Likewise, with “transcorporeal weather”—the material ways in which specific bodily practices, both human and nonhuman, are co-constitutive of weather, we come to see how the contemporary patterning of responsivity to climate change (within the frame of sustainability) seeks to assert our control over the elements and invests in scale, repeatability, standardization, and climate apocalypse narratives to the exclusion of a different ethos of responsivity. Because we see climate as something outside, something foreign, we have mounted this luxurious and exhausting framework—the elaborate maintenance of which calls on an ethics of big funds, lone interacting actors, money shots, and political promises. Not that there is a “better” way, a deeper layer of action that can resolve this crisis.13 What we are in effect attempting to do is to control temporality, which is a monumentally tasking project of maintaining our autonomy in the world. In time. In weather.
The whole apparatus is thus framed from a Newtonian metaphysics that caters to the concept of human exceptionalism and the inexorability of a single timeline and future along the lines of human activities. I say Newtonian because it was Newton who conceived time as an absolute linearity, a straight line dotted with moments. The consequence of this spatialization of time is that we see ourselves as within time, or time as exterior to us. We have to be in time much in the same way we have to catch a train. However, what this throws out is that there are multiple temporalities, that bodies secrete and reconfigure time in every gesture, movement, and act. The temporalities created by lava condensing into rock are different from those that are summoned in the blooming gesture of yawning garden phlox.
I might use one of the West African stories I used to tell you to elaborate further: Who is faster, Rabbit or Tortoise? In the story, they have to race to a finish line. Tortoise wins, of course—not because he is faster, but because the rabbit gets cocky and overconfident in his skills, and actually sleeps at the tip of the finish line. The tortoise crawls along all this while, and crosses the line long before the rabbit jumps awake to meet his folly. Slow and steady wins the race, we then say. And yet, there is a sense in which the temporalities secreted by Tortoise’s and Rabbit’s bodily intra-actions with environment are incommensurable with each other. Tortoise isn’t slow, he is Tortoise-in-collaboration-with-context. In the same way, houseflies avoid being swatted because their metabolic rates are different from ours. Scientists say they are able to do this because they perceive time in slow motion. Time perception, however, is not the issue—since time is not something out there. Instead flies inhabit/co-weave different temporalities; their bodies intra-actively produce slow-moving others.
We—all bodies in their specificities—are time-making and time-diffracting.
Because we imagine ourselves autonomous, we act in ontological tension with massive time, and because we see the world as a linear series of cause spilling into effect ad infinitum, we want to time-travel to a human future by time-freezing ourselves in the present (hence, the paradigm of “sustain-ability”) and removing the extraneous variables of competing causes crowding our performances of permanence. It’s an expensive endeavor.
The unit of climate change is thus not carbon emission measured by supposedly neutral metrics. Carbon emission is an abstraction with universalizing effects; it is too narrow, too linear, and too stunted an explanation for climate change.14 Moreover, it serves a single Future. It is the colonizing race track that imposes a teleology on the world, and tacks on the politics of sustainability to this furniture. Greater carbon emission equals bleak future equals no humans. It is in lockstep with colonial time—and this not because the climate isn’t changing (it always is!), and not because humans aren’t contributing to these changes (we are weathering bodies, after all), but because colonial time imposes a single dimensionality and directionality, makes room for a single class of actors, and invests in a solutionism that alienates a more sensuous “politics of possibilities” … a politics of many streams. This politics is yet to come, and still it is not something yet to be articulated or awaiting complete theorization. Indeed a relational ontology of thick time compels us to notice the small—and not just in terms of isolated moments of complying with our learnings in carbon literacy: “A climate change imaginary of ‘thick time’ pushes us to hold together the phenomena of a weather pattern, a heat-absorbent ocean, the pleasure of a late-fall swim, and the turn of a key in the ignition as the interconnected temporalities we call ‘climate change.’”15
The traditional climate imaginary in fact loses sight of climate change and the extent to which weather is transcorporeally manifested and iterated between bodies when it emphasizes a “stop climate change” approach. Hijacked by the linear time, by human exceptionalism, by the metaphysics of an agentially ineffectual nonhuman world, and by the intergenerational (and perhaps inter-traumatic) politics of development, climate change becomes menacing. We cannot stop climate change, or control it according to predetermined plans. Does this mean we shouldn’t care about global warming? I would argue that moving outside the framework of progress expands the space of caring and being accountable, and opens up a space where new patterns are possible for being responsive to the myriad ways weathering bodies are co-enacting the ground beneath, the sky around, and the spaces between us.
The gluey metaphysics of progress—the suggestion that we are here to stay and that the world owes this to us—spins the clay pot so exclusively that those of us immured with modernity find it difficult imagining other ways to live. What if our human civilization and our experiences were structured by and oriented toward the delightful exploration of the finer details of ecstasy? What if carbon reductionism was not the only way of understanding climate change? What if, when we met, we exchanged singing seeds, shared stories of psychedelic expeditions through the portals of normal wakeful states, and swapped wisdoms and rituals on navigating the ambivalence of life? What if we weren’t so addicted to growth, progress, consumption, and independence? What if we befriended dying? What would life look like?
I have often asked these questions in company of colleagues, who look at me quizzically, wondering if I’d gone mad. Why would anyone question progress or sustainable development?
Progress is the name we give to the curious idea that it is more important to compete in an abstracted space with faceless disembodied avatars, to sit at a cubicle-contained desk punching numbers into a computer in return for figures, to climb up an imagined ladder where real worth awaits, and to run a race whose winner is its ultimate victim—than it is to attend to the riddling yelps of a young child, to acquaint oneself with the shape-shifting mysteries of play, and to lose oneself over and over again in the swirling eddies of love. In a culture that largely defines worthiness, sanity, and success in terms of how distant we are from our feelings, how far and fast we run away from our roots, how numb we are to the fluency of our bodies, daring to slow down … daring to be still is the most damning act of rebellion.
Sustainable development is not our way of embracing our entanglement in the web of life; it has nothing to do with revitalizing our inescapable tethering with “nature” or recognizing that we are materially constituted by agencies and actions outside our control. It is our way of sustaining the primacy of economic advancement and cultural homogenization. If you are in any doubt about how skewed the paradigm of sustainable development really is, look at its indicators. They are all entirely economic. In other words, the way we know we are in a healthy relationship with nature is by looking through the lenses of economic development; in other words, our alliance with nature is directly proportional to how estranged we are from her. Nature in this conception is the network of raw materials awaiting redemption in our Calvinistic universes, and awaiting meaning and direction in our Cartesian coordinates. Making “nature” an “other” is the singular motif that keeps emerging in every new approach to addressing our crises today.
The issue of responsivity still remains. Saying we are entangled and already alive i
n a stream of transcorporeal imbrications can often come across as deterministic—as if we were in fact saying that there is nothing we can do about what we already do. Or that we are the same with everything else. But as Neimanis and Loewen note, entanglement is also a “space of difference,” not enforced homogeneity. This means the world is constantly challenging itself, and that very specific intra-actions produce differences (which do not imply separation). This is not a picture of determinism nor the theocentric ideal of “free will.” In both conceptions, the mind-body duality problem is well and alive: nature is fixed and machinelike, while mind is free.
Some theorists fall on the side of determinism, pointing to the ways social, psychological, and biological principles shape behavior. Those who advocate the notion of free will place the mind totally outside of these machinelike circumstances, but find it difficult to say “where” this freely disembodied quality resides and how it interacts with matter. A “third” addition to the classic debate is compatibilism, which posits that determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive—but even that doesn’t address the strict dichotomy between matter and discourse.
New materialisms like agential realism ease the tensions by rethinking nature as fluid, open, and generative. Again, nature cannot be conceived apart from mental stuff, or discourse, or mind. They are already entangled. As such, our rigid formulation of matter as dead stuff gives in to a different conception of matter-mind as ontologically indeterminate. Barad’s contributions in quantum philosophy point exactly to such an indeterminacy. Humans are neither predetermined nor free disembodied creatures: we are betweening-bodies in an ongoing reconfiguration of “space-timethics.” This does not mean we cannot act or be creative or be directional or organize; but it does mean that we never act unilaterally. We act in murmuration.
I think that certain topological openings and potentials, occasioned by new materialisms like Barad’s and interest in what indigenous cosmologies can teach us about the world, are now making room for new kinds of politics. These concepts are co-producing new directionalities, and creating “the provocation to think otherwise, to become otherwise.”16 I do not know how to characterize the possibilities opening up—since the feminist materialist spaces opening up do not enforce or rigidly recommend types of action. The “new” possibilities invite performance artistry, rekindling or improvising indigeneity, writing and speaking about “deepening” our responsibilities to climate matterings, and learning to take care with the nonhuman populations around us.
Maybe a different otherwise, a home, lies in another ethos that reframes the questions about survival. Maybe other places of power17 open up when we relinquish our convenient narratives of human exceptionalism and triumphalism—those stories that centralize human agency and enthrone human interests as supremely paramount in the multiverse. These new materialist concepts enjoin us to decenter ourselves not simply because we are now regaining some awareness about the nobility of other species and life forms—and not entirely because we are ourselves now humbled by our less than spectacular origins—but mainly because these times of upheaval call on us to revisit what is implied in being human. Do we continue to insist that we are lords over all, masters of the universe—uniquely distanced from the fleshy, dirty discourses of “nature” or from weather—ravaging plagues burning soil and earth into asphalted forms of our own making? Or do we recognize our relatedness to all things, our real dependence on the land we supposedly transcend, and that to be human is not a magisterial decree of isolation, but a chorus … a syncretic process of shared ecological participation?
Upon leaving the university, I allied myself with a specific “new world” type of activism and with practitioners who had spent many years working with marginalized groups, calling out the damaging effects of neoliberal capitalism on local well-being, researching into alternatives to mainstream approaches to climate action, exploring other ways of conceiving education, and so much more. I suppose it was the “natural” next step to take when we left: I had always wanted to “do some good” in the world, and not sit behind a desk. Your birth situated my intellectual exertions for social justice, this quest for home in a world that often feels increasingly hostile to homecomings.
I was offered a platform to speak quite early, even before your mother and I decided to leave to create a life for you. I traveled quite frequently, speaking in places as far-flung as Byron Bay in Australia, as animated and evocative as Istanbul, and as enrapturing as Penang, Malaysia. In the past few years since we left active academic work, I have clocked in more travel time than most people I know. Your Yoruba grandmother has a nickname for me—“Àjàlá Travels.” Don’t bother figuring it out; the reference is also quite lost on me! I hear it in her voice anytime she calls—a bafflement that often borders on worry. “You travel too much,” she’ll say, noting that even my dad, who was a diplomat, never traveled quite as frequently. The irony is not lost on me: I leave you behind, I leave my dear Lali, and travel far away to talk to strangers about finding home. And then when I return, I’m too busy to play with you, because the next invitation has only just arrived. You are missing a father in my quest to become a good father.
And therein lies the Omelas-like tragedy in my quest. This urge to run. To fight something. To prove something. To be vindicated. Fretful slivering things that live in the shadows that haunt the roads we take.
Justice is awkward. Awk-ward. Not forward. “Forwards” speak of gold-plated futures in wait. “Awkwards” take note of something else. A Middle English word for “clumsy,” “backward,” or “perverse” was awk. The word itself evokes the idea of things lacking a certain grace about them, being of many minds as opposed to walking resolutely in one direction. In spite of the many negative connotations attached to the idea of being awkward, awkwardness is a profusion of grace, and not the absence of it. When we don’t know what to say or what to do or where to go, it is often because many paths are open to us, many possibilities are known, and many agencies are making themselves heard. The tip of the tongue is a diving board into finer waters.
This is how things move. Awkly. This is what we have to consider: that the straight and narrow road that begins where we are—in the doldrums of modern life that denies us community, on the wrong side of colonial history, in the pit of dark places—and purportedly terminates at the place we want to be—a better world, an economically just arrangement, a race-celebratory society—is not always the road to take. Indeed, there is no such road. The world is thick. Bent out of shape. Out of whack. The square-jawed causalities Enlightenment sustained, this vocation to unhook ourselves from the umbilical connections to our bodies and their queernesses, promise us a justice it cannot deliver.
A poetics of the real insists we come down to earth in her bashful awkwardness, in her stuttering eloquence, and meet her in that place—ourselves shorn of our heavenly glow and tasseled garments. Down here, in our bodies, in torn cuticles and unruly hair, in not knowing half the words we say, in first birdsong and last gleam of light, in these bodily negotiations with chicken pox, in sacred hypocrisies, in catching a cold, in making New Year resolutions and failing each of them, in the promiscuities of a longing eye, in the provisionality of a zealous believing, in snoring, in breathing, in laughing and dying, lies justices-to-come. That enlightened quest for the long arc of justice, spanning the sky like a leprechaun’s rainbow, shimmering in the distance, above everything, must now be abandoned for a keen noticing of the life worlds and doings of the things around us. I would say that the slime trail of a hush is the transient mark of justice.
That the world resists convenient causality and stable natures is a concept that can open us up to other places of power, other ways of acting or partnering with the world. When Karen Barad writes that “there are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibil
ities for living justly,”18 it might seem like the most blasphemous thing to utter—especially to people in precarious situations who do not have the luxury of philosophical musings.
What about cars, penicillin, and Facebook? What about more money? That would seem like a pretty nifty solution to many, wouldn’t it? But the point, if I can stress this, is not that these things aren’t there, but that they are threadbare and tentacular, and they tug on the fabric of the world and pull in agentic effects we often do not or cannot account for in our neat models of change. Summarily, you can only expect solutions in a world where humans are truly separate from everything else, where we can disclose the elegance of things from a vantage point. Not only is such a standpoint not possible, but it has dangerous imperialistic consequences.
Does that mean we shouldn’t do all that we can, and work harder in the particular ways we can? Of course not. A neomaterialist offering like Barad’s doesn’t pretend to teach the “correct way to act/think”; it doesn’t offer a model or platform that guarantees the results we might want to see. It doesn’t postulate a “background reality” that we are ontologically distanced from, and to which we must tie our actions if we want “true” or lasting solutions. It doesn’t dismiss the “previous” or think of itself as truer than other explanations we give for the world. Instead, it can serve as a strategy for examining the material-discursive frameworks of assumptions, of place, of time, and human and nonhuman populations that produce specific realities—to the exclusion of others, and the ethical implications of those we have taken for granted and those that are occluded. In other words, agential realism can help us examine how differences are co-enacted—how we draw lines between old and new, good and evil, correct and incorrect, fact and fiction, and so on.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 33