An Invitation to Post-Activism

By Dr Báyò Akómoláfé, WEAll Ambassador 

[We invited the poet, scholar, activist and father, Báyò Akómoláfé, to reflect on the role of our Community of Practice and the artist in amplifying the Wellbeing Economy Alliance’s deep inquiry into our captivation by the dominant capitalist and neoliberal stories of our times and in bringing new stories to life.] 

I think that our captivity is fundamentally sensorial. This is the reason why I am fond of speaking about ontological mutiny or sensorial apostasy. This language reaches out for the same kind of affect without wanting to terminate at legible and fully intelligible futures. 

It is my understanding that white modernity or European modernity effectuate some kind of captivity. It has a hold on our subjectivity. It has been engaged in the manufacturing of the subject. The manufacture of the dissociated self who is alone, trapped…dependent on systems that perpetuate suffering. In that sense, there is what looks like an invitation for us to lose our way. I’m speaking now with the cadence of my elders who, in our proverbs from West Africa, would say that ‘the times are urgent, slow down’. That in order to find our way now, we must become lost. 

I think ‘getting lost’ is a kind of craft. You might almost think about it as the logic of the fugitive. If art is anything it is about reframing those boundaries that we’re used to and allowing ourselves to wander, and move, and notice the world in different ways. 

So, if capitalism is some kind of sensorial work….if economies and economics, and how we move around the world…if the normative is sensorial, then the work of decoloniality, the work of coming to different kinds of futures is a mutiny of some kind. 

I’m very wary about attempts to gather geniuses in a room so that we can supposedly devise the next kind of system in the world, because that notion already presumes that we are somehow outside of these systems. It presumes that all we have to do is think about the next system. That’s very anthropocentric, very hubristic, to believe that we can just do that. 

We are implicated, we are part of the world that we critique. Right? So my work centres and revolves – meanders and lurks – around the idea of cracks. Where a crack is understood as an opening of some kind, as some kind of generative incapacitation or failure.

Brothers and sisters, that’s what you are calling for. What your work feels like to me is an invitation to stay in the cracks of failure. That’s where art thrives. Not on the surface but in the subterranean, in the sub-altern. That’s where new subjectivities are born. 

We need a craft of some kind, or politics, that notices and celebrates these openings. 

Postactivism 

Postactivism is a matter of irruptions and eruptions, breakthroughs, cracks, flashes, fissures, fault lines, discontinuities, blasts, splits, rifts, ruptures, seismic shifts, world-ending openings, miracles, strange encounters, and the yawning maw of a monster. It is my way of describing the flows and possibilities that proceed from the moment when things no longer fit.

I think the best way to come into this, to dance with this question is to, first of all, notice that it is not framed with humanist understandings of agency, centralized in the self or in the life of the mind. So I’m not starting with the ‘empowered individual.’ Right? That’s the history of the liberal world order. We could trace that history, starting back from 1948 and Hiroshima and all the things that that world did to try to coalesce around the ontology of the human: creating institutions, the United Nations, NATO, the World Health Organisation, the IMF. 

It was an ontological project and we’re still in that ontological project. So it becomes very, very difficult for people to understand ‘the world’ apart from starting from what we know. Where do we start? My instinct is not to think in terms of individuals taking action. It is to notice that action is constantly happening around us. It doesn’t revolve around human inten- tions. The world is constantly weaving desire in multitudinous and surprising and unexpect- ed ways. And we are enlisted in these weavings. We might like to think of ourselves as the originators of action but we are not the originators. 

We are part of ecologies of acting ‘together with’. 

So, in that sense, postactivism is not the next thing to do. Right? I never think of it as ‘here’s a fresh set of ideas that you can run with.’ I think of it as an interruption in the field. An interruption in the field…like a crack, like an opening, a disruptive, prophetic opening that weaves us differently. 

Let me paraphrase the French educator, Fernand Deligny. It’s not the spider that weaves the web. The web is not the project of the spider. The web is the project of the web. There is a sense in which we want to reduce it to the units that we are used to, like the idea that the spider weaves the web. No. The project of the web is the web. 

So I am thinking about all the ways that we are being enlisted, compelled and summoned into new kinds of work. And these new kinds of work perhaps look nothing like work. It may 57 look as ordinary as being the father of an autistic child. This is ordinary everyday living. 

Postactivism is not the way I describe a superior form of being that guarantees solutions. It is not “post-” in the sense of being a successor narrative, a deeper truth, a surer track to utopian worlds, a formula for saving the world. Instead, it is the site where continuity be- comes impossible, where “the world” in its colonizing completeness feels less compelling than that one riven place that sprouts alien notions, and where the solutions of the highway seem inadequate to a now unusual, more-than-human, arrangement. 

A frothing crack opens in the ground, enacting a break in the seamless totality and knowability of things, disrupting the exclusivity of human agency and inquiry, dispersing vitality, and expanding sociality to include things we hadn’t considered. 

This is postactivism. When we have come to the end of the rope, to the very end of the world, and there are no more words. 

Syncopation 

I’m working along these lines of thinking with other posthumanist scholars to craft something that I call chiasma. This is ethnographic work, working within the cracks. It’s a fancy word for how we trace….how we begin to trace our sensorial affinities with land, with what we’re eating, with how we move with other beings. And how this invites us to take on new shapes. The instigator here is not the empowered individual or the human self. It is the crack. The cracks become instigators for a new kind of politics and imaginaries. 

Another way that I think about these cracks is syncopation. I’m not going to go deep into rhythm theory to explain that but when a groove or a piece of music is disrupted, new elements come in and enhance dance-ability. The idea of syncopation is like a mass disabling event. What I’m trying to say here is that at some level the supremacist projects and narratives are being disrupted. This includes disruptions to the clearing of whiteness… which should not be identified with white people. Whitness is a geonengineering project….a cultural project, which can enlist black bodies too. It can enlist cyborgs if it wants to. It’s not about the colour of one’s skin. 

This supremacist project is being disrupted. We’re beginning to feel the world in different ways. You can speak of mass traumatic intergenerational effects, spilling and disrupting the individualizing work of whiteness. You can speak about about the eco-, sexual, political disruptions afoot. You can speak about pandemics and viruses, and microbial activisms. 

At many levels we’re being disrupted even in the ways we tell stories and anticipate the future. I’m thinking that these cracks that are emerging everywhere are opportunities, 58 openings of some kind. I think of them as political agents in their own right. 

We’d like to put a band aid on these disruptions. Whiteness polices the cracks. Psycholoogy is the policeman of capitalism, right? 

So there’s a sense in which we’re moving towards the posthuman to address a very human crisis. Our responses take different shapes. It can be archival in one place. It can be story telling in another. It could be speculative fabulation in a different place. 

It’s an ecology of multiple practices instigated by this disruption that I describe as postactivism.