Akomolafe, Bayo. _These Wilds beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home_. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2017. # Progressive Summary Under the conceit of trying to find a home in the world for his daughter, Akomolafe embarks on an exploration of what lies beyond modernism and post-modernism. He finds solace in things, in a fecund world that cannot be encircled by stories. # Key points There is no magical, perfect destination. The ongoing flux of being and becoming (the dust of existence) is the only heaven there is. Modernity is characterised by a Euclidean emptying of space, everything ordered to a single point of truth. Post-modernism was the result of encountering other cultures which challenged this. But in focusing on language, post-modernism still left out the material world of nature. # Resonances [[Belonging]] [[Sometimes imagination alone doesn't go far enough]] Burning Man and [[Dust Culture]] # Quotes > I make a promise to give you a home, to work for your future, to love you with my darkness, to be the ground upon which you stand to greet a whole new world. I promise to be your father. > > This is why I am here, and why I sit with this wild man: because the only way I can meet that promise is to seek out the ghosts that haunt my fatherhood-in-the-making: the ones that linger at the edges of our collective imaginations of human agency, in the crevices of our protracted enactments of socio-politico-economic reality, in the blind spots of our scientific pronouncements about the nature of nature. How can I know what is at stake in such a promise unless I grope at and feel the strange shapes in the vast ecosystem of elided histories and stories that is our world? How can I make you a home unless I set out to encounter the universe halfway? > I am indelibly marked by the small and seemingly insignificant promise I made you to find you a home. To topple regimes of knowing, petition water spirits, climb mountains, and be pierced by a thousand proboscises if only to inch closer to understanding what it would take to live peaceably in this world of dust, shadow, and burning sun. > Modernity is home to us. Our flag is planted deep in this planet, this uncouth carnival of churning matter we barely understand. Not for a want of trying. We are doing our best to encounter the world and make sense of it by reducing it to utilitarian units for potential exploitation. We seek to meet the world by conquering it. We treat ourselves the same way—subjecting the “other” to the brute force of our colonial narratives (a legacy that runs in your veins). But then this drive to mastery has spawned many dreadful things, and the focus of (Western) critical inquiry has shifted once more: rejecting the grounds upon which our cities and empires of selves are premised, we are moving our tents. Many have left their material belongings and the camp, and headed for the sea, roaming in desolate, postmodern waters—stricken with thirst but unable to drink the inhospitably salty water. Awash in a heady place. Lost with no possibility of redemption. There’s a lot to say about these settlements, but what—for now—is important to note is that both of them, the modern and the postmodern, especially the former, are how we struggle against “nature” … how it has become imperative to discipline it, to leave its logic behind, and float above its assumedly brute prolificacy. Spirit above matter. > Maybe, then, there is no return to beginnings. No prelapsarian rendezvous. We must learn to live in the Fall, right here in the middle of things. Not “after” it, as if the Fall were done with, or “before” it, in the exhausting longing for Eden restored. If the Fall infected what was, what might have been, and what might yet be, then a gospel of the Fall is the thing to preach, not so? The absolute splinters into shards of the contingent—and here, this very middling ground—is the gold-powdered lacquer that embraces the fragments in a vast network of many becomings. ## Dust > He doesn’t mind the mechanical choking, the potholes, and the dust particles flying into our eyes—the same canopy of dust that has already colonized the inconsequential blur of tin roofs, market kiosks, angry mongrels, and broken-down cars on our sides. > We cannot account for ourselves, and the world by which our breathing is sustained, without paying homage to dust, to this graceful contingency that imbues all and resists wholeness and lastingness. This mysterious wafture without denouement. Perhaps a libation—the practice of ceremoniously pouring drink to the ground—is not so much about quenching the thirst of bloodthirsty gods or appeasing haunting ancestors, as it is about unsettling dust, summoning Shiva to intervene, if you will, and remembering that we all—hunter and hunted, sacred and mundane, master and slave, homeless and homed—are enchanted by our co–becoming-threadbare. In that ritual, we honor our fading, and yet pray for sustenance and well-being. Dust appeasing dust in preposterous palimpsests of becoming. > > Dust gives us place, while reminding us that it isn’t ours to own forever. We cannot toss our proprietary claims at an ideal, at thought, at place, or at bodies, since the generativity of dust resists permanence and undercuts lasting presence. In my revised reading of the biblical story of creation, which hopefully will not long abide the chastising gaze of time, God curses man—but only apparently. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” It is at once an annulment of the project of eternity and wholeness—or a tongue-in-cheek invitation to us to learn alongside the many others how to live in the midst of the fade—as it is God’s own declaration of freedom from his shiny lamp, where he had not known the merest joys of finitude. It is his convocation keynote address, spoken to himself and to us as we collectively graduate from the eternal to the finite. Once immortal, we all will now have to learn limits. We will have to make do with hints of ideals, the dust trail of essences we will never catch up with. But this is a difficult lesson to learn, because it come swith the message that we are not unilaterally in control of our circumstances. We are not sovereign. “Dust … gives lie to the human presumption of power and control.” > > The real implication of all this talk about dust is that in consideration of the real, or of home, we can no longer march “straight to the things themselves, because that path would only bring us to the cul-de-sac of ideal and ideally dustless entities.” The world can only be spoken of incoherently, not because we don’t have all the details but because the details themselves show up only in traces, in residues, in hints of what might yet be or what might yet have been. Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust. > The many modern practices of world-making (home-making) compel us to see ourselves as alone and uniquely imbued with the powers of agency, cognition, and conation. We are a noble race in a desert, surrounded by a pagan orgy of forms and bodies we are pitted against in a game of survival. It is us against the world. Us against dust. ## Modernity > And yet, even with these painful histories, there is nothing inherently nefarious about modernity. Indeed, if we could give a fuller account of modernity (and no one can), and how it “came” to be, we might need to reawaken old anxieties produced by desires to preserve the ephemeral, to supplant the troubling contingency of things. We might have to listen to the old pre-agrarian European wanderer whose battle against the elements, whose quest to save his family of wanderers in the face of swift and punishing climactic changes, taught him to see himself as apart from the weather and instructed him in the art of cultivation—anything to enhance predictability. Makes me think of what Charles Eisenstein says here, that the story of separation may have started with the first eucharyotic cells. [[2021-03-11#^68303b]] > In short, Western science—and I say “Western” to acknowledge at least one layer of its particularity—teaches the modern world how to see, how to make meaning. > > Seeing clearly, getting it right, offering an answer, striving till we get there, reaching for the stars, finding the truth, never stopping, arriving intact, making it happen, being the first … these impulses substantiate our modern lives. Seeing clearly, especially, discloses a particular relationship with the world. The expectation is that the world around us is explainable, that we can arrive at answers to our most fascinating riddles. Never mind the dust! Just stand this way, push out your head that way, and squint a bit—and you should see the real masquerading behind the indiscipline of finitude. Modernity presupposes that the truth about ourselves can only be accessed indirectly, via representations of things themselves. The truth can be revealed if we harness ourselves and deploy our gifts to hold open the breach in the veil, where the real or “pure knowledge” spills into the ordinary. > > The scientific method (about which I am very certain I will write in subsequent letters) is thus ennobled with the burden of sorting out what is true and what is false. And today, not just our technologies … not just our smartphones and television screens and internet-y activities owe their being to this metaphysics of seeing, but the ways we navigate the world, the things we avoid, how we make love, how we think, and how we think about thinking are all partially produced by these particular ways of seeing that lie at the heart of the modern world. > > The thing with seeing is that it comes with its own set of paradoxes—one of which is that greater clarity or higher definition is always a trade-off for panoramic depth. There’s an Eastern saying for this dialectic: name the color, blind the eye. It means that “seeing clearly” is a practice of occlusion. It means that the premise of modernity—to arrive at the heart of things—is not an arriving at all. For every “resolution” offered to our pressing questions by our present circumstances, there is a possibility discredited or rendered invisible. The dust never settles. > > No definition of modernity captures its essence, and that is because there is no essence, no ideal explanation to arrive at. We can only speak with a lisp about these matters, with a humbling stutter. Even the idea of modernity is a product of a Eurocentric analysis that looks “back” on “history” and arranges it in convenient thematic clusters amenable to contemporary discourse. > And yet there are some things that feel true and pressing about our world of clock time, long weeks, headline news, and occasional skirmishes with nature—things some metaphors might highlight: one might say that to be modern is to be in a constant state of ornamenting our exile, constantly changing the wallpaper to screen out the jarring effects of the world, a mass forgetting. Burrowing deeper to arrive at the ideal. Trusting that the dust will settle so we can see clearly. > Because the self—that rusty screw that holds the chug-chug-chugging machine of modernity and its manifesto of estrangement together—is so closed up, so ontologically distanced from everything else, modernity produces an exhausting verticality, forcing upward movement or transcendence by denying the significance of our connections with others. > Modernity is about investing energy in the politics of getting it right—in painstakingly numbering the table, naming things, creating hierarchies and categories and protocols for arriving again and again. - This makes me think of Phil Shepherd's Compulsion to Arrive. ## Post-modernism > The very logic of modernity and its quest for the universal, for expansion, for “naming the thing itself once and for all,” inspired events that undercut its own foundations. Made possible by the technologies of travel that colonial impulses necessitated, many nonwestern cultures and worldviews became accessible. Meeting the strange “other” in colonial moments preceded institutionalized slavery and racism, but it also opened up channels of cross-cultural interactions that challenged the imperialist power of modernity. Soon, some began to react against modernity. There’s no one name for this critical engagement, but we’ll focus on “linguistic constructionism” as one aspect of these cultural conversations. He dates linguistic constructionism to the 1960s. > Something was missing in the linguistic constructionist’s account of the world. The linguistic account was a shore without oceans—a neat and tidy island that refused to consider the grating bodies that rubbed against its squeaky-clean universe of words and names. In positing that language was critical in our account of the world, constructionists presented powerful insights that are very important to keep close in our search for new settlements. They rejected heaven, because it wouldn’t have been able to contain everyone; too many people and possibilities were cut out. They won the battle over denaturalizing nature. But it was a pyrrhic victory: the new practices of focusing exclusively on language to understand what was happening in the world failed to bring in the contributions of the world in its own emergence. Just like paper currencies were once promissory notes backed up by stores of gold and other valuable artifacts, but were gradually exchanged as money itself, discourse came to be considered as the only thing that constitutes reality. Facts became arbitrary (as opposed to being pre-given), and it became fashionable to speak about your truths versus my truths in a new socio-political milieu that denied the existence of anything outside experience. The significance of the nonhuman world was overlooked, and the architecture of anthropocentrism, polished in modernity, was updated to cement our desired distance from the discipline of dust. In short, postmodernity failed to satisfactorily address the dichotomy of language versus nature upon which modernity, the other half of this moiety, based its problematic quest for home. > It seems there is much more at work than our plots make space for—much more than can be beaten into the gauntness of alphabets. It seems the world also does things, also resists, also initiates, also produces and speculates and throws tantrums—and that narrative dynamics aren’t the only things we must take into account as contributory factors in the world’s emergence. > Postmodern concepts suggest we now live in a virtual world of our own making—a world of unequal power distribution, yes, but a world constructed from human comings and goings. There are shadows, but the world casts no shadows of its own. And if it looks like it does, this is only the ventriloquist behind the scenes, working the levers to gain power. Bodies are at the short end of the causal chain, without inherent meanings, and the mere backdrop for the inscriptions of culture. > > What escapes postmodern discourse are the problematic stabilities it in fact produces—even when it claims that nothing is still. Even when it claims everything is flotsam, to be retrieved and discarded at will for our Crusoean ends. Falling squarely on its blind spot is a humanistic foundationalism that centralizes and privileges discourse at the expense of bodily contributions. It’s easy to miss, but postmodern visuality betrays its deep anthropocentric commitments the closer one leans into it. You could imagine that with more sophisticated camera technologies, with zoom lenses, for instance, we have the ability to adjust focal length and depth. We can zoom in and out, traverse distances without taking a step—and with this focal changeableness it is easy to lose sight of the instigator behind the lens, the one afforded the luxury of permanence. ## Descartes > In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes announced a disciplined and methodical skepticism that pointed to that absolute metaphysical ground he sought: he would systematically doubt everything that existed, until he arrived at a place where denial was impossible. And so he did away with mountains, rivers, and estuaries, beavers, trees, burrowing worms, and the soils they aerate, glowing sun and pollinating quasars. He even doubted his own body’s existence—considering it expendable on his quest to find the holy grail of absolute knowledge, which was to be the foundation of his philosophical system. > From the seventeenth century onward, the period historians of European timelines often mark as the beginnings of the Age of Enlightenment, Descartes’s reductionistic doctrine helped consolidate the discursive practices of humanism (the system, their concerns, and human subjectivity as central to the world), the development of the scientific method, and the industrial revolution. Our world of towering steel and asphalt owes its unrelenting quest for growth and its desire to climb more and more into dizzying heights of disembodiment to that vision of the material world as a dead, dank, deaf, and dumb place. > Following Descartes’s clinical splitting of reality into a binarism—mind and matter, subject versus object, in here versus out there—the body became a “vexed object,” a troubling obstruction in the way of the logical operations of pure rationality. Truth came to be seen as the unvarnished account of the universe, only to be accessed by means that were passionless and disinterested: to understand how the world works, the meaning of reality, the mystery at the heart of flight, the mechanics of light propagation, the pilgrimage of planets, and the strange monoverse that is the human mind, one needed to put away the flesh—the irrational, teenage, recalcitrant wildness of the body—and discipline the self well enough for the pure mind to perceive the faint signals of the truth. Like a Democritean orb, floating in bland emptiness, reality lived in an exclusive space that was difficult to reach. One needed a certain delicateness, a certain detachment to see the real in the midst of the fleeting. And men—white men, to be precise—were especially suited for the task. ## Post-modernist feminism > Identity is a construct—fluid, user-friendly, and multiple, manumitted from foundational moorings. Neoliberal economics actually thrives on encouraging people to change their identities as often as they please, to buy the virtual face of an avatar or remain hidden behind a profile picture. Additionally, there is an intolerance for the binarism implied in notions of struggle, a trend that might account for a “decreased interest in activism,” except when it becomes fashionable to hit the streets or identify with a cause. One gets the impression that in unshackling itself from the prudery of modernist essentialism and universalism … in throwing away the proverbial bathwater, so to speak—postmodernism-allied femininity also throws away not only the baby but the idea of baths as well. Everything is up for grabs. Whereas Rosie the Riveter might have been part of the appropriate iconography of previous generations of feminist struggle, the “new feminism” has no appointed image, no fixed cause, no poster child for its loose federation of concerns: the tongue-sticking-out, goth-nailed, nose-pierced selfie of a self-absorbed millennial is no less authoritative than the intellectual musings of an academic feminist.