In this "Edges in the Middle" talk, philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe and series host Bayo Akomolafe explore liberal democracy, its limitations, and its possible futures.
Transcript
Sara Grossman:
Welcome everyone. My name is Sara Grossman and I am the program director for the Democracy and Belonging Forum, which is hosting this conversation. The Forum is a network and research hub that aims to connect civil society actors in Europe and North America who are committed to bridging across lines of difference to counter authoritarian populism while centering the needs and concerns of marginalized groups. And we're a program of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. Today, we will be journeying with two incredible thinkers, Achille Mbembe and Bayo Akomolafe, on the question of is democracy white? By white, our speakers today are not referring to white people as individuals, but rather the process by which the identity of whiteness of white people and their others comes to be made, a creation of dominance and subjugation, privilege and disadvantage, inclusion and exclusion. Our speakers will explore the implications of this process of othering on democracy in Africa and around the world, and perhaps invite new thinking on what democracy rooted in true belonging for all people might look like.
So who are these speakers? The first is the instigator of this conversation, Bayo Akomolafe, who is a writer, philosopher and as he would say reformed psychologist. He's currently our global senior fellow whose role it is is to help us rethink our work towards justice and belonging. The second speaker is Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian, political theorist and public intellectual who is also the founder of the foundation for African Democracy. He has written widely on colonialism, democracy and African history and politics, and we are so honored to have him with us today. Before I pass things on to Bayo, I also want to quickly thank our ASL interpreters from Interpret Educate and Serve, as well as our transcribers from LiveCap. If you're interested in getting involved with the Democracy and Belonging Forum, you can apply to join our network at Democracyandbelongingforum.org or follow us across a range of social media platforms at D&B Forum. Back to you, Bayo.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Hello, good evening from India, and I greet everyone who is joining us for this beautiful, momentous, urgent and yet slow conversation and exploration of democracy in a time of turbulence, my name is Bayo Akomolafe, and maybe I should say Happy New Year. This is the first of the series happening in 2024. Well, let's get started. For those of you who are new to this experiment in conversation, I think it's critically important that I explain a number of guiding or cosmological matters at stake here. Now, in most public engagements, the focus is on arriving at some stable truth or some kind of consensus at the heart of the Mbaris as we call them, which is borrowed from the southeastern Igbo people in Nigeria, an aesthetic of meeting the other. The heart is not to arrive at a certain truth, it's not to reach agreement per se. It is to trace patterns of convergence and divergence because the metaphysics at work here isn't a metaphysics of dots and positions.
It's a metaphysics of meandering lines and movements. And so with my dear brother, Achille Mbembe, who needs no introduction, we will be having this exploratory conversation that might feel like a braiding together of voices, of context, of textualities, of differences, of insights, released from the burden of arriving at a final resolution, a final truth, a final arrival, and that's what we'll be doing today in the spirit of the Mbaris, which is to decay the conversation, to release it to the elements, if you will, and see what it does with the world. And I welcome you to this. Now, the question that has occasioned our being here today is a curious one. It's is democracy white? Let me bring you into it this way and situate it this way. So this is obviously a rhetorical question because there's no way you could respond to me, but consider the question, are you free?
Are you free? Might seem like a very jarring question to ask if you're free. It's not really one that we think about every day when we're going through the normal or the familiar, but maybe one way to navigate into the nuances and complexities of such a question is to hold in your gaze the cartographies of your everyday, the things that you do, the rituals, where do you go for food? What kinds of choices do you make at the shopping mall? Who makes those choices for you? What are the influences when you select furniture? Now, if you can hold those rituals, consider a different proposition that those choices are not yours or a scenario in which those choices are not yours, they are predetermined or made by some kind of superintending agency, where you send your kids to school, who you make love to, the books you read, all predetermined by something else. Think about the feeling of carcerality that immediately envelops us when we think about us, our bodies as predetermined.
That's the kind of matter that feels urgently at stake in the year 2024 because 2024 is being described as not a year of elections, but the year of elections. I think there are about 61, 64 elections happening this year. So it's huge. Lots of stuff to consider. This includes India where I'm at now, Kenya, South Africa, France, I think, lots of countries around the world are doing this experiment in democratic belonging and people are saying, commentators, people who are observing say that the stakes have never been higher. This is literally the difference between the continuity of democratic belonging and authoritarian populism. In the United States, the difference between Joe Biden and the looming shadows of Donald Trump.
So a lot of people are insisting that we cannot play loose and we have to have our wits about us because we might lose the freedoms that we have taken for granted. And so there's a lot of mobilizing afoot right now, but you see, it seems that in the mobilizing, in the bringing people in, in the analysis that allows this inclusiveness to happen, there's a lot of leaving out. There's an analysis that is left out. My take on this, and I think I described this in my latest essay, the Children of the Minotaur, is that it seems we've left out the intriguing possibility that democratic belonging itself is in crisis and that it's a material thing that is more than human and not reducible to human sociality or human technologies or human structures or human constructions, that there might be forces and territorialities and movements afoot in the world today, we might rudely call them the Anthropocene that are tugging on the sleeves of belonging, which is indebted to these contexts, these socio material contexts.
What if democracy is not just what humans are doing? What if it's a matter of geological formations and microbial activisms and the ways that our bodies are moving through the world? What if there's a lot more happening? Some climate scientists recently say that climate chaos affects brain sizes, the sizes and shapes of our bodies. By over 10,000 or 50,000 years, they observed that during times of heat and global warming, the brain has reduced itself, so to speak, by 10%. So that in a sense, politics is already affected by these moments, by these more than human forces. So do we reduce our analysis of democracy and the targets and the stakes to unreasonable others on the other side, or do we pay attention to these forces happening at large? Well, let me get right to the chase, is democracy white is not a way, like my sister just said a while ago. It's not a way of saying, does it come from white people?
Is a way of tracing whiteness as an earthly dynamic that dances with liberal global capitalism and neurotypicality, of course, one origin or genealogy of democracy traces it to Athens and the ancient Greeks. So, of course, it's anachronistic to say then that is democracy white, whiteness being a relatively recent phenomenon, racial economic technology in the Antebellum South in the United States. And yet, it still feels like an urgent question to ask because whiteness does not live by itself, you see, it's a globalizing ethic, a globalizing morality that dances with these other forces, the brutal humanism that my brother speaks about, Achille Mbembe. So let's get into that question and the nuances and complexities, knowing we will not arrive at simple answers. The idea here is to touch the tapestry, the embroidery of this manifold and manifesting field of considerations.
Achille Mbembe, yes, needs no introduction. I got introduced to him through his very, very potent seminal concept of necropolitics, which of course can be read together and diffractively with Michel Foucault's biopolitics and biopower. We'll say a little more about that. And he's such a very consequential, contemporary philosopher. Many argue that he's one of the most consequential philosophers on the planet today that I find it a real deep privilege that he has decided to speak with me today and play with me today. He's a little bit sore that Nigeria beat Cameroon at the recent African Cup of Nations. I've been teasing him about that, but he's come all the same. My brother, Achille, where are you? Please join us.
Achille Mbembe:
Thank you so much, Bayo. I'm very, very delighted to be with you and all of those who participating to this conversation tonight, I'm speaking to you from Cape in South Africa. Yes, sir, the green Eagles indeed [inaudible 00:14:31].
Bayo Akomolafe:
But we didn't win either.
Achille Mbembe:
You are getting used to.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, brother.
Achille Mbembe:
After all.
Bayo Akomolafe:
You're welcome.
Achille Mbembe:
220 million people against 30. It makes a huge difference.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Goodness. Okay, let's do this, brother. And you're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you so much for being here and doing this with me. I felt a very good place to start would be the recent events in Africa, the continent that we call home, brother. I think since the 1950s we've had more than 200 coups, which is the largest amount of coups anywhere on the planet. The African continent that is, 2023 alone produced quite a number of coups and a question that is floating in the air is, why is Africa the perennial subject of democratic backsliding? Why is it that we cannot get it right? What's at stake here? What is happening here? What is your take on that, brother? What do you feel is happening?
Achille Mbembe:
It seems to me that we have come to the end of the historical cycle. The historical cycle, which I would argue began with the so-called decolonization, and of course, political and intellectual and cultural movements which made it possible both at the level of the concept and at the level of social practice. And most of these movements, if we look at it thoroughly, emerged, I would argue in the mid or late 19th century, mid and late 19th century when a number of intellectuals from Africa and its diasporas put right on the global agenda the question of self-determination, as one remembers very well, mid and late 19th century was also the moment when the Atlantic slavery was abolished.
It was a moment of economic transition in terms of the recent history of capitalism, the shift from telling of human beings to the interaction to let's say capitalist agriculture in terms of production of palm oil, for instance, along the Atlantic Coast in Africa, the production of peanuts, the introduction to that rent-seeking economy, which was now predicated on the exploitation of land as opposed to the exploitation of people, of bodies, and of human beings. That is when person of Africa's self-determination is placed in the history, contemporary history of the world was, if you want, framed, and that is when struggles for decolonization actually began. They were then heightened in the aftermath of the second World War with the reintegration of Pan-Africanism, let's say at the helm of people like Du Bois, people like Nkrumah and others.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right.
Achille Mbembe:
So it seems to me that it is this long cycle which then led to actual decolonization in the '60s. It is this long cycle that is coming to an end. It began to unravel very seriously in the aftermath of the second World War. It also began to unravel post-colonial order as such in the mid '80s when a number of African states became indebted to international financial institutions, in particular the World Bank and the IMF. It is indeed in the late '80s, early '90s that most of them were forced to undergo structural adjustment programs once again under the leadership of those financial institutions. One thing we tend to get is that the period which begins in the late '80s, early '90s, the period of structural adjustment programs is a moment when the key tenets of what will be known later on as neoliberal economics are being experimented in the continent.
They are being experimented in the sense that the social compromise that had been achieved in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in the '60s, those compromises are unraveling. They are toppled by a new orthodoxy, the aim of which is to expand market capitalism in Africa, aim of which is to use the state or state power in order to ace the wave of privatization, deregulation, which results in the widening of the social inequalities, post-colonial order was trying to, let's say, contain. So what we see in the continent beginning in the early 1990s, and which is still going on today, is an acceleration of a form of economic domination, which is characterized by extractivism, by prediction at a very high stage, prediction and extractivism, which result in turn in the widening and exacerbation of social inequalities, all of which is happening as I speak.
In a fractured world, we see what's going on all around us, whether in terms of the new competition between China and the United States, in terms of what's going on between Russia and the Ukraine, in terms of what's going on in the Middle East, but also in terms of what's going on in our own continent. So, you asked me what are the coup d'état, the symbol of the coup d'état as far as I'm concerned, a manifestation of the end of that long cycle, which began in the mid-late 19th century, which is coinciding today with the emergence of an entirely new continent made up of majority of young people, the demographic factor, young people yearning for a renewed form of sovereignty, thus for instance, the rekindling in a number of sectors of pan-African ideals, a refusal to submit to a world of economic and political order, which has for time marginalized the continent. So what we see in the coup d'état and the kind of rejection or defiance vis-à-vis liberal democracy, it is that yearning a new capacity to retool the continent and to turn it into its own center.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Yes.
Achille Mbembe:
And yet, it has not, I would argue not necessarily the path towards that second liberation. I think we have to move beyond power, violence and force and nevertheless aim at unleashing in our continent a new era in which collective intelligence and reason prevail over and brutality.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you, brother. Thank you. There's a lot to be said and thank you for walking us through this sweep of history, and I think it's very instructive to think about this long arc of inquiry and exploration that enlisted folks like Nkrumah and Du Bois in questions about what does it mean to address, and I would add that Chinua Achebe's not just the government official but novelist and artists and philosophers, James Baldwin. What does it mean to convene sovereignty and do we tether our hopes to the nation state and to the global nation state order? A lingering concern here is if liberal democracy in its contemporaneous formulations, if it has come in on the backs of those extractivist policies like structural adjustment program, did it happen in spite of these extractivist presences or is liberal democracy a form of extractivism itself?
And then how would you invite us to sit with the idea of democracy not being some pathological thing on the African continent, but actually a positive exploration of the kinds of next political imaginaries? We don't exactly know how to name them yet, but that there is a positive force here. The young people are asking questions and they're exploring. It may not be the military coup d'états that will lead us there, but there's something about this moment that is bracketing the presumed universalism of liberal democracy as the answer to all our questions about how bodies convene.
Achille Mbembe:
It seems to me that we probably need to make a distinction between let's say the concept of democracy, liberal democracy, and its actual realization, historical forms of realization. In its finest definition, democracy is the name for a community of life among equals, the principle of equality is absolutely central to the idea of democracy. A community of equals who are free, who are capable through the exercise of reason, of public reason, public exercise of reason to rule themselves in the sense of giving to themselves this capacity to edict laws which guarantee equal freedom, equal security, equal protection to all. [inaudible 00:29:26] also to choose the rulers who will rule them, and what are the legitimate ways in which such rule may be exercised. So if you want, we can give a long list of those attributes, but they seem to me to all be ordained along a sharp vector, the name of which is freedom.
So in that sense, there is an element of universality at the heart of the very notion of democracy, and when I say universality means a horizon, which applies to all, notwithstanding histories, contexts, cultures, religions and so forth and so on, that in terms of let's say possible definition. Now, in terms of how horizon has been actually experimented, actually lived, of course, there is a huge gap. There's a huge gap in the sense that the democratic system or democratic regimes most of the times have taken place, have been experienced within the framework of the nation-state, and not everybody belongs precisely to the nation-state. The principle of the nation-state is to exclude those who do not belong, which means that in actuality, we could have a democratic or so-called democratic regime in the United States of America, for example, which obviously went hand in hand with slavery.
A democracy of slaves if you want, of which the likes of Du Bois once again, but also Tocqueville have written about in his Democracy in America. So democracy has not been historically devoid of very deep contradictions. That was the case, of course, for a long time with the status of women in the polity such as the case today with the status of migrants and foreigners in most countries, not only in the West, but also in our own continent in Africa. But more importantly, democracy in its historical forms has been so to say, restricted to humans alone, and yet in this age of the Anthropocene of climate change, age of the combustion of the world, when the world is burning and when on the verge of a deep ecological catastrophe, it becomes clear that for democracy to be re-enchanted, it can no longer just be limited to humans.
If only we could oppose the distinction between nature, culture, humans, non-humans on the basis of which we have ravaged the earth, that distinction no longer holds or is no longer sustainable, is no longer of ensuring life futures of the kind that are open to all, and therefore, we need to extend the reach of democracy and anchor it as much as we can on something I would call planetary consciousness, which is not exactly the same as universal consciousness. Planetary consciousness itself premised on a community of being a community of life, a kind of symbiotic relationship which connects us to the living in general. And that's where African cosmogonies come into play because that is the kind of philosophical underpinning that is at the heart if you want, so long answer, but your questions are so important that they deserve the kind of thoroughness of your answer. I'm trying to [inaudible 00:35:04].
Bayo Akomolafe:
We have time, brother. We have time. Take your time, brother. Okay, you're done with that?
Achille Mbembe:
Yes, sir.
Bayo Akomolafe:
I have a follow-up question and I want to invite you to think about this, but I'll frame it in terms of a story that you probably have read Ursula Le Guin and some of her sci-fi accounts of utopian belonging. There's one that comes to mind now, The Ones that Walk Away from Omelas, a short story about belonging, about formulation society that had everything going for it. You could call it a planetary kind of consciousness using words like they were eternally happy, they were so happy and it wasn't a happy that was a temporary kind of high, it was a happy that was grounded in beautiful relationships and inquiry and science and technology, and this is how she thinks about Omelas, the story, the narrator, but somewhere in the belly of that city, I think this is what I heard when I read you speak about democracy and it's nocturnal body, right?
It's dark on the belly, the dark side of democracy coming into its own, so to speak, that beneath this city is a child and this child is not gendered. The narrator refuses to genderize this child because the misery of this child is so disproportionate, that it demands that kind of treatment, I think. The child begs for nourishment, for attention, for company sticking its hand through some kind of door or gate or something. And you would think such a morally profound society would not know about this child. Of course, if they knew about this child, they would rush to its rescue, but they don't. You see, and it's not because they don't know, but because everyone knows and there's an instruction that is ontologically, braided with the status of this city that in the very same hour that someone offers compassion to this child, every other child will disappear.
I may be exaggerating it a little bit, but I think that's the premise that people will die and the city's achievements, remarkable achievements in life would be lost if they reach out to this child. And so the title derives from the angst of people not able to hold this tension, and they walk away from utopia, they walk away from Omelas. And the reason I bring this up right now, big brother, is I think that I hear you when you speak about or when you try to distinguish between liberal democracy in its idealistic formulations as a proposition, as against liberal democracy, as how it has been materially practiced. Almost like there's a promissory note here that we're not quite getting it right, but we can get it right potentially, and one day we might actually do that and it'll look like a planetary consciousness, but there is no belonging in our material histories that doesn't enact some kind of exclusion, that isn't born with tensions.
Some complement, some constitutional forcing out, the very idea of the citizen is derived from notions of exclusion. I think you've hinted at that, notions of the vagabond, the fugitive, the pathological order, that's the cost, the hidden curriculum of citizenship, that democracy is indebted to the underground, to the child in the Omelasian dungeon. So my question is, do we continue to give or pay homage to the idea of a promissory note, by and by? In the same ways that physicists speak about one day, we'll have a theory of everything, one day we'll have a theory of we cannot explain or reconcile classical physics with quantum physics or quantum mechanics, but one day we'll be able to do so. Do we continue along these lines or do we notice the materiality of our imbrications with these tensions? What's emerging for you as I share that?
Achille Mbembe:
It seems to me that we need to hold on to some kind of horizon, and here, I will use a term that may look either naive or rather vague, but is not. We need to hold on to some horizon of hope, and I use the term hope here in its political and theological sense, in the sense in which we find it in most of the thinking in Black radical thought, if you want, the works of Fanon, the works of Martin Luther King, the works of Baldwin, the works of the great novelists and the works of some of our great composers and musicians, I did notice how at the beginning of this conversation.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Fela?
Achille Mbembe:
You play from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. There's great awakeness. Toni Morrison and the others. What strikes me in these works is the kernel of hope, which suffuses them, which saturates them, which drives them, propels them beyond the present into a kind of future which will always be somewhat ahead of us. It seems to me that the politics of liberation, which is the other name for the politics of common life, democracy, has to be embedded in that kind of consciousness of time. If we are to avoid the risks of cynicism or of indifference to avoid falling in the traps of instantaneity, of presentism, I really believe that it's something we have to hold onto. It's also something that I draw a lot from our own deep African archive.
When one reads or studies our cosmologies, our deep myths as they are recounted in Yoruba myths, for instance, in the myths of the Dogon in Mali or the people in the Congo, all these productions which precede colonialism and which pertain to the long duration of who we are and where we come from. It seems to me that in this age of consumerism, of divorce between liberal democracy and capitalism, because not so long ago, liberalism or liberal democracy and capitalism had found a way of sustaining each other. My feeling is that age of sustaining each other has come to an end. And that nowadays, neoliberalism is the key enemy of liberal democracy. And in fact...
Bayo Akomolafe:
How do we divorce them, brother?
Achille Mbembe:
Sorry?
Bayo Akomolafe:
What is the divorce going to happen then? How do we divorce neoliberalism? Because their histories are so intricately tied, it seems they're dealing with the same metaphysics here, sustaining the same kind of phenomena. But please go ahead, brother.
Achille Mbembe:
I don't think that we can have that liberal democracy can survive in an environment, in an age when everything is computable, meaning everything is amenable to one form of calculation, of instrumentalization.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right.
Achille Mbembe:
It seems to me liberal democracy, in the sense we had defined it at the beginning of our conversation, can only survive in a context in which a society or a community becomes fully aware of the fact that certain things are incalculable, certain things are incomputable, certain things have to be immune from the law of abstraction and calculation. And neoliberalism is against any attempt at let's say positing certain forms of life beyond what can be calculated, beyond what can be computed. And in that sense, the aspiration is to become a religion in and of itself, but a religion without a God, if you want, proclaim religion which rests fundamentally on repeated acts of profanation, including violation of life as such.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right.
Achille Mbembe:
That's why if I was to use a term you used a moment ago, I would argue that from a sheer metaphysical point of view, there is incompatibility between liberal democracy and neoliberalism.
Bayo Akomolafe:
And it's at this point that I notice beautiful point of divergence because it would seem to me, or the feeling that brings me here is that the ontology of liberal democracy isn't fixed. It's also moving, it's also traveling, and it's only sustained within an eminent field of relations. The meaning isn't a fatal company, it is percolating. The materiality of it is always yet to come. So there isn't a final definition. I'm sure that isn't lost here in our conversation. So I'm intrigued or interested in the ways that it is changing itself, in the way that it is taking on new technologies. And I wonder if the technology of democracy and the ways that we're speaking about it isn't more hospitable to neoliberalism than we give space for it to be. What if it's more accepting of these technologies?
You speak about the new human, the new human as this concatenation of computations, and I'm sure you already have heard about the new Apple Vision Pro and the new race for AI supremacy. Everyone seems to be rushing there. It's the new rush to the moon, if you will. I'm wondering how that is changing and altering the notion of the citizen, the notion of presence, the notion of bodies or the material that liberal democracy works with in its projects of making a world that is responsible to each other. What are the ingredients here for liberal democracy to work with? Or are we dealing with a transcendent definition outside of relations, outside of the ways that the world is turning technologically, socio-materially, theologically? Are we dealing with something that is still Cartesian totally outside of all we can say about it, or do we bring liberal democracy down to earth and notice that it might be changing too, brother?
And I hear what you say about hope, and I think my work is desperately open to hope, but also wants to bracket hope in the ways that Lauren Berlant would do when she notices hope as a cruel optimism, that sometimes our hope actually reinforces or incarcerates us in paradigms that reproduce very troubling realities. It's like the hope of the ants in a death spiral. They hope upon hope that they would arrive home, but their pheromones have locked them in a circle and hope only takes them in a circle and they go round and round and round. It takes something outside of their hope, outside of the circle to break through. So this is not a dismissal or pathologization of hope. It is just noticing that hope has limitations as well, just as I feel liberal democracy has limitations.
Achille Mbembe:
No, I agree with you to a large extent, but just maybe to come back to a point you raised a moment ago, we're circling around it, which has to do with the extent to which let's say technological escalation is somewhat transforming the human. It's not leaving the human and is transforming at the same time rendering ever more complicated, the conditions of exercise of a number of things, citizenship, of practice of democracy itself. I do think that indeed the hallmark, one of the hallmarks of the beginning of the 20th century, it is technological escalation.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right, I agree.
Achille Mbembe:
But it's also what I would call the swing into animism, swinging to animism in the sense that coupled with technological escalation, the transformations of capitalism have led to I would say a two-fold excess, an excess of artefacts that have never produced so many objects as we do today, and the transformation of artefacts into what the Greeks call pneuma, spirit, soul. And nothing translates this excess better, I think, than the techno-digital universe that has become somewhat dear, the double of our earth and the double of our world. And in fact, it is possible to go even further to argue that one of the most distinctive characteristics of contemporary humanity is to constantly traverse screens, be immersed in image machines, but at the same time dreams. And as you very well know, I mean most of these images are animated. They produce all kinds of illusions, fantasies, fantasies of self-generation, self [inaudible 00:54:57], self-enhancement, but they also enable new forms of circulation, incarnation and so forth and so on.
All of that, of course, has transformed the very conditions and which we live together or not, we are exercising it or not, we develop a sense of who we are, where we belong and so forth and so on. So the point I'm trying to make is that although I believe that liberal democracy has a few tenets which are valid, whatever the context especially on principle of equality, principle of representation, deliberation, election, so forth and so on, these things do matter. Doesn't matter where, the institutional forms they take does vary, not the same in Greece as it is in France or in Nigeria or in Cameroon. There's a level of variation there. The key tenets seems to me are universal. And what capitalist contemporary neoliberalism is doing is that it's hollowing out that content, those kernels, and leaving us with a kind of skeleton, without soul, which stands for formal democracy, which we see at work mostly during elections.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Brother, your screen is drifting away. I don't know if you could redirect it to your face. Brother Achille? Brother Achille, are you there?
Achille Mbembe:
Yes, I'm here.
Bayo Akomolafe:
I thought we lost you for a moment.
Achille Mbembe:
No.
Bayo Akomolafe:
You were saying the last point was a bit choppy. I couldn't quite hear you. You were saying something about the nation-state. Could you just repeat that? I want to jump on that a little.
Achille Mbembe:
I was just making a point. Many analysts have made of late have in mind the likes of Wendy Brown who have been showing precisely the extent to which neoliberal forms of financialization of almost everything have been hollowing out democracy itself. And this process of hollowing out the key kernels of liberal democracy. This process is taking different forms, of course, depending on where one is. I was also highlighting the fact that all which remains seems to be elections. You were mentioning elections at the beginning of our conversation, but part of what I witnessed in most parts of our continent is the defiance in relation to elections. First of all, elections are rigged. Second, they do not seem to constitute a key tool to affect the kind of radical transformations, especially younger generations. And therefore, to rethink of these infrastructures of democracy and of participation, we are to re-enchant the democracy itself. That's what I was talking about.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you, brother. I understand the paths that we're traveling with. I mean, if you begin from the proposition that things of the universality of certain tenets of liberal democracy, then I think it's easier to come to a place where we speak about the need to recapture or re-enchant democracy. If you begin, however, from a field of eminence where tenets or Archimedean points in space-time are not as transcendent as we think they are, they are embedded in the movement and the weave of things, then I think the kinds of questions that I ask would meet. So we are weaving together something here, beautiful divergences and convergences. But I want to shift tracks a bit and see if we can come to the question of necropolitics, which I think the way you define it is in relation to Foucault, this capacity to make die is that our systems, our governance structures are producing death landscapes or death scapes now.
And the point that turns here where this production happens is along the lines of racialization, along the lines of racialization, that it's easier to kill off people who look like us than it is to produce life. I think one helpful distinction between biopower and biopolitics is biopolitics is the idea of make live and let die. And would you agree necropolitics is make die and let live, it's death. Let's produce death. Death is the champion, is the champion product here. Could you say a little bit about that in terms of how this dances this necropolitical situation we're in might actually be dancing with the forms of solidarity we're producing with the limitations that young people in Africa are hitting up against in terms of asking questions like, why isn't this producing for us? Why do we seem stuck in a paradigm that has promised us dividends and yet is only creating a bully system? Nigeria is a very recent example, a bully system that is far away, so far removed from our desires and our hopes and dreams.
Achille, are you there? Achille, are you there? Hello? Oh, I think we may have lost him. Okay. Pending the time he gets back. Achille, can you hear me? Okay. Pending the time Brother Achille gets back, maybe I'll just have a conversation with myself and invite us to think about these questions as well. That along what Brother Achille calls necropolitics is the production of death, that citizenship is caught up with death producing landscapes. And I feel that's a very, very intriguing characteristics of our civilization. I'm thinking about the immigrants that crossed the sea to make it to Europe. I'm thinking about all the people that we allowed to die during the pandemic. Questions about who gets to live and who gets to die are questions of necropolitics.
And this is such a very, very critical formulation because it allows us to see the ways that governance structures actually produce harm and oppress and asphyxiation and how they suck out all the oxygen. Of course, the question then that matters is how do we invite materialities of care? How do we reweave different fabrics of care? How do we invite a strain away from the... I use the metaphor of a death spiral. How do we invite a strain away from that so that we can happen upon maybe something close to what Brother Achille was saying a while ago, a different planetary consciousness, a different politics altogether? The points of difference between Brother Achille and myself is that we start from different propositions. We start from different ideas, and it seems Brother Achille stretches out his hand to create a more inclusive paradigm. And we need that.
We need to interrogate our notions of belonging. But it is also true that belonging isn't human, not entirely so, it is not formulated within human conversations. It is not formulated within human dialogue or constructions or sociality. That belonging is the... If we must stretch out our hands to include, then we must already have a notion of a way of accepting that the world is already involved in creating how we belong to each other. So in a sense, architecture, technology, microbes, color, intensity, thresholds, potatoes. I read a recent essay how potatoes influenced whiteness. So it's not just bad white people, which is a humanist explanation. It's that this vegetable influenced the spread of whiteness around the world. So we cannot limit our analysis of belonging to what humans can do or have been doing. It seems we have to also take into consideration how belonging is a post-humanist or para-humanist fabric.
And that it is here in this space of exploration that takes into consideration the more than human that we might be able to frame a different emancipatory politics. This is not an anti-democratic inquiry or question or exploration by no means. It is not a way of saying, we're done with democracy, let's look for something else, the next new thing. No. Instead, it is an attempt to situate democracy within a world that holds space for our bodies to matter. It is a gentle suspicion of the idealism that suspends the meanings of democracy over and above the historicity and the tensions and the indebtedness of our bodies to ecology. And it is also simultaneously a noticing of the deep underbellies of violence that exist in spaces that presume to have arrived. France still enacts or exacts attacks on its former colonies, for instance.
So when we speak about democracy, we want to speak about its underbellies. And the reason why our conversation, and I hope Brother Achille comes back has focused on Africa is because it's usually left out of the conversation, it usually is about some vaunted notion of democracy. And I think the African continent is the Canarian coal mine. It's almost like a prophetic declaration of where the world is heading. So we want to address democracy, its underbellies and not treat it with a romantic gesture to say that it is indebted to larger territorial flows, and we have to start from there and address it from there in its impurities, in its limitations, and maybe open space for inquiry and experimentation in that territory, in those sites of exploration. Brother Achille did tell us that there were some problems with load shedding. It's called in Cape Town power outages. So we hope and pray that he comes back, but if not, I will take the time to respond to maybe some questions that have shown up in the chat and then we just end this exploration.
Maybe I'll just call my sister to share some of those questions that have shown up. I have one here, I'll take it. Okay. This one is for Brother Achille. I would love to hear Achille share more about a post-nation state world and how to think about the current migration crisis in a bordered world. Let me say something about that a bit. I've been saying for some time that it's not so much the case that the poison is in the pot. We must start to consider that the poison is the pot. We often think about violence in terms of humans acting upon other humans. And I love the saying of Karen Barad when she insists that if we start from humans, then we're already too late. I'm paraphrasing here. If we start from the individual that acts upon the world, we're already too late.
It's a very intriguing question. How has the global Westphalian order of nation-states in their assembly, how has it supported, cradled and perpetuated the troubling realities, migratory realities we see today? How has it fostered? Very helpful situational settlement-based notions of identity, but has as a result, quickened the demise of nuance and complexity. How has it fostered hardened boundaries? You might have already guessed that I'm a transnational. Don't let me say I'm a transnational philosopher, rather I have transnational yearnings, longings. I don't know how that looks. And I don't know if Achille knows how it looks more than nation-state world, because I think all of us here were born into nation-states. Maybe it's a question that doesn't require an answer now. Maybe it requires process. Maybe there's something about these moments, these yearnings that reflect syncopated flows from the modern human world inviting us to reconsider the utopias we build while being imbricated within the context that demand utopias.
So maybe where we are going with this, I feel in our tapestry of exploration, is not to arrive summarily at an answer, but to weave something that could hold a different kind of politics, a different kind of reflexivity perhaps, or a different kind of inquiry that departs from the troubles of now. Another question here is I would love to hear more about feminine conceptions of democracy. This framework for democracy feels a bit Athenian. Yes. I mean, the idea of the citizen is framed in war and blood, at least one genealogy of the citizen subject comes in blood and war, the rampage of an archetypal figure and the killing of a monster, and how that killing became the theological archetypal origin, if you will, the origin story of democracy. But are there other accounts of democracy? And I'm quite willing for us to stretch democracy. Of course, we're always negotiating, meaning there isn't a stable one. I'm quite willing for us to stretch its tent so that it does more than inclusion. It does something different. It explores something different. Are there feminine conceptions of democracy?
There's a lot to be said about the popular demarcation between the masculine and the feminine that I don't think we have space for here. But I hear the yearning in the question is, what if democracy is maybe in the dreaming and the yearning voiced by Brother Achille? What if it looks more like the creation of umbilical cords of kinship between us, basket weaves of kinship between us and ecologies instead of the constant proliferation of others that seems to be at the heart of civilizational processes. I'm willing to hold onto that as an ideal, as something to dream with. I don't know how we get there. I'm also willing to think of my not knowing as emancipatory because not knowing is somewhat decolonial in this space, given the fact that we tend to repeat ourselves even when we think we're doing something innovative.
I'm hearing that my brother, Resmaa Menakem, is in the chat, welcome, brother, and maybe I'll take a few more questions. Oh boy, are we naturally born as members of nations or do nations impose their identities and us thereby influencing or controlling our lives? Well, the very concept of naturally is called into question here. I think nature is an artifice, and the artificial is natural in a way that, of course, echoes what Brother Achille and I were already touching slowly, the binarization of the artificial and the natural, nature-culture. There's all of that there. But the question really wants to interrogate, I think, identities as... Or rather something beyond identities, is it possible to live beyond the identities? I feel our present predicament with centering identities, and I don't want to frame it entirely as a predicament. We need a politics of identity. We need a politics of representation. We need those meandering lines of conversations around diversity and inclusion. There is no doing away with that with something new.
However, in a material world, everything is limited. Even identities can get in the way of transformation or politics that centers entirely or rotates entirely around identity, tends to borrow its resources for critique from the very structures that it's trying to critique. Identity is a form of settlement building, it's a form of framing hospitality. It's a homemaking project. But home is not always stable. The background is always changing. And this is the gist of a more than human story. That the background is never still. It is constantly changing, morphing, doing other things. So identity also has to travel. The current same entity almost weaponized at this point, which creates hard edges, impervious borders, that notion of identity is caught up with the assemblage of the nation state. It's caught up with deep, troubling, traumatic forms of racialization, is caught up with notions of technology and the necropolitics that Brother Achille speaks about.
Maybe when these syncopated flows, which we rudely call the Anthropocene, maybe when these things carry us away, so to speak, and tease our borders like the trickster, constantly teasing the hegemonic structure to fall apart, maybe in the falling apart slowly, we might taste new kinds of identificatory rituals. We might do something different or something different might be done to us better still. I'm not sure if that answered the question, but keep it coming and keep praying for Brother Achille to come back. Meanwhile, for those of you who are still with us and are not bored out of your minds, by me speaking with myself, we're also hoping that Brother Achille comes back for a series. So this is the first of a hopeful series of conversations where we go deep into democracy, belonging, and othering, which feels very critical in this year. Does it modernity tend to deny?
Have I missed a question? No. Doesn't modernity tend to deny the metabolic deep time dimensions of its existence? Yes, modernity is a temporality formulating paradigm. It needs at least one iteration of it. I never speak in terms of universals. It needs to formulate time around the critical subject, the citizen subject. It needs to think of time in terms of the economic realizations that are its promise. What it wants to do with the world is to make it instrumental to the dissociated self. What modernity? Neoliberalism, liberal humanism, what it wants to do is to clear the wilds and make it instrumental to the human subject. So there is a sense in which modernity runs smack against slushy time. Other forms of temporalities and its exertions is to bend temporality into the family way so that it produces productivity, some form of continuity, some form of linearity, some form of controllability. I just made that up. Some form of predictability so that it produces mastery. So there are other, you could call it deep time dimensions. I call it autistic time. I call it chronofeminism. How time veers away from the highway.
You know how we speak about body clocks. Our bodies are not just monolithic temporalities, they are multiple temporalities organs having different times. Biologists tell us that, I think if you have a wound, your skin heals faster at night. I may be twisting this around than it does in the daytime. Or is it the other way around that your skin, if you have a gash or a wound, it heals faster in daytime than at night. There's a sense in which our bodies are temporality squelching, or secreting machines, if you will. And by machines, I don't mean the dead sense of the machine. I mean it in the delusion sense. What about something like Joan Tronto's conception of caring with, I'm not familiar with this author as an alternative conception of democracy. I'm not familiar with this author, but I'm intrigued and interested in learning more about this idea of caring with, yes, we need other materialities of care.
I tell people all the time that my work is about sensitizing bodies to the rifts, the metabolic rifts, the cracks that are emerging around the world, and that these cracks, all their ontology, their presence to the exhaustion of white modernity. White modernity is heaving and breathing hard under the Sisyphean weight of holding aloft the myth and the tragedy of the individual. That's what it wants to perpetuate. It's exhausted. Our work isn't to save the world. It's not to summarily come up with a blueprint for the next. I think sometimes when we think that way, we're only perpetuating the present. Our work is to stay with the process, is to stay in process, in inquiry together, in inquiry together, to explore together, is to fall apart together and to touch the equal tones of our failures, to rise up our failures, to be enlisted by the images of modernity. All the ways we don't line up with identity or line up with the proper human subject or the good citizen is a monstrous departure from modernity, except we are well practiced in hiding that.
So if I were to think about caring with, it'd be a radical accompaniment with these lines of departure. It'll be about holding space for the falling apart together. Is there a post-democracy here that is not a dismissal of democracy but is awaiting at the edges of it? I think so, and I think we can do this together. I think there's something pragmatic about the losses of today, the fears and anxieties about authoritarian populism today, except that our anxieties are usually re-instrumentalized as reinforcement. We don't want Trump. So let's do everything we can to get the anti-Trump, forget what he's actually proposing. We just need democracy. And this fetishization of the democratic option seems to ironically make space for the proliferation of authoritarianism. So we need a different politics people.
A different politics isn't about finding the answer, it's about staying with the questions. And that's a deeper form of solidarity than arriving at a new blueprint. And maybe I'll take one more and we're at time. Unfortunately, we couldn't get our brother back, but this is not the end. This is, like I said, a series. And if you're still here, thank you. Thank you for experimenting with us in the glitches and the cracks and the openings. This is what this time means and needs. One more question. What if a post-nation state imaginary formulates towards a diasporic solidarity that centers planetary consciousness? That's a book right there. That's a keynote. Yes, I hear that, diasporic solidarity.
I think our next Mbari will dwell more on sensuous solidarities, what I call sensuous solidarities. One of the things that I was going to strike out and name with my brother here was the idea that solidarity can be a form of biopolitical control. That solidarity could be a form of necropolitics. And I know that's troubling to consider, but the gesture here is to name the territory that has produces us to name the tensions, to accommodate those tensions and to probably sniff out new cartographies in staying with the trouble or staying with the tensions. So there's a lot more to do people, and I thank you for being here with us. We're having cookies and milk backstage for those of you joining us in conversation. And I just want to thank the team, Kali, and my other sisters and siblings that have been interpreting for us. Thank you so much for being with us, and we will see you very soon. Take care now.
