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

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

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

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

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

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

It kind of romanticizes the Indigenous, and this is why, you know, sometimes I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to center Indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those Indigenous technologies that kind of instrumentalized them for modern anxieties, like, grabs them by the scruff of their necks and says, “here's climate chang... 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

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.

But the most famous familiar one is the story where things fall apart, and how this culturally stable setting with your coherence and just the attempt of the protagonist trying to live true to those moral demands on his person creates trouble, which tells me, and I think, to any other reader, that the world is imbued with irony and paradox and comp... See more

But moral stabilities are also indebted to larger territorial flows. So even the concept of good and accountability and evil is also indebted to other things, the river, the libidinal flows, and the archetypal algorithms that make us are constantly migrating, and in those moments good could become incarcerating.