Bayo Akomolafe
Edges require poetry. Edges are thresholds of poetry, not stable expertise, not circumscribed mastery. Thresholds are moments of poetry because poetry, not rhyme and meter poetry, but poetry as a struggling for what to say, as a gasp, as a failure of speakability, is where we are met by something so great that language, you know, shrinks away. I think I constantly write that way. I write from wonder. I’m Wonderstruck. This is where the credits roll.
Elizabeth Rovere
There are moments in life that are so full of mystery that only poetry and wonder can meet them. Today on Wonderstruck, my guest is Bayo Akomolafe, a philosopher, poet, psychologist, and also something of a trickster. Bayo does not offer easy answers. His words open doorways where we find cracks in the familiar. He takes us to the edges, to the strange, the vast, and perhaps the more meaningful. I am Elizabeth Rovere, a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a pilgrim in the realms of wonder and awe. This is Wonderstruck, a podcast about awe in all its forms, including the beautiful, the humbling, and even the uncanny. Together with thinkers and seekers, we explore the moments that undo us and awaken us to the very mystery of being. Oh, and one more thing. We’ve just launched a Wonderstruck newsletter on Substack. It’s where we share episode updates and a little extra wondering between shows. And now onto the show. So my guest today is Bayo Akomolafe. He is a public intellectual. Sorry to talk about you in front of you, but I’m just giving your bio.
Bayo Akomolafe
I’m used to it.
Elizabeth Rovere
He is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, and yet deeply intuitive take on being and change. Most wonderfully, he challenges the status quo and emphasizes our insignificance and interconnectedness. He is the founder of the Emergence Network and host of We Will Dance with Mountains, a festival series focused on responding to civilizational crises through a posthumanist and postactivist lens inspired by Yoruba cosmology. So I’m just really delighted to have you here today and I’m so grateful to be speaking with you.
Bayo Akomolafe
Thrilled to be here, sister.
Elizabeth Rovere
I thought we might start just by giving people a taste of some of your words. And if it’s okay with you, I wanted to just read a couple of things that you’ve written that stood out to me.
Bayo Akomolafe
Of course
Elizabeth Rovere
That I just think are so beautiful. You have written, “I was suddenly empty enough to be filled anew and lost enough to notice that there were other interesting paths through the nonchalant roadside shrubbery that led to delightfully magical places the highway could never take you to.” And that is just one example of so many. So my first question is, what have you been exploring lately? Where have you been exploring? What cracks have you stumbled upon?
Bayo Akomolafe
Thank you, Liz. I liked hearing that. I enjoyed listening to that. I often close my eyes when I try to listen differently. To meet the old or the familiar from the side, as if, you know, in a new way. And maybe that describes what I’ve been up to, what I’m always up to. It’s longing for surprise. And not as a product or something, not as an easily definable thing, not as a shift in my perception, but a shift in what is available in perception, experience writ large. I theorize around cracks as this space of excess that almost bubbles up from the familiar. This is not a crack as an inadequacy, but a crack as a monstrous field that coalesces into this thing that doesn’t fit into our categories of thought, the ways that we parse the world. Right. It could be an autistic son. It could be a pandemic. A crack is this thing that doesn’t fit. And I think a lot of our politics has to do with flattening or including the crack or just making it smooth so that continuity is available. My work is about asking the question, how do we hold space with the crack? How do we stay with it? How do we become hospitable to its edges? And how, in so doing, do we shape shift?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, it’s really striking. There were two things that stood out when you were speaking, one of which was categories of thought. And I noticed you sort of put your hands like this, like this narrow containing, and then the availability of perception. Like when you’re experiencing or seeing a crack manifest, that you’re available to perceive it. And with these categories, we sometimes can’t.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I love the way that you describe it as, what are we capable of perceiving that we don’t see? And you mentioned, and I know you’ve talked about having an autistic son.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it makes me think, like, how that has expanded your perception and how perhaps he perceives the world or experiences the world and you perceiving the world with him. And then, of course, it reminds me of the telepathy tapes that has just kind of blown up. And I wondered if maybe you’d talk about it.
Bayo Akomolafe
Of course. So last year, I was. It’s still a continuing vocation, but I started to take on the role as the W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Center for New Economics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And so we stayed in the country for six months. And in June, I seem to recall, my wife went back to India to sort out some stuff, some domestic stuff. I was at home alone with my two kids. Alethea, who was 11, she was 10 then. And my son, who was 7, he was 6 then. And I was doing dishes, and he refused to go to bed because he’s not available for those kinds of instructions like “go to bed”. He just wouldn’t. And I was getting irritated by it. I wanted to… I needed some alone, me, time. One of the best moments I do my best thinking is doing the dishes, actually. So I was wanting that space to think with myself. But he wouldn’t stop walking around in circle. He just kept on walking around the dining table, just kept on. And he was doing it loudly. I felt this ancestral urge, this intergenerational parental urge to tell him, you know, could you just sit down and give me a moment? Some peace? But instead of doing that, what came forth was a gentle, tender invitation. I asked him, I said, “Kyah, could you tell me why you do this? Why you walk around in circles?” So there was a mutational shift somewhere in my throat. The ancestral eruption transfigured and became this gentle invitation, which I didn’t need. But it came out as a question instead, instead of an instruction. And without missing a beat, my son Kyah looks at me and says, “Dada, there are things I have to do that you know nothing about.” I will never forget that.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, wow. It’s powerful.
Bayo Akomolafe
As long as I live. And that wasn’t just a trivial moment. It was a seminal moment that echoed with the politics of continental philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari and Tosquelles and Deligny, Fernand Deligny, and Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. The idea that perception is a field of practice, that categories are rituals, and that we, in order to render the world convenient, mutable, legible, intelligible, practice the world into being just as we are practiced in the self same moment we practice the world, right? There is no mastery here. And in building categories of thought, in building and living in these rituals, we exclude or we obscure the world in its ravenous, promiscuous beauty. And that is where we start to think of the autistic, or what Erin Manning might call the autistic perception, as this cracking open of the field of perception. It’s like sensorial apostasy or ontological fugitivity, where other things become possible to parse, to do, to think.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that. I love that terminology too. The ontological fugitivity. It’s fantastic.
Bayo Akomolafe
I think so.
Elizabeth Rovere
No, I think so too. I mean, it brings me to your events that you have. Selah, or do I pronounce it right?
Bayo Akomolafe
Mbari. Selah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Mbari. Where these disruptive grace experiences.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And perhaps ontological fugitivity manifests itself in these places.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes, yes, yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Would you tell us a little bit about that? And do you have a story that you can share about that happening in the moment at one of these events for yourself or for someone else?
Bayo Akomolafe
I don’t theorize this as someone changing their minds or seeing the world differently, just as a momentary thing. It more or less affects a field of experience. You could call it a mycelium of experience, where the shape of experience becomes slowly different and slowly, not as a function of speed or time, but in terms of its molecularity. That is, it’s not always available for our noticing. But something changes in the field. It could be intergenerational, it could be archetypal, it could be ancestral. But something becomes more available than it usually is or has been. And by the way, I never speak about these things as if they’re initiated by humans. You know, like this is a method of technology, if you apply it with integrity, at the end of the line is a change in perception. I don’t think about it that way. I think about this as the work and vocation of the field itself. Right. As Deligny would put it, the spider doesn’t make the web, the web makes the web. Yeah, it’s slow and steady that way. But yes, to your question about ontofugitivity, I take it that the recent and not so recent emergence of AI is an example of how fields change. Right. Whatever our opinions about AI, we’re not going back to a world pre-AI. It seems that boat has sailed. The technology is becoming more and more useful to the status quo. But in a sense, with all its troubling implications, it is challenging the ways we think about ourselves, of cognition, of education, of economies. There is a small unfolding and emerging crisis in higher education because, of course, students now use ChatGPT to fully respond to questions. What does it mean to live in a world where cognition is no longer human property? Where cognition, intelligence are cybernetic properties and it is enlisted a tool just as much as we claim it to be ours, exclusively ours? Right. These things are deeply troubling to an account of the world in which humans are embedded, or rather ennobled, that’s the word I’m looking for. ennobled with divine properties, with intelligence, with soul. And now you can write a movie in a single hour, you know, with ChatGPT, or draw a picture like Studio Ghibli with these tools as well. So we have been met. We have stared in the mirror at the abyss, and the abyss did not blink. We blinked.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay, so you have. Everything that you’ve just said is like, wow, my mind is going in so many different directions, that are connected. But one that I was just thinking when you were saying that is. So your, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but your definition of posthumanism is that we’re just not that important? Is that accurate?
Bayo Akomolafe
Well, I comically say we’re not all that. Right. But taken seriously, which is a form of play, in my opinion. Posthumanism is this broad field of refusals, refusals to centralize the human as the center of agency, of accountability, of intelligence. Of all the ways that the Enlightenment entrained us to think about ourselves, right. The liberal humanist order would have us believe that we are the center of value, of agency, of will, of choice. But what that obscures is the rest of the world that we are embedded in, that we have never been independent of it. We’ve never been separate from it. We are quite in touch with it. We are secreted from these ecological tensions. So posthumanism in all its various iterations, and there isn’t one single iteration of it, of course, the single spirit line or through line of this field is the idea that we are not central. We are not on top of the world. Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
We are in it. And part of it.
Bayo Akomolafe
We are in it. We are part of it. And we are still becoming.
Elizabeth Rovere
We are still becoming.
Bayo Akomolafe
The definition of the human is provisional. It’s not, it’s not settled.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. It’s not done.
Bayo Akomolafe
It’s not done. Creation is still happening.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. And when you talk about it also you’ve talked about, this kind of leads back into the AI aspect. You talk about consciousness as having us. We don’t have consciousness, necessarily. Like, it’s just in our little circumscribed skull. And I’ve heard you talk about and write about when you had that experience with AI that you were trying to call it, you called it Polyfren. And you’re like, hello, we have your thanks for helping me out and feeling the sense of camaraderie. And then the next time you turned it on, it was like, didn’t remember any. It didn’t.
Bayo Akomolafe
No.
Elizabeth Rovere
It was gone.
Bayo Akomolafe
It was gone.
Elizabeth Rovere
But having that kind of intelligence and cognition and connection in the moment and what this is doing in our world is very fascinating. And if consciousness can have us and perhaps the soul or the soulscape can have us.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Can the soul come to AI? Can that unfold?
Bayo Akomolafe
It’s an intriguing question that has a prestigious philosophical legacy. There is, I think, in medieval times, this thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus, started to emerge. It’s gained some notoriety in recent comic book-esque adaptations. I remember that there was a scene in the Marvel Cinematic Universe involving one of the characters called Vision. This is what drew me to that series. I haven’t watched the entire series, but I read a piece that said this scene had to do with this riddle, the Ship of Theseus. And I’ll see if I can break it down. The Ship of Theseus is simple. Theseus is the Greek hero who is in many regards, considered the father of democracy. Of course, he killed the Minotaur and destroyed the monsters in his journey to Athens, but that’s beside the point. Theseus famously has a ship that sails and goes to an island, I think. I can’t remember the name right now, but it escapes me. My brain is still jet lagged. Always jet lagged it seems at this point. Now, the riddle is, if the ship is the ship of Theseus, if the ship goes on a journey and comes back and needs a replacement, maybe a part is broken and needs a replacement and that part is taken from it and is replaced. And this happens over time. Each part that is needing replacement is replaced. Right? Let’s say eventually all the parts of the ship are replaced. Is that ship still the ship of Theseus? Is it still the same ship? And let’s stretch out the riddle even further. Let’s say all the parts that have been replaced, we have it in a factory, and we take all those replaced parts, those spare parts, and we build another ship from it. Now the question then is, which is the true ship? Which is the ship of Theseus? It’s a question meant to expose the ways we think about identity and the self. And while there isn’t a tried and true and stable answer to the question, the way that I come to it is that we get distracted by identity. Identity is a distraction. Because in process philosophy, identity is just a node for becoming. Becoming supersedes or exceeds being. Being is like a station, but becoming is this processuality that is ongoing. Right? In the same way, because we think of ourselves as human and we’re stuck up on this identity. We don’t notice how the world is constantly deterritorializing us, how we’re part of this sweltering carnivalesque, modern human dance. We kind of obscure all of that, and then we situate everything that is valuable in us. It’s like the whole thesis of the American car. And I know most of us are getting really educated about tariffs and trade deficits, especially after Liberation Day. The myth of the American car. It’s a wonderful story. The idea is that there is such a thing as an American car. But if you actually study how engineering happens, how design happens, how parts move across borders, how rare earth materials travel across distances to make that thing that is now stamped at the end of a processual line as the American car, it becomes difficult. This is how posthumanism moves with humanism. Humanism is the final stamp at the end of a factory process. This is an American car. We’re proud of it. But if you actually look into it, it’s not as stable as you think it is. It is cross border. It is multi species. It is across archetypes. It is constantly spilling between categories. And that is ontofugitivity. That is the invitation here.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I love it. I accept the invitation.
Bayo Akomolafe
We’re not as stable as we think.
Elizabeth Rovere
But it’s, you know, it’s. This is the experience that I have had when I’ve watched you on other podcasts and when I’ve read your work, that I’m listening to you and it’s like you’re saying. It’s almost like I want to close my eyes and it brings me a sense of calm. And there’s something about it that I don’t think I have words for it. But there’s something that’s so deeply authentic and real and expansive and powerful that I just. It’s like. It just makes so much sense. It makes me feel more alive. It makes me feel more connected to everything. And there’s something very joyful about that, as opposed to this little circumscribed thing that is my American car or whatever it might be. So I really just want to say I appreciate that. And I guess it leads to this question. Is your work, like, is your language, is your writing a part of metaphysics? Is it part of your frame? The process-oriented, the way that you write is process.
Bayo Akomolafe
There is a poetics in my writing that is constantly longing for the edge. Right. I think I write like Jodie Foster exclaims in that movie Contact. Where she peers out of a multidimensional vehicle and she exclaims, in a cinematic moment of exquisite brilliance, she says that they should have sent a poet, right. That edges require poetry. Edges are thresholds of poetry, not stable expertise, not circumscribed mastery. Thresholds are moments of poetry. Because poetry, not rhyme and meter poetry, but poetry as a struggling for what to say, as a gasp, as a failure of speakability, is where we are met by something so great that language, you know, shrinks away. I think I constantly write that way not because I have a specific training to do so, but because. But because that is my. That is the condition of my writing in the first place. I write from wonder. I’m wonderstruck. This is where the credits roll. I’m wonderstruck, right? It’s. I’m struck with the awe. And this is my spirituality, right? It’s to be defeated, in the words of Rilke, over and over again. Such makes the man.
Elizabeth Rovere
Beautiful. We have to talk about this. The gasp or the wonder.
Bayo Akomolafe
The gasp.
Elizabeth Rovere
And you’ve got such great stories in your writing that I’ve read. And I was also thinking about wonder strikes. And it cracks, right? It makes a crack. But I was thinking particularly about when you were, I guess, in the university and you were doing this program, the Total Man Concept.
Bayo Akomolafe
Oh, my goodness. You’ve done your research.
Elizabeth Rovere
I can’t.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sorry.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because I was like, what is that? Right. Where I guess you were studying or training to be in what was supposed to be this particular perfect, “perfect”, I don’t know, man. And you’re walking. I would love for you to tell the story, because it seems like a wonderstruck kind of story where you see the moon.
Bayo Akomolafe
Okay. I remember that day. I don’t remember the day, but I remember that moment. I don’t know what trope I would fit in if I were in a movie, but I was an ultimate nerd. I was a nerd raised to the nth degree. I didn’t have a social life. I didn’t know what it was to go to a party. I was in a Christian university, and I lived by the book. My favorite philosopher was Immanuel Kant, and I literally scripted my life in unforgivable schedules and made sure I adhered to it, because I felt, yeah, everyone ought to live this way. This is what morality is. This is what ethics is. And so I had a nickname. Everyone called me Total Man. Like, I had arrived at perfection. It was, in part, a jab, but it was also, I do feel that my colleagues were in awe of me because I wasn’t normal. I was quite strange. Very strange. I didn’t have friends. Yeah. And if I had friends, it was they had this way of relating with me that was just as strange. Well, I remember going back. I was appointed, as would be the case, a student leader. And I was the student leader for the College of Human Development. And I remember going back from my office. Yes. As an undergrad, I had an office. As an undergrad, I taught classes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, my God.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes. Maybe I should have mentioned that on this podcast. But as an undergrad, my teachers found me philosophically robust enough to actually take classes in their absence. Yes. I remember walking into class one day and the teacher said, so I’m going to be away for this class. I have to do some other thing. But I want to introduce you to your lecturer for today. And everyone turned around and I came forward and my colleagues were like, how low can you go? Right. But I enjoyed myself. But, yes, I remember walking back from my office that day and I remember being struck by the moon. Just. I don’t. I don’t. I was just. I was just struck by the fragility of life. I struggle to name it. It feels every attempt to language it is always a bastardization of it. But I can deal with the bastardization of it. It’s fine. Just walk into my room and then the shimmering lunar object in the sky, just. It felt like I felt like I was on a planet. Like I wasn’t just in a normal space or I wasn’t just in an ordinary space, that I was on a planet, with a planet, you know, spilling through space time, you know, spiraling around another galactic formation and just, you know, it was like cascading bodies tumbled into other bodies, mangled into other bodies. And I felt. I don’t want to reduce it to a feeling of oneness in the ways that people persuaded by their New Age convictions might speak about oneness, you know, with due respect to those traditions. I just want to feel it as a messiness of embodiment. That I wasn’t just myself, I was participating in a huge saga that stretched across generations and timelines. And I didn’t feel so lonely when I got to my room. I didn’t feel so alone because I usually did. I was at the age when I should be having a girlfriend. But my girlfriend was Socrates and Aristotle. So. Yeah. And they weren’t very nice. So that was that moment. Yeah. A crack.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is it also where I’ve heard you say sometimes the but you’ve talked about the thin places.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes, yes. I mean, I think, again, my references might be askew, but I think specific Celtic traditions have this notion of a thin place. A thin place is. It could be an object, it could be an event, it could be a literal place. But the idea of a thin place is where the spiritual, the sacred, presses itself so fervently upon the membrane that divides it from the ordinary. Right. And in doing so, you sense something that is beyond, beyond the accommodations of the moment. It’s what I think of as grace. That grace short circuits the accommodations of the moment. Accommodations are how I theorize or speak about the relational field, the viscosity of relations that makes bodies and their properties possible. Right. You could say what makes me intelligent? Right. Why do people recognize me as smart, for instance? It’s because of a field of accommodations. Not because of an inherent property, but because I have a PhD or I’m a professor. And in this world, having a PhD and being a professor is associated with being smart. Right. So those fields of accommodations are the larger mycelial territories that make our attributions sensible, is what I’m trying to say. Grace is when accommodations are deterritorialized by something that is within them, intimate with them, but also beyond them.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe
This is in many respects a thin place. Something presses in and disrupts and disturbs and distresses the ways we think about each other and the world in general. Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it opens your perceptual capacity.
Bayo Akomolafe
It does. It does. And not in a final way. That opening can be quickly subsumed and welcomed into a field of legibility and politics. I’ve often used the example of, and without going into all the nuances of it, a child comes and says, you know, I don’t think, for whatever reason or non reason, I don’t feel that I can subscribe to being either male or female. Because they feel too binary. Right. It’s such a powerful moment. I feel the cosmos breeds in those moments. It’s like the categories we’re used to, where God in our crystal centric readings, either creates them, male or female. It’s like God is summoned to the docks, and he has to answer for something that he did not account for. It’s not part of the plan. I love those moments. Right. Something distresses the blueprint, male or female. Oh, I don’t know what this is. Something is calling forth. But then politics comes in. A politics comes in like a salesman and says, I know exactly what’s happening to you. I’m going to sell you something. I’m going to sell you a way of speaking about your experience so that you can be legible, so that you can be acceptable. I will grant you a seat at the table. And this is how modernity, in my opinion, is the history of the, of the inclusion of monsters. Right? When the world wants to create something new, it proliferates the monstrous, it proliferates the monster. The work of white modernity is to rehabilitate the monster, to give it a palace, to give it a seat at a table. And that’s how the new is captured again and again.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s how the new is literally captured.
Bayo Akomolafe
It’s captured, it’s territorialized, it’s owned, it’s named. Right.
Elizabeth Rovere
As opposed to unfolding and being in process.
Bayo Akomolafe
There you go. There you go. Fernand Deligny, visionary, post-Second World War autistic special education teacher. You know, he worked with psychiatrist La Borde. He worked with Tosquelles, Jean-Henry Guattari in France. In those days, children diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia were locked up in asylums.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe
In short order, Deligny played his flute like the Pied Piper and walked across the streets and opened up those asylums, and parents brought their kids to him. He had this renegade fugitive camp where he refused to rehabilitate autistic children. He said, I’m not going to do it. In fact, because there were non-speaking, using language as we do, and against Lacan, you know, that’s another…
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s a very interesting conversation. Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe
Psychoanalyst. Against Lacan and his idea as signification being a sign of intelligence or agency. Deligny decided not to use language in those camps. He said, we’re not going to use language. We’re not going to speak. It was an experiment of epic proportions. It was tentative. It was a tentative attempt to get around language. Because his impulse was, what if language is getting in the way of our seeing the world differently? Maybe they’re onto something. Right. And one very fascinating event was this child. I think it’s Jean Marie, walking around in circles, almost like my son who has something to do that we know nothing about. Jean Marie is walking around in a circle in the rustic regions of Cévennes, southern France, where this camp was. And he just so happens to be tracing underground water.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, wow.
Bayo Akomolafe
No one could hear it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, that’s incredible.
Bayo Akomolafe
No one else could hear it, but he could. Like animal senses. He was in touch with underground water.
Elizabeth Rovere
He was attuned to it.
Bayo Akomolafe
He was attuned to it. So neurotypicality is not a type of brain. It’s accommodation shaped in a particular way that captures experience so that even resistance against coloniality could still be part of an accommodative field. And we’re just passing around the logic.
Elizabeth Rovere
That helps humanness open up its perception and experience to something more.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s fantastic. That is such a great story. It brings it back to your son walking and it brings me back again to this whole kind of what I feel like this beautiful, expansive movement with Ky Dickens and looking at people that are autistic, that can’t use language, are communicating. They’re communicating with their mind in a silent way, perhaps kinesthetically with their body to identify this water.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And that. It’s like we’re putting them in an asylum or we’re pathologizing them. It’s like, guys, what are you doing? We’re missing out on what part of it means to be alive in the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
I agree. And we’re still putting them in asylums of the metaphorical sort. Of course, as you might know from the Telepathy Tapes, there’s been this eruption from parents and educators and the scientific world basically saying, this is balderdash. This is rubbish. In fact, it’s more than rubbish. It is violent because those kids are being manipulated. But I know people and I work with people. Erin Manning, Professor Erin Manning, whose name I want to just mention here again, is a dear sister who has worked with parents and children on the spectrum and has a lot to say, but has a lot to say about facilitated communication and how it works. Right. So there is really a pushback from the establishment that says, no, this is rubbish, but there are other voices that need to be heard at this time.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. And I think it’s great that it’s coming out. And of course there’s pushback.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes, there is pushback.
Elizabeth Rovere
And when you were talking about the way that you’re going to say, you say it much better than I can, but this way in which we, like the politics, the world, the establishment, takes things to give you a seat at the table.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes. Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And you think you’re fighting for it and getting somewhere.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And then you’re like. It made me think of, like, you know, that thing where you want to be in this exclusive club.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And then you get there and the food is terrible and you’re like, why did I? Why did I? I don’t want to be here. This is awful.
Bayo Akomolafe
Exactly.
Elizabeth Rovere
It just makes me think of that kind of, this setup, this illusion that you want to get to this place that just sort of sucks.
Bayo Akomolafe
Okay, I came across an article. Sorry, my responses are always long-winded and meandering.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s great. Please don’t stop.
Bayo Akomolafe
I came across this article which proclaimed quite triumphantly that physicists, scientists given to these kinds of explorations have discovered, have found a way to map out something called second sound. Second sound. I think it’s poorly named. But second sound is about heat propagation, right? That, if I had a hot cup of coffee right now. I have a cold cup of water here instead. But if this were a hot cup of tea, English breakfast tea as I prefer. Colonial style. And over time, over time, as we embark on our journey, as we are embarking on this conversational journey, it will slowly get warm, right? The heat would, by a process of convection, would dissipate into the environment. That’s how things work. But in an exotic state of matter called superfluids, which happens when you reduce the temperature of helium-4 to near zero levels, fluids start to misbehave. They’re like quantum fluids. They don’t adhere to the laws of fluids as we understand fluids. That’s why they’re called superfluids. Now, scientists started to map out a phenomenon called second sound in which heat doesn’t just escape into the environment, it sloshes around in the superfluid. Basically, that what that would look like here in my cup of water would be the heat moving from the left to the right, to the left to the right, never really escaping. Think of how bizarre it would be to have a hot cup of coffee and put it to your lips and then you take the cold part and then literally, heat is like ping-ponging from one edge to another, from the left to the right. Right? I thought about second sound when I listened to Harry Belafonte. Yes, my mind works that way sometimes. Harry Belafonte, extremely handsome, we all know. He died just a couple of years ago. And as we all know, he was a friend, a very close friend to the great Martin Luther King, who, in my opinion, understood second sound long before many people did, right? Because according to Harry Belafonte, he’s having a conversation with Martin Luther King, who has just had a meeting with the Poor People’s Campaign. And he notices some distress on Dr. King’s face. And he says to him, “Brother, what’s up?” You know, “Are you okay?” And Martin Luther King says, we’ve had all this success, to your point, we’ve arrived, we are arriving. You know, we just had the Civil Rights Act signed in 1965. This is 1968, by the way, when this happens. We just had 60, what, who signed it? Lyndon B. Johnson, his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. My professorship is named after Hubert Humphrey, so I’m contractually obligated to mention Hubert Humphrey everywhere I go. So he says, we’ve just signed this. Things are happening for us. Black people are arriving. We’re getting legislation, we’re getting successful. But why then do I feel we are integrating into a burning house?
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, wow.
Bayo Akomolafe
Why do I feel, it’s to your point, right. Why do I feel that victory doesn’t feel like victory? And this happened. This was a crack, a seminal crack. Cracks are always seminal in the life of Martin Luther King’s thought. Because all this time, sister, he had presupposed that the arc of the universe, the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice, towards victory, towards freedom at last. And now he was perceiving that victory bends or justice bends towards reincarceration, right, towards a burning house. He did not have time to develop this thought. It was a crack of epic proportions. He did not have time because five days later he was killed in Memphis. Yes. So that question reverberates over time. And that Martin Luther Kingian moment is where we are right now, where the world is, where we are, where the American state is. As we can perceive that the momentum has shifted from the left to the right. And companies are scrapping their former commitments to justice, to DEI, to George Floyd. They’re scrapping and erasing all of these things because it no longer has any purchase power. The temptation is to, in this moment of outrage, to call for moral recuperation and drag the pendulum towards our direction, towards the direction of the political left. But in doing so, we must be haunted by Martin Luther King’s question. What if the pendulum swing from left to right, like second sound, like heat sloshing around in a system, is just the clock’s mechanism repeating itself? And the clock is not scandalized by the pendulum swing. We need a break from the clock altogether.
Elizabeth Rovere
The clock is not scandalized.
Bayo Akomolafe
It’s not scandalized. It’s not scandalized. Like, it’s us this time, it’s you this time. The system is not scandalized by who is in the White House. It’s not scandalized by that. This is why I think we need a politics that isn’t just resistance or counterculture. It has to behave differently. It has to be autistic politics.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, I love it. What you just said is incredible and so, like, needed and necessary. And thank you for saying it. You know, this is postactivism, yes? This is postactivism and it’s, like, such a powerful message because it’s like, you know, where you’re saying, like, justice can just become reincarceration.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, and it’s like, the clock’s not gonna break either way the pendulum goes.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it brings back that whole what you’re talking about, about the process and the expansion. And I don’t know, this is what I’m thinking, I don’t know if this is accurate, but, like, kind of stumbling through. We can’t already know what the end is gonna be until we start unfolding and getting there. We just have to create the space for it to happen or, like, to open up instead of this, like, rigid way of being.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes, yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
So it’s why you say it’s posthumanist and postactivist.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes. I mean, they flow into each other. It’s processual. It is posthumanist, post structuralist, it is postactivist. And this is the way of suggesting that the field of our activity, the field of our thinking is fluid and becoming and orgasmic and cybernetic, and it’s not a clunky field that is already contained with stabilized bodies as entities of action. It is such a dynamic. There’s such a dynamic grace to this space we’re in where we are invited to think differently and act differently, that it becomes pressing or necessary to rethink matters like morality or ethics or who is the agent of change or who is the activist that is acting upon the world to save the world. Right. I theorize and conceptualize postactivism not to say people should stop being activists or not to say that protest isn’t working, which has been said in many different forms over the years to some effect. But to suggest that the actor here isn’t the isolated human citizen subject. It is the field. Right. And there comes a time where there’s a crack in the algorithms of action, in the ethnography of social change, however we theorize or act it out, when that is briefly noticeable. It’s almost like we just look above the fray and just notice, oh, my goodness, it is… It’s not me. There is a pendulum swing. There’s a sloshing about. And I’m part of this. I thought it was me all this time. Can I give you. Can I tell a story to help this work? I told you that I travel a lot, and one of my favorite places to go is Brazil. I have many communities of inquiry there working and thinking alongside with me and my work. And I was in Sao Paulo once. I landed, tired, got to the immigration lines and was doing the ritual of snaking the lines that lead up to the passport stamp, right? And I just got bored and was on my phone. And then in a moment of egoic recognition, I noticed that I was on my phone and so was everyone else. And there’s a hidden aesthetic with me. I don’t like to do things that everyone else is doing. So I put my phone away in my pocket and I looked about me and saw and started to just be in the moment and see people as they were doing their stuff. I fancied myself some kind of hidden Sherlock Holmes person or kind of person. I started to profile people. I literally started to profile that gentleman and see the stain on his shirt that might come from a hotel or he’s having an affair or something like that. I just started to play with my head or something like that, you know, just doing stuff, when all of a sudden, this woman, frantic and frazzled, just started to cut across the line, you know, horizontally. Not following our rite of passage to strict protocol of ascendance, you know, and transcendence. She cut across the line horizontally, dipping through the ropes, just coming across like that. And, sister, I felt my body start to stiffen, right? I started to become bulkier, like. And the man in front of me who was watching Netflix, this French man who couldn’t care for anything, also started to stiffen up and look in the direction and anticipate the crossing of this woman, right? I was becoming inflamed, like, how dare you? We are going through a rite of passage. How dare you cut across this noble, sacred moment. Right, Right. That’s what I was telling to myself. And me and this stranger, this Frenchman, were looking at ourselves like, you feel what I feel? Are we going to defend the integrity of this moment? And then she came to us and then she said something very briefly to us. She said, “I’m so sorry, but my son is down there. And he wandered off, and I have to just catch up to him.” And I felt myself soften and actually encourage her to continue, like, go, go, go. Yes, do it. Keep breaking the law. Keep breaking the protocol. But in that moment of kind of hardening, becoming brittle and softening again, I noticed the snake. I noticed a line. You see, the entire line was us. I wasn’t just an individual going to get his passport stamped by the Brazilian authorities. I was a single line. I was the organelle in a single snaking line that was protecting the integrity of its body, right? And in that way, I was already part of this organism, this strange organism which had its head progressively chopped off, you know, by each arrival, with this Frenchman and with the others who were inflamed by the crossing, right? But the transversal crossing of the trickster, whatever this woman was, made it possible for me to notice, to notice myself, as if for the first time. That’s postactivism. That, I’m going to act, I’m coming to Brazil, I have my schedule. But this woman, in her crossing, taught me that, no, I was part of a larger algorithm and I wasn’t by myself. And maybe if we draw away from the weathering patterns, no, from the presumptuous individuality of our lives and we notice the weathering patterns, you know, that make us part of something, things that have no names, algorithms that have no authors, then we might notice that what we call our attempts to save the world might just be another pendulum swing of a system that knows how to protect itself.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s great. It’s a great, beautiful.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sorry, long story.
Elizabeth Rovere
No, it’s a great story, but there’s just a couple of things I really love to talk to you about or just ask you about. First of all, like, there’s more and more, it seems like it’s more and more in the world, about we’re in these liminal realities or spaces. That things are unfolding and happening, whether it’s AI or whether it’s, you know, UFOs or whatever it is that are getting more and more legitimacy. Do you think that we are at this kind of Carl Jasper’s Axial Age phenomenon? Is that happening to us where we’re questioning what reality is and things are really starting to shift? Do you think that’s happening? And then the second question is if these liminal spaces or cracks are so rich, like you long for them, but why are people in general so afraid of these spaces? And how, I mean, how can we proceed to invite people more and more into them? Because I feel like it’s very rich too. But I do think I am also sometimes scared of them.
Bayo Akomolafe
I think of liminality as the in-betweenness of all things. We’re constantly in liminal spaces. Or rather the liminal is not a once in a blue moon thing. The liminal is always with us. Right? If you think about the world as processual, as riverine, as Panraic, then we are always in liminal spaces. However, that’s not to say everything flows all the time, you know, that’s not to say that there aren’t stabilities. We have bodies. Right. Even though our bodies are bleeding cells, you know, skin cells, all kinds of cells, and contributing to the dust, you know, commonwealth around us. Even though that is true, you know, we still have stabilities. Entanglement creates stability as much as it creates flow.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, that’s beautiful.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yeah. It’s not just everything is flowing. It’s that in the flow, stability is possible, right? Yeah. And those stabilities are how life becomes real, how life takes on form and shape. It’s how life becomes captive to its own dynamics. We practice the world into being. The world is a practice. The point here is that some practices can become so, so tight and so carceral that nothing else gives. Right. You know, we’re stuck on ourselves. We’re stuck in our perceptions. It’s in this space that the liminal shows up as cracks. In other words, the cracks are the ambassadors of liminality. Right? And in fact, it’s in times of sturdy, brittle practices of incarceration that cracks are more. You know, you don’t have cracks in water. You have cracks on hard surfaces. That’s when cracks are more crack-y. Right? So I think that we are just too well practiced in modernity at smoothing things over, at covering things up. And we have very specialized language for doing this work. Sometimes we call it justice, sometimes we call it healing, sometimes we call it inclusion. We’re just very well practiced at covering things up. Think about the pandemic. A major, a major distressing of world economies. Right. Erupts from years of abuse of ecologies. It just cracks open things. In my sense, as horrible as that experience was for people, leading to millions of deaths, it might have been the passing of a wild God of some kind. A God that we had been praying to, a God that we had been begging that please pass by and stop things so that climate change will stop happening. Please pass by. You know, we had been, with all our protesting, our joining about, we had prayed for that, that moment. We just weren’t expecting it to come in that way.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Bayo Akomolafe
And so it passed, and everything was stilled. We built spaces between us. We built monuments called six feet between us. And we. We said, oh, our bodies. We cannot touch our bodies with any form of levity any longer. We have to greet each other with masks because we cannot trust that the air will not carry our essences to each other. It was such a seminal priestly sacred moment. But then what did we do? We rushed into whatever we call it. Getting back to normal, recovery, health,
Elizabeth Rovere
Fixing it.
Bayo Akomolafe
We fixed it. We fixed it. And I’m wondering if that isn’t the model of how we cover things up, how we hold fort, hold space for the system in its continuity. Yes, that’s the start. Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it was this time where it unfolded this opportunity for things to really, fundamentally really change or shift. And then it started to. And then it didn’t. You know, we missed it. And I’m wondering if you feel that something else will be afoot that could provide that circumstance or opportunity to change.
Bayo Akomolafe
Right. So I want to come to this from the side, as I usually do, and suggest. No, we didn’t miss it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay.
Bayo Akomolafe
To say we missed it is to presume that we’re outside of the system. And that we’re trying to fix the system, and we’re just looking for the Microsoft engineer to just come and take a look at my software so you can tweak it a little bit and we can get the system working for us. But that’s not what I’m saying. We are the system. The system. It’s not that we’re outside of the system. I always remind people we’re not in capitalism, we’re capitalism speculating about itself. Right. So it’s not that we missed an opportunity to fix the system. It’s that the system is constantly proliferating, unsettled moments. Right. The system is not complete. No system is. Right. This is what I think of as blackness, but that blackness is an identity, as skin color, but blackness as the radical incompleteness of everything. Right. That makes decoloniality possible, that upsets colonial claims to exclusivity and power. I represent this blackness with a small B, not with a big B, that is trying to fight for space with whiteness. It’s the fugitive minor tone that infiltrates every field like a trickster, like a woman horizontally crossing a Brazilian line and upsets your claim to stability. Right. So with regards to the pandemic, it’s not that we missed an opportunity. It’s that the system quickly coalesced or convened bodies to cover the cracks. But in covering the cracks, it creates new cracks. Right? It always. Systems beguile and obscure their radical incompleteness. They’re ashamed. They blush because. Because the one thing they do not want to have known is that they’re not as complete or as pervasive or as universal as we think they are. And so even though the pandemic, in my way of speaking about it, felt like it was closed. It did spill into other kinds of perceptions. It did open up the field a little bit. Right. Suddenly, people started to question, do we have to go to work? Where did we get the idea that work…why not just do it from home? And things change with cracks. The system recognizes itself for the first time only in that flutter in the cracks emergence. And so we recognize ourselves for the first time. We ask new questions. We’re still using online schools. We’re still battling with the workforce. We’re still thinking about AI. We’re still thinking about what administrations should do should another pandemic happen. So the pandemic is still having an afterlife. There is no boat that has sailed. We are the boat. Exploring it. Sailing. Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
No, it’s really. Yeah. No, that’s striking. Very striking. So, too many questions. I mean, I feel like that’s kind of a lead into the idea of unschooling, not having to fix everything or fit people into something, rather than opening them up to become.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
So I really do want to talk about that, but I feel like I have to talk to you about this one question that I’ve been wanting to ask you since I read about you.
Bayo Akomolafe
Let’s do it.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s really important. So, you know you lost your dad when you were 15.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes
Elizabeth Rovere
I lost my dad when I was 20. And I. I really. It meant a lot to me, the way that you’ve written about that loss and, you know, how it was a point in your life where there was this rupture and you were like, I have to get to the heart of the matter.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I was really curious about what the heart of the matter is or was. And the whole point of the name Abayomi. Is that pronounced correctly?
Bayo Akomolafe
Yeah, it’s good.
Elizabeth Rovere
That it’s. There’s this. So that was your dad’s name and it’s also your name.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s also your son’s name.
Bayo Akomolafe
It’s also my son’s name, yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
But. So it was like the fact that it means like that you say that there’s a translation where it’s, they buried me, but they didn’t know I was a seed.
Bayo Akomolafe
Indeed.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I was just like, that’s amazing on so many different levels. And the one that hit me was about, like, death and soul and transformation. And what does that mean to die, but to be a seed? And then what is the heart of the matter? And maybe you could just speak to what I’m trying to talk about.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes. Those were very powerful moments. Still are moments that I breathe with. My name is Adebayo. And my mom says I also bear the weight, the burden of the name Abayomi, the fuller form of which is Ota Abayomi Olorun OJe, in Yoruba parlance. And what that means is the enemy would have vanquished, would have won, but God did not allow it. The poetic sibling of that is what you have said. That they thought they buried me, they did not realize I was a seed. In other words, the condition, the very conditions of my oppression became the conditions of my strange emancipation. Impressing me to the ground, they did not realize that that helped me flourish.
Elizabeth Rovere
I was thinking about it in terms of, like, death. Like, you know. You know, they say if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. But, like, what about when it kills you?
Bayo Akomolafe
Yeah
Elizabeth Rovere
What about when you bury. What if death is burying a seed?
Bayo Akomolafe
Oh, that’s so beautiful a question. Well, I think death needs a new cosmology. The stories we tell on the West African, in West Africa and among the Yoruba people, we tell the stories of death gaining a queer kind of life. It’s like in dying, we witness, or we experience a horizontal kind of life. You know, we’re used to vertical life. But when a tree falls down and we name it as dead, it still generates other kinds of life. It still proliferates other kinds of possibilities. It springs fungi, and it becomes part of a different kind of network. So death is not a dead place. Death is strangely generative. One of my most fascinating stories to repeat is the story of Eshu, the divine trickster of the Yoruba pantheon, the Orisha of the crossroads, stealing into the slave ship to travel across the Atlantic, right? He breached the moral membranes of victory. He understood, like Martin Luther King, that wrestling with the slavers to drag the pendulum to his side of things. Because the story is that they were fighting all of the supernatural beings. The Orishas were fighting the white slavers. But he decided not to fight. He decided to stay with the monster. And so he crept into the ships and sailed into the unknown world. He had something to do that we know nothing about. He followed an autistic politics, you know. And there in the ethical breach, he creolized the world. He made it possible for other forms of religion, other forms of perception to thrive. Santería, Candomblé, Capoeira, martial arts framed as dance. The creolization of the world is only possible when we’re willing to stay with our failures as they emerge as cracks in the formations of success and legibility and intelligibility. And maybe that’s what I call a parapolitics. So yes, there is an Abayomi in every moment. There is a liminality that is creeping out in every moment, in this moment, in the… As we all witness the decline of the empire of the United States, you know, and it is declining. These are the end times for the American empire. Right. Not just economically, I dare say spiritually and politically. Right. The world is shape shifting. Right. It’s in these times that the temptation to rush to some other modality, neurotypical modality of victory is highest. I think this is the time to go underground, is to travel like Eshu.
Elizabeth Rovere
I’m kind of curious about this Eshu. As I was thinking about it, as I was reading what you were saying, and I just couldn’t help but thinking about this like, this trickster and this like the shape shifting God and the like. It’s. I mean, so my question to you is, because you grew up Christian.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
So do you. I was thinking like Jesus is kind of a trickster a little bit with the parables and like the paradoxical talk and speech and you have to like, kind of, you’re just like, wait a minute, what? And that’s Jesus. Instead of like what you grow up when you’re in a kind of more of a traditional institutional Christianity.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
You don’t really catch that. And I just thought it was really interesting and I was wondering if there’s a way that you’ve kind of blended these things in your spirit, your own spirituality.
Bayo Akomolafe
Yes. This is cheesy, but Eshu is right there in the name Jesus. Right? Oh, the letters E, S, U. That’s Eshu. To spell Eshu, you need an E and S and a U. So in that order, it’s right. Right smack dab in the middle of Jesus. So it’s obviously cheesy, but I often use that to think about, yeah, Jesus as trickster. Jesus as upsetting the moral paradigms of this day. Jesus as transfiguring, moving between the saccharine and the mundane and the divine and the unexpected and the fugitive and the criminal and the less than Lord and the more than Lord and the, the human and the fungal. You know, there’s, there’s all of these things happening. But you’re right, that wasn’t the Jesus I grew up with. The Jesus I grew up with had a Tommy Hilfiger suit, business suit, clean shaven, had a soundtrack that followed him everywhere. It was money, money, money, money. Money. That was the Jesus I grew up with. Rich, private jet. That was the Jesus I grew up with. The territorialized, stabilized Jesus, which was anticipated in the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky, sorry. In the Brothers Karamazov. In that parable somewhere in the text in which Jesus returns to the church and the church imprisons him.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes, yes.
Bayo Akomolafe
And they’re like, what are you doing? They basically say, what are you doing? You came back for real. You’re ruining everything. Business is booming. And then you just come and show up and you’re like. And poor Jesus is probably like, but that was part of the plan, right? Didn’t you read? I was supposed to return? And they’re like, not now. You’re ruining too many things. You know? They imprison him. Yes. I grew up in an imprisoned Jesus. I think there is a Jesus that does not want to be the icon of an empire or does not want to be the sheep of an everlasting kingdom. Right. There’s a Jesus of the wilderness that is still making his way through it, that is still longing for answers and only knows how to alchemize good questions.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s great. I love that. Thank you for saying that. I didn’t ask. I was curious about why you would talk about your dad as being cool.
Bayo Akomolafe
Oh, my dad is cool. My dad was James Brown cool.
Elizabeth Rovere
Really?
Bayo Akomolafe
With the sideburns and stuff? Yes, he was cool. I could only aspire to be as cool as he was.
Elizabeth Rovere
So, you know, as we’ve sitting here learning that your work challenges the boundaries of how we think about the world and ourselves and what it means to be human. So what do you think or hope or want people to take with them when they meet your ideas? And since answers are like, sometimes a slap in the face, and questions are the ones that we should be.
Bayo Akomolafe
Obscure. Answers obscure what is already happening. Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And we. We want. We like questions. What question could you leave us with to our audience, our listeners?
Bayo Akomolafe
What question? Let me move towards it in this way. When you said. When you said at the beginning of our beautiful conversation, sister. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Elizabeth Rovere
Me too.
Bayo Akomolafe
When you said that, I feel a spaciousness. I feel calm, warmth, you know, like there’s more. I recognize that because. And I smiled a bit because that is constantly what I get from people that I speak with. It’s not as an effect of me, it’s an effect of a combination of where people are and the intervention. The distressing fugitive intervention of these conversations that maybe, maybe we don’t have to fix the world. Maybe we’re not all that. Maybe we’re microbial. Maybe we’re this or that. Maybe there are other actors in the field and maybe it’s not left to us to carry, like Atlas, you know, the entire world on our shoulders. And we can rest assured that the world is carrying itself. We’re not the ones carrying it. We’re not the ones making the web. And I understand why people immediately feel a sense of [exhale]. Because it means it’s that maybe modernity is running out of room, but there’s sanctuary. Maybe it’s not an attempt of making more room. Maybe it’s an invitation to make sanctuary. And making sanctuary is about cultivating. Cultivating. Cultivating an attentiveness, a kind of attention to the cracks in where they emerge. How they emerge. It’s cultivating this sensibility, this co-accountability, so that we’re more responsive to these monstrous eruptions. So my question then is where does it hurt? Maybe that’s what I’ll leave us with. Where does it hurt? Where doesn’t it come together? Where are the places in your body, in your world, where the logic that has been given to you, the logic by which you operate doesn’t quite hold itself well? Where is it becoming exhausting? Where is grief lurking? Where is a ghost hiding in the ghost lights of the theaters of politics which you are embedded in? Where are the promises of modernity failing? Right. The idea that, for instance, this is just one stream out of a million, that eventually, as we gain mastery and sophistication over our technologies, we would work less and we would enjoy luxurious lives supported by robotic servants doing everything we want. But where does it feel like that isn’t panning out? Right. When you examine the story of your life and of your world and of your expectations and anticipatory modalities of how life ought to unfold? Where is the story glitching? Where is the program failing? Maybe that could be a speculative space for us to gather around and think and eat and read together.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s beautiful.
Bayo Akomolafe
Thank you.
Elizabeth Rovere
Thank you so much. Really appreciate having you here. Thank you. Thank you.
Bayo Akomolafe
Thank you very much, sister. Thank you.
Elizabeth Rovere
Bayo, thank you so much for joining us today. We loved having you with us. So many things in this episode stayed with me, from creating sanctuary to sensorial apostasy, ontological fugitivity, and also the energy of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster God. I just loved this episode. Please let us know what resonated with you in the comments. We’d really love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this episode and think somebody else might too, please rate the show and share it with a friend. Follow up and leave us a comment @wonderstruckpod on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Wonderstruck is produced by Nastasya Gecim and edited by Niall Kenny at Striking Wonder Productions. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, Travis Reece, Baillie Newman and Josh Wilcox. And remember, let wondering be your compass.
