Public Intellectual | Author | Distinguished Professor | Visionary Founder, TEN | Father and Life-Partner
I often speak about falling apart, about disability, about disintegration, about losing our way, about being composted, and about failure. No sooner would I finish writing these words than many immediately seek to resignify these unruly sentiments in positive light. You know, to put an optimistic spin on it. As if the caterpillar's melting into an imaginal goop always carries the promise that it will emerge on the other side of its decomposition, safe and sound and flutteringly butterfly-like. As if darkness were a vassal to light, only there to serve its constant suzerainty. As if the gist of failure is that it ends with popular ideations of success. As if a throughline shoots its imperial way through the flow and tide and tussle and tumble and mumbling messiness of things, a beam-me-up-scotty deus ex machina that always arrives at the full stop of the gilded script. As if the monster - that prop in the vaunted saga of the hero's journey - doesn't have it's own stories to tell. Disintegration is not 'positive'; "love and light" do not necessarily attend to the occult practices of seeds buried in the earth or the subaltern parties zombie bacteria throw in the heat of the dark. And disability is not a lounge in the terminus of the neurotypical. In an open-ended world, the anthropocentrism of positivity obscures the pressingly urgent ways things fall apart - not to get back up again, but to be apart. The undulating waves of becoming do not carry any guarantees with them. And "healing" is not the final end of all things or rights we are entitled to. Much in the same way the neologism of "failing forward" has come to concretize corporate commitments to certitude in times of chaos, the expectation that we are entitled to confident futures and convenient closures diminishes our capacities to welcome the strange. The world is too rich, too promiscuous, too generative to host hope and stability alone. Indeed, it would seem that the universe is more prolific at generating loss than it is at keeping things together. In the selfsame moment it manufactures the membrane, it summons the conditions of its decay. Perhaps, in these posthumanist times, we'd have to meander a little, stray a little more, stutter even more, and cultivate the capacities to relinquish the tyranny of Happily-Ever-After, if only to listen to elsewheres between the lines. Bayo Akomolafe
Once again, thank you for your work, Bayo Akomolafe. As we sit here in Australia observing RUOK? Day, we found ourselves this morning having a conversation about it being okay to not be okay. Thank you for pointing to the beauty and possibility of suspending our judgments of good/bad, positive/negative, okay/not okay. That this constant binary categorising of experience locks us out of the messy essence and subtle mystery of our dynamic and rich universe.
Working from a healing-centred stance, I also observe that there are many unhelpful associations and understandings of healing as a fix, or a cure, or a reset. These perspectives fail to take into account that where healing manifests, like death, healing is ultimately passing on information to the next generation, it has its own purpose and principles and timings. Humans have learned to manipulate (rather than participate in) healing in a way that so often perpetuates dis-ease, instead of letting things die, compost, be re-integrated. There is a powerful medicinal plant comfrey, 'bone-knit', but if applied on a deep wound that is still inflamed, it is so powerful that the wound may close before the inflammatory process has completed its work, creating greater toxicity in the body, which could even become gangrenous. This, to me, represents what is happening all around, to 'fix' our bodies, our communities, our politics, our environment superficially with expensive, experimental 'cures' that simply compound the issues so we can barely discern what is what. It's time to pause, stop, listen deeply.
If we are the verb and letting go is the noun than loss isn’t something that happens to us. Or something like that.
Wow Bayo Akomolafe! Deep gratitude for this one. I think many of us have come up against a world of positive turns and consequent shunning whenever we try to articulate such notions. This is the timely and messy work of just being in the smelly, bitter, ugly, abrasive, and cacophonic existence that we are faced with. 🤘 On an aside, there is a podcast where Sophie Strand spins a beautifully twisted tale of the chrysalis and metamorphosis, with a finishing open ended question of whether the two are even the same entity having gone a transformative experience, or rather, the old being composted for the emergence of something different and new. Thank you.
bayo. you're a poet.
Dr. Monica Boos Dorothe Liebig an interesting post re our conversation on hospicing later today x
Thank you for this indictment of “the anthropocentrism of positivity”
Love this.
Program and Operations Manager @ GA Tech Transforming Business Operations through People-Centered Strategies
1yAs someone who is a dear friend of the dark, I welcome this so whole heartedly. We need these spaces. And fear not, those of us who are friends of the unknown will walk with you hand in hand