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

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

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.

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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