De-institutionalisation of knowledge as a decolonial option

Our world is getting increasingly convoluted. Truths collide as much as they fight for dominance in a reality of proliferating logic. If the 21st century is a spaceship, we have made several galactic jumps in the last decades, at the heart of which are the world wide web and the Internet. We are on the verge of yet another. Today, artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of sci-fi. As I write, my note-taking app can use its AI to analyse my writings’ pros and cons, deciphering certain areas of incongruities. It sounds mechanical when I read it but it is not incoherent or unbelievable. Every technological advancement of recent years is tailored to subsist in a world and economy that transcends borders, even though the outcome reverses little regarding class and social division. Time, one of the most enduring constructs of our species, has been reconfigured by the parallelism of the offline-online paradigm, such that there are two chronological versions of ourselves. The Metaverse is in the making. Your device can learn and memorise your idiosyncrasies through Machine Learning. The brittleness of Absolute Truth has succumbed to the reverberating clamour for plurality.

Nevertheless, anxieties about the future hang overhead like an ominous dome. It is as if our technological advancements and economic manoeuvres outpace our ability to advance, in corresponding proportion, the conceptual form at the core of what it means to be human in the 21st century. If digital footprint data is the new currency in a world of surveillance capitalism, facial recognition technologies, undercut by algorithmic biases, are the new apparatus for constructing and standardising a monolithic gaze.

In certain parts of the world, especially in the self-designated developed regions, the air is bright and right, yet tight. One can attribute this to sensibilities engendered by the advent of Covid-19. There is something therein to hold on to, if only as one patch of various interconnected factors that remind us that the handwriting has been on the wall all along.

In social terms, we have developed a few more isms and abbreviations that intervene to complicate binaries and dichotomies that, until recently, were assumed to be uncontested categories within natural sciences and theologies. It’s safe, at this point, to imagine that we are standing at a historical turning point in the making that would change the course of this mother ship and the biodiverse lives it sustains. Arts and humanities – specifically those not held in the tight grip of state-funded institutions – have burrowed deep and embraced, to a large extent, the idea of subjective Truth. The world of science, struggling with self-denial, is playing catch up.

We are more aware than ever of how interconnected we are, even as many factions continue to work hard to uphold the status quo and the doctrine of stark borders. Nonetheless, we yearn for connection. We fear isolation. We crave the solace of a homogeneous, worry-free concept of home and family while helpless to the lure of diverse human communities, mobility, internationalism and multiculturalism. A both-sides-ism that, on the perverse side of the spectrum, amounts to wanting the best of both worlds. However, when considered from the prism of emancipated subjectivities, we are experiencing refraction of the myriad forms, layers, densities, textures, torques, and subtleties at points (and between points) where the re-emerging “Self” intersect and forces towards inevitable self-reflection. As if we are all in a maze of our own making wherein we can see – and be seen – only to the extent we are willing to be exposed to the refracted rays that warn of no order or readily predictable pattern.

Can anyone hide or be protected from these refractions while simultaneously wanting “to be seen”? This question lies at the heart of the dialectics of the future. It is perhaps why such words as “vulnerability” and “empathy” have become the latest commodified catchwords.

In our time, knowledge has become omnipresent. Gone are the days when knowledge could be mined, exported and imposed from one culture area (country or people) to another in broad daylight. Nothing of this, however, implies that the weaponisation, hoarding and appropriation of knowledge(s) have seen their last days. If anything, there is a heightened frenzy in the tracking and tracing of knowledge by agents in institutions of the arts, academia, humanities, sciences and tech – some of them newly appointed as interlocutors of realities beyond the margins of a world heavy-handedly shaped by the Enlightenment age and white patriarchy. These agents indicate a future up for grabs that, if optimistically viewed, is the only hope there might be. Their disposition sets the compass towards what Edouard Glissant refers to as “the always possible infinite” or what I call “a needful Utopia”. But, on the flip side, it is at this infantile stage – if we permit the use of the term “post-covid era” as a marker – that we ought to be mindful of contrived efforts, hasty attempts and uncritical imaginations leading to “black-washing of the white-washing” by same agents whose body of knowledge and authority legitimise them as the “horse’s mouth” of post-colonial discourse.

In any case, they are the new gatekeepers, conduits, backed by an old institution aware of its imminent obsolescence caught in the conundrum of their self-woven double standards. One can go as far as manufacturing Truth over centuries. But history has shown, many times over, that even the consequences of Truth can be too much of a truthful pill to swallow. These agents are appointed to help ease, if not defer, the pains incrementally. We are also allowed to call this process “healing the world”. I predict that, in the near future, we will witness a massive proliferation of artistic concepts with headlines and taglines containing such words as joy, care, self-love, togetherness, bodily knowledge, queer, pluriversality, and yes, “decoloniality. They will mean everything and nothing at the same time.

These agents equally stand the chance of proffering the legitimacy for which context-specific knowledge(s) are uprooted, transported, cannibalised and stripped of its spark before it has had a real opportunity to germinate into “a knowledge that cannot be stricken by obsolescence” as Glissant puts it.

At the core of this frenzy is the incessant need to capture and bring anything that shows potential for value into the realm of quantification. We clamour for a world of harmony with the same zeal with which we denigrate knowledges that cannot be readily measured and extracted.

To buttress my point, I resort to a jestful analogy: Imagine a faction of these agents from the African and Diaspora-African communities as chefs appointed to propose and replicate a Pan-African-Diasporic menu in a given country in the Western hemisphere. A good number of these agents are Afropolitans where the designation parochially connotes “Cosmopolitans of African origin” – one which, as it stands, finds genuine autonomy only when it measures up to the privilege of the white passport or pitted against Blacks/Africans without the means to move as freely across borders vis a vis proximity to whiteness.

Many of the meals on this menu typically contain hot spice, vegetables and seasoning context-specific to the tropical region where they originated. Theirs would be, amongst other things, the task of transformation, translation, transposition and transportation. The dish will most likely be called its local name; its genealogy will be explained accordingly. However, there is a sizeable chance that many of the menus will be stripped of their hot spice, intrinsic to their gustation, to accommodate and tolerate the taste buds of Europeans who, regardless of the eclectic configuration of the visitors, are invariably considered the standard.

This is already problematic as it is. Yet, my locus of attention is not in the “stripping of spice” from the dishes but rather the fact that enough weight is not given to the hyphenated spaces between the local context and the transported one. What other name – that acts as a verb or adjective – could we assign to the dishes stripped of their spiciness that would account for the movement, and paradoxes, that ensue in the process of transposition and transportation within transitory trajectories? In other words, what exactly is the historicity and cartography of the dishes? This is the challenge that the new arbiters of post-colonial realities face. And it is not a simple one insofar as the standard audience comprises people who would instead defer the daunting work of encountering, recognising and acknowledging their reflection in the refracted rays induced by the “becoming planetary” of our predicament.

How might we begin to contemplate this challenge?

If knowledge in our time is omnipresent, what then is knowledge? Here, I propose that knowledge has ceased to be a thing that is capturable or an accreditation – contrary to the unregulated growth of data mining. Instead, it is in the air we breathe. Indeed, it is the air. Thus when Frantz Fanon talks about the human of the future as those with a “new respiratory rhythm”, he refers to a different consistency of tangibility. Not only is the respiratory rhythm that Fanon speaks of intrinsic to the nature of the “newness” that Glissant associates with the Poetics of Relation, but it is also, in itself, a methodology of knowledge collation and an aesthetic of artistic forms. We can only understand this consistency by referencing the concept of symbiosis and osmosis at points where they reconfigure our understanding of how knowledge moves and forms the planetary.

Moreover, these two biological processes also help us understand the ingenuity of rhizomes and mycelium. In the future, knowledge will be tentacular and tangential. It will move like a network of undercurrents, invisible and ungraspable to materiality, yet tangible. It will be spiritual in its most potent form and, as such, intrinsically related to motion. Only then can we speak of “a glowing from within”, of which the manifestation is corporeal. Thus, if there is no movement, there is no life – knowledge is somewhere else – outside life. Conversely, what obstructs movement obstructs life. This organic and infusing rhythm will bring about a de-institutionalisation of knowledge, for every attempt at decolonisation and emancipation of the subjective will amount to patchwork insofar as knowledge is collated and validated institutionally.

In a world where the marginalised, the disenfranchised and the colonised are engaged in an intentional and deliberate act of self-recreation – generating radiations that empower and reinvigorate – we are witnessing a new form of individuation that draws its urge and urgency from its innate Wealth of Difference. It has been there all along, glued like skin to his, her or their Presencing (what the Igbos would refer to as “Chi”). The Euro-American institutions of human knowledge (as well as those across the globe modelled around them) act as funnels through which these rhizomatic processes of ingenious human pro-activity are captured into a holistically namable quantity. It is also a process of containment which, in the long run, amounts to an “emptying out” or a siphoning.

Beauty was once everywhere before it was in the eyes of the beholder.

Rather than continue to sustain these institutions, which, in their true sense, are edifices of Western hegemony, we must cultivate and nurture a mindset that allows for the proliferation of micro-projects and communities in all their gradations and granularity and legitimise the processes therein beyond the attribute of scale and locality.

As we encounter each other as humans who, at a depth of our singularity, yearn for warmth propagated by those around and beyond us – a state of plural-singularity, so to speak – only the imaginative power of delineation can lead us forward through the fog of the present into a future that is an open question. To decolonise means, first and foremost, to de-institutionalise frameworks through which knowledge is legitimised.

The Power of Delineation

As we continue the work of conceiving a new form of individuation, giving it new respiratory rhythms through the disposition of our subjectivity, we shore up the Wealth of Difference concurrently. Therefore, to be “knowing” would imply being “discerning”. In other words, we must inculcate the ability to delineate between multifariously intertwining strands of subjectivities within any healthy or fruit-yielding context of collectivity. 

This ought to be a practice in all senses of the word. It must infiltrate our sense of reading, visualisation, auditory, oratory, olfactory and, yes, gustation. It must transcend the regularities of habits, courtesy and politeness. It is not etiquette, nor is it a game of “pros and cons”, “either-or”, or “for and against”. It is not both-sides-ism. On the contrary, it will be the new basis for self-honesty and human authenticity. In it, there is no fertile ground for hypocrisy and double standards.

To become fixated on such concepts as plurality, pluriversality, multiculturality or decoloniality without cultivating the power of delineation necessary for navigating the multi-contextual realities those concepts presuppose, at best, is getting ahead of ourselves, and at worst, a dangerous oversight.

Thus, the truly progressive ones are those who tend, with care, diligence and faith, to the networks of our differences. They are gardeners of the hyphenated spaces that expands and contracts according to the weavings of encounter. They are also healers. 

How can we embody these concepts without the aptitude to recognise Difference(s) nor what to make of its wealth? The keyword, in this case, is “recognise”. To recognise is to open the eyes anew to the many promises and possibilities inherent in a person or thing. It is a visual category as much as a spiritual one insofar as it means revelation.

Much of our visual reading of reality is material in consistency. That is, whatever the eyes can ascertain through the image compositions of the brain is considered valid. All else is questionable, if not outrightly unbelievable. But we are continually reminded that existence does not obey the laws of materiality. Yet the deficiency of movement in our thoughts and understanding of our immediate reality comes from the incapacity to hold evidential what eludes the eye-brain orbit.

From this perspective, one can understand that any imperialist, colonialist, or misogynist gaze can only draw from an ossified image stored in the recess of the past, which now forms the bedrock of the subconscious and plays a significant role in one’s reading of the material world. As long as we have yet to divest ourselves of this calcified logic through which we read materiality, attempts to move beyond these tendencies will remain a patchwork, if not new forms of the same old order.

Recent studies have shown that many data sets fed to the Artificial Intelligence machines behind facial recognition and automated identification carry over this deadened image of white patriarchy, training the AI systems to be racial and gender-biased to the detriment of specific demographics. Joy Buolamwini, the Ghanaian-Canadian-American computer scientist specialising in algorithmic biases in facial recognition technology, has dedicated her career to peeling the layers of gruesome happenings behind the scenes of Surveillance Capitalism. Although she has become the face of concerns shared by a few others in her field with whom she worked, her disposition and methodology point to the direction of what I mean by the imaginative power of delineation. She is simply saying, “You are undermining the Wealth of Difference, and that is a crime against humanity”.

The power of delineation allows us to nurture and groom the ability to recognise the present time beyond the fixed images in our consciousness and to commune with currents, frequencies and radiations hitherto indecipherable. These currents are not necessarily grand, eventful gestures, nor are their presences conspicuous. Yet they are as potent and life-sustaining as air – an indispensable component of life we most take for granted.

Those imbued with the imaginative power of delineation will be attuned – at various gradations of frequencies – to the fluctuations and movements at those moments where Differences encounter and enter each other. By now, fear and anxiety, like dead skin, would have fallen off their newly formed subjectivity. Thus, they wear their Difference proudly rather than weaponise their outer walls. Their gaze is refreshed, from one context to the other, in a perpetual act of newness and active distillation of sensorial inputs as they carry their Body and Being along in their presencing. Wherever they go, they are always where they ought to be.

With time, points of encounter between differences will be divested of their inscribed violence. Such words as “disharmony” and “dissonance” will not immediately evoke an existential threat emboldened by fear of the Other. Instead, they will signal a shift in perspective or, at worst, a transient dead end. Be it as it may, there will always be enough headroom in every context of communion to openly contemplate the “dialectics between the possible and the impossible”. For if there is such a thing as Infinity, none of us will live long enough to know. Our lives remain a conversation in continuum.

Emeka Okereke
Berlin
February, 2024.