"In this very real, material, sense, democracy has always required the provisional supply of prosthetic bodies to nourish and fuel the manufacture of the citizen-subject and the maintenance of the citizen. Without this underbelly, this subterranean supply of bodies, it cannot forge its ethos of belonging/othering.  

This choreography of discardability is written into the cells of more proximate experiments at democratic belonging. When Peniel E. Joseph writes that “America’s ‘democratic experiment’ is inextricably tied to the history of slavery” [11], he means to draw our attention to the slave ship, the cotton plantation, the lynching rope that curls around a tree branch, to Jim Crow laws, and to the crawling bottom layer soil of aerating agents, fertilizing activisms, and invisibilized ‘worm’ bodies lurking in the shadows of the public order. I think he means to suggest that citizenship is expensive; it takes worlds,  human, more-than-human, other-than-human, not-quite-human, and inhuman to create citizenship. Each individual citizen is the majestic product/outcome and yet ongoing exertion of the hidden public. The blood of the vanquished.

To think of democracy, belonging, and the demos through a posthumanist reframe of politics, compelled by the dense and stunning materiality of our days, is to touch the ways they are entangled with loss, with the inappropriate, with the forgotten, with the partial, with the non-legible. If the citizen-subject is perched atop a superstructure of privileges, a heaven of some kind, a perceptual order that tracks along typical lines and tendencies of subject formation, beneath this vast edifice are the relations and the burdens of slave, the fugitive, the vagabond, and the bare. The idealized modern citizen-subject with all his accoutrements – rights, privileges, phones, doughnuts, access, clarity - is entangled with lithium mining in the DRC, the blackening of teeth and dental mottling in Khouribga due to the extraction of phosphate dust, the decimation of Sumatran tigers in Indonesia, or the proliferation of forced labour camps to produce consumer products.

The citizen is a vast ‘colonial’ enterprise that needs maintenance, a sensorium of entrainments that requires the uneven participation of idealized subjects and their prosthetic others. The citizen is a metastable, porous, fragile, and heterogenous assemblage of bodies that has gained resilience through the flattening conditions of the Anthropos/Demos. Again, the citizen is not human. The citizen is a desirous heterogeneous assembly of bodies in emergence, a field, a moral intensity, an arrangement of ethical flows, a reductive focus on ‘behaviour’ in the stead of entrainment, a co-production of the legible citizen subject".

bayo akomolafe