On [Pseudo-]Impossibilities and the Politics of Becoming: Postscript to the Conceptual Framing of the Thirteenth Edition of the Bamako Biennale
“It is out of tension that being is born. Becoming is a tension, and being is the child of that tension of opposed forces and tendencies.” Kwame Nkrumah1
Approaching a topic such as the one outlined in the title of this essay demands a framework consistent with emancipatory politics. I find Nkrumah’s maxim in the epigraph suitable not only because his thought system resonates with the political substructure of the biennale in terms of the dialectics of subjectivation he theorises— by squarely addressing notions of multiplicity, difference, becoming, and heritage— but also because I believe there is much in this beginning point to unpack by way of restituting the photographic form into the space of multiplicity, given the gravity of the biennale which serves as Africa’s sole and most important largescale exhibition dedicated to lens based practices. This essay is however not a review of the most recent edition of the biennale. It will not give much information about the five chapters, curatorial decisions, seventy five artists’ works, nor exhibition sites. It is rather considered as an experimental effort to think through the thematic framework of the biennale based on its conceptual and philosophical proposals.
“Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” is the theme for the biennale. The phrase, theorised in the context of personal identity by the Malian ethnologist, historian, and author Amadou Hampâté Bâ, vis-à-vis Bambara and Fulani worldviews, loosely translates from Bambara into English as “the persons of the person are multiple in the person”. To paraphrase Bâ, the concept of the person is, from the outset, very complex2; which is to say that a person is always and already multiple from the vantage points of the physical, psychological, and spiritual conditions that shape personhood (Bâ prefers to call this “interior multiplicity”). In this system the being of personhood is neither absolute in their singleness nor wholly complete unto themselves. Here Bâ not only affirms the dynamism of contingency at play in this interiority, he also introduces the counter-intuitive (and arbitrary) universal dimension even within the particularity of personal being. And this dimension could be said to be the excess that is intrinsically constitutive of the production of cognitive reality but which is at the same time patently disavowed3 by purist and individualist ideologies. Ultimately it can be posited that the immanent tensions that pre-condition being are eternally present in any procedure of subjectivation (the event of becoming a subject), and it is in this spirit that I map Nkrumah’s tactically hysterical discourse on being and becoming4 to Bâ’s. Nkrumah’s aphorism encapsulates what I have already mentioned as the dialectics of subjectivation (or further summarised as the paradox of becoming), and since Bâ’s framework is not mutually exclusive to this thought I proceed for the remainder of this essay on this bricolage.
If the humanist subtext of Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono conditions us to think of subjectivation in terms of the singularity5 of Bâ’s interior multiplicity (which already opens up the scintillating dimension of an interiority of multiplying multiplicities infinitely resuscitated in the evental horizon of the particular), Nkrumah’s perspective, also consistent with the curatorial position, enlarges this event of becoming into coming to terms with the political-economic cognates of our being while stretching into the arena of social justice6. The being that emerges out of this “tension of opposed forces and tendencies” is a militant and wounded one. They cannot be whole because of an ontological split or brokenness (the kind Fred Moten speaks about as irreparable7) effected on them by the despotic institutionalisation of ideologies of purity, wholeness, and standardisation (i.e. uniformity). As Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the artistic director of the biennale has intimated in the concept note of the biennale, “one of the most violent afflictions of the colonial enterprise and/in its manifold manifestations was its ability to reduce us into persons devoid of multiplicity and relegated to a notion of individuals as single beings.”
Strictly speaking, from the standpoint of any stultifying logic or structure of subjugation, asserting the multiplicity of being is impossible for its other (whomever is external to its provincial nucleus of power and subjected to its paternalism). On the one hand the impossibility of this potentiality of becoming is of a pseudo kind, virtually governed by the oracle of inequality which ordains being as monolithic and operates on exclusion from the establishment or status quo. On the other hand, marked by a plethora of real impossibilities (dispossession, poverty, threat of violence and mechanisms of oppression, war, and so on) the subject who emerges from this abject imperial framework must forge a new possibility out of the “impossibility of possibility”8 in the enclosure of what the status quo has territorialised. And since new possibilities are only possible when something is not a possibility9 the paradox of becoming is the ethical injunction nonetheless espoused by the other. Becoming is therefore resistance politics, and from the Nkrumahist perspective, the “brokenness of being”10, or its [pseudo-]impossibility thereof, is the vantage point from which becoming is not only possible but necessary.
This purgatorial subject— who emerges out of the traumatic conditions of rape, torture, wretchedness, and abuse in their symbolic and material circumstances— is also the one, in the context of egalitarian politics, who cares enough about the generality of being to effectively act in the hope of ushering in a new reality. They who are excluded from legitimate participation in the situation of being by inegalitarian power forces are potentially those who threaten to wreck its relational dynamics by announcing or self-proclaiming their rightful place and proceeding to act on it on the basis of equality11 (I must add that in the emancipatory struggle it is they and also those in the provincial class who are prepared to betray or become treacherous to their class of origin by joining forces with the dispossessed; risking their safety and foregoing privileges on the same principle of equality12).
From this perspective, given the inegalitarian coordinates of the status quo, the person who has now become a subject of politics must posit a new question; one that creates a new space within their interpellation through which emancipatory and restituted futures can be deployed and nurtured: “Why am I what you are telling me that I am?”13 The hysterical question, laden with anxieties of self-determination, potentially creates a new possibility out of the impossibilities of stultification and domination. It animates being with the ominous contingencies of becoming and opens up the space for politics qua politics because “politics truly means the creation of a new possibility.”14 But the “impossibility of possibility” imposed by the despotic system must be distinguished from the paradox of becoming, which is alive with potentialities and is the affirmative practice of creating new possibilities15. The latter formulates a coming to terms with the dialectics of subjectivation—i.e. the contradictions and potentialities that come with not being able to attain any kind of total unity in the situation of being whether intrinsically or from without.
Correlatively we can think of this espousal of affirmation with respect to restituting the photographic medium/form itself. The curatorial vision of the biennale does more than jettison the spurious idea of a standalone or autonomous singularity that has no compunction for universal correlates; it also interprets Bâ’s thesis on posthuman terms. Ndikung explains the rejection of this inegalitarian structuring of the world thus: “the impositions of notions of singularity— as in [the] singular and unchangeable [notion of] beings, single and inalterable identities, single and fixed planes or spaces in which we find ourselves and navigate in, singular and immutable cultures, jealous deities and their singular belief structures, the single story or politics or political system – seem to be some of the most challenging concepts to get rid of post liberation and independence, from the forces that have held a huge part of the world under bondage for too long a time.”
For the two editions in which Ndikung has been artistic director (2019 and 2022), the task has been one of stretching the terms of what is possible as far as the image-oriented biennale is concerned… “to think of the photographic beyond photography”16. Working with him as co-curator for the twelfth edition I can say that this entails deepening the restitution of the photographic medium into the space of multiplicity. By asking what can/has photography do/done? instead of “what does this photograph mean?” or what photography is17, Ndikung and his curatorial teams18 have, for both editions, opened up the space for explorations into the photographical experience beyond the “hegemony of sight”19: expanding into the epi- and trans-ocular possibilities of photography encompassing textuality, objectness, performativity and aurality20. In short, shifting from the superficial, iconographic, referential, and indexical predilections of reading an image into the iconoclastic and micrological nexus engendered in the space of multiplicity.
I have argued elsewhere that [over]emphasizing photographic iconography— the image as signifier (marker, bearer, and producer of meaning)— is to first of all introduce a politics of exclusion in the experience of such images21. It becomes stultifying not only because it so undermines co-presence, but also because it impedes those dissonant spectators who may know nothing (nor care to know) about its referential context from a legitimate encounter with the image. It takes mechanisms of repression to privilege such superficial reading of visual information over the universe of operations it takes to manifest a picture. Secondly, to tacitly legislate this verificationist relation between the picture and its referent, through the violent process of suppressing all other determinations, also amounts to the exclusion of politics as such. And so we see that if we leave classical iconography uncontested as it relates to photography, we easily arrive at what we have earlier talked about: the “impossibility of possibility” foisted on us by despotic enclosures.
Siting photography in the space of multiplicity hystericises such contrivances and affirms the possibility of meaningful, meaningless, indifferent and other contingent encounters with a picture. An image is always an experiment… and a picture is an event, an instance in the becoming of the image.
*’Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono: On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming and Heritage’ opened on 8th December, 2022 and runs through February 8th, 2023.
—Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is a key member of the blaxTARLINES KUMASI coalition. Ohene-Ayeh was co-curator of the 12th edition of the Bamako Encounters — African Biennale of Photography (2019/2020). He teaches at the Department of Painting & Sculpture at KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana.
List of References:
Badiou, A. 2004. ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’. Lacanian Ink 23. The Woodster Press. ISBN 188830121X
Benjamin, W. 1998, The Author as Producer, in Understanding Brecht. London, New York: Verso.
Ranciere, J. 2009. Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.
Harney, S. & Moten, F. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions.
Ndikung, B.S.B, Lepoultier, A. S, Harmel, A, Ohene-Ayeh, K (eds.) 2019, Streams of Consciousness: A Concatenation of Dividuals [biennial reader]. Berlin: Archive Books & Editions Balani’s.
Nkrumah, K. 1964, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization, Panaf Books Ltd.
Ohene-Ayeh, K. 2021. The Artist as Historical Materialist: Kelvin Haizel Exposing the Photographic Real. IUB website, accessed January 2, 2023. https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/texts/theartistashistoricalmaterialist/
Žižek, S. 2020. Sex and the Failed Absolute. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Endnotes
1 See Nkrumah (1964:103)
2 “Tradition teaches that initially there is Maa, the Person-receptacle, then Maaya, i.e. the various aspects of Maa contained in the Maa-receptacle. As the Bambara expression says: ‘Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono’ (The persons of the person are multiple in the person.) One finds exactly the same notion among the Fulani. The concept of the person is thus, from the outset, very complex. It implies an interior multiplicity – concentric or superimposed planes of existence (physical, psychological and spiritual at various levels) as well as a constant dynamism.” Amadou Hampâté Bâ as quoted in the concept statement.
3 This is also the lesson of Freudian and Lacanese psychoanalysis. That there is an excess to the ego known as the unconscious which is also a subject and which is knowledge albeit unknown.
4 More specifically, Nkrumah’s modern perspective on postcolonial subjectivity is encapsulated in the following statement: “The philosophy that must stand behind this social revolution is that which I have once referred to as philosophical consciencism; consciencism is the map in intellectual terms of the disposition of forces which will enable African society to digest the Western and the Islamic and the Euro-Christian elements in Africa, and develop them in such a way that they fit into the African personality. The African personality is itself defined by the cluster of humanist principles which underlie the traditional African society. Philosophical consciencism is that philosophical standpoint which, taking its start from the present content of the African conscience, indicates the way in which progress is forged out of the conflict in that conscience.” Nkrumah (1964: 79)
5 I use this term not as a synonym to ‘singleness’ but as used in physics and in mathematics to denote a point at which a thing or event possesses infinite value, for example the centre of a black hole.
6 Nkrumah theorises what he terms “Consciencism” as a materialist philosophy of decolonisation in Nkrumah (1964).
7 See Moten and Harney (2013: 152)
8 See Badiou (2004)
9 Alain Badiou phrases it such: “[W]e can create a new possibility when something is not a possibility.” “But the true function of artistic creation today is the possibility of saying that something is possible, so to create a new possibility. But where can we create a new possibility when something is impossible? Because we can create a new possibility when something is not a possibility. If all is possible, you cannot create a new possibility. So, the question of a new possibility is also the question of something impossible, so we have to assume that it’s not true that all is possible, that also it’s not true that all is impossible, we have to say something is impossible where something is impossible. I have to create a new possibility. And, I think the creation of new possibility is today the great function of art.” Badiou (2004)
10 Moten and Harney (2013: 5)
11 Jacques Rancière (2009) writes that politics begins with the demos (those who belong but are excluded); when they themselves announce and proceed to act in affirmation of the universal premise that “we are all equal.”
12 Walter Benjamin speaks of betraying one’s class in the practice of class politics thus: “Aragon was therefore perfectly right when, in another context, he said: ‘The revolutionary intellectual appears first of all and above everything else as a traitor to his class of origin.’ In a writer this betrayal consists in an attitude which transforms him, from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus to the ends of the proletarian revolution.” Benjamin (1998: 102)
13 For Slavoj Žižek, “[I]nsofar as questioning the identity bestowed on you is the basic feature of hysteria—the hysteric’s question is ultimately: “Why am I what you are telling me that I am?” See Žižek (2020: 253).
14 Badiou (2004)
15 Badiou (2004)
16 (ndikung 32) He has also said that the 12th “edition of the Bamako biennale is an effort to rethink the politics and poetics of seeing, perception, and being, and in many ways to revise the politics that birthed and have sustained this biennale over the last 25 years.” Ndikung et al (2019: 33)
17 See Ndikung et al (2019: 10)
18 The curatorial team for the twelfth edition of the biennale (2019/2020) are Aziza Harmel, Astrid Lepoultier and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, while the curatorial team for the thirteenth edition (2022/2023) are Akinbode Akinbiyi, Merriem Berrada, Tandazani Dhlakama and Liz Ikiriko.
19 See Ndikung et al (2019: 31)
20 Ndikung et al (2019: 31)
21 See Ohene-Ayeh (2021)
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