These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  The “linguistic turn” from modernism is now being reworked and critiqued in a “turn” to materiality and its many agentic effects. The “new materialisms” embrace interdisciplinary work into the ways culture and nature can no longer be seen as separate; into the way identity and race are both material and discursive; into the way biology is already a matter of history and the discussions about it; into the manner concepts and meaning are material; into the particular ways justice is not some giant supernatural arc spanning the globe like an ideal we can only ever hope to approximate, but shaped and born in topological openings and closures. And how the very concerns of feminist theory, the “old” anthems that draw us all into the gravitational pull of femininity, to the specificity of female-identified bodies, is also a cry for environment, for healthy economies, for ethically profound relationships with nonhuman others.

  While it might be tempting to think of new materialisms as a successor to postmodern feminism, to do so would be to reiterate the dualisms that postmodernism claims to address, but fails to.11 The startling “re/turn” to the material world that takes the shape and form of the many neo-materialistic theories is not some kind of fourth-wave feminism; neither does it follow from the postmodernization of feminism. Nor does it need to be tethered to a “progress narrative structure”12 to make its vital contributions about “naturecultures.”13

  It is not post-postmodernism, not a “new” thing that dismisses the old or says, “We are the new philosophies in town, so back off.” The popular sense in which we now speak of failing status quos and symptoms of underlying disorders, giving way to a more promising tomorrow or a better world, imbibes that implicit notion of progress and a dialectic of the new, where the previous is banished. In many indigenous worldviews, there is no new that is not old (which is often the reason why babies in Yorubaland are named after recently deceased grandparents, in a gesture that communicates returnings) and no old that is not inexhaustibly new—which is why many materialist feminists advocate we turn to “old” texts, work with the insights of modernism and postmodernism, hesitate to name monumental sociological structures as totalizing, and (perhaps) relinquish the idea that we will arrive at a situation or a world without shadows if only we learn to resolve the problems of today.14

  For instance, Frost reminds us that:

  Constructivism has been tremendously useful for feminist epistemologists in their efforts to denaturalize and politicize knowledge claims that disavow the historicity of empirical facts … [and] as a critical project, constructivism has prompted the exhaustive search for the mark and agency of the social in any knowledge claim, a quest not simply to identify the social, linguistic, or cultural dimensions of perception but also to specify the social and political relations, negotiations, and practices through which both subjects and objects of knowledge come to be constituted as such.15

  If one could think of feminist postmodernism as a wave racing for the shore in a game of who arrives first and who stays there, then perhaps it meets an obstacle in the ocean itself, in all her ferocious turnings and twisting and playful involutions. Expansive and enthralling. A roar of nature. The “material turn” isn’t about getting to the shore, it’s about obstacles and finiteness and making queer leaps. It’s about a world that snaps back, hisses, obstructs, and objects. It’s about being stuck, about emerging partially, not fully understanding, not arriving, the rumor of a shadowy core at the heart of brightest light. Coming down to earth is about being in the mangled middle.

  Before I go any further into this thrilling enunciation of a world stranger than we can imagine—a world the hushes, the dots in my quest to connect many dots to solve the puzzle of home, led me to revisit in new ways—let me say a thing or two about obstacles.

  When you were two years old, you took me by my little finger and dragged me out of the house we were staying in while we were in Richmond, Virginia, with your aunt Ifeoma. You wanted to swim in the pool at the center of the residential estate. That morning, I had made a conscious decision to let you lead me anywhere you wanted to go. We waved good-bye to your mother, and left the house—your determined gait pulling us in the direction of the watery goodness ahead.

  When we didn’t make a right turn to the pool, I realized you had missed the way. But an implicit aspect of my promise was to follow your lead, even if that meant going in the “wrong direction.” So you continued to run ahead—in the direction of a nearby lake, while speaking animatedly about swimming in the pool.

  As we approached the lake, you stopped dead in your tracks.

  “Remove your shoes, Dada!” you said.

  So I did. I liked to walk barefoot so it was just as well. But I didn’t expect what was to come next.

  “Wear my shoes, Dada!” you said, as if it were a very natural thing for a thirty-year-old man with size 45 feet to wear pink sandals that hardly protected his toes. But, as you already know, I did. And then you slipped your little feet into my own flip-flops, and reinitiated our journey. At this time, I could sense the first restless stirrings of the politics of adulthood, as I struggled with feelings of embarrassment.

  Moments later, we were standing by the lake, at its loamy edges, watching the ducks, the faint ripples occasioned by their gentle retreat. We simply stood there. You, by my right hand, just stared at the serene body of water. Small innocent seconds rolled into uncomfortable minutes. At some point, I wondered whether this might be a good time to chip in a fatherly lesson or two, or to connect with you in a deep way—anything to fill the disturbing void of silence that had enveloped us. I tried to talk, but you shut me down. “Dada, don’t talk,” you said, with the cavalier eminence of a two-year-old. I had promised to let you lead, but I wasn’t sure what the joggers nearby were now thinking of the queer voiceless figures standing by the lake.

  Then, I heard birds. I am not good at identifying them, but those distinctly avian sounds came wafting through, bending and melting with the wind, ruffling the green leafy protrusions above us. A murmuration of sound, creature, and surprise. It felt sudden—like the arrival of a triumphant gestalt where there were merely bits and pieces of the puzzle. I noticed lichens crawling around a tree, the exuberance of the soil beneath our feet, the quack-quacking of the ducks intent on making themselves heard. It was a soft “a-ha” moment: I noticed that everything is alive. I understood in that very tactile and embodied way that the material world wasn’t just a backdrop for human activity, wasn’t just static being or template awaiting the ordainment of meaning.

  You and I ended up playing after our unexpected libation of silence, decorating our faces and hands with mud, poking little twigs into the wet loamy soil, occasionally interrupted by the leitmotif of quacking around us. We walked back to our apartment like veterans of an exquisite order of things. Neighbors threw quizzical glances at us; I stammered out weak explanations like “she likes dirt” or something else to account for our very dirty appearance. Your mother was even less forgiving, and ordered us to the bathroom.

  The stains of your lesson in silence were the only things that didn’t wash off that day, and have lingered ever since. I am grateful to you for teaching me how to come to watery edges. Yes, you brought me here first. I am grateful to you for teaching me how to remain there for a while longer than is comfortable. For teaching me a tangential lesson about obstacles.

  This is what I learned: that an obstacle is the richest, thickest, densest place in the universe. This is so because it is where things stop and often die, failing to continue on their way. It is where carcasses of hope rot into the ground, inadvertently fertilizing it. It is a place of desperation and longing and roaming ghosts.

  This is my way of saying that I think it is not empty. This place—an obstacle—is bursting with activity, with microbial adventures, with dancing generativity, with experiments into dis/continuity, with playful meanings and alchemical shifts, with eloquent invocations and stuttered words. When you meet something fierce, too strong to overcome, too high to
climb, too eminent to sidestep, too dark to enlighten, don’t take it too personally—you have merely met an antibody, whose sacred task is to challenge you, discombobulate you, disfigure you, and introduce “you” to the strange vastness of your family. A larger commonwealth of becoming. Just as soils chastise seeds, and cocoons imprison caterpillars, obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control.

  I am learning that a dead end is a beautiful place—partly because I have been there many times before I began these letters to you, as well as in the course of writing them. Dead ends are opportunities to reconfigure our notions of continuity.

  In the resistance of bodies and the vibrant materiality of the world, new materialism theorists are heralds of edges. I like to think that some of them had been part of the pilgrimage of the never-ending story inaugurated by postmodernism and constructivism. They had fought back the stabilizing effects of modernist knowledge claims, reclaiming bodies as congealed conversations in an attempt to neuter their mechanized control.

  But now at the Alethean edges, a silence brews—a thick silence sewn together with the protest of bodies, with the simmering intentionality and vibrancy of objects. With the stirring of the other-than-human. Among the congregation gathered by the banks, voices start to whisper like the pitter-patter of raindrops on the ground. Karen Barad, holding hands with the others, whispers to herself and to those within earshot: “Language has been granted too much power.”16 Language has been granted too much power.

  The power of language is considered overbearing in its particular ways of explaining the world solely in terms of linguistic and social constructions. “New materialists” feel language has actually explained the world away, making invisible the ways the corporeal is also formative and agential in the world’s emergence. Casalini writes that for these authors, it is necessary

  to go beyond the dualism between nature and culture, between the material and the discursive, and between realism and social constructivism. This is possible by imagining nature, objects and nonliving nature, not as static and ahistorical, but … as agents themselves. Scientific activity cannot be explained on the basis of the separation between subject and object. It calls into question a network of relationships in which each actor (human and nonhuman) plays an active role. Nature and bodies materialize by emerging from an intricate web of interactions between actors and actants.17

  There is much more at work in the production of reality than the processes and activities of language and politics. Matter also shapes the world; our bodies, dust, eyes, oceans and chairs have a logic of their own, and have effects on what is constituted as real. Casalini writes that we need

  to go beyond the dualism between nature and culture, between the material and the discursive, and between realism and social constructivism. This is possible by imagining nature, objects, and nonliving nature not as static and ahistorical but … as agents themselves.18

  The dead things around us are not so dead, which is why Alaimo and Hekman write that

  Nature can no longer be imagined as a pliable resource for industrial production or social construction. Nature is agentic—it acts, and those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world. We need ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world—ways that account for myriad ‘intra-actions’ (in Karen Barad’s terms) between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal, and technological. Since the denigration of nature and the disregard for materiality cannot be entirely disaggregated, material feminism demands profound—even startling—reconceptualizations of nature.19

  This limits the unvaried application of discursive analysis to everything, and rephrases culture as an aspect of “co-emergence,” not the warp and woof of it. A single radioactive heap of waste can have vast political consequences, in the same way a piece of paper is a thinly compressed material made from pulpwood, the microbial activity in heavy dense soil, climate characteristics, the discipline of a farmer, her partner’s support, and even the presence (or absence) of particular governmental policies that regulate the felling of trees in their area.

  None of this is metaphorical, even though these entwining linkages I have drawn might feel tenuous and overdone. In fact, given that the examples I just provided are hypothetical, I have hardly touched upon the world-implicating complexities involved in the production of a single object—in this case, radioactive waste and a single piece of paper.

  The Yoruba people speak of “ayé,” loosely translated into the one-tongue as “life”—a poor translation, if you ask me, for what they try to articulate is a mode of causation that is unwieldy, surprising, diffracted, multilinear, ecstatic, and sensuous: where a single eyelash that unplugs itself from its socket and is stepped on by an oblivious human could curse that person with madness. Where a gust of wind contains not only dust and rushed air, but the charged cravings of a rebutted love-stricken admirer. For Yoruba people, especially those “uneducated” ones like Bàbá, one cannot draw too straight a line from cause to effect. Indeed, one cannot even draw a sure unidirectional line from cause to effect, since effect can flow into cause, and—even more startlingly—also because time is not conceived as a single stream flowing from past to future but as a cycle … a muddy viscous puddle that means the past is amenable to reconfiguration. In a sigh, we—together with multiple others—are part of a web of life, not just stuck on it like a hapless fly-turned-spider-breakfast, but the very web itself in its fluctuations and rich complexity. And movement, the slightest gesture, sends tremors through the veins of our never-ending reiterative becomings.

  Many new materialisms coincide with these ideas, and insist that the effort to pry ontology away from epistemology, or to think of matter as removed from the discursive, or to imagine mind as acorporeal, leaves us asunder and closes up interesting and promising new pathways for understanding the universe’s multi-complexities.

  This is why biologist Donna Haraway began to speak about “naturecultures”—no longer nature versus culture but the entanglement of the twain. Neither an ontology nor an epistemology but an onto-epistemology.

  Karen Barad also coined her own neologism to explain just how intimate ontology and epistemology are: ontoepistemology. Neither an ontology nor an epistemology. The effect of that was telling us that ocean and shore are indeed “closer” than their intellectual history of gratings might suggest. Barad speaks about the material-discursive to highlight this entanglement between what we’ve traditionally taken as irreconcilable: our conversations about the material world (mind) and the material world itself (matter). With another profoundly disruptive formulation: “intra-action” as opposed to “interaction”, she makes an argument for the intra-dependence of things. The latter presumes that the world is made up of linear causal modes and preset independent objects with pre-given boundaries, properties, and meanings—objects that later come to “inter”-act in an occasional relationship. Intra-action, on the other hand, turns that picture on its head, showing how relationships precede the objects in that relationship. Objects—be it a laptop, climate change, the idea of determinism, or what “home” means—only come to gain their “thingness” and specificity in the context of a relationship. And, this emergence doesn’t happen in a once-and-for-all way. The world is not just an empty container for things, like this jar of toffee sitting on the water dispenser a few feet from me. The world is an ongoing relationship where “things” are constantly rupturing and congealing due to human and more-than-human practices. Intra-action presumes entanglement, not independence.

  Take light, for instance. What is its true nature? What magic infuses this seemingly immaterial yet substantial “thing”? I often ask a question to people that meet with me on my teaching tours: is it possible to frame an intr
insic, independent, precontextual definition of light? To arrive at its essence in some final, unambiguous way? To describe what it really is as opposed to what it does or its effects? The responses usually range from the tautological “light is that which enlightens” to persons, grasping for words, trying to bodily perform illumination with widened eyes and spread-out fingers. And a quizzical gaze for good measure. Some science-oriented ones might say that light is a wave. Others say it is particulate.

  Isaac Newton—the seventeenth-century English mathematician—was one of those who championed (in his book Optiks) the idea that light propagation was a matter of traveling particles, little corpuscles spilling into space. Newton was Western science’s idea of royalty, so he went largely unchallenged in his views about the nature of light. But there were other notable scientists (such as Christiaan Huygens) who thought that light behaved more like a wave than like little balls. Up until the moment the nineteenth-century English scientist Thomas Young conducted his inspired double-slit experiment in 1801, there was no one way to sort out this deeply troubling matter—to literally sort out the deep ontology of light. Whether wave or particle. One thing felt sure, though: light was either wave or particle. It couldn’t be both. Such an idea would have been outrageous to classical physicists.

  Young felt if light propagation was wave-like, it would behave like the ripples on surface of water, with opposing waves canceling each other out or reinforcing each other, creating interference or fringe patterns, and so on. His experimental apparatus consisted of a source of light filtered through a pinhole, directed at two slits in a barrier, and captured eventually on a screen facing the barrier. Young expected that when the streams of light from the two slits touched the final screen, if light propagation was wavelike, he should observe interference patterns or alternating ridges of darkness and brightness—but if the corpuscular theory was correct instead, he should see two bands of light directly in line with the slits.