Bayo Akomalafe on Post-activism
How does "activism" transform when it emerges not from within the conventional and habitual modern notion of human self as sole agent, but rather into a process-relational ontology in which the world is simply overflowing with agency in the form of all things and beings--even stones and atmosphere? What happens to activism when all of the world participates and the locus of transformative agency is radically distributed?
Something new wants to be born in us.
A questioner in the above dialogues spoke about "feeling into knowing".
Let us also wonder, in relation to feeling-into-knowing, about knowing-into-feeling.
But to do so, do we not also require a deep dive into tacit knowledge? -- both the notion of it and the experience of it in feeling?
We are swimming in oceans of tacit knowings which are silent, which do not speak, of which we do not know their many names. (My computer spell check does not like the plurality of 'knowings' -- wishes to unify it as a whole without parts.)
Modernity, as it has been called, constituted a frame, a realm, a boundary, a container... for ethics and aesthetics, and these two have their own agency, apart from that of modernity. Our tacit knowing increasingly insists -- INSISTS! -- but does so in feeling, that this frame is wrong. It's misbegotten. It's mistaken. Mistaken. Just plain mistaken. Beauty -- one among a thousand key concepts in the emerging aesthetics -- would escape the bounds of "beauty". Truth would escape the bounds of "truth" -- and these would unite with "knowledge" in an ever-emerging, processual wholeness which finally allows "wholeness" to be partial, to be becoming. And in this very way to be whole.