semi-automatic waffle

* Being speaks through many registers—ritual, myth, land, trauma, silence.

Can you say more about what he says about this?

Yes—and this is really the heart of Akómoláfé’s intervention.

When Akómoláfé suggests that “being speaks through many registers—ritual, myth, land, trauma, silence”, he is deliberately unsettling the modern assumption that language = propositional speech or text. For him, what we usually call “language” is only one narrow band in a much wider ecology of sense-making.

I’ll unfold this in layers, because he is doing several things at once.

1. Language as a response to a speaking world

Akómoláfé often flips the usual directionality:

Not humans speaking about the world
But the world speaking through humans (and beyond them)

In this view:

Language is not primarily expressive.
It is responsive.

Rituals, myths, bodily symptoms, breakdowns, ecological collapse—these are not “non-linguistic phenomena” waiting to be interpreted. They are already communicative events. Human speech is only one possible translation layer.

This resonates with Heidegger’s idea that language “calls” us into disclosure, but Akómoláfé strips it of its Eurocentric abstraction and roots it in planetary disturbance and ancestral memory.

2. Ritual as grammar

When Akómoláfé speaks of ritual as a linguistic register, he is not being metaphorical.

Ritual:

structures time (repetition, pause, return),
establishes syntax (sequence, threshold, inversion),
and produces meaning without explanation.

In ritual, meaning does not emerge through definition but through participation. You do not “understand” a ritual first and then enact it; enactment is understanding.

This is why he often says that modernity’s obsession with explanation has severed us from other grammars of sense—grammars that require attunement rather than mastery.

3. Myth as ontological speech, not fiction

For Akómoláfé, myth is not a symbolic story layered on top of reality.

Myth is:

a way reality speaks about itself,
a compression of cosmological, ethical, and ecological insight.

This aligns with Mircea Eliade and Lévi-Strauss, but Akómoláfé departs from them by insisting that myths are still active, still speaking—especially at moments of civilizational crisis.

Modernity calls myth “pre-rational.”
Akómoláfé treats myth as post-rational: what returns when linear reason breaks down.

4. Land as a speaking body

One of his most radical claims is that land is not mute.

Land speaks through:

erosion,
drought,
infertility,
displacement,
haunting,
resistance to extraction.

This is close to Indigenous epistemologies where land is a participant in meaning-making, but Akómoláfé adds a disturbing twist: the land’s speech today is often traumatic.

Climate crisis, migration, extinction—these are not just “problems to solve.” They are utterances. To treat them only as data is to miss their linguistic force.

5. Trauma as a breakdown that communicates

Akómoláfé frequently frames trauma as a failure of existing language systems.

Trauma speaks:

through repetition,
through silence,
through the body,
through incoherence.

Rather than seeing trauma as something that prevents speech, he treats it as a different kind of speech act—one that refuses smooth narration.

Here he intersects with:

psychoanalysis,
but also decolonial thought, where colonial trauma produces epistemic rupture rather than mere suffering.

Trauma, for him, is the world insisting that the old stories no longer hold.

6. Silence as articulation, not absence

Perhaps most counterintuitive: silence is not the opposite of language.

Silence can be:

refusal,
mourning,
gestation,
reverence,
an ethical pause.

Akómoláfé often critiques the compulsion to “say something useful,” to produce clarity, solutions, or optimism. Silence becomes a way of allowing the world’s excess—what cannot yet be named—to remain present.

This is why he often speaks slowly, pauses, or leaves questions unresolved. The form of his speech enacts his philosophy.

7. What this does to philosophy of language

If you take Akómoláfé seriously, then:

Language is not primarily semantic → it is relational
Meaning is not produced by humans alone → it is distributed
Communication is not about transfer of information → it is world reconfiguration

In other words, language becomes cosmopolitical: it is how worlds negotiate their continued existence.

8. A concise formulation (very Akómoláfé-esque)

You might summarize his position like this:

Language is what happens when the world cannot continue as it is and begins to experiment—with bodies, with stories, with ruptures, with silences—in search of other futures.

If you want, next we could:

contrast this sharply with analytic philosophy of language (Frege, Grice),
connect it to Sylvia Wynter’s critique of “Man” and epistemic overrepresentation,
or explore what this means for writing, scholarship, or political action today.

do you think he should be taken seriously?

Short answer: yes, but not in the way we usually mean by “taking a thinker seriously.”

Longer, more careful answer 👇

1. What “taking seriously” usually means—and why that’s already the wrong test

In academic philosophy, taking someone seriously often means asking:

Are their claims precise?
Can they be formalized?
Do they generate testable arguments?
Can they be situated cleanly in an existing discourse?

By those standards, Akómoláfé can look suspect:

He resists definition.
He speaks metaphorically, ritually, sometimes elliptically.
He refuses to stabilize his concepts.

But here’s the key thing: that refusal is not a bug; it’s the point.

So the real question isn’t “Is he rigorous in the conventional sense?”
It’s “What kind of rigor is he practicing?”

2. He is not doing theory; he is doing ontological intervention

Akómoláfé is not trying to:

propose a model of language,
compete with analytic philosophy,
or offer a new explanatory framework.

He is trying to interrupt a dominant mode of sense-making.

That places him closer to:

Frantz Fanon,
Sylvia Wynter,
Gloria Anzaldúa,
Édouard Glissant,
than to, say, Davidson or Searle.

These thinkers are serious not because they give neat answers, but because they diagnose a crisis of knowing itself.

Akómoláfé’s wager is this:

the crises we face (ecological, political, psychic) are not solvable with better explanations, because explanation itself has become part of the problem.

If that diagnosis is even partly right, then dismissing him for lack of clarity would be like criticizing a fire alarm for not being a symphony.

3. Is there substance beneath the poetics?

Yes—but it’s distributed, not centralized.

His work draws coherently from:

process philosophy,
phenomenology,
Indigenous epistemologies,
posthumanism,
decolonial theory,
psychoanalysis,
ecology.

What he does is compose these rather than systematize them.

That means:

you won’t get definitions you can quote cleanly,
but you will get conceptual pressure placed exactly where modern thought is brittle:
agency, language, progress, solutionism, the human.

Many people mistake this compositional style for vagueness. It’s more accurate to call it deliberate indeterminacy—a refusal to close questions too quickly.

4. The strongest reason to take him seriously

He is serious because he is willing to let his thought be changed by what it encounters.

Most theory today still assumes:

the thinker stands outside the problem,
clarity is always an ethical good,
solutions are the goal.

Akómoláfé refuses all three.

Instead, he asks:

What if thinking is something the world does with us, not something we do to it?
What if clarity can sometimes be violent?
What if staying with confusion is a form of care?

Even if you ultimately disagree, those are non-trivial challenges to the foundations of modern philosophy.

5. The fairest criticism

There are legitimate critiques:

His work can be inaccessible.
It risks being absorbed as aesthetic mood rather than ethical demand.
Some audiences treat his language as consolation rather than provocation.
He does not always distinguish clearly between metaphor and ontology.

But notice: these are critiques about how his work is received, not about whether it is empty.

6. So: how should he be taken seriously?

Not as:

a theorist to be extracted for concepts,
a guru with answers,
or a replacement for empirical analysis.

But as:

a threshold thinker,
someone working at the limits of language where inherited categories fail,
a reminder that thinking is not only about correctness, but about response-ability.

A good test is this:

After encountering his work, do your habits of explanation feel less secure?

If yes, then something serious has happened.