Season Two, Episode Ten: Post Humanist Thinker Bayo Akomolafe on Embracing Uncertainty

In this episode of Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast, we are honored to welcome Dr. Bayo  Akomolafe. Post humanist thinker, poet, teacher, essayist, and author. Together, he and our host, Martin Ping share a thought provoking conversation exploring a rich tapestry of ideas, beginning with Bayo’s inspiring fellowship at the Schumacher Center for New Economics. The conversation delves into the concept of drifting and its relevance in our current times, the value of embracing uncertainty, grieving as a form of politics and so much more. It's a deep and reflective dialogue you won't want to miss.

Learn more about Bayo’s work and explore his writings and offerings at his website, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net. To get tickets for the carnival, Vunja: A Gathering of the Seeds, with Bayo Akomalafe and Friends at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington on August 6-8, visit https://centerforneweconomics.org/events/vunja-carnival-2024/.

More About Bayo:
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). 

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). 

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership A

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Transcript

Heather Gibbons (00:10):

In this episode of Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast, we are honored to welcome Dr. Bayo  Akomolafe. Post humanist thinker, poet, teacher, essayist, and author. Together, he and our host, Martin Ping share a thought provoking conversation exploring a rich tapestry of ideas, beginning with Bayo’s inspiring fellowship at the Schumacher Center for New Economics. The conversation delves into the concept of drifting and its relevance in our current times, the value of embracing uncertainty, grieving as a form of politics and so much more. It's a deep and reflective dialogue you won't want to miss. So let's get right to it.

Martin Ping (00:54):

Good afternoon, Bayo. It is nice to see you and a real pleasure to have an opportunity to have a conversation.

Bayo Akomolafe (01:02):

Always wonderful brother. Always wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Martin Ping (01:06):

Well, thank you and thanks for making the time today. So right out of the gate, I'd like to ask you about the fellowship that you're doing at the Schumacher Center for New Economics because it's such a great opportunity to have you in our neighborhood for five or six months and to have time to just really hang out. How did this come about that you were tapped for this honor?

Bayo Akomolafe (01:34):

I like the word tap.

(01:39):

Well, it was some kind of conspiracy. I mean, I've been in conversation with Susan. I spoke here at the Schumacher Center at St. James actually, but hosted by the Schumacher Center last year I think I did a talk on post activism. We met at dinner then for the first time, and then this other worldly intelligence just invaded our sociality and conversation started to sprout what would it look like for my family to come here with me and to spend half a year or even a full year, we had to shorten it to half a year, but what would it look like for us to all come here and be here together and to engage this beautiful convivio ecologies?

Martin Ping (02:35):

Is this the first fellowship that's named after WEB Du Bois? 

Bayo Akomolafe (02:42):

Yes. Yeah. I mean I requested that since it was very collaborative, it was more than just an invitation. It was actually putting heads together to craft what this could mean, and I suggested that we name it Du Bois and maybe in a way of honoring his work and pushing it further to its outer limits to see what else it can do right now in these charged moments.

Martin Ping (03:17):

Well named and I was very interested in meeting Sarah Buie at dinner. Andrea I know for some time and was really struck by the name of her organization, the Foundation or Center for Uncertainty I think it is, or [Council on the Uncertain Human Future]

Bayo Akomolafe (03:35):

Yes,

Martin Ping (03:36):

Which I, the

Bayo Akomolafe (03:37):

Council for Uncertain Human Futures or something.

Martin Ping (03:40):

Yeah, I love that. Seeing as uncertainty has been my operating system for most of my life.

Bayo Akomolafe (03:47):

Yes, indeed. Yeah, there is. Great. And Clark University, of course there the primary hosts of our dancing through these places.

Martin Ping (04:00):

You mentioned your talk back in the fall, which I came to on post activism, and you also speak about a post humanist world, and I think it'd be nice to elaborate a little bit on that to just say what that means to you and give a little description.

Bayo Akomolafe (04:22):

Well, this past Sunday I spoke about dark fungi. People who were there felt that was remarkable. Not that, not that I'm a mycologist or something or I know a lot about fungi, but it is intriguing to think even just for a little while about what swims around us that there are all these alphabets between A and Z is what I've tried to say, Martin. It's not just there’s A, and there’s space between and there’s Z, we don't live in a distant-ist world that is entirely graphical or geometric or spaced out. The world is teeming with, I was going to say life, but even life would be an insult to what the world is doing. It's not life or non-life, it's just experimental becoming. And there's something about reading that story about dark fungi that speaks to what scholars have been examining around posthumanism, and posthumanism is a decentering of humans. In a nutshell. It's a way of saying that maybe our intelligences, maybe cognition, maybe how we make decisions, maybe how we frame culture and sociality, maybe how we do technology. Maybe all of these things are not just tools. Maybe we don't live outside of the world. Maybe we live within the world. We are the world in its collaborative, orgasmic becoming, and that's what posthumanism is. It's a tense field or rather it's a field of tensions that wants to tell the story about humans in a different way.

Martin Ping (06:27):

Yeah. Well, I love that picture that you're creating and it's may we live in interesting times. The title of your talk, which I didn't realize was one of three curses when I first saw the title of the talk. And maybe you could say more about that in a minute, but one could say it's these are certainly interesting times that we're living in and probably all times are from any perspective, but it does feel like we're at the edge of something that for me looks like uncertainty and the narrative needs to broaden and shift if it's going to be encompassing expansiveness of our consciousness to live into these new times in a way that is actually something that I would say in a nutshell I would like to see possible for our children and grandchildren. I think the current construct is not quite going to cut it, but I don't have the eloquence to say exactly what the new will be other than it needs to encompass this view that you've expressed in the post humanist idea.

Bayo Akomolafe (07:43):

Right. I mean, I don't think the new is eloquent, and I don't think it rides on the waves of eloquent elaboration. I think that the new is stuttering and that the new it speaks with a lisp that the new isn't this shiny already composed, already predetermined thing just a few feet away from us. It's not a matter of distance. The new is a matter of failure. The new is how we stray away from autographic, linearities and steady highways. The new is the sidewalk, so to speak, or the bushes beyond the highway. So I agree, brother, that we have come to some kind of limit, some limitation of our logics, and I'm acutely aware, of course, the climate crisis of these times and how we're telling stories about climate collapse and global warming. My wife EJ said, it's really hot outside, of course being really hot, is it what climate or global warming is about?

(09:14):

But heat domes and the death of species and runaway weather patterns of course contributes to this ambience of crisis and this idea that we need to address it head on. I do take issue with the idea of thinking straight. We are often invited to think straight. We need to get the facts in a row, apply some expertise and address the problem. I think thinking straight is exactly how this crisis emerges. I think one has to think voluptuously, one has to think adrift, one has to follow thought through its hidden career. One has to visit mountains and dig one's hand in soil and listen to the world in a different way That doesn't depend on a techno bureaucratic solutionism where we are and where exactly we want to be already steadily portrayed on a magical blueprint. There's something repetitive and terrifying to me about that. If we know exactly where we want to go, then we might be repeating the same logics that have brought us to the place of trouble in the first place. This is the reason why my people say, in order to find your way, you must get lost. So how do we drift away? How is drifting a vocation of these times? How is drifting a form of thinking together? How is drifting a form of loss? How is grieving a politics of this time? Those are the questions I'd like to hold space for.

Martin Ping (11:06):

When you hold the space for questions like that is one of the phenomenological outcomes that others who are holding that similar space are like you're sort of finding each other because it seems to me this is a moment for us to be doing this. And I think you said on Saturday, it's not up to you. And it's interesting because it's very easy, and I certainly do it myself, to be caught in the kind of trap of urgency that things feel very urgent, whether it's social climate, political, the atmospheric climate, there is an urgency. So to be a member of all these slow money, slow living, slow cities to go slow is one thing, and to drift is another thing. And to have the courage to do so feels to me like strength in numbers would really help here. So my question is are you finding are the other drifters self-organizing?

Bayo Akomolafe (12:21):

I think in a sense the drift cannot be reduced to the drifter, right? The drift is how we are, and by we I don't just mean humans, but how bodies are being summoned into new kinds of logics that are not available or computable or measurable by the civilizational forms that we've assumed. I'll just give a very, very down to earth example. I was being interviewed I believe last year, and it was this very important platform and I was speaking about my theory of white syncopation. I was speaking about drift and how these elements in the world are tugging at our sleeves, disrupting our performances of confidence and urging us to meet a sense of loss. It's like we've come to the edge, we've come to the edge of how we operate, of how we think, and the world is dynamic at the eco tone of edges.

(13:32):

Like this threshold is inviting a different kind of performance altogether. I was describing white syncopation and I was waxing poetic about it. And in the middle of it, the interviewer, I noticed she was distressed for some reason and she just started to cry. She started to cry so much that I actually stopped myself and said, sister, you can take all the time you need just we will be here. And there was someone else with her two interviewers, I think one was a professor. Anyway, I said, let's take all the time you need and there's no rush. We'll be with you in this time. And she did. She took her time, she took some tissue and she blew her nose and she wiped herself and she tried to compose herself and get back into interviewer posture. And I said, just before you get back into that posture, I just want to let you know that what I was talking about earlier, that's exactly what you just performed.

(14:38):

That's exactly what you just met, that this crying in the middle of a formal interview, which is a no-no for something professional and expert, this crying in the middle of it, this transgressing of the ethics of an interview is exactly what the world is secreting today. We're all being called out of the logics of that steady performance and in ways that we cannot even explain. And I said, that is syncopation. I didn't tell her to explain why she was crying or anything. We just stayed with the unwieldiness of that experience in the middle of an interview. I think the same is happening in the world at large. We are losing our composure where the logics of proper composure are hollowing out, and I think there's something emancipatory about that. So the drift is happening and it's enlisting us into how it's mattering, and that's very intriguing.

Martin Ping (15:52):

A challenge that comes up for me as you say that is that in this liminal time of sort of in between or at the edge and the not knowing and the uncertainty of what's at the other side of that, the breakdown of the logic, and that's somewhere inner sensing that that's occurring, is it possible that that's producing a lot of the anxiety and mental angst that is, I look around and I sometimes think, wow, people seem like we're really going crazy here. Some of the things that feel so out of whack to me in such a short amount of time, and I just wonder if that's part of it.

Bayo Akomolafe (16:36):

I believe so. In fact, I just had a conversation before joining this one, and the interviewer just a while ago quoted someone who spoke about, and I cannot remember this person's name, but spoke about how the movements of this moment will be terrifying and they might wreak some kind of havoc that kind of engineers us into the posture of pathologizing it. We will often name the new as a problem, we will name it a problem, we'll give it a name, we'll put it in our archive of diseases. But that idea that the news shows up often as pathology, as dis disease, as a kind of discomfort that is not easily named or easily designated, that remains intriguing to me. So see, Martin, I think I've been using the language of a mass disabling event. There's this mass disabling event that corrupting our purity. If you think about civilization as a purification of our wildness, there's a mass disabling event, some kind of exposure, and all the red alerts are going off.

(18:06):

I spoke recently about how the disruption of binaries and sexual orientation is an indication of that kind of syncopation, but as bodies become different and sensuous and explore and experiment, there is also a politics that seeks to re-engineer composure. And I think to some degree, the left, the political left in its engineering of recognizability might be complicit in making bodies back to a kind of steady logic, if you understand what I mean. It's like the only way to be recognized is if you proliferate pronouns. I've written and talked about pronouns, for instance, but that if you don't insist, and it's not even the pronouns themselves, it's the energy behind their usage. If you don't get it right the first time, then you are part of harm. That ethic is caught up in so much troubling civilizational patterns. So I do think that the world is proliferating, diversionary and fugitive kinds of identities and frameworks and possibilities, but that our politics is to attempt to heal. That is to come and sit here, we'll give you respectability, we'll give you a suit and a tie will give you representation, will give you visibility, and there's something troubling about that.

Martin Ping (19:49):

I was given a book by a dear friend called The Overview Meditations on a World in Transition written by a person named Willow Defebaugh, I hope I'm pronouncing her last name correctly.

Bayo Akomolafe (20:05):

Yes, yes.

Martin Ping (20:06):

And she's a trans person and she breaks. 

Bayo Akomolafe (20:09):

I met her recently.

Martin Ping (20:10):

Oh, I was so moved by this book.

Bayo Akomolafe (20:13):

She’s a dear sister, love her so.

Martin Ping (20:15):

Yes,

(20:16):

Yes. I hope I get to meet her one day. I know her partner in this magazine, Atmos, Jake Sergeant, but I have not met her. But I did read the entire book, every essay and the introduction, and I was really struck, and I think you said it in just a little while ago, that there's something important, really important too in these voices of people who are kind of living a transition themselves, that are in some way micro cosmically embodying the larger transition of this disrupt disruptive time that we're in. And I don't think I ever heard it so loud and clear as I did in the way that she wrote this introduction, and it was in no way militant in your face kind of writing. It was just this beautiful invitation to expand my own limited understanding to just say, wow, there's something really, I need to listen to this voice.

Bayo Akomolafe (21:20):

Yes, yes. Willow is one of the most profound speakers and thinkers that I've ever met, and Jake, Jake, Sergeant, they're friends, Jake and Ryan of Atmos magazine. I was keynote at their event recently. And so yes, Willow's book speaks eloquently and beautifully to this idea of disruption and transition and ecology springing from the cracks and how that isn't, she doesn't write, like you so revealingly said, she doesn't write with a militant morality if you don't get it right, there's something wrong with you or something like that. She's speaking to something that doesn't lend itself to that militancy, so that politics, in other words, she's speaking to a different politics, what I will call a para politics, and that is not available for the kind of politics we have today, which is engineered around representation, which is linear. And again, representation matters. But if that's all we have, we're in trouble.

Martin Ping (22:33):

I would just make a comment that I find one of the things most refreshing in coming to your talks and your writings and that you also have the same ability to be speaking about rather challenging themes that could become polarizing, but you do it in a very non-binary way. And I have never heard you talk down or negative about any other being, and yet without skirting or trying to avoid difficult issues or topics, I think you do so in such a gracious and inviting way that I just find refreshing thinking of something I read in one of your writings around the idea that the current construct is all set up around victory and defeat, and it would seem to me, I'd be curious to know when did it come to you or how did it come to you that it's not in spite of all the urgencies and everything, it's like our task is not calling us to be wedded to victory and defeat. Where in your journey did that really become available to you or has it always been?

Bayo Akomolafe (23:58):

I really don't know how to answer that question. Everything I say to that in response to that would be a lovely, and it's okay to be a form of fabulation. It would be making up a story to meet the imperative of the question. I don't know. I could refer to my readings, my cultural training, an intuitive sense of the processual. That is a world that is never finished. I'm very, very much frightened by prospects of a heaven, heaven, a stable destination that is finished and complete. There's something utterly terrifying to me. It's not even the notion of a hell. It's the idea of that you're dead, and then you float up and you meet an angel and the angel says, well, here's your room.

(25:09):

And it's not like, here's your room for the weekend. It is like, here's a room for all time. This is it. This is what you've been working towards, this room here, it's gold, this golden toilets golden everything. That idea of being finished and arriving is terrifying to me. So I guess something about the intelligence of that fear, I don't know where it comes from. It's alien and familiar all at once, just instruct me in the ways that allow me to notice that even victory could become a trap, right? And their historical accounts, that and lessons, you know, I spoke about on Saturday the African independence movements and how those movements from the late 19th century to the seventies - 1970s, those movements were attempts to chase away colonizers and it gave birth to new, brand new African states that aspired to reach the very height of nation statehood.

(26:28):

But in defeating our colonizers, in the sense in chasing them away, in achieving victory, in achieving independence, we found out that we were caught up in a trap. We were stuck in a sense. We had to turn around and deal with flags and anthems and the international monetary fund and debt and so much more than we couldn't have anticipated when we fought to gain independence. So I'm thinking about the non legible futures, Martin, the spaces we don't know yet. I think about victory as part of a perceptual stronghold. Something carceral like a prison cell, like gaining access in a prison cell still renders you in the prison cell. I'm looking for a way out of that carceral dynamic, and that is why I interrogate and seek to disrupt our notions of success and victory and arrival and independence and emancipation and very specifically justice. Justice for me is the legibility of the public order, right?

(27:48):

Justice is how the public gains, its legibility, its intelligibility. Think about the immigration process. This is not popularly talked about, but scholars and the literature have some insights around this that when migrants come to the United States, for instance, there are series of rituals and processes to render to render their bodies and their journeys and their stories legible to the American public. It's not just to the American public, migrancy anywhere in the world is a coming to a threshold. I mean, I'm a Nigerian. I travel with my Nigerian passport, and every time I come to the border, I am marked and I have these questions that are thrown at me about my work, my person, my expertise. What do you do? Tell us why you're here, or could you step this way, sir? Secondary screening. And then the interrogation goes even deeper. These are not wishy-washy things.

(29:03):

They are material consequential rituals of marking bodies and rendering them legible. Even the very seemingly insignificant act of doing that thing, what's that X-ray thing that you go through of standing in a different of posture is ableist already, right? There's something about that that suggests be legible in this way, and then if you pass the Rubicon, if you cross over the threshold, then you're accepted. So I think there's something about being accepted, being marked and being rendered legible that is increasingly troubling. And so I'm looking for the non legible, the places where we don't add up the places where we spill away from the lines that have been already predetermined and what that offers us as a species.

Martin Ping (29:59):

I love that. Well, in that, you bring up a question around another ideal and another important term, and that is freedom.

(30:15):

And there was quite a discussion on Saturday at your talk around freedom and are we free or can we ever be free? And I'd love to go into that a little bit with you if you will. Yeah, because if I heard it correct on Saturday, you were leaning to saying that we're not actually free. I'm going to say all this and you can correct everything that I get wrong, that we're not free as individuals. It's really our interdependence which would kind of steer us otherwise. And my question, I mean, I firmly believe in our interdependence and actually have had festivals here that I called our declaration of interdependence around the 4th of July rather than independence because I think that that's a big fallacy that I call it the John Wayne syndrome. I don't know if John Wayne means anything to you.

Bayo Akomolafe (31:25):

It does, it does. Absolutely. I have lots of John Wayne stories,

Martin Ping (31:31):

But my question really centers around, for lack of a better word, what I would call inner freedom. Is there any allowance for our inner freedom within the entanglements of an interdependent reality?

Bayo Akomolafe (31:48):

It depends on what you mean by inner freedom, brother. I find it excruciatingly difficult to parse between the inner and the outer. It's not just because of my vocation as a psychologist or a post human thinker. Well, it's largely because of that. It's that I don't know how to think ecology and psychology apart. I don't know how to, they're not two separate things for me. It's that in the same stream that moves from fungal secretions to other kinds of mycorrhizal and rhizomatic possibilities, that same stream bleeds and yields and merges into the gilded interiority of ourselves, how we think, how we feel, how we understand the world. These are not to be demarcated or separate, separated from the world outside, and that's what I might mean by freedom. I mean in the Henry Bergson sense that declarations of freedom and independence, so-called, are the creativity of a morality of the steady individual.

(33:16):

They are attempts at thinking about the individual, the individual self, right, the individual as a majestic transcendent arrival point that there is nothing else that if we think about agency and responsibility and cognition and decision-making and choice, we kind of reduce it to the individual that acts upon the world, and that's a very, very American enterprise. It's a very Euro-American enterprise, the individual that acts upon the world, that solves problems. What that obscures is the world that acts upon the individual, right? It obscures and it erases out of view how the world forms us and formulates us and shape shifts us in return. There's this American saying about guns don't kill people, it's people that kill people or something like that. And there's this other argument around guns I think related that guns are tools, right? They're just mere tools and having them is, wherever you land on that, on either side of that conversation, the idea that guns are just tools or tools are just tools, is a deeply humanist story, and it is inadequate to tell and hold the weight of what is happening or how our bodies are still being made.

(34:47):

We are not as fully put together as we think we are. Just like music cannot be reduced to its bits. You cannot take a note and decipher the music from the single note. The music is more than just a coagulation of notes. There's something about the changeability of the note that means the note is not still or individual. This is Henry Bergson's example. It's not even mine. It's brilliant, but it's the idea that music is not just a summation of notes in the same way. Freedom is not to be designated to the note itself. Freedom is the assemblage. It's how changeable, emergent, emancipatory, how we move and how movement moves us. So we don't have freedom per se. It's a very capitalist framework to think through or to think within. When we say that we have freedom, I think instead that we are free to the extent that we are able to fail, or to move, or to become something else that we don't even know yet.

Martin Ping (35:58):

What came up for me as this David Whyte poem, do you know the, I know

Bayo Akomolafe (36:03):

David one,

Martin Ping (36:04):

Yeah. We shape ourselves to fit the world, and by the world are shaped again, visible and the invisible working together in common purpose to produce a miraculous, something along those lines. But it's the act itself that is interesting. I think I would say the same for the idea of morality, that it's another one of these things we have, do we have, are you a moral being or we have morality that can only, it seems to me anyway could be determined in the moment and in the act because we can explain away and rationalize it away one way or the other until the cows come home. But the fact is we don't really know. It's not something we have.

Bayo Akomolafe (36:54):

No, no, no. I spoke about morality on Saturday as well. That's not something we have. Morality is a holding pattern. I've often distinguished between ethics and morality by saying ethics has no viscosity, morality, morality, however is viscosity. It's how bodies are rendered available to logics and systems of belonging and identitarian patterns. I was speaking about this in Italy once, and I remember a dancer, she's Nigerian, Italian. She got up and she started to dance out what I was saying, and she said, she didn't say, she said with her body, she said, morality is this. No. She said, ethics is this, and she was doing something fluid with her limb. She was just moving. And then she froze and she said, this is morality. The morality is this. Frozenness is a state of captivity, right? I'm not saying that we don't need morality, therefore we do, every form of settlement, every form of naming, every form of ritualizing, every form of christening

(38:11):

the world in one way or the other needs morality, but morality will often get exhausted. Our notice of what is good and what is bad and what obtains and what it doesn't obtain and what is beautiful and what isn't will often need to change. Where we plant a home will often desert itself. I've said it in my book that if we don't leave home soon enough, home will leave us. There's a sense in which morality migrates as well. It's the migrancy of morality that I call ethics. It's the fluidity of a world that is never finished.

Martin Ping (38:51):

Yes, right. That is something to sit with, a little gift there. The other quote that has come up with me all through this conversation is just like Rilke’s quote on living the question that we should really live the question that we don't. And I'm so comfortable with that. I like questions so much better than answers. I've been always suspicious of answers, especially when they're quick and right off the shelf. Then I don't know. It just doesn't seem it can be that ready, and I think it probably gravitates around my conscious or unconscious comfort with this idea of a world and continual progress that we're just part of, human becoming rather than human being. Thank you for making that so available and present to my conscious thinking, because I do like to sit with this. So in a few minutes that we have left, I would be remiss not to ask you about, and I hope I'm pronouncing it right, Vunja!, the carnival that is coming up in

Bayo Akomolafe (40:11):

August,

Martin Ping (40:11):

Which I'm signed up for.

Bayo Akomolafe (40:12):

Well, thank you, Martin. Thank you. Thank you. And I thank you to all the forces making this carnival happen, as I said on Saturday Carnival is the vocation of not thinking straight. It's like when thinking straight meets its algorithmic limitations. When justice doesn't seem like it serves, many examples, I can offer to show how justice is not some idealized arrival rendezvous point. It is a practice, it's institutional, it's colonial too. But when it meets its own limitations, then we need to think through absurd times, absurdly, we need to dance with the monster instead of trying to rid ourselves of the monstrous. And the carnival is this site of holding the excess not successfully, but just meeting and encountering the excessiveness that spills beyond the logics of our time. It's not a solutionistic enterprise, it's not a party. It's not just having a good time. It's not having a good time centrally at all.

(41:27):

It is meeting excess. And so happens it's a seed carnival. We call it a seed carnival because we're planting it as a seed and we hope it germinates and sprouts into a forest of carnivals around the world. And it happens August 6th to 8th. It's a few weeks from now, and I'm very excited about it. Maybe one more thing to say is that I grew up thinking that the miraculous was something that happened once in a while. I grew up Christian, you see, and the model of the miraculous that was recommended to me was that the world was ordinary and the miraculous was the tinkering of some divine interrupter from outside of the ordinary, tinkering with how things should work. But I'm now understanding that the miraculous is the paradigm, that we live in a world that is miraculous and that our perceptual frameworks are what we rudely call the ordinary, and maybe the task of today is to become fugitive, is to break away from those strangleholds so we can sense the world differently. That's it.

Martin Ping (42:50):

That is great place to take a pause. I love living in a miraculous world. Thank you. I love that I'm living in a miraculous world with you, and I'm looking forward to being together in August and certainly before. I really, from the every corner of my heart, thank you for the time today and for being so open, gracious, and it's really been special time for me.

Bayo Akomolafe (43:30):

Thank you, Martin. Thank you.

Martin Ping (43:31):

Thank you. Bayo.

Heather Gibbons (43:45):

Learn more about Bayo’s work and explore his writings and offerings at his website, https://bayoakomolafe.net to get tickets for the Carnival, Vunja: A Gathering of the Seeds with Bayo Akomolafe and Friends, at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington on August 6th through 8th, visit https://centerforneweconomics.org/events. 

Thank you for tuning in to Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast. Our interconnected initiatives work together to fulfill our association's mission of renewing soil, society, and self. To explore more about our efforts, visit us @hawthornevalley.org. As a registered 501c3 nonprofit, Hawthorne Valley thrives on the generosity of supporters like you. Please consider making a donation to help us continue our work. Additionally, you can support us by sharing this podcast with your friends and leaving a rating and review. A special thanks to Grammy Award-winning artist, Aaron Dessner for our beautiful soundtrack, and to Aaron Ping for his exceptional editing skills.