Black subject, an imprint of white logic. 0.64

00:33:30.360 Its method of intersectionality, an iteration of what seems popular beyond a studied and careful appreciation of Kimberly Crenshaw's more nuanced thesis, contributes to the discretization of bodies as fully articulable subjects of meeting. End quote. 0.91

00:33:49.360 I would love to hear more about this trap of identity and the creation of subjects.

00:33:56.840 Yes, it's like a full circle thing we're doing here.

00:33:59.620 We're coming right back to the idea of the individual, right?

00:34:03.700 I think I would never, ever forget the words of Professor Marisol de la Cadena in conversation,

00:34:09.760 conspiratorial conversation with me, when she told me that,

00:34:13.980 I think that the vessel of capture wasn't just the slave ship.

00:34:19.620 It was the concept of the human, right?

00:34:22.480 Bodies were imported into the growing enterprise of the human, the human or the Anthropocene, right? Bodies were imported into it as prosthetic contributors to the emergence of the Anthropocene, right? 0.63

00:34:41.100 So black bodies were placed on a spectrum, one might argue. 0.99

00:34:46.200 The spectrum was not quite human, less than human, right?

00:34:52.120 Our, and I use our with some hesitation here,

00:34:56.020 but our approach, approach of the minoritarian has been to aspire, 0.92

00:35:02.860 to leave behind the prosthetics of being a minority

00:35:07.800 and arrive summarily at the halls of power

00:35:12.440 to leave the hallways and enter the room, so to speak,

00:35:17.240 to stop standing at the gates

00:35:19.200 and to gain entrance into the city, right?

00:35:22.280 And the strategy for that has been to adopt

00:35:26.160 the same ontological tools of the city, which is identity.

00:35:31.080 Modernity's strategy for creating individuals

00:35:34.200 is to settle them into suburban identities,

00:35:39.080 to stabilize them,

00:35:41.880 to say, I will cut off the wilds 0.99

00:35:45.040 like a Procrastean bed,

00:35:47.500 and that was to the thief

00:35:49.120 or to the visitor or to the traveler at night. 1.00

00:35:52.280 I will cut off your limbs. 1.00

00:35:54.520 I will cut off your tendrils. 1.00

00:35:56.480 And I will, with exacting precision, 1.00

00:35:59.680 I will place you within a room.

00:36:02.160 And this is where you will have power.

00:36:04.680 This is how you will sing.

00:36:06.380 This is how you will thrive.

00:36:08.000 But you must be identified.

00:36:10.400 You must be intelligible.

00:36:12.220 You must be legible.

00:36:13.760 You must be surveilled.

00:36:15.300 You must be useful to my purposes. 1.00

00:36:19.460 And so blackness, this big B blackness, 1.00

00:36:23.880 has been this yearning to be seen, to be recognized, right? 1.00

00:36:29.040 To have a seat at the table, to speak truth to power, right?

00:36:33.600 To be visible.

00:36:36.720 With visibility, however, comes the trap of being useful.

00:36:41.860 And with the trap of being useful comes incarceration.

00:36:48.040 Because if you're surveilled, if you're legible to, say, the nation state,

00:36:53.840 then you're available, then you're numbered.

00:36:59.040 And then I can incarcerate you. 0.99

00:37:01.580 So black excellence is this narrative, this yearning, this presumption that the way to go, the way for blackness to go is from the shores of violent capture to migrate from the edges to the center of the city, from the borderlands to the hinterland of capture, you know, and to occupy power there. 0.99

00:37:27.800 to be more visible to be seen to be celebrated to rise to fame to have a private jet to do all of 0.99

00:37:37.800 that it's a world-building process in this way blackness is a form of white capture 0.99

00:37:43.940 now this is not to say this is bad or this is evil you know i don't think in those terms 0.95

00:37:50.620 But this is to say that if blackness is comorbid with the Anthropocene, are there other ways to frame blackness, you know, this minoritarian capture that might allow us to go in different directions other than the one we're all headed to right now? 0.65

00:38:09.840 Is there a way to think of the minority that isn't this ticket, this one-way highway to this city set upon a hill, right? 0.79

00:38:25.340 Is there a way to think about all of that without capitulating to modernity's algorithms of capture? 0.72

00:38:33.380 So that's what I'm saying here.

00:38:35.440 We need other ways to spill.

00:38:37.460 We need other ways, perhaps, and this is why I use subterranean, because it's quite difficult for surveillance cameras to pick what is beneath the ground, right?

00:38:47.720 So we need beneath-the-ground politics, or supplementary politics, if you will, which is not a dismissal or a pathologization of identity politics, but a way of holding different questions and different energies and orientations, or rather disorientations.

00:39:05.140 as we come up against a time

00:39:08.860 in which the crisis of loss is becoming escalated.

00:39:17.940 I'd love to hear more about the concept of Black exile

00:39:23.880 and its relation to the Afro scene

00:39:27.200 and what points of our current era gesture towards different ways of being.

00:39:33.160 right when something flashes up when something flares up and burns through the algorithms of

00:39:44.100 continuity going to the shopping mall going to city hall seeking recognition when something

00:39:50.740 bursts through that the landscape that is made visible through that new parallaxed vision

00:39:57.620 is the Afro-Scene. 0.92

00:40:00.220 It's not after the Anthropocene.

00:40:02.640 It's not a replacement concept.

00:40:05.020 It's not a substitute for the Anthropocene.

00:40:07.540 It is a stowaway concept, right? 1.00

00:40:10.620 The Afro-Scene lives within capture. 0.95

00:40:13.680 And this story of capture here is the Anthropocene. 0.98

00:40:17.920 The Anthropocene is capture. 1.00

00:40:19.940 The Afro-Scene is the sideline logic, 0.99

00:40:23.660 the logic that sidles, the non-legible logic that sidles the materials of capture, right? 0.92

00:40:34.140 It's issue, traveling with the slaves across the Atlantic, the trickster, traveling with the slaves

00:40:40.620 across the Atlantic. That's what the Afro scene is. And what it encourages is a different posture 1.00

00:40:47.160 altogether. It's to listen. It's to a world that is wilder than the materials of the Anthropocene

00:40:55.240 might invite us to notice, to appreciate. It is thoughts traveling with bodies melting into each

00:41:03.240 other. It is ancestors, you know, living and breathing. It is spirits with three heads,

00:41:08.620 you know, skating the surfaces of the Atlantic Ocean. It is all these things that live with us

00:41:17.000 and speak with us and dream with us that we don't know how to voice or language.

00:41:24.580 So the Afro scene becomes this carnivalesque, festive, radically hospitable concept

00:41:30.400 that invites experimentation with embodiment.

00:41:34.620 Beyond just the binary of healing versus injury, victim versus perpetrator,

00:41:39.760 justice versus injustice, black versus white, here versus there.

00:41:43.820 it skirts the lines it straddles the binary it exists in the cracks between the binary 0.52

00:41:50.060 right so black exile becomes this performance of queer relationalities instead of speaking 0.68

00:41:59.940 to my senator and i'm not diminishing speaking to one's senators or legislators but instead of 0.68

00:42:06.220 just speaking to my senator i might as well communicate with furniture i might as well

00:42:12.700 find ways to trace, you know,

00:42:16.380 connections that my body is already practicing

00:42:19.020 with ancestral becomeings.

00:42:23.080 I might as well lose my way

00:42:25.100 and in becoming lost,

00:42:27.920 be alive to other spaces of power, right? 0.99

00:42:30.980 Black exile is the invitation to occupy the monster, right? 1.00

00:42:35.660 And I remember in that essay, 1.00

00:42:37.620 I stay with this idea of occupying the monster,

00:42:40.820 you know, exploring the story of Badijo, the Nigerian actor who inhabited the body of the

00:42:52.460 xenomorph in Ridley Scott's Alien in the 70s, right? He entered the monster. He became the

00:43:01.060 monster. And it's a rich story. I invite anyone who doesn't know of Badijo to explore his story.

00:43:09.780 I think body job becomes a figure for Black exile, an invitation to experiment with embodiment, just as issue is an invitation to experiment with embodiment, is a disappointment of those enlightenment precepts, concepts about politics, being either utilitarian, industrial, or natural, or any of those things.

00:43:39.780 It's not Lockean or Hobbesian, that politics is premised on a singular notion of nature, can be a form of a trap, that what we want to do right now is experiment with new nature culture and render them more resilient as we perform with them.

00:43:58.340 Mm. Oh gosh. I'm just sitting in the complexity and the beauty and the expansion of it all.

00:44:11.120 And there's so much in the article, Black Lives Matter, but to whom we need a politics of exile 0.57

00:44:18.780 in a time of troubling stuckness. And I want to read another quote because there's so much in

00:44:24.920 here. And you write, quote, the irony of attempting to create safe zones to nullify

00:44:31.620 the offending body and to postpone fascism indefinitely is that it is often in the effort

00:44:38.480 to guarantee this immunity to the corrupting influences of the folks across the aisle that

00:44:44.160 we become the very thing we resist, end quote. Yeah, I'm thinking back to a number of moments

00:44:53.120 in our conversation on parenting. And I'm wondering how the idea of nurturing plays into

00:45:00.420 embracing the dangers as well. We could not keep our children or ourselves or our loved ones from

00:45:07.960 the dangers of the world, but perhaps we can give them and ourselves the space and care that will

00:45:13.700 allow us to embrace the dangers in a way that stimulate growth. I wonder how might we come to

00:45:20.320 see danger and the, quote, unsafe as places for challenge and expansion. Yeah, just the idea of

00:45:26.880 making home with discomfort. Right. We don't know how to think forward or anticipate these things

00:45:35.380 because the world's emergent. We will often need to build walls. I'm not against walls.

00:45:43.160 We will need walls.

00:45:45.080 We will need, let me just hyper-fixate on the notion of walls for a moment

00:45:50.340 and say maybe we might even build barbed wire fences with guns, right?

00:45:56.920 Who knows, right?

00:45:58.760 What are the conditions that would make those kinds of structures

00:46:04.260 not just possible but required, right?

00:46:09.060 You could imagine a sci-fi scenario of zombies, a zombie apocalypse, right?

00:46:16.500 I guess if we're in such a scenario, most of us would be behind those fences and we'll do our best to justify the need to gun down all the zombies that are beleaguering and haunting our gates.

00:46:30.160 but then there are moments when something crosses something transversal something molecular and it

00:46:39.780 upends the structures and the positions that we've adopted and it shifts things ever so slightly so

00:46:47.280 that we are suddenly at odds with our safety we're suddenly at odds with our permanence

00:46:54.220 We're suddenly at odds with the very arrangement that seemed to ensure our survival or survivability, right?

00:47:06.120 And then someone asks a question, and the question is, what if we let the zombies bite us?

00:47:15.620 Maybe the zombies biting isn't so bad.

00:47:20.440 I don't know if anyone has explored

00:47:22.940 no I think someone did

00:47:24.840 I think a cartoon

00:47:26.060 I can't remember the name now

00:47:28.700 explored the idea of

00:47:30.840 okay maybe what if we stopped

00:47:32.900 and let these zombies

00:47:34.860 actually bite us

00:47:35.900 and it led to

00:47:37.460 quite fascinating story concepts

00:47:40.640 and narratives

00:47:41.380 there's one going on now called The Last of Us

00:47:44.980 and it's

00:47:46.880 a zombie flick

00:47:47.840 probably the most intelligent take on the zombie

00:47:49.980 Of course, the most intelligent take on a zombie 1.00

00:47:52.960 For me would somehow bring in its African roots 1.00

00:47:56.620 And that cosmology 1.00

00:47:58.580 Maybe the zombie as fugitivity

00:48:01.940 From imperialism

00:48:03.580 That take haunts me

00:48:06.420 The Last of Us

00:48:07.500 This fungal infection that takes over the human

00:48:11.320 And in so doing, creates art

00:48:14.120 You know

00:48:15.160 I think that

00:48:18.680 But what we want to do is, I often think of it as infection, is to allow ourselves to explore the duplicity of safety.

00:48:33.440 And I'm not sure, I don't know if you know the story of an extinction event that happened in our guts.

00:48:39.960 This is what the researchers exploring this called it, called it an extinction event.

00:48:45.500 They noticed that in paleo feces, that is feces that has lasted a thousand years and is available for scrutiny, these archaeological digs, they noticed dried up feces with remnants of microbial communities.

00:49:06.460 And they studied the diversity of these communities, microbial communities, and noticed that it defers significantly with our own microbial communities now, our gut microbes.

00:49:22.680 One might say, and I think they do make this point, that paleo feces that they studied had diversity.

00:49:30.300 We don't have as many microbes as they did a thousand years ago.

00:49:36.460 For instance, my question has always been, after reading that, what does that allow us to notice?

00:49:42.800 What has this loss of microbial diversity taken away from us?

00:49:48.000 These researchers suppose that in losing the diversity, we became a microbial monolith,

00:49:55.060 you know, an interspecies defined by a monolith.

00:50:00.400 How has this loss shaped our experience,

00:50:03.000 shaped our activisms, shaped our politics,

00:50:06.020 shapes our visions and our possibility for imagination?

00:50:09.220 How is this effectively significant, right?

00:50:13.480 But to gain new microbes is to risk exposure.

00:50:19.280 To see the world differently is to take risky steps

00:50:23.740 outside of our walls and ramparts,

00:50:26.960 to let ourselves get beaten by zombies

00:50:29.360 is to risk entertaining one, at least just one, right?

00:50:36.140 And I know that's a horrible prospect

00:50:39.160 because Hollywood has so bastardized the image of the zombie

00:50:42.660 that no one would be attracted to the idea.

00:50:45.560 I wouldn't be attracted to the idea myself.

00:50:47.900 But maybe the things that we recoil from have a promise to them, right?

00:50:54.920 And that's the irony of safety.

00:50:56.940 The very thing we suppose we're keeping without is exactly performed within in our very efforts to keep the enemy without.

00:51:07.080 Think of all the ways climate justice or our responses to climate matters, you know, performs itself as a recoiling from death to come, right?

00:51:20.940 We can see death down the line.

00:51:22.760 And so we go round in circles, we go round and round in circles, anything to stop ourselves

00:51:29.900 from marching forward.

00:51:31.380 But in performing our bodies that way, we kind of secrete death so that our tautological

00:51:39.100 economies and politics seems to be the very exemplification of death, animated death,

00:51:46.320 right?

00:51:46.720 We're trying to avoid it, but we recreate it in avoiding it.

00:51:52.760 So I think we've crossed some kind of material inflection point

00:51:56.760 where safety is not producing the phenomena

00:52:01.680 that we expected it to.

00:52:04.780 Safety is cuddling us and safety is banishing the visitors,

00:52:10.900 the ontological guests that travel

00:52:13.860 and take some parts of our bodies with them.

00:52:17.600 Safety is pushing them away.

00:52:19.800 Our bodyguards are taking away the nourishment

00:52:22.680 that we need to become different.

00:52:25.640 So we need to risk.

00:52:27.780 We need a politics of risk and play.

00:52:30.580 And this is not something new.

00:52:32.740 I mean, I think some researchers noticed

00:52:35.580 that children in favelas and in slum

00:52:39.960 were less likely to get ill from COVID

00:52:42.800 than those well-protected children in the cities.

00:52:47.080 mm-hmm there's so much more to ask and explore together but i will begin to close with this last

00:52:58.600 inquiry it's about creating new worlds which i think is a good way to close for today and

00:53:07.420 in welcome to the wandering winding way of the wound for science and non-duality

00:53:13.320 you discuss the idea that when we get into a utopian state, we forget about the circumstances

00:53:20.420 that brought us there and we begin the cycles again. I'm wondering how might we create new

00:53:27.560 worlds that emphasize constant shifting and growing rather than seeking a stabilizing or

00:53:34.960 stuck idea of perfection. And I'm also wondering how that ties into tangibly engaging with

00:53:43.320 disruption. And maybe you could offer some places where you've offered disruption.

00:53:49.900 I think utopia is a political imaginary secreted by the affordances of modern stability.

00:53:57.640 we're able to think that way in terms of finality in terms of heaven speculatively modern

00:54:05.980 concepts have lived for for longer than what we now call modernity right strands of which still

00:54:14.760 animate our discourses and conversations about change and social transformation and yet there's

00:54:21.020 something troubling about utopian imaginations. I'm sure many scholars work with utopia as a

00:54:32.320 virtuality, as a possibility, right? At least to the extent that it reveals something about us

00:54:40.020 and our own operations and our own assumptions, right? What's troubling for me about it is

00:54:47.920 the hidden curriculum of finality that innervates its operations, right? It's like we've arrived.

00:54:55.600 Here's, there's no movement from here. So your question about, you know, how do we keep building

00:55:03.180 and not assume finality? I think we will always risk stability. To be embodied in the way that

00:55:13.920 we are. I do not know how to think outside of plateaus, right? Emergence is not just

00:55:20.940 eternal flow. Emergence is also the creation of stabilities, right? We would need stabilities.

00:55:28.640 We would need names. I mean, today's revolution is tomorrow's industry. So there isn't,

00:55:36.480 I don't know that there is

00:55:39.140 that there is a way to live in flow

00:55:42.580 to live in itself is to presume stability of some kind

00:55:47.220 bodies are not switch on switch off things

00:55:51.040 we would need to eat

00:55:53.560 we would need to ritualize eating

00:55:55.540 we would need to name ourselves

00:55:57.360 and we would then need to ritualize

00:55:59.200 and build traditions around that

00:56:00.740 and we would need to sustain those traditions

00:56:03.020 some of us would be enlisted and deployed

00:56:05.340 to the gates that we eventually build around our revolutionary concepts.

00:56:11.580 And then by and by, sooner than later, I guess, what those stabilities produce would be ironic

00:56:19.820 desires for rupture. Cracks will emerge in the very attempt to create stability. Such is the

00:56:27.540 nature of emergence, I might say. We will, in the very attempt to build home, find the wilds we

00:56:35.560 exclude springing in the gardens of our new homes. And then some wonderful person,

00:56:46.440 maybe a descendant of Ayana, would have a conversation with a descendant of Bayo

00:56:52.300 in the year 3000.

00:56:55.600 And then they would have a conversation about revolutions

00:56:58.640 and maybe whatever post-activism is called then

00:57:02.300 might re-emerge as a consideration of how we lose our way

00:57:07.560 and do something different.

00:57:11.760 And I think my work is to do this for now,

00:57:16.720 is to settle with disruption.

00:57:19.340 My work is highly theoretical.

00:57:22.300 But it is not exclusively theoretical.

00:57:26.420 Do a lot of work thinking and reading around these concepts and then invite inquiry.

00:57:31.740 That has been the majority of my work.

00:57:34.700 And then leading organizations, building alliances around the world to not just explore with me,

00:57:40.420 but to see if there is some pragmatism here.

00:57:44.160 I mean by pragmatism or pragmatic politics here.

00:57:48.400 By politics, it has to be practiced in some way.

00:57:50.620 So when I name post-activism as an instigation of a new politics, I am speaking about the very exciting prospect of inviting people around the world to create around this, to join others in thinking through and practicing through these ideas.

00:58:10.160 If you ask me how I see this playing out more intimately, it's, again, in my relationship with my son, my children, what you might poetically call ultimate disruptors.

00:58:28.160 disruptors. My children invite, especially my son, invites me to let go of the usual,

00:58:38.100 the expected, and invite me to build around him, with him, to settle into the feud of his intensity

00:58:46.960 and to stay there, stay with the trouble of that. That is my most intimate post-activism.

00:58:55.180 that is my most intimate calling

00:58:57.320 yes

00:58:59.140 and I think that's

00:59:01.340 how new worlds emerge

00:59:02.400 oh thank you

00:59:05.200 bio for sharing

00:59:07.620 the theoretical

00:59:08.900 to the personal and

00:59:11.080 I'm definitely

00:59:12.380 wandering into the

00:59:15.140 image of our

00:59:17.200 descendants in year 3000

00:59:18.840 talking about revolution

00:59:20.320 I see it

00:59:22.840 I definitely can imagine that really. I don't know. Clearly, I'm imagining where they are and what the world looks like at that point. But yeah, I just appreciate you and the poetics that you bring and wrestling with these concepts that so many people try to keep tidy and easily digestible. And I'm so tired of that.

00:59:51.120 And I don't trust that. And I'm grateful for all that it is that you must have to put into all of

00:59:59.980 this. Yeah, it is like a murmuration, actually. I've been watching the birds lately. And that's

01:00:05.180 what I feel like this conversation was. Thank you, Bayo.

01:00:08.880 Thank you so much. Thank you, Rianna. It was wonderful speaking with you.

01:00:12.860 Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild.

01:00:27.500 The music you heard today is by Julio Quintu, Janavi Veronica, and Laila McCullough.

01:00:33.560 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrum, Julia Jackson, Jackson Krumpf, Evan Tenenbaum, and Jose Alejandro Rivera.

For The Wild - June 30, 2023

DR. BÁYÒ AKÓMOLÁFÉ on Ontological Mutiny ⧸338

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