AKOMOLAFE

''It is often said that Cleisthenes (c. 570 – c. 508), of the Alcmaeonid family, founded democracy. Herodotus himself, the acclaimed “Father of History”, refers to the Athenian statesman as “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy.” At a pivotal moment in Athenian history, Cleisthenes guided the aristocratic metropolis through bone-deep democratic reforms that transformed the citizen-body into new assemblies that prefigured modern, democratically elected, representative bodies.  

But origins are neither neat nor convenient. In a world that spills beyond categorical calculability, there are too many risks involved when we seek to draw neat lines that mark stable beginnings and endings. Cleisthenes’s reforms, though significant, are a partial recuperation of small shifts, anxieties, yearnings, behaviours, epics, and gestures that preceded his glorious emergence in the Aegean sun. As Nancy Evans suggests, “Cleisthenes was not the first democratic reformer; he was building upon foundations laid by generations of Greeks before him” [1]. One such notable Greek contributor to the democratic aspirations of the Aegean-proximate metropolis, shrouded in the mists of legend and history, painted by admirers with often flattering brushstrokes to magnify the tales of his civilizing rampage and mythical status, is Theseus. Great Founder and King of Athens. Contemporary of Hercules. Mythical Upholder of Democracy. Killer of Monsters. Killer of the Minotaur.  

The story of Theseus begins with an anxious Aegeus, King of Athens, who – without heir to his throne – consults the Delphic Oracle for an answer to his predicament. The answer that arrives is ambiguous and unclear, and Aegeus, returning home via Troezen, confides in his friend, the King Pittheus, an enterprising mind, who discerns a plot and urges Aegeus to sleep with his daughter, Aethra. That night, after the deed is done, Princess Aethra of Troezen wanders the beach alone and encounters Poseidon, the great god of the oceans, who also takes the beautiful Aethra to himself and sleeps with her. And so, the duplicitous origin of Theseus is forged: son of the divine and the commonplace, the mythical and the historical, the fleshly and the ethereal.  

Aegeus soon learns of the pregnancy and leaves Troezen with instructions to Aethra: that when the child comes of age, he is to return to Athens bearing the sword, shield, and sandals of the King of Athens – proof of his royal heritage. In time, Theseus, young and adventurous, reclaims his destiny, and makes his way to Athens. As is usually the case with the journeys and choices of iconic heroes, Theseus avoids the easy routes and elects to take the tortuous, anfractuous path to Athens, the way through highway robbers, brigands, and murderers. Skilful and quick with his weapons, the headstrong hero-in-the making quickly annihilates these nuisances, and arrives to his father’s embrace, the new heir to the throne of Athens.

While in Athens, Theseus learns of a social contract between his new home and King Minos of Crete, a terrible arrangement requiring the city to offer up seven boys and seven girls every nine years to a monster that lives in the Cretan domain. The sacrifice was instituted as penance for the murder of the Cretan prince, Androgeus, on Athenian soil. Our young hero would have none of that. He begs his father to appoint him one of the fourteen youths to travel to the island. He vows to kill the monster, the fabled Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, discarded offspring of an illicit affair between King Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, and a white bull. The Minotaur, the object of Theseus’s rage, is so terrifying to look at, so offensive to the senses, that Minos has the inventor Daedalus, father to Icarus, contrive an impenetrably deep labyrinthian maze, where the creature is incarcerated.

It is Theseus’s encounter with the Minotaur that becomes the overwhelmingly defining act of his life. With the aid of a love-smitten Cretan princess and sister to the Minotaur, upon reaching the island, Theseus enters the labyrinth with a ball of string, with which he traces his way through, and manages to kill the Minotaur, re-emerging an intergenerational hero whose name and labours would become the motif by which most other heroic exploits gain relief. After the tragic death of Aegeus, Theseus becomes the last mythical king of Athens, the standard of heroism, and most importantly, the alchemist of Athenian citizenry. Cleisthenes himself deploys the Theseusian myth as the prime motivation for his reforms, embellishing his gestures with stories of the young hero’s labours and memorializing him in public buildings.  

It is a very difficult thing to think of Theseus apart from the emergence of the Athenian demos. John N. Davie writes: “Of all Greek heroes, Theseus . . . has the greatest claim to enshrine all the best qualities of the Athenian citizen, not least in his championship of the demos, celebrated by poets and painters alike of the classical period” [2]. The myth of Theseus is the archetype of the emergence of democracy. Without the exploits of Theseus, the rampaging brutality of his heroic crossing, the swiftness of his sword, the demos couldn’t emerge.  

However, these days, heroes and humans in general can no longer be conceived in the pristine ways we have been used to. The halo is broken. In times when human exploits are being bracketed by the more than-human, in times when the backgrounded elements of the stories we tell are now forcing their way to the forefront, it would seem consistent with these posthumanist, human-decentering reframes to account for the force majeure behind the rise of citizenry by stressing the contributions of Theseus’s victims. That is, the monolith of citizenry is indebted not just to the strength of Theseus’s swing but to the death and blood of the monsters left in the wake of his colonizing passage. If ‘things’ must be accounted for not only by the presences they are constituted of but by the absences, the citizen is not just the isolated human recipient of specific rights and privileges, but the vast ecology of repressions and deaths and flattening logics, the roiling alchemy of myths and archetypes, the fading away of the monstrous to make room for the gentrified image of independent rationality, the disappearing and pathologization of the passions.

The Minotaur’s death and the suppression of the monstrous must be considered part of the assemblage that has forged the phenomenon of democratic citizenry. The myth of the Cretan monster and the blood seeking hero are an archetype for the kinds of historical clearings, civilizing gestures, exploitive tactics, genocidal interventions, colonizing epistemologies, extractivist moralities, and invisibilizing strategies that are imbricated with the appearing of the citizen-subject. A Minosian-Theseusian deal propagates through the fabric of these troubling encounters: a bull-man’s head for the prosperity of the city-state; a Native American tribe’s death for the founding of a Canadian school; eleven million Africans as prosthetic sacrifices for the founding of the industrial world; the explosion of mountains and desacralization of landscapes for the predictability and convenience of parking lots.  

Today, democratic citizenry thrives as the manufacturing of certain kinds of subjectivities, which are in turn contingent upon the suppression of the monstrous. The citizen-subject (unlike the fugitive, carried away by the passions) is the rational outworking of public codes of conduct, the morality of principled settlement. The citizen-subject is a proper self, in control of his emotions, possessing language, the recipient of neurotypical training, a creature of the surface, possessing an interiority of thoughts that mark his essential divinity, and yet renders him available for the surveillance and scrutiny of the public. The citizen-subject is the consumptive core of neoliberal capitalism, the obedient cog in the wheel, the prize for Theseus’s princely labours. The citizen-subject is the individual. The sanity and perpetuity of this individual depends on the ongoing labours of Theseus: if the citizen-subject is to survive, the world and its wilds will need to keep being flattened, keep being arranged into bits of legibility, and brought again and again into the grammar of the public order. In other words, the citizen as a posthumanist politics and ecological project already involving colonial processes beyond human sociality produces the citizen subject, the magisterial human-above-matter. And we must give thanks to Theseus for this state of affairs.

The thesis of this essay is thus strange and contentious, because it is my firm but creaturely belief that the Greek hero Theseus – in his genocidal wiping away of the monstrous to make room for the demos – missed a spot. Or several. A lesser-known story – so unknown in fact that I am likely just making it all up – suggests that the Minotaur wasn’t alone in the labyrinth of Daedalus. Somewhere in the deep blackness of that commodious prison, cut away from the stories of vanquish and valour, were the children of the Minotaur. Little bull-boys and bull-girls. Hidden in the shadows. Missed by Theseus’s eager sword. Crawling out after the text of the story had faded with the materials upon which they were printed. Mourning their father’s carcass with hideous, soul-curdling, braying sounds that rippled through the walls of the labyrinth but didn’t quite make it past the outer boundaries of Daedalus’s genius".  

"Ultimately, a posthumanist reading of democracy resituates it within a vast stream of co-becomings, instead of thinking of it as a uniquely human product. Democracy is not just what happens in legislative chambers and the courts of law, it is immanently connected with the phantom biological modulations of the dinoflagellate pfiesteria piscicida; it relates to the winds that whip up dust from the Bodélé Depression and carry them in dancing processions of diatoms across the Atlantic Ocean; it relates to the geodesic powers that tether cartography to the curvature of the planet. Seeing democracy as what the planet is doing – and what it might now be undoing – forces open new considerations about belonging, othering,  power, and agency in a vitalist, animist world.  

Instead of the language of decline (as in, the reported decline of democracy), which seems to be laden with humanist anxieties associated with technobureaucratic solutions and close-ended logics of repeatability, it is possible to offer a reframe that notices democracy is maturing, yielding to the elements, becoming accountable beyond its own rationalities, and becoming conjugated by syncopating forces. ‘Decline’ gives way to ‘declension’, ushering us to the strange hospitality of post-democratic futures.

By ‘post-democratic’, I do not mean ‘after democracy’, since what is meant by the democratic is only partially disclosed, not fully known, and still yet to come. The ‘post’ in ‘post-democratic’ exists side by side as an inherent tension in the liberalist project. One response to that has been the rush to come up with new systems, to name a new civilizational epoch, to gather academics into a conference room and induce them to craft alternatives to democracy, if only for the fun of it. I would suggest that one theoretically compelling task – given our posthumanist presumptions about the processual nature of reality – is not to articulate the next political epoch...such a task – to know what comes next – is impossible. The future is non-legible, emergent,  and co-produced by a vast array of heterogenous actors – not by resolute, discrete human agents.  

One thing to do then might be to stay in the sensorial vortices of post-democratic tensions, where experience is afoot with other gestures. This post-democratic tension is not an already decided space, but embodied inquiry woven with the sensorial apostasy within cracks, at the peripheral edges of neurotypical perception where reality mutinies, or at the place of autistic perception where the world is still coming together.

The work of tending to cracks, of weaving inquiry at the prolific tips of syncopating flows, of inhabiting the generative incapacitation of losing our way from the nuclear cornucopia of the neurotypical, of  becoming disabled by implication, of seeking out new alliances and hybridities, and opening new grammars of embodiment beyond the carcerality of liberalism and whiteness, is what I might call  “making sanctuary.”

Making sanctuary, an inflection of the medieval practice of “claiming sanctuary” – in which fugitives from the law were granted temporary asylum within the church – is not about humans being safe. The recipients of ‘making sanctuary’ are not minorities or persons in precarious circumstances. The recipients are the tensions, the disabling effects, the blasts of syncopation that we often urge out of our spheres in a bid to return to ‘normal’.  

Making sanctuary is dwelling in post-democratic cracks, post-citizen ecotones, post-humanist tensions – while becoming accountable to new relationalities, new lines of flight, fractal choreographies, and new intensities that refuse to reify the dominant perceptual order, and as such signal potent transformations from regular/familiar subjectivities.

As an artistic vocation – far from being a single methodology – making sanctuary invites us to be hospitable to intensities that constitute a decentering of citizenship and a loss of white stability. The hidden codicil of such a decolonizing gesture is that by coming to those zones of encounter, to those syncopating cracks, we too might be spirited away. We might feel different, sense different, and be enlisted in new entrainments of co-becoming.  

In short, making sanctuary brings us by and by to the children of the Minotaur at our gates, echoes of lingering pasts. What happens when we, children of Theseus, meet the other, the offspring of the  Minotaur?" 

BAYO AKOMOLAFE