Transcript: The Edges in the Middle, III: Báyò Akómoláfé and Indy Johar
Indy Johar I think we see the world through the language of dead things. The language of economics perceives the world through the language of dead things. And we've, in that purpose, also killed ourselves, made ourselves dead things. So there's a there's a real understanding of the world, and we can only free ourselves if we perceive the agency of others.
Ayana Young For The Wild is honored to present The Edges in the Middle, a series of conversations between Bayo Akomolafe and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Bayo's work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. In this role, Bayo has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the institute's Democracy and Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across differences to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Bayo's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy and Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
This recording features Bayo's conversation with Indy Johar, who is the founding director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs, Based in the UK. An architect by training, he is a senior innovation associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield. He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome based investment, and the future of governance.
Bayo Akomolafe Good evening, from Chennai, India. It's good to see you again. I'm glad to be in this beautiful conversation with my brother and to everyone who is assembled here with us. Thank you for showing up, for being here. I was just having a conversation with Indy about the weather in India. I crave some cold right now. Some of European cold and snow. Just goes to show you how worlds can diverge and diffract and become something entirely different. But I digress.
I welcome you to this beautiful exploration. And 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. The Mbari is an aesthetic. This is a reminder, is 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? This is an invitation to respect decay and the limitations of sensemaking rituals. So, if you can put your, your body in the body of a fugitive escaping. I know this is probably impossible to do. But it's speculatively possible, put your body in the body of a fugitive escaping the trap and a capture of the slave plantation. There is no time for maps, there is no time for clarity about where this slave is heading. There is only the effort, the attempt, the imperative to get as far as possible away from the plantation. It is such fluid cosmologies that inform the Mbari and what we're doing here. Our attempt is not consensus. It is not safety. It is not a finished product. We will not be dropping the mic. We will be picking it up and not just speaking to it but interacting with possibilities, poetic possibilities. And yeah, that's what we're doing here today.
We want to talk about a new theory of the self. There is a story from my childhood that involves Anansi the Spider. You might have heard of him and Anansi is a trickster like the tortoise in Yoruba stories, or Loki in Marvel cinematic universes. Anansi is given an assignment by his grandmother to watch over a pot of beans and gravy that she's just prepared. The problem is Anansi, as in all the stories that is told about him, is greedy. And so he takes this gravy and he's eating the beans and his stuffing his mouth with it. And he becomes so taken by this gastronomic experience that he takes the entire thing. When his he notices his grandmother is about to enter the house, reenter the house, and stuffs it in his hair in his hat, rather. And while she is going about the house, his head is burning, and his hair is frying, and the heat is getting to him. And he cannot respond to any of the questions that the grandmother is throwing at him. In a sense, we also have heat in our heads. Our heads are hot right now. And all we can offer, let me just let it out of the bag, is a gasp. So a new fear of the self. Indy and I are going to be meandering through the Black spaces of contemplation on the matter with personhood, what has happened to identity and what has happened to the self? We don't have a fixed or final product glossed over and ribboned and presented and package. We don't have that. All we have is a gasp and I think that is the most eloquent thing we can offer. Indy, are you here? Can we begin?
Indy Johar We can indeed. What a pleasure to be here, my brother.
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you so much for doing this. And you're no way right now craving what I can generously offer you. But I refuse to... Let me start with this problem. And we'll see how it goes. I have no idea where this is going. And I think that's the gift of this moment. It's what happens to selfhood. What happens to the liberal humanist, traditional self, which was, according to all the doctrines and wisdoms and insights secreted from modern landscapes supposed to be domiciled in our bodies. Why are we exploring a new theory of self? What is so compelling about this for you?
Indy Johar I think I really appreciate your your framing of this conversation. And I think I think let's imagine this as a gospel. So the premise I think, why this is important as a conversation is that I think that things like climate change or biodiversity losses, these big crises that we face, in my view, are not a crisis of the outside world. They're a crisis of our relationship with the world. And it is a crisis of how we manifest in the world that is manifesting in what I would many people would say is a self terminating situation where we are killing the thing around us in order to kill ourselves. And this is rooted, I think, in fundamentally how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive the world. And I think the conception of that, and I think you talk about it through the words of the pixel or the individuation of the world. And I think this is.. I don't think we can deal with the crisis of climate change without dealing with our crisis of self. And, and this is foundational, and it really it's rooted, I would argue, in in the theory of objectifying ourselves, objectifying the world around us. And this object/subject relationship has created the space for I would say violence and waste. It creates a space for violence and thereby creates a space for waste, things that are externalized, things that are rejected the system. And this thesis is manifesting in the world around us. And what was once, you know, you could argue we were living in a perceptually, conceptually infinite world, that violence and that waste was ignorable, and now that that trash and that violence is no longer ignorable, because that micro-violence now eats back at us. So it was problematic even when it was born, but the problems weren't visible. And now those problems manifest back into us in a way that I think our civilization terminating for ourselves. And so I think this is reconceptualization of the self and our thesis of the self. Without that, I don't think there's a pathway to the addressing the problems. And I think the final point I'd make on that is that that conceptualization of self is not just philosophy, it's how philosophy manifests into language. So, it is it is language then grammar, then grammar then actually stuff like institutions, property... there is a property which allow for that violence to be concretized in law. All the way to theories of transactions and economics, [unknown word] economists, theories or models of the world. So this conception is, is then virally infected all of our structures of how we conceive and structure the world and thereby accelerating that object/subject relationship in a way that is now self terminating. So I think it is it is both philosophy, but also philosophy, language to institutions. It's a root problem. And this is I think, why climate change is more than just a technological problem. It is actually a problem a much deeper problem or a relationship with the world, which is why biodiversity losses we're living in the age of, of a great extinction event. Because it's much deeper than than I think we talk about.
Bayo Akomolafe And therapy as well add therapy to the to the list. This might be a good, good way to bring that in storywse. There's this story I tell about two monks strolling down the river, and byand by they hear someone drowning, screaming for help. One of the monks jumps into the waters and drags the person out to resuscitate the person, and they are on their way. But then it happens again. And someone else is the water calling for help. And the same process repeats itself. And then it happens again, and again and again, until the monk that is now enlisted in this troubling cyclicity of saving someone else decides to run up, you know, the river instead of jumping into the waters. And his companion calls out and says, "Where are you going? You're supposed to, you know, I can't swim, you supposed to save this person." And he responds, "I'm going to stop them from from where they're dropping in." Right. And I come to the story again, and again, because in my profession, I refer to myself as a recovering psychotherapist, psychologist. But in my career, which wasn't that extensive, I found myself faced with the impossibility of the individua. It was easier for me to see this. My client was supposed to be the contract of the clinical alliance, is that I, the therapist with the skills is supposed to help the client navigate. But what if the client is monstrous? What if the client is the social, the political, the economic, the ecological? How 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. And so it's you're right brother, this, it seems we have to come to this problem, which is far from being an abstract issue. Far from being an example in sophistry, or just talking talk. This is, this is at the heart of the climate crisis. I don't like to use climate change when this is at the heart of the ecological emergencies that we are facing.
Indy Johar Exactly. And I think unless we start to address this, I don't think there's a pathway. And it's rooted in everything, our theories of identity, our theories of registries, our theories of ownership, our theories of economic rights,. Even our rights agenda is rooted in some of these things. And I think this is where it becomes, it's a deep code problem. And I think, you know, I would, we could argue it's a problem, which is maybe at the center of 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 and there is nondivisible. And at that moment in time, this may be a critical, social, linguistic, philosophical, institutional, re.. a new emergence, a kind of.. And this is why I think many people, people like Thomas [inaudible] and other people, talk about this being as a 1 in a 400-year or 1 in a 6000-year transformation, because it's rooted in our fundamental idea of, of theories, control... words like governance, right? Words governance beget classification, classification begets identity. Because these are top down, still top down associations in positions of power, in positions of theories of self. They're in positions of, of language. And, you know, just playfully, maybe even words like belonging, right? Like, who do I belong to? Right? Do I want to belong to something? Or what is the... where does the word find its root from? And I think there's fundamental questions about these words, because these words are still about Association-asymmetric association, asymmetric lineages, asymmetric power-that do not recognize. And I think there's a reconciliation of our entanglement, reconciliation of our agency, reconciliation of our care. And also, I think this is where one thing I'd say is, I think we see the world through the language of dead things. The language of economics perceives the world through the language of dead things. And we have in that purpose, also killed ourselves, made ourselves dead things. So there's a there's a re-understanding of the world. And we can only free ourselves if we perceive the agency of others. This is a really, if we see the world through death things and that that is what we become in process. So how do we actually re-enliven the world? We breathe the life into the world and also recognize the life in us, which is not in position and do exactly as you said, it cannot be defined. It's an act of journey. It's a becoming. And this is where all of our language of identity is about fixity, determination, constraint and even your, I read your work, you know what you're [unknown word] were saying about intersectionality. Whilst intersectionality allows us to see more than one relationship and more than one constraint, it's still a theory of constraint to those one things rather than a dynamic intersectionality as a verb. We're constantly in a new intersectionality in an emergent intersectionality as opposed to a fixed one. And I think these things become really critical. But yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe To that point, I've often used the term nounism. If it's a silly at this point, that we you know what I mean? It feels like... this is how I describe whiteness. Whiteness is not reducible to white person's whiteness is not white people. Whiteness is speculatively the genocide of relations, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Erin Manning. It is the placement of bodies in strict, rigid, unforgiving, immobile, you know, sterile identitarian boxes as a placemaking, world building project, right. And this is why blacks scholars, like Fred Moten, through the voices of my sister, Marisol de la Cadena would suggest that the real violence that was performed down to Africans wasn't a slave ship. The slave ship was only part of it. The vessel of dishonor, if you will, the vessel of capture was the human individual. That was what transported the human individual as the thing that you are now going to fit within. Because the worlds that we lived in, and I'm not trying to create some revisionistic or originalism that we ought to return to. I don't think of the world in that way. It's not a binary, there's nothing pure to return to. But there are accounts that, that suggest that we saw ourselves, you know, together with mountains, that there wasn't a private sense of self, there still isn't in many parts in, at least where I come from. Grief is a public event. There isn't some private interiority that I'm supposed to tend to, so to speak. That's a that's the breeding ground for new ancestors. Right? So So, I hear you when you suggest that the citizen is a burden. It might be the most ontological, ontologically heavy thing on the planet, the citizen is the it's not about carbon reductionism. It's about the presumptioness of citizenry... the idea that the performative closure, you know, that reduces the agonistic tensions of the world around us, the flows and tides of things to that atomic thing in front of us.
Indy Johar I think you know, you could add the enlightenment or certainly the scientific and the Newtonian enlightenment was exactly that thesis right then. The Newtonian enlightenment allowed for the divisibility of the world into discrete ways of seeing. The scientific paradigm, it was born, was a theory of that – Enlightenment was to use light to separate, to make visible, to capture in a very particular way. And we lost the [unknown word)... We, 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. So the science and is already at the end of that enlightenment journey of the divisibility of the world into a new paradigm. Yet, and 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. Yet, what we haven't done is culturally, linguistically moved beyond this. And your thing about nounism is perfect. Because we know ... like Anishabe language and other languages have been 80% verb-orientated. With English is a noun-orientated language. And it's become more noun-orientated, object-orientated as a language. And that language, as you rightly say, is a way of saying that then captures ourselves. So the language is, is we're not captured. I think there is something interesting that that we're facing is that, that there is also some something extraordinary going on. That there is a new consciousness emerging at a different scale as well. And I think I'd like to bring this on the table, of course, James Lovelock, and his book on Novacene is really interesting for me, because I think he purports I think, a very powerful idea that the planet itself is becoming conscious, that actually, our ability to put satellites up into it, and then to be able to change our behaviors, to be able to see the planet, to then ecological systems to actually also be asked to change our relationship with ecological systems. This machine-human-ecological singularity, this consciousness emerging at the planetary scale, is also challenging our theory of individual self. So I think we, you know, if we argued that we are seeing the birth of a new metal life, there is also something extraordinary going on in that sense. So I think the question of self becomes really critical, because we are now.. we can no longer assume dominion, but recognize ourselves in fractals of life. And that means that there was a different relationship required a different way of being required in that in that cognition. And I think that unless we're able to deal with that appreciate this meta life, and our components are placing that meta life and also recognize our relationality. And that's a profound change. And I think, I think we're at the end of an enlightenment era, that area of light-orientated seeing to a new era. And I think you rightly say, and I think there are other cultures like Japanese culture, which you talked about In Praise of Shadows, where there was a beautiful question in the book In Praise of Shadows, where it says, you know, ... What, if we photograph shadows, as opposed to photograph light? What would how would we see the world? And I think we've seen the world in a very particular way. And I think we're in that transition moment. And this is why I think the cultural project of actually the conversations that you host, Bayo, the kind of integrity of those questions that you're opening up is so critical. Because without these conversations, I think all of our other solutions are just superfluous [unknown world] because there's a root crisis to root transformation that we're operating.
Bayo Akomolafe Let's go deeper into this, brother. I'm loathe you to use the exhausted metaphor the rabbit hole, but we'll see what we can do. You know, I said earlier, I can see a question around Blackness. That doesn't it equally apply to Blackness? Well, the essay addresses that. But Blackness is also an identitarian form of capture. Right? It's, there is a scene we have on the streets of Legos. Now, we did not know we were Black until White people came, right. It's, it's, it seems that what we are itching for, is spillage. Right? Is is the sense of exceeding the boundaries that were supposed to inhabit. The categoricity of the person is part of the algorithm of modern civilization and complicit in the co-production of what some call the Anthropocene. Right? So so there isn't, there isn't a throwing of solutions at this. There isn't some technical bureaucratic flaws, that releases us from this. This feels like a call to shapeshift to become something entirely other different exquisite, if you will, to your point about planetary consciousness. Sure, you know about ChatGPT is in the Chat,GPT. Yeah, exactly. That is frightening. Some people right now AI, conversations about AI. Well, I don't want to go into AI. But I found I find it remarkable that I posted a question there recently about comparing Simondon, Gilbert Simondon, and his theory of the preindividual connected that with clinical psychology and Deleuze. So I just crafted a question there. And I swear to you, the response was shockingly good. The response was shockingly good. If a student of mine wrote that as an essay, I would have given the person and I hate to speak about grades or given the person an A. But if I don't do that all the time, just to get back at the university system. But it just it just speaks to the idea that intelligence is not as scarce as we think it is. That the world is profuse, replete with life forms, so maybe this is my question to you rather than dare I call it a miracle. What in your experience, in in your awareness in the stories you've heard, the things that you've explored feels like a transversal. breaking of the idea of the self? Maybe, maybe an experience about? Shall I say, ESP, extrasensory perception? Which is, which was the original thesis of Sigmund Freud, he was really, and then he covered it up with the interpretation of dreams. His real focus was the transference of thoughts. Have you come across? Or are they Is there any thing that feels like empirical evidence or even anecdotal evidence that might shock you or shock anyone else listening into rethinking the boundaries we think we have an examining it from a different perspective?
Indy Johar It's, I think, the thing that broke me or transformed me was, was exactly what I said earlier, which is this idea that what if the planet is coming alive, right? And what is the planet is, in a sense, a life, which is now extraordinary in the universe, where the divisibility between human machine ecological systems is a synthetic divisibility. And the dominion thesis of the human being and dominion of the the world is a synthetic idea. And when you look at it from that perspective, it changes everything for me, because it fractally transforms everything around us. And the singularity is not a singularity of AI. But it's a singularity of this consciousness, this machine human ecological consciousness that is, that is emergent. And you can see, you can see the evidence of these interrelationships starting to actually have feedback and resonance and new ways of organizing. So for me, this, this view, changes everything. And it then changes all sorts of things as you rightly like the place about what you know... I'm really troubled right now about this conversation that we have of 8 billion people being a burden on the planet. And I'm troubled by our analysis of looking at the planet through the lens of 8 billion people. Not yet, I don't know 1 trillion lifeforms, right? I think, how we narrate this language is problematic. And then and how we narrate the population as a population burden is, in itself is part of a power thesis. So, and this is where I think we have to shape the narration of it's we... we have many... the great and the good talking about the population, but whereas actually, you could talk about the life perfusion, you could talk about, yes, we were the profusion of life, the profusion of machine, human ecological emergence that is happening. And this is again, the theory of humanity and burdens and, and object power subject hood, who is about and who is not, and we know that, you know, you probably only need to get rid of 1% of the world's planet, maybe maybe less. And actually, that burden disappears that we've currently got. So it's not a burden on total population. It's burden lifestyles, and the way people want to live. So I think for me, the profoundness at the level of this kind of machine, human ecological life emerging, a meta life emerging is, I think, quite extraordinary. And I think we're in the midst of it. And one thing I was going to say was that I feel, you know, I feel identity is an impositional order, like racialization. I think most of identity is an imposition of order, an order structured through power, and control, and the preservation of control and preservation of divisibility. And actually, it's completely at odds at the relational sense of actually where we are, where we need to be. And that divisibility is, we're at odds of that. And I think that's something completely at odds with a new planetary, relational human machine, ecological emergence that we're seeing. And this is the conflict, we're in the middle of... this kind of conflict of these two worldviews in transition.
Bayo Akomolafe So if we do not see ourselves as individuals, or rather, if we are invited to see ourselves as ongoing processes, already complicated, already haunted, already inviting cyborgian assemblages, that we are implicated, imbricated with machines, and technologies and concepts and
Indy Johar ecologists and viruses,
Bayo Akomolafe and viruses and fungi and bacteria, and, and are not and have never been alone then it seems that we're being invited to new postures, right to assume new postures. Again, this is an invitation to a new politics, brother. You're causing a lot of trouble by saying this, I hope, you know. I was speaking, you know, my last point was about, you know, exploring, you know, Teresa Brennan writes about or wrote about, of blessed memory, wrote about the transmission of affect, you know, exploring the idea that emotions are not human. Right? It seems a very scandalous thing to admit, or to say that we don't have emotions, emotions have us, right. Right. So that there is some truth to the saying that you can walk into a room and you can feel the emotions in the air. And there's actually some story I often tell about a man who explored that concept. But but there are other things afoot brother, you know, especially in my discipline, it's the idea of the external mind, you know, the external cognition, what N. Katherine Hayles would call nonconscious cognitive, non, I think is nonconscious cognition, and exploring the ways that cognition is how we think is not a matter of what goes on here. It's a matter of phones, and landscapes, and parking lots. All of these are assemblages of thought. They produce thought, where we don't think outside of these things. So that to become a genius and go into a room and try to fix the world's problem. Like, I think Davos is an exemplification of is just to repeat the problem of isolation of dissociation. I'm also speaking about the dark, psychic mind, the idea that we have as moderns defeated the wilds. We've chased away the gods, and we're free from that we're immune from possession or the things around us. I 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.
Indy Johar I think the statement, the language I would use is the entangled mind. This is, we are one part of an entangled mind.
And I think and I think we often see this as a, as an imposition on our theory of freedom. And actually what it is, is less than imposition or our theory of freedom. It's a place a place of sanity. The more untangled we become, actually, I think the risk of obstruction is the risk of manifestation and violence. And I think the the abstracted thesis of the individuation, the abstraction of ourselves from the world around us. And I would say the iconic symbol is the human in an astronaut suit, feels perfectly. This was the absolute apex point of a misunderstanding of what it means to be human. Because for a moment, we could isolate ourselves. Yet we know I think the research is out there that humans if we were to be divided from the planet significantly longer our cognitive capabilities decline, our health declines massively. So this is a momentary isolation, which we sort of was the apex point of modernity thinking or enlightenment thinking, that divisibility and I think the divisibility law in that divisibility lies madness. And actually entangled mind is actually the mind or feedback of relationships, flows. It is just the place of health, and our theories of money. Our theories of power have been orchestrated on theories of obstruction, because that is what we were taught as a theory of enlightenment, the abstracted mindedness, power. And I think this is a I think the thing we have to reconcile is a kind of conversation of freedom in entanglement, the freedom to grow in that landscape of that mind.
Bayo Akomolafe Yes. That we're not free from our indebtedness to the world around us. Yes, yes, but
Indy Johar No, no, I was this, this freedom to also intermingle and to relate, to construct, that is the freedom of the world, not the freedom to be isolated in the prison. And I think this is a different theory of freedom. And it requires us to operate and dance with care in relationship to that entangled mind that we live in. And then there is great joy in this. And I think we have, we've created a theory of freedom, which is a theory of escape, escape theory of escapism from that entangled mind, that entangled world and a world of debt things. We've imposed that world to be a debt, that a world of debt things. And we have to enjoy the... rebuild the life, reunderstand the life, of the table, life of the matter, life of the world around us and our life with it, with it, in deep entanglement of it. And I think there's beauty in there, there is a new language in there, there's a new way of conceiving, and then there's a new way of actually architecture in there, which I think we start with,
Bayo Akomolafe And you're gonna get to the... it feels and speaking of architecture, it feels like. Again, this is a call for social experimentation. I mean, one hour is not enough to do justice to our gasping around this. It's a broad commitment to investigating our porosities. And, and just to really situate this, again, this is not some heady, philosophical affair with words, this is really something that is tethered to our deepest aspirations for a world that works for not just humans, for multiple life forms. It is tethered to our hope, for beauty, for for thriving and living well. But the thing is, I think we really need to come to a place where we see the way we see and think about the ways we have been invited to think. Right. And what you're seeing, Indy, is we have thought and acted through the prison and the prison of the individual for far too long. Right? The Anthropocene is this galvanizing cautionary tale. Everyone put your hands on deck. Let's save ourselves from drowning, but it still collapses at the feet of the agent, the human agents, the ones supposed to march in and save the day. So it doesn't seem to be adequate to the moment. It feels like we need some different ethic. Maybe this is where the Trickster comes in. We 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. What do you see? Or what do you feel a social experiment? A social experiment, a social experimentation, or politics built around social experimentation, of touching our borders, of listening? I heard this talk about listening to the earth listening to the world around us. What do you think it would take to convene a practical politics around this vocation of losing our way of exiling ourselves from the plantation of the individual?
Indy Johar It's a powerful question. And I want to, and I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna say this, hopefully, with sufficient care. I think we have to challenge ourselves to recognize ourselves as being a multiple, multiple and an entangled. So I think when when I used to refer to my grandparents, and my grandparents, I used to say they are coming over even in the singular. So my grandparents in old language terms, it was always there. And we because we recognize that there was a it was a, it was a formal plural. They were not one. They were, there was a many.
Bayo Akomolafe We have that in Yoruba as well.
Indy Johar Right. Exactly. Right. Yes. Yes, exactly. And I think there is something about that, that I think is really deeply profound. Because it actually challenges this idea of the singular. It challenges our idea of the divisible in a very simple but clear way. And it requires us to challenge our own theories of the singular, am I 'a' Indy, am I multiple Indy(s), and how do I give myself permission to live in that multiplicity, in that dynamics. I think there's a freedom that we have to give ourselves in order to be able to actually embrace a different way of relating to the world. And I think it's a small thing. But it's profound, because we are trapped in our own singularities in our own individuality is the own sense of self. And I think the freedom is really vital. That freedom of the multiplicity is really critical as a stepping stone of this reality. And I think that is a for me, one of the key stepping stones in that conversation. And I think, and that opens up a new way of relating everything around us, the world around us, and the things that we see, I think that to me is the unit of transformation. And I think we see this in the world around us, we see the crisis of, of how we relate to each other, and how we how we transform that language. And I think that language is really particular.
Bayo Akomolafe So it's a relational reconfiguration, we're talking about, again, not to use the language of do the work in yourself. I think that has its place. But But there's something really navel gazing, navel gazing-ish about this idea to focus on yourself like, and that feels foreign to me, that feels alien to me.
Indy Johar I think it's true, but I think it's for me, it's not a focus on ourselves. It's actually the imprisoning of ourselves.
Bayo Akomolafe Yes, yes, I agree.
Indy Johar I think I think if we can unprison ourselves from the individual landscape, I think we can actually start to relate to the worlds. And I think we have to recapture language. Language, like freedom, which has become a language of escape isn't an escape. So we have to recapture words, and re-embody them into new philosophical frames, which is what you're doing by doing it beautifully. Because unless we do that, the world constructs in the language that we use, and I think we have to have a re-orchestration of language. I know it sounds basic, but I think without those philosophical, and those initial frameworks, it's very difficult to then say, well, actually, you know, property as a theory, property is in a way to be in proper order, into be in relationship to what I perceive as proper order is a theory of power of orchestration between object and subject to the ordering of myself, rather than recognizing the intrinsic order of the thing itself. So we have constructed theories of property, and then legal construct, so that theory of dominion into that framework, and then we've enslaved the world to that thesis, and this delicate recoding of these things. These are not just words, but they are power structures, they are manifestations of orchestration, they're the thing that makes the land, that the thing that reduces the agency, that the thing that destroys the butterflies, because in proper order to my perception, these words have magical power. They're like spells which transform and destroy the world around us. And we are using those words without cognition of the spells that we weave into the landscape around us. And for me, we have we have to understand that we are the magician's of those words. And we have to become cognizant of the of the spells we weave. And those spells have been programmed into us. So I think I hear you but kind of work on self, I think it's the it's more the work on my relationship with the world and recognizing the spells I'm locked into the words I'm throwing around without actual due consideration and due care into that complexity.
Bayo Akomolafe Hmm, I mean, it's, I would I would even dance with that, dancing within those spaces are beautifully creating, brother. That the individual is, or the individuation is a choreography of gestures, if you will, right. Not that there are individuals moving, moving atomically from point A to point B, but that the there is a cartographical unity, that more or less describes what individuals are doing or what the individual is, right? So that a falling away from this cartography would be spillage, would be exploring the more than human, would be opening ourselves up to new language. Languages would be breaking out of the sensorial monoculture of the modern, right. So it's, it feels to me that it's about losing our way. It's about it's about what Glissant would call the poetics of relation, or the right to opacity. It's, it's the fugitive. It's we're inviting fugitivity here. And there's one consideration that I have to bring up, brother, before you go. It's, it's, it's about the future. Right? I mean, we've talked about within a space of a few minutes, spoken this, this deserves 10 hours, by the way... I almost felt paralyzed at the beginning of this because there are too many directions to take this for me. But um, if wellness is trapped by our concentrations of individuals, if politics is also beholden to this very, very pixelated notion of the individual, then 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. It 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.
Indy Johar Look, I think there's two aspects of this. I think, if we were to understand ourselves as a knot of flows, we are a knot of flows, and these flows exist. They exist. In a way time is also just a construct that we built to stop everything happening at once - is the kind of idea but actually what we are is in this knot of flows. And these knots of flows means that our cognition isn't that of objecthood but as our is a function of water flows. I don't think we have yet language for this thesis of this knot of flows, we don't have, Cartesian frameworks don't allow for this know of flows to exist. Our drawings are manifestations of logic don't allow for this knot of flows. And this is what creates a, an object-orientated reality, this is what creates also the theory of waste, because we do not recognize the relationships in time. And the relationships of every glass bottle being a function of sand, which took millions of years to deform to then actually that glass holding for a moment, then being liquidated and being termed something else. We exist in those knots of flows. And I think that is a that is a way of perceiving, a way of languaging, the way of relating in the world, and also a way of seeing ourselves in the world. And in that moment in time, I think the mountain is no longer an object. The mountain is an act of flow. It is a it is a rock and flow, as is everything else. And I think there is a new way of being in that world. And I think the science is already there. The the the knowledge is there, but we haven't built our scaffolding are cognitive, philosophical, linguistic scaffolding to make this happen. But you're right. Time is also a part of this problem. But it's also our theory of this knot of flows in that frame.
Bayo Akomolafe Right, I like that phrase, knot of flows. And, you know, thinking about time this way changes the question, and 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 trome of imperial time, right, the idea that time marches on, right? I like to see with the Yoruba people that time is slushy, right? There are pockets of time here and there. There are many futures. There are many pasts. The world has already ended. So that when we come to climate matters, and predictions of apocalyptic endings, right. It's not just to say that we have already been there, that a lot of people have already been there and are living through that, now. It's also to say there isn't a fixed future, right, waiting outside of our bodies. Bodies relationally secrete spatial temporal continuities, or discontinuities. Time is not outside time is not an ideal, just like justice is not an ideal floating by. We, with nonhumans around us cocreate these intensities. So that like you are preaching brother, and it's a preaching. We are being invited to new relationships with the world and maybe new times secrete from that I thought we could end it this way around grief, brother, which touches on a question that I'm seeing through the sign of my eyes here. It feels a proper way to end for me, appropriate, but not as to grieve the loss of relationship, the apartheid that is enacted by modernity, the imprisonment of the individual, but to also consider the ways that grief and grieving is not permitted in modern flatness. As a psychologist, my work was to get people to be productive again, right? Is to get you back into the race. You know, the pitstop that allows you to just get back out there. There 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. Right? It it seems like, it seems like maybe grieving is activism. I don't know how your, how that resonates, or how that dances with you.
Indy Johar I mean, I think the spaces of grieving in my world view is that this the space of humanity has been reduced to the production and the consumption and the storage of and storage logistics of humanity. And all the other dimensions of being human have been evaporated. They have been from our spaces. A city is you know, a public square is a function of the cappuccino, the boy with a balloon. It actually no longer has the space for actually a human in grief, or actually even a human in reflection. Actually those things are not a value. We are we are reduced to this polarities of work and life, and these have also been sort of pixelated into divisionality, to actually break us in this way. So I think the pixels are so low resolution, they are part of our mechanistic theory of self, to actually reductive idea of being human. And for me, this is why this conversation is important, because this is a reawakening of being human. It is a new awakening of being in its complexity, and its richness, post pixelation, a reenlivened analog and biological as opposed to the kind of pixeled bureaucracy of the world, right. So I think this is an opportunity for breathing life back into us. A life where we are not just bad robots, and life that allow that I think is crazy. And I think grieving is as much as joy. I think these are [inaudible] spaces that we have to reawaken, and that I think, is a really powerful component. And I would argue, the New Machine Age or the Age of Automation, creates a new space for humanity as we are freed from the shackles of being bad robots. And I think the idea of being freed from the shackles of being bad robots is an embrace for this new humanity. And I think this is going to be a new liberating space for a new liberated entanglement and a RE and untangle a liberation not to be free, but to be reentangled with the world and reembraced by the world and our journey. And I think that is a it's an optimistic view of actually reembracing ourselves.
Bayo Akomolafe That opens up 1000 new questions. But this means we still have a lot of places to go and explore. We're not arriving anytime soon. We are touching and being touched. In our explorations. All I can say at this point in time is that there is no encounter does that does not leave us hyphenated. And my name, in this moment is now Indy-Bayo as yours is Bayo-Indy. And maybe that's the gift of our moments. We are, we are touching each other in ways that escape the surveillance state. And that is summarily, and ecstatically our mode of leaving the plantation, the possibility of emancipation. Thank you so much, brother, for doing this.
Indy Johar Absolute pleasure. And a real honor to be in conversation with you. Thank you for everything that you're doing, Bayo. It really is critical. You whisper words to the world which transforms it in ways that you probably can't see all the time, but I want to fully acknowledge what power you do.
Bayo Akomolafe Thank you, brother. Thank you. Part Two soon.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Edges in the Middle. The music you heard today was by Sitka Sun, graciously provided by the Long Road Society record label. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.