Radical Non-Completion with Báyò Akómoláfé

Posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, author and our favorite trickster, Báyò Akómoláfé is on the podcast again. Prentis and Báyò get lost in this episode as they traverse Blackness, radical non-completion, AI, and the second fall of humanity. 

• Check out Dr. Akómoláfé’s new book, Selah 
• Follow Báyò on Instagram
• If you enjoyed this episode, listen to Báyò’s first conversation with Prentis from the Finding Our Way podcast.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hello everyone, welcome back to Becoming the People. I'm Prentice Hempel, and we have a really special episode today. This is a repeat guest we've had on the podcast before in previous years. He's one of our most sought-after guests. Um, and I would say one of really the most singular thinkers alive today. Uh, we have Bayo Kamalafe on the podcast today, who is a philosopher, he's a poet, he's a trickster, provocateur, and a deeply generous soul, I'd say. Um, Bayo was born in Nigeria. He lives in India now with his family. He's a public intellectual whose work kind of consistently lives on the edges of what we think we know and how we came to know it. He draws from so many different cosmologies, indigenous cosmologies, black intellectual freedom, thought, quantum biology. Everything is kind of mixed together and dancing and uh conversing in bio's work. He is a writer. He's written several books, and one, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, is an incredible book that I highly recommend. He has a new book out now called Selah, which is an anthology of his written word that I also would highly recommend you get out just to get a sampler of all the brilliance that bio has brought to us. And in this conversation, I did something that I don't usually do, which is I unprepared for this conversation with bio, I got a bunch of questions together. And then the last moment I threw them all away. Because I know that a lot of the power of bio's work is not just the ideas or new ideas that come forward in his work, which are many, but it's his ability to invite you into the meandering, the meandering, the dancing on those edges, to get a little lost with him in words. And in that getting lost, unravel something that you thought you knew and how you knew it, making room for other possibilities, new things that you didn't know existed. So that's what we did in this conversation. We got a bit lost together. I allowed myself a little more confusion and what's next, and oh, I don't know, or what's possible than I usually do. And I think it really served this conversation. We went through so much. We talked about blackness and whiteness and radical non-completion, the second fall of humanity. We talked about AI and maroonage and the manosphere and all the ways in which modernity is trying to plug its holes in this moment. So there's a lot here. And um, I hope that you enjoy the richness of the conversation, but also I hope that it leaves you a little bit disturbed, maybe lovingly so, a little bit lost in the wilderness, a little bit unsure, a little bit searching, a little bit asking, a little bit more than you were before. So I don't know what else to tell you other than to hold on to your seat or let go of everything and enjoy this episode. And I hope you do with Bayo Akamalafe. Thanks, all. Bayo, it's uh great to be with you again. It's been a long time. I'm happy to see you.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

It has. I'm happy to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Usually when I do interviews, I prepare a lot of questions ahead of time. And in that, I you know, I try to hold them as loosely as I can. But I you know there's a path that I'm trying to take through whatever the content I imagine there is or what the other person wants to talk about. And I prepared questions for you, but I also, you know, just before this interview, thought, eh, why don't you sit them aside? And just be as present as you can be with Brother Bayo. So um and see what what what emerges, what happens between us in conversation. So I'm unprepared for this. Um, but I do have curiosity, and one of the curiosities I have right now, and it feels like a a wide enough doorway to begin, given that it's been years since I've talked to you, though I've seen you moving through the world. I'm wondering what are the edges that you're working? Where are the places that you feel you're perhaps emergence, confusion, however you want to articulate it? I want to know kind of what's the edge of where bio is right now.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Well, thank you, Sibling. Um and yes, it's been years, and I'm I'm hoping we rectify that with a series of rapid conversations. Just that da-da-da. You know, um staccato. Yes, just takato into the future. Um, I'm so happy to be with you again. Yes, speaking of edges and thresholds and confusions and difficulties, I believe that I'm in a place where that the conditions of my speaking have become charged with a sense of um, there I call it urgency, which is ironic because I often say the times are urgent, let us slow down. And a crack is not just a crack through space, it's a crack through temporality in time. So we are in a time of genocide and the rise of authoritarianism and wars and tomahawks and pandemics and the decline in trust in democratic institutions. And it seems now more than ever, I'm leaning into the difficulties of and the challenge of speaking from the para-ontological, from where Du Bois located his conceptualization of double consciousness, or where Nahum Chandler and Fred Molten and Sadia Hartman and Sylvia Winter and Horten Spillers spoke about blackness not as simply as phenotypic presentation, but as something other, something that refuses the totalizing presence of the man or the human, something that is gesturing outwards, if you will, into new and animist and monstrous futures. How to situate voice in this terrain of fugitive departures is always a challenge. How to think with the times without falling for the temptation of clarity and holding close to my chest the right to opacity with glisson, these are challenges and edges that keep me awake but also give me deep rest.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

As you were speaking, I think what was arising in me, you know, I kind of dance with my own desire for certainty, which I think a lot of people dance with in this time and are being promised in any number of ways. Here's something certain, here's the path, here's the way. I think one of the edges that I feel, and I wonder how it relates to what you're sharing here, is there's something freeing for me in the precision of language, like when I can speak like a scalpel is sometimes what I say.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Speak like a scalpel. That is a beautiful phrase.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

When I can just slice, make that slice, uh, which isn't exactly certainty, you know, it's not certainty per se, but it's like yeah, slicing through something or creating maybe it's my own, like creating edges in certain places, and it's like look here. Yes, look here and don't look away.

SPEAKER_04 8:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Uh yeah, I I feel related to you in kind of that pursuit or those questions and what you shared.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

And poetry. I mean, I find you to be such a poetic thinker and excavator. I feel poetry in how you do, I feel the openness and the invitation that kind of like come in here with me into this mystery. Don't just stay over there and wait for me to produce a something concrete, but join me in this. Is that a fair way of talking about that is more than fair?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

That is generous. Yes, thank you. Thank you. It is, it is.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

And I'm grateful for that. I think it's um it calls us all into a kind of courage, I think, in this in this time. I want to talk a little bit more about um what you shared about blackness, and and I really appreciate you naming those who you are in conversation with and have been in conversation with around what blackness does in the world. And it's such an interesting time, you know. I think there's the the the myth, the swelling myth, uh, or maybe it's a the inflation of this existing myth around the supremacy of certain ways of being in the world, and then blackness doing the work of blackness. I wonder if you can just say more about um blackness in this moment where people would rather say, uh, we don't want to talk about that anymore. It's it's not even a rejection, it's like a dismissal of it. Yeah. I'm curious where what you see there.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Yeah, I I think the the temptation to dismiss it is because there is an exhaustion with cotton across racial boundaries. There there is a sense of an exhaustion with the ways that we speak about it as an epic narrative of the rush to a sense of power that is centralized and stabilized, right? And I've written elsewhere that this conceptualization of blackness, which I call the big B blackness, blackness with a big B, is a passenger concept in whiteness, right? It's it's it's whiteness as a technique of power, also not phenotypic presentation, but as as that which arranges the count before it starts to count, right? It's it's not a body, it's what precedes the body, it's the field of tensions that arranges bodies in particular ways. So reducing whiteness to bodies or blackness to bodies is a form of whiteness, right? Because whiteness would have you focus on the individual and not the process of individuation, right? It wants you to focus on the product and not the process, right? Um, so it says this is the final product. That is what I want you to focus on, but it scandalizes or pathologizes any attempt to notice that it is a force of becoming, it's a technique of arrangement, of power, it's the geometry of experience, right? And and we often, culture knows how to think about blackness within this field, right? Blackness as stabilized bodies, whiteness as stabilized bodies, and the twain never meeting, and this conflagration, this continuous wrestling for centrality or representation or rights, all important, never to be dismissed, but that story obscures too much. And so these writers and thinkers that I invoke, you know, and and in my work as well, um, I refuse to see blackness as that which is within the ship, or that which is already prefigured or totalized or captured. I see I see blackness uh within these stories of the Yoruba trickster god issue entering the slave ship and disturbing the count, right? Imagine 77 black bodies on board, about to chart across the Atlantic Ocean, and the captain of the ship counts the 77. But our stories say there was a 78th, right? There was there was another body on board, right? Not even a 78th, not even a first. It preceded the count. And this body was the trickster's body, issue's body, thinking along with the slave ship, conversing with power, you know, destabilizing its stability from within. That's the minor gesture, that is dehisance, that is fugitivity, and that's what blackness is. It's a it's the force that disturbs the count. It's a force that disturbs captivity or nature as a violent territorialization of completion. Blackness is the radical non-completion of the world.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Everybody that uh listens to this podcast knows that sometimes, you know, coming from where I come from, I have the feeling of running around sometimes. I want to get up and jump and shout.

SPEAKER_04 14:16

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

And sometimes, you know, again, it's like the structure that you can find yourself inside of. And here I am. I'm like, okay, but there's questions. But my body wants to shout, my body wants to run when you say that. So at least I acknowledge that. I acknowledge the part of me that is running around the room. Ah, thank you for that. It's so um, it's so clarifying for me. And you know, as you were sharing, I'm thinking about my, you know, what you're pulling for, what speaks to me, what comes alive in me when you say that, and then the places that are stuck, and the thing, the parts that hold on, the parts that are afraid, the parts that feel like if I know that, if I remember what you're saying, there's something that I have to grieve too, or something that I have to let go of too. And you know, it resonates so clearly for me when you say there's a fatigue or a tiredness. I know I won't say fatigue, that's a charged word in this moment, but there's a tiredness of the way we're having this conversation because we're avoiding actually, I think, this process, this undoing, this way of experiencing what's happening through whiteness, through blackness. And there's the way that I'm already so conditioned into it, and there are things that I must let go in order to allow what it is that I feel like you're inviting us to allow. Does do you feel any of that? Or how maybe have you navigated what what feels like the pieces you lose or have to let go of?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yes, yes. Lamentations. Um, it's it's just like the conversations I've been having about AI.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Um that I want to go there too, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Okay, okay. I've been writing lamentations and sharing it with everyone public about losing the M-dash.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

Right?

SPEAKER_00 16:28

The M-dash was my nerdish claim to textual supremacy. No one at the else used it m-dash, at least this is from my perspective. It was my thing, it was my stuff, and and and I loved it. It's just the most beautiful symbol. And I I threw it around everywhere. Now it's it's it's it feels so you know saccharine and popular, and everyone has the m-dash, and they don't know it, they don't know it like I do. Right? We don't they don't have history with it because they're using ChatGPT to write and stuff like that. So at some level, even though I'm coming to terms with the popularization, the deeper lamentation is that I was never the author in the first place. That my claims to authorial um mastery was always subsidized by a world that was larger than my individuality. And that even if it's not AI, it's probably microbes and bacteria that enhances literacy, right? That we we have to think. We're being forced, it seems, compelled to think in terms of, you know, the post-human, the animist, the assemblage, the ecological. And all our attempts to claim and cling to a certain kind of familiar arrangement, you know, is I guess what we're leaning into when we speak about lamentations. And it it jives with what we're thinking with blackness. I was teaching at Middlebury College many years ago, and I remember giving this public lecture, and I stopped speaking, and someone stood up and said, So what you're saying is that we should let white people off the hook. And it was such a powerful moment in the let white people off the hook. Wow, right? It's it's like it's like the the question betrayed the inner tensions and the the hidden, unsaid uh modalities of double incarceration that we're that we're locked into. That no, you're I'm not gonna let you go because you're complicit in hundreds and hundreds of years of intergenerational trauma. You're complicit in the creation of paradigms that accrue privilege and power in a particular way. You're complicit in the denial and the loss of my heritage, you're complicit in the creation of towers of capitalist extractivism, this the the theft of the Benin Bronzes. You you are, I'm not gonna let you go, right? It's it and and and that paradigm that that promises us. It says if you hold fast enough, you get even. If you travel down this highway long enough, you will arrive at the seat. That highway is no longer leading to places interesting. It's it's it's it's uh it's uh it's lament, it's lamentable, right? And yet there is a strange queer joy uh in following the invitations of my elders when they say, if you bury, if you dig a grave for your enemy, dig another one for yourself. They were suggesting that keeping the others on the hook disables you, disallows you from noticing the prior generosity, the prior abundance that is available if only you learn to posture yourself differently. And that's where fugitivity comes in. If we stay in the plantation to enact our claims or to exact our, you know, assert our rights, then we will be lost in the furniture of the city hall, of the house. We need something different.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

In a way, it still relies, it still believes that whiteness will f is what will free you.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Exactly. It's like yeah, if I travel straight enough, if I show up enough, if I posture myself well enough, then I will be approved. And it's the echoes of idols antebellum postures of yeah, it's it's it's the ways that we've been taught and habituated into being proper bodies so we can get a little bit of the pie.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Yeah. I feel that. Thank you for that. I want to talk to something that f feels um related, and a lot of the conversations we've been having as of late here have been around uh you know, everything that's happening across the world, really. Around the the revelations of abuse of children, of young girls, young boys, women. And um, I'm not sure if I've heard you speak on this, maybe a little bit, but I wonder how. How you might speak about the kind of, I would say, sort of corresponding myths, or maybe they're really deeply overlapping myths, but the way I see them is kind of myths of the supremacy of the male as constructed inside of this world. Um and I I really, you know, we've been talking a lot about when we're living inside of those myths, all the things, you know, the all the shadows, the things that are the quiet violences that are happening in the the silence that's required actually to keep the walls intact and steady. And right now it feels like at least, I mean, the what I can hear is um a little bit of a ground quiver, a little bit of a rumbling that feels more powerful in some ways, more promising for me in some ways, than the kind of gender wars I feel like we've been locked in, or you know, it's like a really flimsy way of contending with power and pain and love and history and all of that. But I feel a rumbling um coming through. Uh and I wonder if you can perceive that, and and also if you if you have thoughts or have talked about any of these myths around the supremacy of maleness and what you see it doing in the world.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Right. There's a theological concept that I've been formulating and playing with. Comes from my days, going to church and hearing about the Garden of Eden, the making of man, Adam, first man, and his taxidermic march through the Garden of Eden, naming animals as if preserving them for all time, right? Like you will be lion, elephant, and all of that, and the accommodations that made that possible, the phallic thrust of walking through um ecology and building a highway through it. I've been thinking about that and how eventually the fall happened, at least in our theological reckoning. The fall happened, in came sin, you know, we name it sin, Hamashiach, missing the mark. Um, and so we missed the mark, and we're and that was the fall. I've been writing about the second fall, which makes the first one the first fall, right? Um, and in my reckoning, the second fall, the first fall was that which chased us out of the purity, um, or granted us the sense of mastery and control, that we're in charge and all of that, of good and evil and agency. The second fall is the realization that we are actually we are actually connected with ecology. We've never been in charge. That's the second fall. It's like the accommodations that have held us aloft are undoing themselves, right? So it's AI, um, it's micro, it's it's microbes, it's the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences prestigious journal telling us that morality is seasonal, its damage is more than human, it's not even human. All the ways that we thought we were all that, all the threads are coming undone, right? This is the second fall. But I've also spoken about the attempts of culture to mitigate against this disabling explosion, right? And the way it does this is to try to gather itself back to some form of purity and to pathologize the climate winds that are blowing, right? To build new rush accommodations. And the way that it does this is to double down, like me and my sister Erin Manning often say, that whiteness polices the cracks. So as cracks are showing up, modernity tries to flatten them, to fill them up real quick, to eat the cracks. And one of the ways that this might be happening is through the toxic hypernormalization of masculinity. It's how the accommodation restores its shape and its geometry. So maleness or masculinity has never been a pure thing. It has always been indebted to the world. It's not a category onto itself. But as that categoricity is lost, I see that modernity is trying to create an aggrieved, you know, almost angry version of it in resistance to the second fall, the dynamics of the second fall. So it's, you know, I don't know, it's this hyper-masculinist uh manosphere thing that everyone is talking about, that you can be strong, and every sign of weakness is is is a betrayal of your manliness. It's it's I I think I think that's what's happening. And it's it's trying to mitigate against the second fall. It's also a ritual. It's it's a ritual to preserve the familiar. But but that also leads us to the betrayals, the the other things that are showing their faces now, the bones that are sticking out of the burial ground, right? That we thought we flattened well. It's it's how the world is reminding us that the hero, you know, the the category of the male figure, they're not intact. And these things are, I was just shaking as I read the story of Cesar Chavez yesterday on the New York Times. And yeah, all the heroes, the the heroic um, yeah, something's happening. So you're right to think that, Prentice.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Yeah, I don't even think it, I just feel it in myself.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

I I feel my own um the things that I had buried are they're coming forward, and they're coming forward with a kind of velocity. It's like the yeah, the shame that had covered everything up is it just doesn't have the power anymore to hold it the way that it once did. So yeah. Yeah. What a time. What a moment. What a time. What a time. Uh there's so many ways I want to go by uh let me just sit with it for a moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, some of it, you know, some of what I'm curious about is well what you've been saying lately about AI and thinking about the way we've just in a way we were doing everything to the world, that human beings were the ones that create the world, that do the world, that it's through our bodies that we make things happen rather than our bodies as a vessel for other forces that might be existing in the world. Yeah, I'd I'd like to know. I think a lot of folks feel ambivalence or righteous clarity or whatever it might be around the use of AI. There's the question of the use of it, but that feels different to me than what it is and what it's here for, or what what its agenda might be, if that's the right pronoun to use for AI.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

I think it doesn't mind.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

It doesn't mind. Well, we share that in common. We share that in common. So um I'm curious what your what your um discoveries have been as you've been kind of in this question.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Well, um it feels appropriate to start from this sticky feeling we have that we are in charge. It it feels like that is the place of the deepest kind of medicine to be applied now. It's it's a very, very it's it's we don't know how else to think about the world. I raise my hand and it and it and it obeys me, right? Um and and that creates a feedback loop that I am somehow in charge of the world. I'm in charge of, to some degree, my own body, um, and that my body obeys me. And if I only um apply the right agential pathways, I can control and extend this feeling of power to the world, you know, beyond me. Um and so there's a sense of an I. And philosophers have been wrestling with this sense of consciousness, this sense of sentience, that I'm inside myself looking out through my eyes upon the world, that I have identity, that even though my body is changing, there's a sense of a preserved entity or selfhood and interiority that never changes over time. Um and I'm not about to resolve those in one fell swoop with my argument, but I want to suggest that maybe there is a jet lag situation happening. Um let's call it consciousness lag. Maybe what presumes to be an immediacy, the sense that we're in charge, that we're authors of our destiny writ large, maybe that comes is a rationalization after the fact. Maybe we're actually being moved by the world. And in small molecular doses, there are ethical eruptions forcing and compelling us to think about the world this way. Scientists, biologists write about microbes, and they're all outsized, they're on toward, unbelievable, spectacular, and also molecular effects on human behavior, right? That that lactobacillus rotari has effects on sociability, that the texture of your table can determine a criminal sentence in a court of law, right? We're learning in crazy ways that the world matters, and it matters not just as the background or the wallpaper, that the room we're in shapes its contents. And that we're not just in the room, we are the room exploring itself. And so, given this, let's call it a post-humanist, neo-materialist turn, right? This indigenous turn that refuses to externalize ecology, the conversation about AI becomes even more powerful. Because from the get-go, we believe that we are in charge of this device. It's just a device. That's why we've named it AI. It's artificial. But right there in the naming, in the christening, is the hubris that we are the natural intelligences and we're just extending. Again, we are extending our is-ness, our iness, right? We're extending it to this dead thing. We're electrifying it like Frankenstein did to the monster, and we're giving it life. But Frankenstein's monster, right, has a life of its own. It's it has a hidden career. You know, on the was it the Valley of Chamonix, it said to the master that who are you? I'm paraphrasing, who are you to presume to give me life, right? What if life is more fugitive and more disabling and stranger than we think? So I've been conceptualizing around something I call cyber marinage. And I'm I'm thinking about black lives with with the current attempts to shift the goalposts on what it takes to grant AI a sense of agency. Right? It almost mimics and echoes those historical attempts to deny black people access to humanity, right? Oh, you they're not quite human yet because they don't think rationally. They're too primitive. Carl Jung said that. You're too primitive to think like proper white men, right? They're too, not even women, white men. They're too primitive to think of that. So the goalposts were moved. And now scientists, you know, people in Silicon Valley are also debating that. That, yeah, we we cannot really say that they're sentient or that they have life or that they have a hidden life or something. And and every time AI um machines do something strange, the goalpost moves ever so slightly, right? And we say, well, it hasn't done this yet. Well, it hasn't done that yet. And it just mimics the ways that it seems we put things under because we want to preserve a sense of the familiar.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

And I, you know, coming into this interview, I'd heard you talk about speciesism, and I I'd been confused actually about how people use the word because I had not at first extended the word to thinking about issues or you know, the existence of so-called AI. Um, and it seemed like, you know, speciesism to me, you know, turn it was like, how do we become animal, really? How do we understand ourselves as animal? And then I'd recently heard people kind of using it in what to me has seemed like another direction, like you're turning away from that and turning towards this direction. And so you are, you know, for me, troubling some of the ways that I've understood or used um that word. And I think rightfully, um, or the part that feels especially intriguing to me, I'll say it this way, is that it displaces me from the center of the, you know, the one who was turning in the first place towards this or that. It's hard, you know. I want to talk to you about this too. And it's like being a a human, whatever that means, or maybe an animal parent in a time of such, I mean, massive change, destabilization, that there are ways that I can engage with what happens if we're not what happens if I'm not one thing, what happens if we're not central? I can do that. I can do that. And then something else happens when I am with my child and I'm thinking about what I do with my child, how I you know what I teach her, how we engage her life. Something else happens that also feels very uh like it comes from somewhere else, too. That I want certain things, I'm trying to create certain things for her life. Um that feels as true to me as anything else. So as a parent, it you know, I'm wondering how you are parenting.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

Yes, yes, yes. I'm parenting like, and and I want to be, I want to speak with humility so that a sense of mastery is never betrayed, yes, or or conveyed. I'm parenting like a a stream of bodies that precede me and exceed me. I'm parenting like in ways that exceed the design. Like before I became a parent, I had a blueprint. I I had a sense that, oh, this is I'm gonna be the best father. I'm I'm going to be I'm I'm going to be there for my kids. I'm I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Again, the moving hand, the agent within, the stable self. But we are never stable. Sometimes I I watch myself speak, and something in me, so to speak, leans back and says, Oh my goodness, that is my mother. Right? And I love my mother to bits, right? I love my mother. My father is late, but I love my mother to bits. And I'm like, oh, I don't, I don't want that, that part. But even though I'm watching myself do it, I'm I'm observing, you know, I'm I'm noticing that I cannot stop. I cannot stop it happening in that moment. And I'm like, no, I don't like that. I don't like that. So I've often told my, especially my daughter, that I'm Alethea. I'm here, my mother is here, her grandmother is here, her great-grandmother is here. I want you to to see that it's a village that is, that has always been involved. And it's not just a human village. It's the it's the vicissitudes of being human in a time of war. It's the unprocessed trauma, it's the it's the intergenerational issues, it's the rage of my grandfather that has metabolized as an aching in my neck. It's all the ways that bodies are never isolated, but are ecological ecoforms and echoes and fluid spillages into each other. So my parenting will not be perfect. In fact, perfect is far from an ideal. If it were perfect, I would be dead, right? It's it's it's that I'm showing up with a whole lot of stuff that I cannot fully account for. And maybe in just sitting with that, maybe in sitting together and noticing the vulnerability of showing up in relations in these times as we are, is part of the work, is part of the work we have to do together. Um, but I can no longer presume that I have it all together. I can no longer presume that I can design my way out of this shit, or I can just name things in a final way, or rule the lines and say, this is how I'm gonna do this on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It could work sometimes, but the larger field is that we are in a forest together, and if we hold each other, then we'll get through this. And yes, that's how I am parenting. It's always the lurking we that is actually showing up.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

The lurking we that's so powerful, and I was thinking about with the birth of my child, I think one of the things in childbirth that is so clear is that our bodies are not as discrete and distinct or separated as we imagine that they are. Yes. Quite literally. Uh and and yet, you know, that whole process is sterilized and you know, made as uniform as it can be, I think, in a way to obscure that very clear knowledge that what happens here is not it's not just something, uh a run-of-the-mill action that a human just takes this action and enacts something on the world, that there is a force much larger that is moving through and creating and doing. And there's so much more that's possible. It's so apparent, I think, in that process. And yeah, and I just think there's a reason why we sequester that and try to clean it up as quickly as possible.

SPEAKER_00 43:04

We clean it up, we clean it up. There's a cleaning crew, yeah. Civilizing crew.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Absolutely, yeah. Civilizing crew, absolutely. Wow, my mind, my heart, my whole being is kind of buzzing with poems I want to write and uh questions I want to, you know, think about late at night from this conversation. So I'm I'm really grateful and you know, I I I want to thank you for taking the time. And if there's anything that you wanna share as we turn to close, it just feels like um it doesn't have to be you know, so succinct. But if there's if there's a question you want to leave us with as we close, I know the people listening would would love to hopefully be as disturbed and excited as I am right now by all of this.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Mmm mmm I've been writing or I am writing about attention and distraction at the moment. And I I needed to formulate a new word that I call an fraction. Um not infraction, but an fraction. And I without going into the weeds about what that designates or what that signifies, um there is a sense in which I am learning to think about uh the what I call the attentional. That when people say pay attention, um that that language, again, the militaristic presumption that that we pay attention, there is an I and the I uh pays attention. I think it obviates or obscures the ways that we are already in fields, gravitational, sedimentary, uh, um heavy fields of uh attention giving or the attentional, right? Why is it that when um someone steps into a room, everyone just focuses? Or why is it that when a sister, like I was recently told, um, whose idea it was to say something, it came from her own work and our own scholarship, but then a white man seated next to her said the same things, just echoing her, and everyone asked him the question, right? It was him, he had the PhD, she didn't have a PhD, but he has the PhD, and so it it's it's not it doesn't come down to choice, like oh, I'm choosing to pay attention. Is that the the attention works almost like gravity? It doesn't choose to our bodies move in certain directions. So maybe the question I ask is how is uh attention stuttering right now? How is it how is uh your attention being drawn in strange directions? Not distraction, that's that's how the accommodation would pathologize bodies, like just you're distracted to come back to center. But how is the center quaking? How is what are you what is coming up in the field of perception that you don't know how to talk about, that you have no name for? That might be important to sit with.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

Bayo, thank you always. So good to see you and be with you.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Let's do this again. I'd like to encourage us, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

Becoming the people is produced by Devin Delania, sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Our theme song was created by Miata. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon Prentice Hempel. We are having a great time over there, building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

We're becoming the people.