00:00:00.000I think we see the world through the language of dead things.
00:00:08.440The language of economics perceives the world through the language of dead things.
00:00:13.140And we have, in that purpose, also killed ourselves, made ourselves dead things.
00:00:18.920So there's a re-understanding of the world,
00:00:22.440and we can only free ourselves if we perceive the agency of others.
00:00:26.380for the wild is honored to present the edges in the middle a series of conversations between
00:00:33.820bio komalafe and thought companions like john a powell v naomi klein and more these limited
00:00:41.300episodes have been adapted from bio's work as the global senior fellow at uc berkeley's othering
00:00:47.740and belonging institute in this role bio has been holding a series of public conversations
00:00:52.860on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum,
00:00:58.540which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the U.S.
00:01:03.180who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy
00:01:06.800and advance belonging in both regions and around the world.
00:01:11.060Bio's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging
00:01:15.500by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms.
00:01:19.940To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
00:01:28.040This recording features BIO's conversation with Indy Johar, who is the founding director of Double Zero and Dark Matter Labs, based in the UK.
00:01:38.400An architect by training, he is a senior innovation associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield.
00:01:46.580He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome-based investment, and the future of governance.
00:02:08.140I'm glad to be in this beautiful conversation with my brother and to everyone who is assembled here with us.
00:02:16.080Thank you for showing up, for being here.
00:02:19.760I was just having a conversation with Indy about the weather in India.
00:02:24.920I crave some cold right now, some European cold and snow.
00:02:30.900Just goes to show you how worlds can diverge and diffract and become something entirely different.
00:02:37.920But I digress. I welcome you to this beautiful exploration.
00:02:43.340And just before we dive in and I bring my brother up, I feel led to offer a libation of thought, of spirit, of hope and prayer for what we're doing here together, digitally and spiritually in this space.
00:03:03.980The Umbari is an aesthetic. This is a reminder. It's an aesthetic of exploration, of losing one's way. This isn't an invitation to find the truth or to arrive summarily at a final analysis of things, right?
00:03:26.880This is an invitation to respect decay and the limitations of sense-making rituals.
00:03:36.760So if you can, put your body in the body of a fugitive escaping.
00:03:44.440I know this is probably impossible to do, but it's speculatively possible.
00:03:48.640Put your body in the body of a fugitive escaping the trap and the capture of the slave plantation.
00:03:54.980There is no time for maps. There is no time for clarity about where this slave is heading.
00:04:04.140There is only the effort, the attempt, the imperative to get as far as possible away from the plantation.
00:04:13.120It is such fluid cosmologies that inform the Umbari and what we're doing here.
00:04:20.720our attempt is not consensus. It is not safety. It is not a finished product. We will not be
00:04:29.620dropping the mic. We will be picking it up and not just speaking to it, but interacting with
00:04:37.320possibilities, poetic possibilities. And yeah, that's what we're doing here today.
00:04:44.360um we want to talk about a new theory of the self there's a story from my childhood
00:04:54.900that involves Anansi the spider you might have heard of him Anansi is a trickster like the
00:05:03.220tortoise in Yoruba stories or Loki in Marvel Cinematic Universes Anansi is given an assignment
00:05:13.340by his grandmother to watch over a pot of beans and gravy that she's just prepared.
00:05:21.360The problem is Anansi, as in all the stories that is told about him, is greedy.
00:05:28.640And so he takes this gravy and he's eating the beans and he's stuffing his mouth with it.
00:05:34.720And he becomes so taken by this gastronomic experience that he takes the entire thing
00:05:42.300when he notices his grandmother is about to enter the house, re-enter the house,
00:05:47.280and stuffs it in his hair, in his hat, rather.
00:05:51.740And while she is going about the house, his head is burning, and his hair is frying,
00:05:59.320and the heat is getting to him, and he cannot respond to any of the questions
00:06:03.800that the grandmother is throwing at him.
00:06:05.940in a sense we also have heat in our heads our heads are hot right now and all we can offer
00:06:18.360let me just let it out of the bag is a gasp so a new theory of the self India and I are going to
00:06:26.140be meandering through the black spaces of contemplation on the matter with personhood
00:06:34.100what has happened to identity and what has happened to the self we don't have a fixed or
00:06:39.240final product glossed over and ribboned and presented and packaged we don't have that all
00:06:45.300we have is a gasp and i think that is the most eloquent thing we can offer indy are you here
00:06:50.520can we begin we can indeed uh what a pleasure to be here brother thank you so much for doing this
00:06:59.820And you're in no way right now, craving what I can generously offer you, but I refuse to.
00:07:09.340Let me start with this, brother, and we'll see how it goes.
00:07:12.300I have no idea where this is going, and I think that's the gift of this moment.
00:07:22.360what happened to the liberal humanist traditional self which was according to all the doctrines and
00:07:32.340wisdoms and insights secreted from modern landscapes supposed to be domiciled in our bodies
00:07:39.260why are we exploring a new theory of self what is so compelling about this for you
00:07:45.280um I think I really appreciate your framing of this conversation and I think I think let's
00:07:52.380imagine this as a gasp I so the premise I think why this is important as a conversation
00:07:59.040is that I think that things like climate change or biodiversity losses these big crises that we
00:08:06.680face in my view are not a crisis of the outside world they're a crisis of our relationship with
00:08:13.260the world and it is a crisis of how we manifest in the world that is manifesting in what I would
00:08:20.380many people would say is a self-terminating situation where we are killing the thing
00:08:24.480around us in order to kill ourselves and this is rooted I think in fundamentally how we perceive
00:08:31.840ourselves how we perceive the world and I think the conception of that and I think you talk about
00:08:38.720it through the words of the pixel or the individuation of the world and I think this is
00:08:45.340I don't think we can deal with the crisis of climate change without dealing with our crisis
00:08:50.040of self and and this is foundational and it's rooted I would argue in in the theory of
00:08:58.560objectifying ourselves objectifying the world around us and this object subject relationship
00:09:06.300has created the space for i would say violence and waste it creates a space for violence and
00:09:14.760thereby creates a space for waste i things that are externalized things that are rejected in the
00:09:19.460system and this thesis is manifesting in the world around us and what was once you know we you could
00:09:26.780argue we were living in a perceptionally conceptually infinite world that that violence
00:09:32.800and that waste was ignorable and now that that trash and that violence is no longer
00:09:38.720ignorable because that micro violence now eats back at us so it was problematic even when it was
00:09:44.660born but the problems weren't visible and now those problems manifest back into us in a way
00:09:50.280that i think our civilization terminating for ourselves and so i think this this
00:09:56.060re-conceptualization of the self and our thesis of the self without that i don't think there's a
00:10:03.560pathway to addressing the problems and i think the final point i'd make on it is that that
00:10:09.980conceptualization of self is not just philosophy it's how philosophy manifests into language so
00:10:18.240it is it is language then grammar then grammar then actually stuff like institutions property
00:10:24.680theories of property and which allow for that violence to be concretized in law
00:10:29.560all the way to theories of transactions and economics homo-economist theories of models
00:10:36.180of the world so this conception is is then virally infected all of our structures of how we conceive
00:10:43.560and structure the world and thereby accelerating that object-subject relationship in a way that is
00:10:49.360now self-terminating so i think it is it is both philosophy but also philosophy language to
00:10:54.600institutions it's a root problem and this is i think why climate change is more than just a
00:10:59.040technological problem it is actually a problem a much deeper problem or a relationship with the
00:11:03.180world which is why biodiversity losses we're living in the age of a great extinction event
00:11:08.120because it's much deeper than i think what we talk about and therapy as well i'll add therapy
00:11:15.180to the to the list um this this might be a good good way to bring that in story wise um there's
00:11:21.980there's this story i tell about two monks strolling um down the river and by and by they hear someone
00:11:34.140drowning screaming for help one of the monks jumps into the waters and drags the person out
00:11:41.500resuscitates the person and they are in their way but then it happens again and someone else is in
00:11:48.480the water calling for help and the same process repeats itself and then it happens again and again
00:11:53.740and again until the monk that is now enlisted in this troubling cyclicity of saving someone else
00:12:01.460decides to run up you know the river instead of jumping into the waters and his companion calls
00:12:08.760out and says, where are you going? You're supposed to, you know, I can't swim. You're
00:12:12.840supposed to save this person. And he responds, I'm going to stop them from where they're
00:12:17.160dropping in, right? And I come to this story again and again, because in my profession,
00:12:24.540I refer to myself as a recovering psychotherapist, psychologist. But in my career, which wasn't
00:12:32.160that extensive, I found myself faced with the impossibility of the individual. It was easier
00:12:40.140for me to see this. My client was supposed to be, the contract of the clinical alliance is that I,
00:12:47.780the therapist with the skills, is supposed to help the client navigate. But what if the client
00:12:52.400is monstrous? What if the client is the social, the political, the economic, the ecological?
00:12:59.400How do I stuff that into the anorexic confines of my of my study or my room for the therapeutic encounter so that it seems this thesis of the self, this dismantling thesis of the self, which is at the heart of modernity, seems to be troubling everything, all the institutions by which we name ourselves and we name the world.
00:13:59.040Our theories of identity, our theories of registries, our theories of ownership, our
00:14:04.840theories of economic rights, even our rights agenda is rooted in some of these things.
00:14:11.060And I think this is where it becomes, it's a deep code problem.
00:14:14.460And I think, you know, I would, we could argue it's a problem, which is maybe at the center of, you know, the Fermi paradox, the kind of the idea that civilization can only if it can transcend itself in our theory of being entangled and recognizing entanglement, agency and care and a planetary self, the language I would probably use as a planetary self, that we are part of a planetary self.
00:14:40.620and there is it's non-divisible and at that moment in time this may be a critical
00:14:45.280social linguistic philosophical institutional re a new emergence a kind of and this is why
00:14:54.640I think many people people like Thomas Bjorkman and other people talk about this being as a one
00:14:59.260in a 400 year or one in a 6,000 year transformation because it's rooted in a fundamental idea of
00:15:06.760of theories of control words like governance right words like governance beget classification
00:15:12.700classification begets identity because these are top down still top down associations in positions
00:15:18.920of power in positions of theories of self they're in positions of of language and i you know just
00:15:24.620playfully maybe even words like belonging right um like who do i belong to right do i want to
00:15:33.920belong to something or what is the where does a word find its root from and i think there's
00:15:40.100fundamental questions about about these words because these words are still about association
00:15:44.980asymmetric association asymmetric lineages asymmetric power that do not recognize and i
00:15:51.500think this there's a reconciliation of our entanglement reconciliation of our agency
00:15:56.280reconciliation of our care and also i think this is where one thing i'd say is i think we see the
00:16:02.940world through the language of dead things the language of economics perceives the world through
00:16:09.260the language of dead things and we have in in that purpose also killed ourselves made ourselves dead
00:16:16.180things so there's a there's a re-understanding of the world and we can only free ourselves if we
00:16:22.780perceive the agency of others this is a really it's if we see the world through dead things and
00:16:28.120that that is what we become in process so how do we actually re-enliven the world
00:16:34.120re-breathe the life into the world and also recognize the life in us which is not impositional
00:16:39.720and do exactly as you said it cannot be defined it's an act of journey it's a it's a becoming
00:16:45.400and this is where all of our language of identity is about fixity determination uh constraint and
00:16:52.680even your your i read your work you know what you were beautifully saying about intersectionality
00:16:57.320where whilst intersectionality allows us to see more than one relationship and more than one
00:17:02.520constraint it's still a theory of constraint to those one things rather than a dynamic
00:17:07.880intersectionality as a verb we're constantly in a new intersectionality in an emerging
00:17:13.240intersectionality as opposed to a fixed one and i think these things become really critical but yeah
00:17:17.960to that point i've often used the term nounism it is silly at this point but but you know what i
00:17:24.840I mean, it feels like this is how I describe whiteness.
00:17:31.300Whiteness is not reducible to white persons.0.61
00:17:37.620Whiteness is speculatively the genocide of relations, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Aaron Manning.0.86
00:17:47.360It is the placement of bodies in strict, rigid, unforgiving, immobile, sterile, identitarian boxes as a placemaking, world-building project.0.66
00:18:02.700And this is why Black scholars like Fred Moulton, through the voices of my sister Marisol de la Cadena, would suggest that the real violence that was performed, done to Africans, wasn't a slave ship.0.80
00:18:24.900the slave ship was only part of it. The vessel of dishonor, if you will, the vessel of capture
00:18:32.320was the human individual. That was what transported the human individual as the thing that you are now
00:18:40.340going to fit within. Because the worlds that we lived in, and I'm not trying to create some
00:18:45.920revisionistic originalism that we ought to return to. I don't think of the world in that way. It's
00:18:51.300not a binary. There's nothing pure to return to. But there are accounts that suggest that0.90
00:18:58.820we saw ourselves, you know, together with mountains, that there wasn't a private sense
00:19:08.660of self. There still isn't in many parts in, at least where I come from. Grief is a public event.
00:19:15.360There isn't some private interiority that I'm supposed to tend to, so to speak. That's the breeding ground for new ancestors, right? So I hear you when you suggest that the citizen is a burden. It might be the most ontologically heavy thing on the planet.
00:19:38.060The citizen is not about carbon reductionism.
00:19:42.940It's about the presumptuousness of citizenry, the idea that the performative closure that reduces the agonistic tensions of the world around us, the flows and tides of things to that atomic thing in front of us.
00:21:07.340you could the enlightenment or certainly the scientific and the newtonian enlightenment
00:21:12.740with exactly that thesis right the newtonian enlightenment allowed for the divisibility of
00:21:19.540the world into discrete ways of seeing the scientific paradigm it was born was a theory of
00:21:25.940that enlightenment was to use light to separate to make visible to capture in a very particular way0.78
00:21:32.120And we lost the ambic, you know, and I think that journey is also scientifically coming to an end in a way, whether if you look at any of the stuff that's on quantum physics, that journey is coming to an end.0.53
00:21:46.320So the science is already at the end of that enlightenment journey of the divisibility of the world into a new paradigm.0.98
00:21:54.260Yet, you know, David Bohm and various other people have been at this for 50 years plus, have been showing that the science has already moved beyond this.
00:22:04.280Yet what we haven't done is culturally, linguistically moved beyond this.
00:22:07.780and your thing about nounism is perfect because we know like anna schwabi language and other
00:22:13.040languages have been 80% verb orientated whereas english is an is a noun orientated language and
00:22:18.660has become more noun orientated object orientated as a language for it and that language as you
00:22:23.540rightly say is a way of seeing that then captures ourselves right so the language is is we are now
00:22:30.320captured i think there is something interesting that that we're facing is that that there is
00:22:36.760also some something you know extraordinary going on that there is a new consciousness emerging at
00:22:43.380a different scale as well and i think i'd like to bring this on the table of course james james
00:22:48.900lovelock and his book on nervous scene is really interesting for me because i think he purports i
00:22:54.720think a very powerful idea that the planet itself is becoming conscious that actually the our ability
00:23:26.560that we are seeing the birth of a new meta-life,
00:23:28.980uh there is also something extraordinary going on in that sense so i think the question of self
00:23:35.840becomes really critical because we are now we can no longer assume dominion but recognize ourselves
00:23:44.020in fractals of life and that means that there's a different relationship required a different way
00:23:48.460of being required in that in that cognition and i think that and unless we're able to deal with
00:23:54.040that appreciate this meta life and our component our place in that meta life and also recognize
00:24:00.280our racial relationality that's a profound change and i think i think we're at the end of an
00:24:06.220enlightenment era that area of light orientated seeing to a new era and i think you you rightly
00:24:12.860say and i think there are other cultures like japanese culture which it talks about in praise
00:24:17.800of shadows where there's a beautiful question in the book in praise of shadows where it says
00:24:22.500you know what if we photograph shadows as opposed to photograph light and what would how would we
00:24:30.340see the world and i think we see the world in a very particular way and i think we're in that
00:24:34.780transition moment and this is why i think the cultural project of actually the conversations
00:24:40.360that you host bio and the kind of integrity of those questions that you're opening up
00:24:44.060is so critical because without these conversations i think all of our other solutions are just
00:24:50.620superfluous add-ons because it is a root crisis it's a root transformation that we're operating
00:24:56.260let's go deeper into this brother i i i'm loathe to you to use the exhausted metaphor of the rabbit
00:25:03.420hole but we'll see what we can do you know i i i said earlier i can see a question around
00:25:10.000blackness um that doesn't equally apply to blackness well the essay addresses that
00:25:15.960But blackness is also an identitarian form of capture, right? There is a saying we have on the streets of Lagos that we did not know we were black until white people came, right?0.76
00:25:29.780It seems that what we are itching for is spillage, right, is the sense of exceeding the boundaries that we're supposed to inhabit.0.82
00:25:47.340the the categoricity of the person is part of the algorithm of modern civilization and
00:25:56.940complicit in the co-production of what some call the anthropocene right so so there isn't
00:26:05.220there there isn't a throwing of solutions at this there isn't some techno-bureaucratic
00:26:10.740clause that releases us from this. This feels like a call to shapeshift, to become something
00:26:21.980entirely other, different, exquisite, if you will. To your point about planetary consciousness,
00:26:29.780I'm sure you know about chat GB, is it the chat GPT? Yeah, exactly. That is frightening. Some
00:26:37.600people right now, AI, conversations about AI. Well, I don't want to go into AI, but I find it
00:26:43.540remarkable that I posted a question there recently about comparing Simondon, Gilbert Simondon, and
00:26:51.740his theory of the pre-individual, connecting that with clinical psychology and Deleuze. So I just
00:26:57.700crafted a question there, and I swear to you, the response was shockingly good. The response was
00:27:04.680shockingly good if a student of mine wrote that as an essay I would have given the person and I
00:27:10.200hate to speak about grades I would have given the person an A perhaps if I don't do that all the
00:27:14.540time just to get back at the university system but it just it just speaks to the idea that
00:27:21.320intelligence is not as scarce as we think it is that the world is profuse replete with life
00:27:28.320form. So maybe this is my question to you, brother, then. Dare I call it a miracle?
00:27:37.120What in your experience, in your awareness, in the stories you've heard, in the things that
00:27:44.660you've explored, feels like a transversal breaking of the idea of the self? Maybe an experience about,
00:27:54.640shall I say ESP? Extrasensory perception, which was the original thesis of Sigmund Freud. He was
00:28:05.700really, and then he covered it up with the interpretation of dreams. His real focus
00:28:10.700was the transference of thought. Have you come across or are there, is there anything that feels
00:28:20.180like empirical evidence or even anecdotal evidence that might shock you or shock anyone else
00:28:28.280listening into rethinking the boundaries we think we have and examining it from a different
00:28:35.060perspective? I think the thing that broke me or transformed me was exactly what I said earlier,
00:28:48.660which is this idea that what if the planet is coming alive right and what if the planet is
00:28:55.740in a sense a life which is now extraordinary in the universe where the divisibility between human
00:29:05.420machine ecological systems is a synthetic divisibility and a dominion thesis of the
00:29:09.980human being in dominion of the world is a synthetic idea and when you look at it from
00:29:15.000that perspective it changes everything for me because it it fractally transforms everything
00:29:21.040around us and the singularity is not a singularity of ai but it's a singularity of this consciousness
00:29:27.800this machine human ecological consciousness that is that is emergent and you can see you can see
00:29:33.760the evidence of these interrelationships starting to actually have feedback and resonance and new
00:29:39.980ways of organizing so for me this this view changes everything and it then changes all sorts
00:29:48.680of things as you rightly like you place about what you know i'm really troubled right now about this
00:29:55.380conversation that we have of eight billion people being a burden on the planet
00:29:59.900and i i'm troubled by our analysis of looking at the planet through the lens of eight billion
00:30:06.840people not yes i don't know one trillion life forms right all right i think how we how we
00:30:13.820narrate this language is problematic and then and how we narrate the population as a population
00:30:20.520burden is is it in itself is part of a power thesis so and this is where i think we have to
00:30:28.080shape the narration of its we we have many the great and the good talking about the population
00:30:33.580burden whereas actually you could talk about the life profusion you could talk about yes we
00:30:38.360the profusion of life the profusion of a machine human ecological uh emergence that is happening
00:30:46.360and i think that and this is again the theory of humanity and burdens and and object power
00:30:52.640subject hood who is a burden who is not and we know that you know you probably only need to get
00:30:57.000rid of one percent of the world's planet maybe maybe less and actually that burden disappears
00:31:01.620that we've currently got so it's not a burden of total population it's a burden of lifestyles and
00:31:07.220the way people want to live so i think for me the profoundness at that level of this kind of machine
00:31:14.100human ecological life emerging and metal life emerging is i think quite extraordinary and i
00:31:19.460think we're in the midst of it and one thing i was going to say was that i feel i you know i feel
00:31:27.540field identity is an impositional order like racialization i think most of identity is an
00:31:34.500impositional order an order order structured through power and control and the preservation
00:31:42.220of control the preservation divisibility and actually it's completely at odds at a relational
00:31:48.800sense of actually where we are where we need to be and that divisibility it's we're at odds of that
00:31:55.660And I think that's something completely at odds with a new planetary relational human machine ecological emergence that we're seeing.
00:32:03.680And this is the conflict we're in the middle of, this kind of conflict of these two worldviews in transition.
00:32:09.720so if we do not see ourselves as individuals or rather if we are invited to see ourselves as
00:32:27.500that we are implicated imbricated with machines and technologies and concepts and ecologies
00:32:35.620and viruses and fungi and bacteria and and that we're not and have never been alone
00:32:43.600then it seems that we're being invited to new postures right to assume new postures again
00:32:49.740this is an invitation to a new politics brother you're causing a lot of trouble by saying this
00:32:55.980i hope you know um i i was speaking you know my last point was about you know exploring
00:33:02.360you know teresa brennan writes about or wrote about of blessed memory wrote about um the
00:33:10.760transmission of affect you know exploring the idea that emotions are not human right it seems
00:33:19.500a very scandalous thing to admit or to say that we don't have emotions emotions have us right
00:33:26.520right so that there is some truth to the saying that you can walk into a room and you can feel
00:33:32.300the emotions in the air and there's actually some story i often tell about a man who explored that
00:33:38.300concept but but there are other things of fourth brother you know especially in my discipline it's
00:33:44.640the idea of the external mind you know the external cognition what n katherine hills would call
00:33:51.920non-conscious, I think it's non-conscious cognition. And exploring the ways that cognition
00:34:03.780is how we think is not a matter of what goes on here. It's a matter of phones and landscapes and
00:34:11.940parking lots. All of these are assemblages of thought. They produce thought. We don't think
00:34:18.600outside of these things. So that to become a genius and go into a room and try to fix the
00:34:23.880world's problem, like I think Davos is an exemplification of, is just to repeat the
00:34:30.700problem of isolation, of dissociation. I'm also speaking about the dark psychic mind,
00:34:35.920the idea that we have, as moderns, defeated the wilds, we've chased away the gods,
00:34:44.760And we're free from that. We're immune from possession or the things around us.
00:34:53.980I mean, this is what I'm speaking about, a milieu that allows us to think about how texture, architecture, furniture, rhizomes, plants and all of these things are thinking alongside with us.
00:35:09.480I think the language I would use is the entangled mind.
00:35:14.760this is and we are one part of an entangled mind yes and i think and i think we often see this as a
00:35:22.240as an imposition on our theory of freedom and actually what it is is less an imposition on
00:35:28.100our theory of freedom it's it's a place place of sanity the more untangled we become actually i
00:35:35.660think the risk of abstraction is the risk of manifestation and violence and i think the the
00:35:41.980abstracted thesis of the individuation the abstraction of ourselves from the world around us
00:35:48.180and i would say the iconic symbol is the human in an astronaut suit feels perfectly this was the
00:35:56.300absolute apex point of a misunderstanding of what it means to be human because for a moment we could
00:36:02.520isolate ourselves yet we know i think the research is out there that humans if we were to be divided
00:36:08.140from the planet significantly longer our cognitive capabilities decline our eco our health declines
00:36:12.940massively so this is a momentary isolation which we sort of was the apex point of modernity thinking
00:36:18.460or uh enlightenment thinking that divisibility and i think the divisibility in in that divisibility
00:36:24.620lies madness and actually the entangled mind is actually the mind of all black relationships
00:36:31.340flows it is it is the place of health and our theories of money our theories of power have been
00:36:37.660orchestrating our theories of abstraction because that is what we were taught as a theory of
00:36:42.140enlightenment the abstracted mind in its power and i think this is a i think the thing we have
00:36:47.900to reconcile is a kind of conversation of freedom in entanglement the freedom to roam in that
00:36:54.780landscape of that mind the freedom of indebtedness that we're not free from our indebtedness to the
00:37:00.300the world around us yes yes but exactly no no i was this this freedom to also intermingle and
00:37:07.860to relate to construct that is the freedom of the world not the freedom to be isolated in the prison
00:37:14.840and i think this is a different theory of freedom and it requires us to operate and dance with care
00:37:20.860in relationship to that entangled mind that we live in and there is great joy in this and i think
00:37:27.100we have we have created a theory of freedom which is a theory of escape a theory of escapism from
00:37:33.680that entangled mind that entangled world uh and a world of dead things we've imposed that world to
00:37:39.820be a dead the world of dead things and we have to enjoy the rebuild the life re re understand the
00:37:46.240life of the table life of the matter life of uh the world around us and our life with it with it
00:37:52.920and deep entanglement of it and i think there's beauty in there there is a new language in there
00:37:57.480there's a new way of conceiving in there there's a new way of actually architecturing in there
00:38:02.380which i think and you're gonna get to the architecture
00:38:05.500it it it feels and speaking of architecture it feels like um again this is a call for social
00:38:14.720experimentation i mean one hour is not enough to do justice to our gasping around this
00:38:22.880It's a broad commitment to investigating our porosities.
00:38:30.660And just to really situate this, again, this is not some heady philosophical affair with words.
00:38:41.360This is really something that is tethered to our deepest aspirations for a world that works for not just humans, for multiple life forms.
00:38:59.460It is tethered to our hope for beauty, for thriving and living well.
00:39:07.200but the thing is I think we really need to come to a place where we see the way we see and think
00:39:15.940about the ways we have been invited to think right and what you're saying Indy is we have
00:39:24.100thought and acted through the prism and the prison of the individual for far too long
00:39:32.580Right. The Anthropocene is this galvanizing cautionary tale. Everyone put your hands on deck.
00:39:42.060Let's save ourselves from drowning. But it still collapses at the feet of the agent, the human agent, the one supposed to march in and save the day.
00:39:53.360So it doesn't seem to be adequate to the moment. It feels like we need some different ethic.
00:40:01.100Maybe this is where the trickster comes in.
00:40:02.780We need a different modulating ethic that allows us to feel our porosities, to touch our edges and know that our edges are also diasporic and not as local as we think they are.
00:40:15.380what do you see or what do you feel a social experiment, a social experiment, a social
00:40:24.020experimentation or politics built around social experimentation of touching our borders, of
00:40:30.220listening? I heard you talk about listening to the earth, listening to the world around us.
00:40:35.080What do you think it would take to convene a practical politics around this vocation of
00:40:42.120losing our way of exiling ourselves from the plantation of the individual it's a powerful
00:40:49.740question and i want to and i'm going to say this and i'm going to say this hopefully with sufficient
00:40:55.620care i think we have to challenge ourselves to recognize ourselves as being a multiple
00:41:08.840multiple and and entangled so i think when
00:41:14.360when i used to refer to my grandparents and my grandparents i used to say they are coming over
00:41:22.080even in the singular so my grandparents in in old language terms it was always they
00:41:28.580and we because we recognized that there was a it was a it was a formal plural they were not one
00:41:35.820there were there were the many we have that in europe as well just just right exactly right
00:41:42.080yes yes exactly and i think there is something about that that i think is really deeply profound
00:41:49.300because it actually challenges this idea of the singular it challenges our idea of the divisible
00:41:57.040in a very simple but clear way and it requires us to challenge our own theories of the singular
00:42:03.640am i a and d am i multiple indies and how do i give myself permission to live in that multiplicity
00:42:11.040in that dynamics i think there's a freedom that we have to give ourselves in order to be able to
00:42:15.840actually embrace a different way of relating to the world and i think it's a small thing
00:42:19.540but it's profound because we are trapped in our own singularities in our own individualities the
00:42:25.360own sense of self and i think the freedom is really vital to get that freedom of the multiplicity is
00:42:31.480really critical as a stepping stone of this reality and I think that is a for me one of the
00:42:36.840key key stepping stones in that conversation and I think and that opens up a new way of relating
00:42:45.120to everything around us the world around us and the things that we see I think that to me is the
00:42:49.880unit of transformation and I think we see this in the world around us we see the crisis of of of
00:42:56.720of how we relate to each other and how we how we transform that language and i think that language
00:43:01.700is really particular so it's a relational reconfiguration we're talking about again
00:43:07.620not to use the language of do the work in yourself i think that has its place but but
00:43:14.540there's something really navel gazing navel gazing ish about this idea to focus on yourself like
00:43:25.220and that feels foreign to me that feels alien to me i i think it's true but i think it's for me
00:43:35.280it's not a focus on ourselves it's actually the the the unprisoning of ourselves yes yes i agree
00:43:42.760i think i think if we can unprison ourselves from the individual landscape i think we can
00:43:49.640actually start to relate to the words. And I think we have to recapture language, language like
00:43:54.920freedom, which has become a language of escapism. So we have to recapture words and re-body them
00:44:03.700into new philosophical frames, which is what you're doing by doing it beautifully. Because
00:44:08.400unless we do that, the world constructs in the language that we use. And I think we have to have
00:44:14.120a re-orchestration of language. I know it sounds basic, but I think without those philosophical
00:44:19.300and those initial frameworks it's very difficult to then say well actually you know property as a
00:44:26.800theory property is the is in a way to be in proper order and to be in relationship to what I perceive
00:44:34.240as proper order is a theory of power of orchestration between object and subject to the ordering of
00:44:39.660myself rather than recognizing the intrinsic order of the thing itself so we have constructed theories
00:44:46.000of property and then legal constructs on that theory of dominion into that framework and then
00:44:52.380we are enslaved the world to that thesis and this delicate recoding of these things these are not
00:44:59.200just words but they are power structures they're manifestations of orchestration they're the thing
00:45:03.940that makes the land dead they're the thing that reduces the agency the thing that destroys the
00:45:08.740butterflies because it's in proper order to my perception these words have magical power they're
00:45:13.840like spells which transform and destroy the world around us.
00:45:17.980And we are using those words without cognition of the spells
00:45:21.100that we weave into the landscape around us.
00:45:23.500And for me, we have to understand that we are the magicians of those words
00:45:28.000and we have to become cognizant of the spells we weave.
00:45:31.980And those spells have been programmed into us.
00:45:33.740So I think I hear you about the kind of work on self.
00:45:37.860I think it's more the work on my relationship with the world
00:45:41.640and recognising the spells I'm locked into,
00:48:31.720I almost felt paralyzed at the beginning of this because there are too many directions to take this for me.
00:48:37.760But if wellness is trapped by our considerations of individuals, if politics is also beholden to this very, very pixelated notion of the individual,
00:48:52.340Then we also have to consider that time is secreted. Our particular notions of time as this edifice that flows from the past, touches the present and is going towards the future.
00:49:07.040It seems to also be a creature of our entrapment, our ontological entrapment, so that it might be suggested that there are other temporalities, other ways of thinking and moving with time that we haven't conceived of yet.
00:49:23.060look i i think there's two aspects of this i think if we were to understand ourselves as
00:49:31.280a knot of flows we are a knot of flows and these flows exist
00:49:38.040they exist in a way time is also just a construct that we built to stop everything happening at
00:49:44.840once um is a kind of idea but actually what we are is in this knot of flows and these knots of
00:49:52.520flows means that our cognition isn't that of objecthood but is our is a function of the not
00:49:58.020of flows i don't think we have there yet the language for this thesis of this not of flows
00:50:03.520we don't have and our cartesian frameworks don't allow for this not of flows to exist
00:50:10.140our drawings our manifestations of logic don't allow for this not of flows and this is what
00:50:17.360creates an object orientated reality this is what creates also the theory of waste because we do not
00:50:24.100recognize the relationships in time and the relationships of every a glass bottle being a
00:50:30.920function of sand which took millions of years to deform to then actually that glass holding for a
00:50:36.700moment then being liquidated and being turned something else we exist in those knots of flows
00:50:41.600and i think that is a that is a way of perceiving a way of languaging a way of relating in the world
00:50:48.740and also a way of seeing ourselves in the world and in that moment in time i think the mountain
00:50:54.240is no longer an object the mountain is an act of flow it is a it is a rock in flow as is everything
00:51:01.520else and i think there is a new way of being in that world and i think the science is already
00:51:06.560Our knowledge is there, but we haven't built our scaffolding, our cognitive, philosophical, linguistic scaffolding to make this happen.
00:51:17.340But you're right. Time is also part of this problem.
00:51:20.240But it's also our theory of this knot of flows in that frame.
00:51:27.880And, you know, thinking about time this way changes the question.
00:51:31.100And I'm developing a thesis that I call chrono-feminism. It's the idea that it's basically the refusal to bow the knee at the imperial throne of imperial time, right?
00:51:49.580The idea that time marches on, right?1.00
00:51:53.100I like to see with the Yoruba people that time is slushy, right?1.00
00:51:58.560There are pockets of time here and there.1.00
00:52:31.500or discontinuities. Time is not outside. Time is not an ideal, just like justice is not some ideal
00:52:38.080floating by. We, with non-humans around us, co-create these intensities so that, like you
00:52:45.560are preaching, brother. And it's a preaching. We are being invited to new relationships with the
00:52:52.700world and maybe new times secrete from that. I thought we could end it this way around grief,
00:52:59.000brother, which touches on a question that I'm seeing through the side of my eyes here.
00:53:05.180It feels a proper way to end for me, appropriate, not just to grieve the loss of relationship,
00:53:12.920the apartheid that is enacted by modernity, the imprisonment of the individual,
00:53:19.900but to also consider the ways that grief and grieving is not permitted in modern flatness.
00:53:28.440As a psychologist, my work was to get people to be productive again, right?
00:53:34.800It's to get you back into the race, you know, the pit stop that allows you to just get back out there.
00:53:41.120There aren't real places of grieving and grieving seems to be this more than collective, you know, interstitial, liminal space where bodies melt into other bodies, where materialities tumble into other materialities.
00:54:00.980Right. It seems like it seems like maybe grieving is activism. I don't know how you're how that resonates or how that dances with you.
00:54:11.120I mean, I think the spaces of grieving in my worldview is that the space of humanity has been reduced to the production and the consumption and the storage logistics of humanity.
00:54:30.220and all the other dimensions of being human have been evascerated they have been from our spaces
00:54:38.380a city is you know a public square is a function of the cappuccino the boy with a balloon it
00:54:46.540actually no longer has the space for actually a human in grief or actually even a human in
00:54:54.840reflection actually those things are not of value we are we are reduced to these polarities of work
00:55:00.760and life and these have also been sort of pixelated into divisionality to actually break us in this
00:55:07.640way so i think the pixel pixels are so low resolution they are part of our mechanistic
00:55:13.420theory of self to actually a reductive idea of being human and for me this is why this conversation
00:55:19.680is important because this is a reawakening of being human it is a new awakening of being in
00:55:25.500its complexity in its richness post-pixelation a re-enlivened analog biological as opposed to
00:55:32.940the kind of pixeled bureaucracy of the world right so i i i think this this is an this is
00:55:39.840an opportunity for uh for breathing life back into us uh a life where we are not just bad robots
00:55:47.380um a life that allow that that i think is free and i think grieving is as much as joy i think
00:55:53.900these are free spaces that we have to re and reawaken and that i think is a really powerful
00:55:58.860component and i would argue the new machine age or the age of automation creates a new space for
00:56:05.240humanity as we are freed from the shackles of being bad robots and i think the idea of being
00:56:11.720freed from the shackles of being bad robots is an embrace for this new humanity and i think
00:56:15.880This is going to be a new liberation, a space for a new liberated entanglement and a liberation not to be free, but to be re-entangled with the world and re-embraced by the world in that journey.
00:56:28.200And I think that is an optimistic view of actually re-embracing ourselves.
00:56:34.380That opens up a thousand new questions, brother.
00:56:37.540But this means we still have a lot of places to go and explore.