Interview republished, courtesy of The Creative Process and Mia Funk. The original interview can be found here
I learn more than anything else from my children. My son, he’s seven, he’s autistic, and I call him my prophet for a reason. He teaches me to meet myself in ways that are usually very stunning. I can get information from other people; I can read a book here and there, but it’s very rare to come across such an embodiment of grace, possibility, and futurity, all wrapped up in a tiny seven-year-old boy’s body. My son has given me lots of gifts.
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, psychologist, writer, public intellectual, and the founder of the Emergence Network. His work, which he names post-activism, marks an earth-wide effort to sensitize bodies towards new response-abilities and other places of power – a project framed within a material feminist/post-humanist/post-activist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home.
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So your work often touches on themes of decolonization and indigenous cosmologies, particularly Yoruba cosmology. I understand this is vastly different from the ideas of ownership and domination in the United States. It’s about partnership and relationship?
BAYO AKOMOLAFE
Agency is a co-responsive, emergent phenomenon within a network of belonging. It emerges within an assemblage. It is not owned by a single body or a single self. This idea is, of course, explored variously in other forms of continental philosophy. If you’re familiar with Deleuze and Foucault and most feminist ecologists and feminist materialists, it’s not new to say that agency is not reducible to the self, but I seem to have been introduced to that idea quite early.
It informs how I think about activism. Agency eventually crystallized into my formulation of post-activism, which has as its central tenet the idea that the way we respond to the crisis might very well be the crisis.
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Could you expand on those themes of post-activism and fugitivity? What do those concepts mean to you, and how do they challenge traditional notions of social change?
AKOMOLAFE
So, post-activism is not “post-activism” in the sense of being after activism. It is not supposed to be a through line to results or resolutions or solutions. It’s not supposed to be a yellow brick road to the futures that we want. It is not a spiritual bypass in the ways that people speak about that concept today.
Post-activism is instead a noticing that the ways we care for ourselves and our causes and our worlds could actually be incarcerated. Another way to put that is to notice that care can often become carceral. I often suggest that we like to embrace things, but sometimes in the squeeze of embrace, it could quickly become asphyxiation, where we choke the air out of each other in trying to care for each other.
My noticing asks what happens when care becomes troubling. What happens when the very solutions that we are so enamored of become part of the paradigm of surveillance? What happens when we are caught up in the very logics that we’re trying to outwit in our attempts to outwit those logics?
To bring it down to earth a little bit, the very righteous, grounded, and well-intentioned acts of people in the global North to discard their waste in a conscious, contentious, and dutiful way reinforce a dopaminergic network. It tells them that they are doing good and suggests a story of goodness. People should work hard to behave that way; however, if you look at the broader implications, people in the global South receive these discarded waste materials, and goodness is no longer working, sister. Goodness isn’t doing well. So we need other kinds of solidarities. This is where I begin to launch the conversation about post-activism.
Post-activism is heavily indebted to post-humanism, which refuses to centralize human bodies, human selves, or human sociality. It asks: what do human beings depend on in order to create the realities they believe are reducible to their own act of will?
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You’ve spoken about family, being a father, a husband, and the importance of ancestry in your work—our conversations with previous generations. I know that your father passed away when you were young and that was an important time for you. How did that reshape your thinking about the world? Do you continue to have conversations? What is your connection to him? Did that help form you in a way?
AKOMOLAFE
My father was my best friend. When he passed away, there was no way to describe it. There’s absolutely no way to describe those first moments when I realized that my father had passed away and was no more. My father’s passing was my first “get real” moment. I think up until that time, it was ice cream and television. I was very young. With my father’s passing, I quickly had to become the breadwinner, so to speak. I had to cook on the streets of Lagos, do barbecue chicken to send my sisters to school, to help us eat. It was a lot of work, and my father exposed me to a world beyond the bubble gum realities that I previously occupied, and I’m still there. He still attends to my work. He still leans in now and then to see how I’m doing.
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Listening to you and reading your writings, it seems to be an act of listening, learning from the Earth. I know that, of course, you’re a teacher. You have a forthcoming retreat and various ways of teaching in the world to try to pass on the knowledge that you have. How do you learn from the Earth and from these other teachers or mentors in your life, including your children?
AKOMOLAFE
I learn more than anything else from my children. My son, he’s seven, he’s autistic, and I call him my prophet for a reason. He teaches me to meet myself in ways that are usually very stunning. I can get information from other people; I can read a book here and there, but it’s very rare to come across such an embodiment of grace, possibility, and futurity, all wrapped up in a tiny seven-year-old boy’s body. My son has given me lots of gifts.
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You are the founder of the Emergence Network. How does that feed into your work? It’s very interesting for me to hear someone say that agency can also be carceral. Often, the word agency is used as an empowering term. So for you, it means something else. Please expand upon that to help me understand. It seems like you’re saying that when we speak of agency, maybe we’re fighting against our nature and imposing ourselves upon nature? It’s another kind of man-made imposition?
AKOMOLAFE
In many transdisciplinary contexts, we are noticing that humans do not unilaterally make decisions or choose on their own, and even their emotional well-being is heavily dependent on the microbes in their guts.
If we are influenced by microbes, environment, and ancestry, then it is almost impossible, or at least substantially difficult, to cut off the human from its ecological context, which means that agency is not a matter of a divine, solitary, independent, autonomous self. Instead, it involves how environments and ecologies come to bear and create other kinds of openings and possibilities. We’re not saying that there is no agency. We are saying agency is political, ecological, and ancestral.
I am a member of too many organizations that work with just as many, or even more. If there were a running theme that I feel beckons to the kind of thinking that I’m peddling and trafficking into modernity, it would be the idea that we’re not alone and that we don’t have to figure things out on our own. Perhaps more than anything else, it would be the idea of entanglement, which has been popularized in mainstream culture as some sort of suspicious compost heap that lacks differentiation. It is not the idea of entanglement that I would like to think about.
The notion of entanglement I consider is that even when it seems we are disconnected from the world around us, physical contiguity is no barrier to entanglement. We derive from systems, and when we try to change the world, we are within the world we are trying to change. There is something humbling about Chinua Achebe’s retort to the idealist who proclaims, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.” Achebe responds, “But there is no place to stand. We are of the world, and we must move at its pace.”
This idea of moving at the world’s pace is a disabling thought, and I mean “disabling” in the most complimentary sense. I mean it as coming to terms with other modes of moving and other modalities of negotiating our realities. It is courageous and grounding, bringing us down to earth. This is what connects these multiple organizations to some degree.
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I don’t know if you would necessarily like to speculate on capitalism and economics, but what do you feel is wrong with it? And how can it be more inclusive of other worldviews that are less rigid, more compassionate, and have more empathy?
AKOMOLAFE
Well, capitalism is, alongside whiteness as a political project and neurotypicality as a governance of bodies, a three-headed Hydra-like space whose intent is to describe, explain, predict, control, surveil, archive, and name our bodies in a final way. In fact, sometimes I think capitalism is not just about profit-making; it’s about capture. It’s about intelligibility. It’s about the legibility of how we show up in the world.
I feel a lot of our politics is geared toward emphasizing or promoting inclusion within these systems. However, I think these systems are becoming tired. Not that I would subscribe to or take down capitalism at this moment, which seems to be how capitalism thinks—in terms of neat holes and categories. My work invites people to cultivate new kinds of perceptions and senses that might open up new ways of being in the world, but not in a final, steady, or pure way.
It really is an invitation to stay with the minor gestures emerging now. To answer your question, much of what passes as politics is devoted to an anti-capitalist project, which, in my view, reinforces and recentralizes capitalism. Therefore, we need a different approach—one that knows how to sidestep capitalism.
I’m constantly in touch with and speaking to our younger siblings, and there is a sense in which our politics is creating more veterans. Our politics appears stuck and tired, and at such a young age, people are becoming veterans. So, I often invite young people to follow this exhaustion and not to try to get around it, pathologize it, or dismiss it out of hand. The exhaustion of this moment is a gift. It is a place of what might be called entrepreneurial opportunity to recreate new kinds of possibilities.
I often convey to younger folks that it’s more than just “do what you want” or “succeed.” It’s an invitation to failure. I’ve given two commencement speeches in the United States, and I usually end by asking people to fail generously. They might interpret that as “failing forward,” which has become a catchphrase. However, I remind people I’m not speaking about failing forward; if you’re failing forward, then it’s not failure. It’s just some kind of curated performance. This is different.
So I tell young people to fail—to explore that failure. Instead of throwing paint at the shop that you think contributes to climate chaos in the UK, maybe we should explore other kinds of socialities and fugitive arrangements. That is, in essence, my thesis for young people. I invite them to stay with the trouble, as I say. The times are urgent; let us slow down, which is not an invitation to jettison activism.
It is more an invitation to stretch the meaning of activism to notice activism’s minor gestures. We are in a time when the elder archetypes—the trickster, the leader—all these archetypes seem to be broken, and we need something more now. I think young people hold so much of the key to blasting open new kinds of possibilities.
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I think that’s true. It is intelligence, if I could think about it in a more expansive view. When in doubt, I look to nature. Often, the problems we have and our attempts to reform the world into our image were already solved in nature. If you go back, it was solved.
I think that is the intelligence, the beautiful symmetry, and mathematics of nature or harmony. You’ve lived in many places in the world and traveled even further for your work and teachings. Can you share your reflections and memories on the beauty and wonder of the natural world? You must have had some amazing encounters.
AKOMOLAFE
I love mountains to bits. You might see them in everything I do, but I love mountains. I especially love it when mountains are devastatingly huge, like elders, looking down on us, the tiny fleeting particles that we are. I like to be overwhelmed with awe, and mountains do that very well. They overwhelm me in a good way. They allow me to see that I’m not as important as my head thinks I am.
