Bayo Akomolafe - the new is not forward
Bayo Akomolafe
2025-04-02
The 'new' is not 'forward'. It is not down the road. Not within the algorithms of mere persistence. Not within the logics of mastery, of hope, or the cruel optimism sustained in our longings for victory.
The new, instead, is a drifting to the side. An attenuated intimacy with the peripheral, with the minor key, with weird fidelities that leak away from the pipeline of the already organized, the already diagrammed. The new is a murmur, not design as such; the flickering flame of a passing, a sidenote.
I understand how this sounds.
Habituated as we are within the matrixial vortices of the inoculated modern, we tend to believe - quite strongly - that agency begins and stops at the edges defined by the human. Even when we wax poetic about 'emergence' and 'complexity', when we suggest that the world is a whirlwind, 'our' anthropocentric-representational-neurotypical habits of thought try to put a handle on the wind's passing. We allow everything else to vary, but ourselves.
And yet, if I must insist, and I do, I must point out that no one can design for the new or guarantee it. Organizations cannot create the new. This follows from the previous premise that the new is not 'human' per se, and is just as startling a claim to make - given that newness is the bold ontological claim of the innovation complex.
Organizations are managerial imperatives, attempts at sustaining logistics for containment. They are forms of administration, a maintenance of perception, and a ritualized coherence in the wake of the passing of a wild god. This is why I think that leadership happens in the swerve of the murmuration, in the peripherality of relations, not in the frontality of the fully seen (with my apologies to a 300-billion-dollar leadership development industry). Not in direct inspiration. Not in the ways we reduce leadership to human agency.
The 'new', often reduced to 'innovation', domesticated within industrial notions of novelty, often persists as a reinforcement of sensorial regimes of perception. The 'new' is seen as a product, an object, a new path, a solution, a category.
What I, however, signify with the 'new' is not innovation (which is the invention of the 'same' under the headline of difference). The new is not capturable within the structures built to receive it. It cannot be planned for.
This is because it is a different difference (a la Karen Barad), a modulation in the affective, relational, ontological textures of a situation. It does not announce itself. It reconstitutes what counts as sense. It is a folding in the field. A mycorrhizal twitch. A subterranean contagion. It is the permanently unanticipated mistletoe in Frigga's enterprise of salvation, in her organized effort to save Baldur.
Within immanence, there is no “outside” from which the new descends. There is only an intensification of potential, an ontogenetic inflection, a strange grace.
To host the new is not to plan for it.
It is to become hospitable to the otherwise.
To ritualize insufficiency (in the words of Laura Pena Zanatta).
To let your methods fail.
To allow your expectations to ferment.
To know that your body will not always recognize what is arriving (because the 'new' is not a property of bodies, it is the condition of embodiment in its reiterativity).
It is to understand that the most urgent responsibility is not to lead the new, but to notice when you are being led by it. To cultivate in exquisitely misaligned doses of partiality an intimacy with our own failure.
The new is not forward; it is awkward.
Bayo Akomolafe
Link: https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=1120794276727804&id=100063917251767