Ep. 17 - Generative Monstrosity with Bayo Akomolafe
I ended this recording and felt cringey. I shook my body a bit. I was feeling foggy, unsharp, slow, unable to hold an eloquent philosophical conversation those days. Broken. Then, I had a long-awaited session with dear Bayo Akomolafe. I swiftly danced with the whiffs of my monstrosity and invited it into the conversation, coherent enough with what emerged. In the end, broken is open.
More than a month after, I opened it, edited it, transcribed it and digested more of it. I love how it turned out.
We explore the monstrous and how de-patologizing any monstrous aspect leads to unveiling new ways of understanding, experiencing and thus transforming public and private affairs, opening up to its potential for generative and transformative politics. The monster is seen as that which cannot be sensed or represented, disrupting our familiar arrangements and exposing the violence we are already in. Courage is seen as an ecological secretion, an infection that invites us to stay with the monster and embrace its disruptive potential. The conversation also touches on the importance of embracing imperfection, breaking societal arrangements, and recognizing our entanglement with the world and technology. Non-attachment is seen as emerging from attachment, and there is an acknowledgment that there is no final arrangement or perfection to be attained.
Quoting Bayo: “I think of courage instead as a wind that blows, that calls us in. It's not always available. The courage to stay with the monster, the courage to stay with discomfort, the courage to sit with the tensions, the courage to stay with the tentativity of these moments, the courage to approach death. These are very errant winds that blow. They're gifts. And we cannot claim to be owners or producers of this gift. Right? But if it were available, I would think about the gifts of storytelling, the gifts of elderly, the gifts of potential collectivity… meeting each other, the gifts of pedagogy. That's the thing we're doing now, the teaching, The insights. None of these are human instigated. They do not originate from us, but they are part of the world. Somehow collecting these things together, bringing these things together, allow for a new kind of politics.”
---
Bayo Akomolafe is an intellectual, post-activist, philosopher, poet, writer, teacher, speaker. He’s a father and proud partner. He has lectured and visited many universities and institutions around the world as is a renowned and acclaimed speaker recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change.
He is Executive Director and Chief curator of the emergence network and recently appointed the first Scholar in Residence of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and of the Schumacher College for a New Economics.
“Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify.
