bayo akomolafe
intro’d to bayo via hans fb share
[actually.. first intro’d in manish jain‘s parrot’s training retold)
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adding page this day (via richard rt):
Tim Kastelle (@timkastelle) tweeted at 4:51 PM on Sun, Aug 23, 2020:
This is a really interesting discussion. I admire the way that every single time @BayoAkomolafe is presented with a dichotomy and asked to take sides, he turns it into a both/and – very deep thinking. https://t.co/CFLhfe9H4o
(https://twitter.com/timkastelle/status/1297667846193979394?s=03)Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13
If you really want to dig into Bayo’s intellectual background, this paper from Ephemera (co-authored with Alnoor Ladha) is a heavy enough dose. But there’s a metaphoric richness to their discussion which an activist, thoughtful person should enjoy—even if the references aren’t immediately obvious.
[21 page pdf.. written w alnoor.. skimmed.. will read/note after video]
90 min video – jul 2020 – Cancel Culture and the limits of Identity Politics with Bayo Akomolafe – [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CaQ2Ggc7f0]
5 min – i’m more of a generalist.. that’s my expertise.. i think my stupidity might just be emancipative.. might just open up new spaces on this phenom..t
usefully ignorant ness
6 min – i’m not american or european.. i’m positioned outside the epicenter of this conversation.. (nigeria). ie: not centralizing around cancel culture..
7 min – (on cultural appropriation.. taking other’s cultures and using it) we would actually celebrate this moment.. ‘yes.. you’re wearing our dress.. dance w it’.. diff ethical considerations at work here.. maybe that’s a gift at this moment.. to see from an external pov.. liberating..
8 min – (on woke culture et al).. ie: book from 40s ending w protagonist hanging himself .. to protest colonization.. he hangs himself on a tree.. which is a curse in that community.. he does it as a figure of dissociation.. as a warning to his community which is rapidly embracing the ethics/morality/practices of colonizers.. getting woke .. becoming developed.. so this his final protest
10 min – i feel that that figure of a hanging body is more/less the vibrant figure of modern subjects/subjectude/subjectivity.. that we are dissociated from other places of power and we are incarcerated in a very tight bubble.. where the only way we can understand what is happening in the world.. where we can belong to each other.. is by condemning each other.. by enacting retributive/punitive measures.. by thinking of power as so impoverished that it is isolated in the city hall.. t.. and so we struggle in this space
11 min – (norse mythology.. god who is immune from death/dying and suddenly incarcerated from all of life) i feel this is a metaphor for whiteness itself.. whiteness being this planetary ethic.. that enlists diff kinds of bodies into itself for the purpose of flattening the world.. and making it safe for the individual, discrete, separate, and dissociated self to thrive.. in rational bureaucratic systems..
that feels like a way to think about whiteness for me.. not just white identified bodies.. which can very rapidly be avatars of whiteness.. but whiteness as a planetary ethic as an earth shaping phenom
that seems to be the context of activism today.. this impoverished place of power.. where we can only draw from the resources of our incarceration .. to address power..
14 min – (on us/them ness) certain ideas are electrifying.. 1\ humanism – many hear it and hear something good.. i mean the theologies/concepts premised on idea of human being central fulcrum of agency for earth.. it’s anthropocentrism.. the human is where everything meets.. and everything else in contrasts is dead/mute/useless.. unless we impose meaning on it
15 min – in this space.. id.. since world outside dead/empty.. everything that we would properly associate w context is localized in human form.. part of a world that is unmasterable.. humanism takes all that and locks it into the human form.. and says this is everything we should be focused on and that’s where id sprouts from.. identitarian politics.. is basically idea of seeking power/belonging.. but also driving further of this notion of humanism.. that we’re the only ones we can count on – that world outside is dead
16 min – that ethics is the human.. and everything good/beautiful/valuable about the world is located in the human..
and that is problematic for many reasons.. 1\ if we do that.. we risk mistaking the conditions for the things that are conditioned.. ie: we risk seeing atom in place of forest.. if ronan said something inappropriate.. forgetting he’s conditioned.. framed in a larger world that exceeds you.. where forces always acting on you.. we forget all that.. and we pixilate you and the only way we can respond to you.. to be responsible.. to show grievance for pain around us.. only way to do that is to eliminate .. to cut out the atom.. because we’ve reduced it.. to the human.. get rid of the you.. the pixel that is disturbing the frame of innocence or the cult of oblivion that we call white modernity.. t
18 min – and that seems to me to be part of reason cancel culture is occupying vast territory today.. interaction between humanism.. tech advancement in prolif of social networks.. and modern despair.. these 3 things.. among many others.. interact to create an arena of poverty.. where only way we can see ourselves is thru categories of thought.. t.. that have been labelled either this id or that id.. either black or white or this or that..
19 min – the idea that we spill thru each other is scandalous to modernity ..t modernity could tolerate the difference.. but it cannot tolerate the idea that being glimpsed in dna tests .. the idea that i am more than the id i have been boxed into..
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
so the only source that humanism can offer to the questions you’re asking (about getting away form us/them ness).. is kill the atom.. get rid of it.. destroy it.. there’s no other way to go
20 min – allow me to use computer terms.. let me call it a concept of pixelation.. w/in a system.. w/in a grid making computer program composed of little bites.. everything in its place.. like a leggo universe.. the only two kinds of action that are possible are defragmentation (system brings bites back together and makes them visible/utilizable to systems progress) and fragmentation (bites fall apart/spill)
21 min – i think the idea of pixelation means we cannot meet each other.. we’re stuck in our egoic incarceration.. t.. only way to go is either to fall apart or to come together into prison.. so .. we’re pixelated.. and maybe that’s a problem there
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
21 min – r: i really love that honoring of the complexity of things.. leads to a lot more compassion.. one of ironies of id politics.. is it strips away the rich individuality we all have.. the life story.. wounding/trauma/suffrage.. and it puts us into a box that misses the richness behind the labels.. there’s something dehumanizing about that ..
23 min – r: you feel at best a constipation and at worst a mild fear/terror that people will say the wrong thing.. it takes away the innocence of human interaction of exchange.. and at same time i’m holding also (realizing) that groups in society systematically disadvantaged.. and we need a politics that locate/describe that process.. how do you marry the contribution to pinpoint injustice.. with a richer understanding of who we are
24 min – first.. let me respond to all of that by repeating this indian proverb.. ‘name the color blind the eye’ seeing is political and naming is risky.. once you start to name things.. you risk losing sight of them..t
label(s) et al – imagine if our only label was our daily curiosity.. and we used that as data to augment our interconnectedness
everyday anew
25 min – if i’m able to locate in some spectral continuum.. a color.. if i’m able to say.. this is what this color is.. i’m extracting the color from its ongoingness.. its becomingness.. i’m making it a thing.. process of thingification..
maybe in some remote time.. we needed (and by we.. the people that would evolve to be humans) needed some protection from the swirl/chaos of nature.. and in doing that they close shop.. stopped being roaming species and they became sedentary and the created civilization.. and they created rational bureaucratic systems in able to protect and to create this idea/concept of safety – from climate forces et al
26 min – i have compassion for all of this.. because i refuse to see the world in the binary of good vs evil
binary ness and the (thinking we have the) knowledge of good and evil.. being at the root of our trauma/addictions/perpetuations
once you take away that label.. you see all the interesting things and you can ask interesting questions.. so ‘name the color.. blinding the eye’.. we risk not seeing things
the it is me ness
and modernity’s greatest work.. what it proliferates is memes and labels.. and processes individuation that are supposedly acts of cutting you away from the world.. and liberating you.. you’re free to become anything you want to be.. but like latur would say.. we’ve never actually been human in that sense.. we’ve always been connected w the wilds/depths
yeah.. label ing as killing/cutting
27 min – r: it reminds me that true freedom is being an intimate participant in the living process of your becoming.. and we live in a world of reifies us into static concepts/id’s.. id politics then adds shameful/punitive element to that.. all of those (labels) of that past reify me in a problematic way.. so.. the degree to which id politics is a regime that puts that process of modernity.. that making of human beings into static.. almost furthers that imprisonment.. layers of division/shame/punishment.. panopticon.. never know if watched or not.. people are getting feeling of being a real main stream politician.. where everything they say is (critiqued) so in fear
29 min – this is then how i would reframe ‘cancel culture’ in the light of our convo.. it’s carceral politics.. it’s mutual incarceration.. a way of responding to power.. except if you respond to power.. you run the risk of becoming the power you’re responding to
30 min – intersectional theory is about framing the experiences of the black woman.. and saying the black woman’s experiences count as well.. see me in w/in this space.. my life matters.. and that’s a beautiful thing to say.. like you said there’s fidelity there.. power there.. i want to be seen.. except that.. who’s doing the seeing here.. who’s noticing who..
i think once you frame your emancipation w/in your epistemology of your oppression.. you run the risk of repeating your incarceration or reinforcing that condition of your imprisonment..t
moten abolition law et al
and i think intersectional theory has only led further into the proliferation of more id politics.. more grid like formations.. more prisons.. and we’re locked into this prison together
31 min – a politics of visibility locks us in
begs a means to undo our hierarchical listening ie: 2 convers as infra
i recently have been theorizing about that.. one of feature of id politics is what i call tricoserality.. think about claims of non dominant target groups.. when they say.. look at us as well.. our lives matter.. their claim/work is to state those claims at the feet power and say.. look at me.. i will not be looked thru.. i will not be dismissed.. i also matter..
32 min – but to do that.. i need to fix the person’s gaze.. i need to hold the person and lock the person into position.. and not just that.. i need to hold my feet firm on the ground.. so that i’m not only locking the person into a particular stance.. and that’s where maybe white allyship comes in.. a lot of performative righteousness.. where people just want to say the right things together.. they’re afraid of being shamed.. all about righteousness politics.. all about representation.. about people going into this pyramidal scheme of power
back to my vision.. i lock you into position and i say .. look at me.. my victimhood becomes a form of power.. and i lock the conditions that frame our incarceration into being as well.. by digging my feet into the ground.. or at least it’s an attempt to do that
33 min – so that in a sense.. i’m locked/incarcerated.. by locking you as well.. i’m incarcerating you/myself.. and i’m holding whiteness.. the very condition that locks us all in.. i’m holding it into space.. locking it down.. hoping it stays still.. i’m stabilizing the conditions of my incarceration.. and hoping it goes away.. ironically.. at the same time
this is what i call tricoserality.. we’re locked into certain positions that do now allow for transformation.. the only way i can hold you into account is to incarcerate you.. by saying that you are evil or good.. it’s a binary position..t
incarceration ness
accountable ness as huge red flag we’re doing life wrong
there’s no allowance for you to spill and to become something else..
the it is me ness.. big time.. killing us softly w its song
no allowance for you to be forgiven.. to change .. to learn from mistakes.. to ask new questions..
bravery to change your mind everyday.. daily curiosity .. et al
huge
unconditional ness.. no judge\ment
34 min – there’s no space for compassion.. for a falling apart.. because your atomistic..
i see you the way the modern era has invited/conditioned me to see you..but there’s no movement there then.. we’re locked into this place together.. t
black science of people/whales law
if we depend solely on intersectional theory .. id politics.. we are going to be locked into this place of power.. we need a worm hole event (linking disparate points in spacetime) that might help us secrete ourselves into fugitive spaces and then we can perform other ways of power.. other ways of noticing ourselves in relation with the world
35 min – r: so how do we draw attention to people .. groups of people .. that are systematically excluded.. w/o locking them into that static ness .. i’m hearing a diff starting point
i want to hold it w some tension.. on one hand.. a politics of visibility.. which is part of universe of id politics and gaining power.. only way this can understand power is in diversity and representational politics.. getting me a seat at the table
36 min – and on the other hand.. i want to hold a politics of fugitivity.. of post humanism.. of what deleuze would call imperceptibility.. that is .. becoming animal
i’ve read authors who have spoken about my traditions as the aim and ultimate goal of intersectional theory.. it tries to invite justice based on certain modern parameters of what justice could look like.. but again as james human would say.. ‘what the client recommends as a solution to his problem is actually symptomatic of that syndrome/problem’..
so seems we’re repeating ourselves again.. by trying to frame justice on id politics.. or redistributive econ.. or mediated communitarianism.. it seems all of these patterns don’t work.. what we need to work is a space of fugitivity
37 min – what does that look like.. many ways to describe it.. ie: leaving plantation behind; becoming woman; becoming animal (deleuze); going on the ground and seeing practices where we can; opening up spaces of being with each other; naming grief;..
i don’t think there’s a wholistic system that can allow us to summarily respond to these issues.. but there are modest ways we can name and stay with the trouble of our complicity.. our co mobility with whiteness
why? i’m not sure that’s best use of our energy (sounds more defensive/incarcerative.. than free)
again.. let me bring that picture to mind.. whiteness is this flattening of the earth.. but i think whiteness also gets exhausted.. and i think over time it weakens in certain places.. it grows wounds.. that become ruptures .. those are the places i feel we are being invited to go to
38 min – what do i mean by ruptures.. i feel that the places that are rupturing are the places that white modernity has medicalized/pathologized.. named as scandalous.. or just pushed out of the frame of intelligibility.. i feel those are the places we need to go to to frame a post human politics of becoming.. a weird politics that might allow us to ask new questions
for me.. that means making sanctuary.. that we’re being called to become monsters.. i don’t mean monsters in the hollywoodized negative form here.. i mean monsters in form of losing shape..
and how do we lose shape..? it’s not something singularly something that ronan can do by holding space during zoom calls.. it’s not something psychedelic society can actually do.. it takes the invisible entourage of the world and ancestrology working with us
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
39 min – it comes up in diff ways: psychedelics; holding space for grief; ..
for me personally.. it comes up in not schooling my child.. that may be shocking to some people.. but on schooling/localized here.. contextually intelligible here.. is our way of addressing colonial systems.. imperial ways of making sense of the world.. it’s not just not sending children to school.. i’m a professor and a recovering psychologist.. it’s about listening to our children .. treating them as elders that have come/returned to deplete the human .. to distress the human.. just a little bit more ..so that other forms of being alive on the planet can surge.. it’s about holding space for the insurgency of the invisible..
not yet scrambled ness.. and the need to quit telling people what to do ness
undoing our hierarchical listening ie: cure ios city
see with heart.. rumi words law et al
maté parenting law et al
what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people
40 min – for me.. all those metaphors mean.. being w my daughter/son and treating them as philosophers in their own right.. listening to their questions.. and following where that leads.. i think those are the fugitive pathways outside of the territory of the anthropulse (?) of the human
imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. we might just get to a more antifragile, healthy, thriving world.. the ecosystem we keep longing for..
and the human again.. to centralize.. the human is the territory of whiteness.. what people like myself have denied access to human
well.. none of us have really had it.. because none of us are free if one of us is chained.. like you’ve said.. we’re all incarcerated.. we’re all like whales in sea world.. not able to dance the dance.. till we’re all freed from that incarceration..
and maybe w don’t need to gain access into the human anymore
yeah that..
maybe we don’t need to perform a politics of visibility.. maybe what we need right now.. is to leave the plantation behind.. to walk out..
yeah that.. moten abolition law et al..
there’s a nother way to live.. to have 8b people being alive.. everyday
41 min – to walk out and go into those cracks in the body/flesh of whiteness and perform the scandalous work of becoming animal.. always modest post human work.. it involves listening.. talking to stuff like bacteria.. mingling w furniture as if it were alive.. it is phenomenalogical.. non anthropocentric.. it is powerful
begs a means to undo our hierarchical listening
gut ness et al
ie: 2 convers as infra – deep listening to self/others/nature
r: what i hear again and again while you’re speaking is a politics of spontaneity
yeah.. that.. fromm spontaneous law et al.. let’s not miss this opp to leap.. to get back/to that (simultaneous spontaneity.. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..)
that actually the truly intelligent move will emerge from within us.. an expression of an intelligence that is much deeper than anything we can think or suppose.. and therein is a pathway to freedom.. that exists in every moment.. to transform the frame.. a liberation that goes beyond any justice movement today..
i don’t know about intellect ness .. but yeah to interconnectedness.. in every moment
42 min – so if i cancel cancel culture .. i think i’m proliferating.. i’m expanding it.. i don’t want to cancel cancel culture.. i don’t want to dismiss it.. i want to have compassion for it.. and how do i have compassion for cancel culture? by refusing to give it its own medicine
the medicine of cancel culture is to say everything is either this or that.. it’s the socratic law of the excluded middle.. i want to tell cancel culture.. no.. there’s a whole monstrous messianic middle here that you’re missing.. and if only you give attention to that .. then you are not evil or good.. not one or the other.. you’re embodied/entangled w things around you
43 min – so .. my refusal is fugitive.. i’m walking away from the proliferation of certain forms of knowledge
walk out walk on.. walkaway .. et al
i’m not going to say.. cancel culture is bad let’s get rid of it.. i want to bring it down to earth.. i want to let it fall.. let it compost
r: on woke and metawoke activism.. the metawoke folks realizing what the woke are doing .. but still perpetuate it.. meeting deep need i have for.. at least i have some allies for seeing world as i do..
45 min – r: on woke activism offering us a religion.. times were good.. whiteness/evil came along.. now clear vision of that.. that white person owns/atones for that.. if anyone questions these features.. ejected from tribe.. 1\ what are the deep longings assimilated religion like that is meeting 2\ what shadow dynamics is it also playing to (i see revenge and desire to be the victim.. and desire for power.. that you can excuse because you’re on the side of the powerless.. i see a lot of unintegrated hate.. hidden feature of the convo)
47 min – you’ve perfectly described a freudian structure consciousness.. iceberg tip & submerged.. freud’s intentions were a structure that is on top being conscious and the it .. the unconquerable.. freud found a way to frame therapy of the psychic gentrification.. the filth of it.. the shame we stuff in there.. freud wanted to expand the ego so much that it has rational control over this swamp land.. then james human comes along and says.. maybe the psychic gentrification is problematic.. losing an aspect of the world.. losing our in touch ness.. framing the self as citizens in this regime of pure light.. that is also another form of speaking about id.. what can we see/name.. what is intelligible.. that seems to be the problem here.. to gain power w/in a system that frames itself as the repudiation of darkness.. one has to appear pure/light/seen.. so to do that successfully.. one has to repress shadows
50 min – but the dynamic of repressing shadows here.. is ironic.. because the more you do your best to press down the things that are haunting.. the more you take on the monstrous forms of the things you are resisting.. the things that you do not want to bear out.. to show
and so it seems like id politics is not only resistant against repression.. it is resistant against tricoserality.. the monstrous forms.. the beasts that threaten to overtake our place.. it’s about keeping them down
51 min – r: despite trying to (sway) other people’s perceptions.. we’re always broadcasting what’s really animated us.. the insecurities/shadows/drives/desires
53 min – r: on spaces to be that deranged human
yeah.. i see right as escaping from maturality of their conditions.. left.. escape into language/performance/labels.. that being conceived as power/purity.. (but) this isn’t about good/evil.. left/right.. this politics won’t find itself in terms of representation.. ie: how many blacks sit at college
representation ness
56 min – if i accepted your apology i would be accepting the idea that there’s only one place of power.. so what i’m rejecting is the thesis that i have to be accepted at your table.. that there’s only one room.. ie: being able to breeze thru airport.. compared to.. being able to see the wind.. so i reject this idea that power has to congeal in a modern democratic space
58 min – r: i see in you someone who is choosing the most liberating understanding of who you are..
i think when we’re framed in certain frames of power.. we will respond to the architecture in the space.. the ecological affect of the space.. and we will mount up walls of resistance trying to put our issues before the powers that be..
59 min – but i want to recall word from fred moten – author of undercommons – when he says.. ‘one does not speak truth to power’.. that seems scandalous.. he’s basically inviting me to consider that power is not as powerful as we think it is and there are other ways of framing power and imagining being in the world
so i want to be able to frame walk out cultures..
ie: cure ios city via 2 convers as infra
not to walk out in terms of gaining some sense of purity and not acknowledging my co mobility with modernity.. already.. not even acknowledging some of us who have .. in africa for instance.. we struggled for independence.. and we learned the hard way.. that when we won.. we lost a game.. even in winning.. and taking freedom/independence for ourselves.. we’re already doing that w/in the epistemology of our oppression.. we needed more than independence to be truly free..
this is a take on activism today.. if activism is entirely premised on the binary options of victory vs defeat.. then we risk being locked in processes of power that might re iterate and re enforced the very conditions we’re trying to escapce
even deeper.. if all of life.. on some finite set of choices
huge.. binary ness and deeper
1:00 – we need a politics of fugitivity.. a product of leaving behind.. of walking away.. a politics of refusal.. leaving behind those spaces of power
rather.. again i think deeper.. because refusal is a time suck..
if we focus on 8b daily curiosities.. on fittingness.. spaces of power become irrelevant s – don’t even take up the time to think about them
and in other ways.. finding ways to name ourselves.. that is not premised on the specter of id.. which worked well w/in modernity.. but only to form new and problematic categories that never meet each other.. that are never entangled.. that have never fallen into each other.. and are never doing anything new
yeah – marsh label law et al.. imagine if the only label we had was our daily curiosity – new everyday
i’m looking for the exquisite.. and the only way to do that.. the rare.. the unsaid.. the unintelligible.. the unthought.. the only way to do that is to find the messianic monstrosity of the missing middle that modernity does not know how to articulate
almaas holes law and missing pieces and missing piece
again..imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. we might just get to a more antifragile, healthy, thriving world.. the ecosystem we keep longing for..
what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people
1:01 – q&a
1:02 – rich – tech support: if there’s a way to get more of the body entanglement into the room..
1:06 – q: role of trauma in reproducing the same.. how do we collectively acknowledge trauma
1:07 – maybe we need to embark on a cartographical project that allows trauma to be seen as a gift on its own.. going to wherever it may lead.. i think one of the categorical mistakes of modernity as well is to see trauma itself as individuated.. it’s my trauma vs your trauma.. this idea that it’s a human thing.. not an assemblage (deleuze).. it’s not furniture around us.. it’s not trees.. ecologies are not traumatized.. it’s humans that are traumatized.. i think that deepens the trauma.. again.. we’re locked into practices that seek to close up or get rid of the trauma.. while not recognizing the conditions that make it possible..
hari rat park law et al
1:08 – so let me use gabor maté’s concept and say.. trauma could be a gift.. a paradigmatic opening.. it comes with its own world.. but if you try to heal it.. like.. to cut it off.. then we’re locked again
maté trauma law.. gabor maté – attachment & authenticity
let me put it in very practical terms.. lost language.. trained to speak english.. so we internalize a sense of inferiority.. we learn to see selves as inadequate.. locked in because we see trauma as a humanal centric concept.. we forget that the systems that trauma creates also reinforces trauma.. it circles back on us
literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
1:09 – so most of the things we are doing to take care of our feelings of inadequacy are very psychological.. i’m a trained psychologist.. i’m a recovering one.. there are many people who cater to people who report/present symptoms.. present feelings of failure.. of not being enough.. we proliferated all of that.. we tasked the ministry of health to create more bed spaces.. so that people who report like this can be taken care of .. but we did nothing about the conditions that make trauma possible..
huge.. again.. hari rat park law et al.. leaving the whales in sea world and expecting health
1:10 – it’s all human.. it’s all anthropocentric.. i think a post human .. in humane or non human notion of trauma.. would allow us to notice that it is not singularly about us
bush health law – keep trying to define as single org
it’s not even about fixing trauma.. it’s about allowing trauma to shape shift us..
bush heal law.. bush communication law.. bush demonization law et al
what kind of politics would allow us to follow trauma where it might lead.. to embark on processes that might help us touch our bodies.. touch where it hurts and share it w the world around us.. what kinds of processes might allow that.. that is the question of the moment for me..t
ie: cure ios city
1:11 – q: how to help esp black women to be heard rather than dominate white male mode..
mech to undo our hierarchical listening ie: 2 convers as infra
1:13 – ie: favela’s – i saw people doing things w waste.. w discarded food.. like i’d never seen before.. ie: peel of orange into detergent.. we shouldn’t fight the powers that be.. we need a diff kind of politics that allows us to depart to remake ourselves.. ways we think about waste, science, health, ed, et al.. i’ve never framed this as either/or.. or let’s do away with schooling.. et al.. we can’t frame politics on only being seen.. if risk being seen.. lose place of power
1:16 – my question is.. if i continue to frame my justice/emancipation w/in the systems that were left for me.. by oppression.. then i risk being a prisoner there.. i want to see where black ness can go other than being locked in the system.. what else can my body do.. other than just proliferate the familiar..t
q: how to be both fugitive and anti racist
i resist naming.. this is going to be scandalous.. my notion of racism is not identitarian or humanal centric.. my epistemology/ontology of the racist takes into consideration the assemblage (deleuze) not the human that is part of the assemblage.. i want to take into consideration the network of bodies that creates that affect that we might call hate/prejudice/sense-of-superiority.. instead of the person .. that is an atomic part of that network.. so the racist to me is not a person.. the racist is the assemblage.. anti racism then takes on a ()? notion .. in light of deleuzian assemblages.. if we get stuck in id boxes.. then anti racism is the proliferation of abstractions.. where.. just finding ways to nullify the individuated self..
one body ness
1:18 – if anti racism becomes a way of responding the the assemblage.. then it becomes more than an act of resistance.. it becomes even an act of compassion.. more than just educating to being woke.. it becomes a way of addressing the conditions that make those kinds of affective feelings possible.. so.. fugitivity for me is the way to do that.. fugitivity for me is noticing the world anew.. it’s post humanism.. it’s finding ways to relate to each other and our planet in ways that defeat the identitarian boxes.. i don’t want to say defeat.. but that composted.. and put it to rest.. it’s exhausted
identity et al
so for me.. the racist is not the human.. the notion of the racist as more than human.. i think that changes everything.. as the network.. as climatic conditions.. microbial instigations.. racializing assemblages is what anti racism work has not taken into consideration
1:20 – q: role of class politics in emancipation.. in and out groups.. if energies weren’t focused on redistribution of wealth.. could we side step and address scarce resources of rent seeking et al
1: 21 – i would say that’s a part of it.. but i’m very reluctant to name that as the prime.. the first cause.. i refuse to see cause/effect as still/static.. it’s not about cause/effect but about interaction.. ie: climate, microbes, influencing everything.. ie: intergenerational trauma is helped along by bacteria
1:22 – i wouldn’t say that class politics is singularly the cause.. even if can say started out with saying you are less than the other.. a way of controlling.. .. it has metasticized to something other.. and it’s now a way of bodies becoming diff.. that transcend any simple solution.. so for me it might mean attending to aspects .. not just pinpointing.. but dealing w them in modest ways.. and that it’s not entirely up to us humans.. but from the collective.. ie: even pandemics can instigate new ways of thinking about our system
1:24 – decolonization for me is not singularly the work of activism it’s the work of the planet.. the whole..
r: feel hopeful.. hearing this diff politics.. but (doesn’t seem as powerful).. what would you recommend to leaders of movements
1:25 – if i could tell you what this looks like.. then it has lost its power.. i don’t know .. i haven’t been there myself.. t
red flag – any form of telling people what to do et al
1:26 – this is an invitation to fall.. fugitive incapacitation.. to unlearn mastery.. to unlearn colonial imperialism.. i don’t know how that looks.. i don’t have a political manifesto.. you see.. that’s another claim of the surface.. if you’re going to tell us where to go then give us a blueprint of how that looks..
i’m being invited into the dark.. and dark is not a means to the light.. i want to trust the world has ().. and it’s inviting me into a place.. and i don’t know what it might do to me.. only thing monster can do to me is break my claims exclusivity.. to coherence.. to allow me to fall apart
1:27 – not about a politics that knows exactly where to go.. doing the work of framing what might yet be
1:28 – you know why deleuzian politics have not yet caught on..? because it’s not amenable to the system as we know it.. it doesn’t dance well w nation states..
and the reason orgs have taken on intersectional politics rapidly.. is because it’s easy to compute.. the algo is easy.. 5 blacks and 4 whites.. that’s racial justice.. but i’m looking for a sense racial justice that is not based on modern power.. that allows modern power let go of its grip of the driver’s wheel.. and i don’t know what that looks like
all i can say is.. making sanctuary.. is the entry point into this cartographical project .. it starts w recognizing the wounds that we have.. the traumatic places that are scandalous in the modern project.. and then working/experimenting with each other to go deeper into that.. staying in those kind of places together.. might allow us to have new questions.. new problems to deal with
yeah.. i don’t know if that’s necessary.. thinking if we do take this opp to leap.. that’s an irrelevant distraction .. so a time suck..
i think we reset.. let the itch-in-8b-souls.. each day.. be our space/place/guide/whatever
otherwise we’re still in a sense dealing with the binary and finite-set already embedded in sea world
1:29 – it’s not a puritan place.. it’s not a place of arrival.. we will not arrive in tact.. but it’s a place where our bodies are broken open and working together
1:30 – r: a politics for all.. every moment.. to trust in the mystery that that’s where the intelligence is.. a new ground of being in polity
again with the intelligence..
r: the thing ego loves the most is control/predictability.. ego activism
1:31 – henry berkson.. vital to our times.. ron seart.. as the destruction of the sensible.. politics is now what maintains.. it’s the messianic eruption of new kinds of sensibilities.. and that will come in small ways..
1:32 – we think of politics as large scale events.. but i think.. relating with my daughter is cosmic.. planting a garden and eating the food.. that’s politics for me
1:33 – r: now in politics full of dead concepts..
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paper w alnoor from 2017 [https://redefineschool.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/cf357-perverseparticles2centangledmonstersandpsychedelicpilgrimages3aemergenceasanonto-epistemologyofnot-knowing.pdf]:
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via hans fb share [https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=626180826189154&set=a.218795146927726]:
Loss needs a new home. Suitably, one that wanders.
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find/follow Bayo:
Father. Life Partner to Ej. Son. Author. Speaker. Public Intellectual. Professor. Posthumanist. Poet. Recovering Psychologist. Fugitive.
his site: http://bayoakomolafe.net/
we are finding that the heart of the matter is not a simple creed, stable ground, conquering Truth, or an exalted state. And that there is nothing ‘pure’ or finished about the world. The heart knows something we don’t – and this is that one and one often equals less; that life cannot be computed in terms of ends and purposes; that the idea that our lives are a lone feverish hunt for happiness is a conspiratorial compromise and, as such, what we all want and long for is not given or uncontested; and that behind the curtains, when the neon lights flicker out and our masks come off, when the candle-stained scripts rest exhausted from all the handling, our most astonishing fear is ourselves – strange, perverse, wild, indeterminate, and powerful.
In a world where intentionality, agency, causality, learning and memory can no longer be safely ensconced away in the fleshy caverns of human be-ing – and at a time when modern civilization, our cherished binaries, our institutions, and our cultural lexicons are unfurling at their seams, grappling with resolute impasses and spinning black holes – I offer these dances with the preposterous. This website. This very material yearning for a world more at peace than the stories of infinite growth allow; a world more alive than can be accommodated in the anorexic confines of Newtonian imagination; a world more just than the exhausted binaries and tired clashes between ‘good’ and ‘evil’; a world where ‘I’ am home with Lali. With our daughter, Alethea. With the preposterous.
Poet. Philosopher. Psychologist. Professor. Passionate about the Preposterous.
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be you. 