#thingification

“Yes, and this “other thing” is essentially the erasure of Being. Towards the end of the essay I talk about this. I have always felt a bit discomforted by the whole notion of emancipation celebrations or “markings.” While I think on the one hand that it is important to mark these events, on the other hand, when you deconstruct this type of activity and question what it is we are, in fact, commemorating you realize that it has more to do with Europeans finally understanding and accepting what we, African people, knew all along, that we are first and last Beings, and that we cannot be turned into things? Hence, we will run, we will fight, we will kill, we will even kill our children rather than agree to be non-Beings? So, in a way we have always been outside of that Law, in a philosophical sense. We are still outside of the law today (and yet trapped by it) in the way the law is used to police and confine black bodies in the new prison industrial complex.”

. . . the planet is forcefully telling us that we are not separate from her and do not stand above her. The sense that human actions are merely discrete, acultural observations seems to be increasingly, ironically, unrealistic, a little too masculine and certainly unsustainable. We are learning that we, and the ‘things’ we have named in the world, are more usefully characterised as snapshots, stills in the movie, the ongoing flow of generative processes. Selves, society and, if we take anything from quantum physics, the material world itself are composed of dynamic relationships over space and time rather than fixed, discovered things.