Reality is layered and full of paradoxes but europatriarchal knowledge insists it can be understood through neat “facts.” It pursues the data, the map, the precise route. It demands mathematical order, specific percentages, and exact measurements, to justify biases and power hierarchies. It’s a paradigm that dismisses the felt; the undeniable flicker of desire that drove the lovers up the mountain in search of beauty, the heart transformed by the journey, the dream that united travellers toward what was missing, and the still blue sky. It recognises only the curated facts.
Facts are vital. I wouldn't want to visit a doctor who disregards them, or argue for a systemic restructuring of gender norms without rationally showing just how dire things still are. I once listened to a lecture by the philosopher Paul Boghossian where he turned reality into methodical formulas. I loved it. Others in the room assumed I’d loathe it due to my philosophy of Sensuous Knowledge. But it is precisely because I don’t see a hierarchy between knowledges, that even an exaggeratedly technical form of philosophy about social phenomena is appealing, under the right conditions.
However, the rule of algorithmic technocracy, under which we live, elevates facts above all other forms of knowing. In our governing system, the experts, the indexers, the engineers are the drivers of culture while the public intellectuals, dissenters, and artists are relegated to merely respond to the formal order.
This is a fundamentally depoliticising form of governance. It turns dissent into a technical problem, and criticism into a sanitised form of particularising. As the scholar Shoshana Zuboff writes in her book Surveillance Capitalism, "The project of naming is the first necessary step toward taming." To escape the domestication, we must become untamed.
I am writing about becoming untamed at this moment because I believe we stand at a critical juncture where we must rekindle our existential lust. Through this we create new meaning and develop a fresh social imaginary—one that moves beyond the language of collapse into a world of deep thinking, critical love and renewed possibility.
Forcing order, method, and standardisation onto fundamentally subjective or incommensurable experiences mirrors the violence of authoritarian thinking. It is a kind of totalitarianism to insist there’s a correct way to measure fundamental features of human existence such as beauty, grief, truth, or consciousness. To constrain beauty to the golden ratio, to categorise grief as something orderly and containable, to definitively turn truth into a matter of empirical proof, and to hubristically pursue a formula for consciousness are dictatorial acts.
It demands that we all find beauty in the same Anglocentric symmetries and recover from grief according to capitalist timetables. It tells us to dismiss our intuitive, embodied, contemplative, and emotional lives if they defy empirical explanation, and embrace the notion that technology possesses consciousness—which naturally becomes more acceptable when we ourselves have been dehumanised to disembodied entities, stripped of our flesh, and diminished to that which can be systemically calculated and measured.
In Lagos, there’s a place called The Shrine, which perfectly conveys the attitude of “untameability” that I am conjuring. It was originally founded by the revolutionary icon, Fela Kuti, and is now kept by his children, prodigious artists in their own right. When you step inside this patchwork of nightclub, concert hall, marketplace, shrine and salon, you immediately sense that you are in a society outside society. Here the rules are fluid, not fixed. The expected hierarchies dissolve — and in their place emerges a self-regulating architecture. The music is at once orchestral and ritualistic. The floor is filled with people dancing, sensually, stompingly — anything goes. The atmosphere is Dionysian, carnivalesque. But there’s also a structural order. Not everyone is on their feet; many are in deep discussion concerning politics, culture, philosophy. There’s no obligation to be one or the other; pensive or expressive, or anything at all. Lightness and darkness co-mingle. Some sing, dance, debate, others sit by themselves, contemplating the kaleidoscopic exchanges. The vast panoramic questions intermingle with small joys and daily anxieties, the subterranean unconscious and the organised mind meet in interwoven flow.
The Shrine is not a romantic utopia. It is a deeply political place. But its politics are not solely about facts; they are about transforming you wholly, experientially. It’s not just about epistemic justice — the right to know — but about epistemic liberation: the right of knowledge itself to manifest polymorphically.
If contemplative, poetic, or affective knowledge were enforced authoritatively, I would take a stance against that, too. The issue is not rationality, logic, or reason. It is the repression, the hierarchical thinking, the control. It is the flame without which transformation is impossible, being extinguished.
What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Are there any topics that you would like me to cover in a future file?
Thank you Minna for this great writing! You are so very right about not only the world is seen today but also the escalating ’need’ to define it in these ways that look not only pre- described or pre-meditated but almost pre-programmed in all fields of life. As an artist myself I have found this new world order quite hard to acdept as such, especially when it comes to matters somehow close to arts in general or the society and life around the arts. I would really love to visit and feel the ’vibe’ at The Shrine; I will put it on my bucket list. But in any case, I do believe in that non-hierarchical thinking- and challenging the current technocratic world order- is really essential. Our societies need it as much as we do as individuals.
For many of us, I think thinking non-hierarchically is really challenging. It's so ingrained. Even when I look to the rest of the animal kingdom, I think I see it--the queen bee and her workers, the queen ant and her workers, apex predators being the "top" of the food chain etc. Reflecting further though, I see that these are merely roles and perhaps even birthrights, but not necessarily hierarchy the way humans view it; the way we view it is purely because of "supremacy". And this notion of supremacy, to me, is beginning to look a lot like magical thinking taken to it's darkest, most perverted aim. I have not read your book (yet!), so maybe that's a good place for me to see where your thoughts are coming from more deeply--but how do we focus on viewing the world less hierarchically?