Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Coming Alive to Other Senses /300 — FOR THE WILD

It's about listening, more than just restoring an image.

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.

Some of them we have named for, you just named a few ‘good’, ‘accountable’, ‘evil’, you know, turning away, a bypass, and in naming and in inhabiting and in performing those neural architectures, we place-make the world. We terraform the world as we are terraformed ourselves, as we learn to acculturate ourselves to the psychic demands of these mora... See more

So to the question of right relationship, I think my heart's yearning is to bless that is to acknowledge that yearning, that desire for a different relationship that is not supported by our modern suburban arrangements but also to caution that sometimes in our quest to go back, we actually re-entrench, or reinforce and reinscribe the modern. It’s t... See more

So “we” need to do something about this, “we” are all in this struggle together, and “we” need to get our act together. That “we,” it's a mess, right? It's a monolithic heap of a “we,” because it kind of lumps the United States, for instance, together in the same boat with Zambia, as if they were equally complicit. That's one way of looking about i... See more

“In what way does justice stand in the way of transformation? In what way does being good actually become an obstacle to being sensuous? In what way does it become an exoskeleton that chains us to the ground, with a presumption that the universe is morally coherent?”If we think of the world as rhizomatic, instead of arborescent, then the new has sp... See more

Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often h... See more

Post-activism is always a matter of disability. Not so much spanking new capacities but disability: where something breaks, that agency becomes distributed. That's why in a sense, post-activism means or suggests that the territorial, agential, humanist, dissociated self - the citizen is dead. And suddenly, we are all exposed to these immersive wate... See more

Modern epistemologies are forward-facing; they centralize the knower. And they often thrive on what some philosophers would call representation nihilism. That is, the presumption that the world is outside, external. And our work is to adequately represent it, right? In our ideas, in our language, and our concepts, to bring it in, so to speak, to tr... See more

And this is the idea then, that if you perform knowing (and notice I said, perform), and knowing is always a corporal, embodied, tactile relating with the world - that is always risky. That is always speculative. That is always experimental. And it's always political. When we know the world in ways that centralized us as prime knowers, one of the s... See more