Unrehearsed Futures (Season 3) #1 Creating in the Chaosmos: Indeterminacy and Generative Incapacitation

“The universe is hostile to straight lines.”

Back in 2003, Belgium was in the middle of holding its national election. It was a landmark one because it was one of the first times the country was going to vote through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) where votes would be cast on and counted by computers. Thousands of hours were spent on preparation, and everything was on track. Until a cosmic glitch inflated the votes of a little-known politician, Maria Vindevogel, in the municipality of Schaerbeek. This result boggled election officials, because it defied mathematical logic: How could a politician be allocated an extra 4096 votes?

It turned out that the culprit behind this mysterious turn of events was stardust. Deeper examination found that the number of extra votes – 4096, a power of two – hinted at a bit flip, a phenomenon where a single binary digit flips from zero to one or vice-versa. According to this theory, high energy particles from exploding stars situated millions of light years away from earth, including supernovae, could penetrate earth’s atmosphere and interfere with electronic devices such as EVMs, causing bit flips that inflated Maria Vindevogel’s numbers in the election. All it took was some tiny bits of stardust to throw us unwitting humans off-balance, off-kilter in a world where we are primed to “galvanize our God given resources to control the world, to predict, to describe, to explain and control,” said Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, Nigerian philosopher, writer, activist, professor of psychology and the director of the Emergence Network at the opening of Season 3 of Unrehearsed Futures – Off Axis: Creating in the Chaosmos.

The indetermiverse

Akómoláfé shared that when he received the invitation to talk about the chaosmos, it reminded him of something he has been writing about: Following might very well be flying without the tyranny of coordinates. He called the idea of a chaosmos to be “shocking, disrupting, troubling, and yet promising, because of the ways that it upsets colonial order, because of the ways that it disturbs imperial continuity.”

He said that modern civilization is premised on the idea of the ‘separate individuated agent’ and the speculatively geometrically aligned and rational, or progressively rational world outside of this agent. The work of the modern citizen, he added, is to “galvanize our God-given resources to control the world, to predict, to describe, to explain and control the scientific method. That’s what gives us power.”

But the universe seems to have a life and imperatives of its own, echoes Akómoláfé. “It seems to dance away from capture, retreat away from being fully named, like an infinitesimally small virus that upsets the entire economy, and breaks open all our control measures.”

The idea of a chaosmos beautifully captures the animated, promiscuous, and fugitive qualities of the universe. “I call it the indetermiverse,” says Akómoláfé, “where the the universe is somewhat haughty and proud, because it is free. I’m saying that the universe is so teenaged, so upsetting, so fugitive, so indeterminate in its arrangement that it can only be seen through the lenses of chaos, order and diffraction, that are coming together and falling apart together.”

If the pandemic is teaching us anything, it is that the assumption of the world being in a Euclidean arrangement where “we” design what we want, and the world just falls and bows at our feet, is turning out to be reductive and occludes a universe or chaosmos that resists straight lines.

The trouble, says Akómoláfé, is that human beings are running on the fumes of industrialization, the fumes of the holocene, the fumes of the anthropocene. What he means by that is the premise that we as a species need the engine that produces the human as an individuated agent of change, is being haunted by different kinds of ghost. “This ghost is a world, a universe, a chaosmos, an indetermiverse that will not be told what to do,” he explains. “We’ve been struggling with climate change since the 1970s. We’ve written books. We know all the data. How come we still haven’t put ourselves right and put everything in order? Because we’re part of the whole that we’re trying to study. I think the greatest call of the chaosmos is a call to humility, a call to fall down to earth, a call to revisit our claims to superiority.”

The pandemic was and is a time when we felt incapacitated and unable to do anything. So how do we rethink this state of disequilibrium and conceptualize it as something from which we might produce new things, whether as thought forms, or actual things in the world? Akómoláfé believes that it is important to not reduce the pandemic to being an epidemiological moment. It is not just an invisible virus we’re fighting against but a political operation at play. “The virus is not just a virus. It is a virus, and it is political,” he expands. “It is not just a tiny virus that can be fully captured under the microscope. It is politics; it is Russia and Ukraine, it is Israel and Palestine, in a rhizome, in a web of becoming.” Akómoláfé proposes a sort of post-activism where people say that to find your way, you must get lost. “By saying lost, one is saying that one must veer away from the highway to commune with spirits, to commune with ancestry, to commune with trees,” he adds.

The trickster

Akómoláfé also talks about the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant who spoke about the right to opacity – that one will not be fully named, indexed, categorized, or fully available for the world’s systems of management. It hints at the fugitive, and at the softer, more nuanced understanding of blackness – blackness that strays away from the politics of recognition. “It knows that identity is much more troubling than our politics can convey. It is doing other things. That’s why it is allied with the trickster,” opines Akómoláfé. “The trickster is the part of the psyche that resists order.” There are some aspects of the world we need that will invite us to stability and modernity, with a reinforcement of these values. But sometimes stability becomes toxic and incarcerating like an exoskeleton, he explains further. “And in those moments, we need failure,” Akómoláfé believes, “We need to go to the places, sights, events we’ve branded as shadows, evil, and the wilds. I think that’s what the trickster is about: an invitation to failure, an invitation to generative incapacitation.”

The trickster enables grief in a way where it doesn’t romanticise it, says Akómoláfé. “It does something with it, which psychologists are beginning to recognise as post traumatic growth, which I often call generative incapacitation. Right there, at the heart of grief and loss is the engine of continuity.”

However, Akómoláfé also cautions against rushing back to joy or well-being after crisis. He calls is a seditious fugitive response. “It is important to understand feelings as territorial beings. What if we are in territories of despair? What if we’re not just experiencing a global warming of carbon dioxide but a global warming of depression? What if we’re territorially affecting each other, infecting each other, exposing each other? That there was already a pandemic pre-pandemic, that modernity, the city, and suburbia is a kind of enclosure that encases certain kinds of fields.”

As the conversation comes to a close, Akómoláfé draws parallels between the myth of Egyptian goddess Hathor and her destruction of the mankind, and how we show up in the world. Much like how Hathor was tricked into drinking wine she thought was blood, Bayo asserts that we are sustained by a trick that we are not moving through the world with our own agency. “Decoloniality is not some singing of Kumbaya that everything is convenient. We will not arrive intact. That is the energy of the woods.”