I am against ‘worldview’. The term seems to have allied itself with a prestigiously modern conceit: the cosmopolitan presupposition that one can embark on a cosmovision shopping spree, browsing through a curated selection of worldviews. You can take on the garbs of yoga in the morning, recite the migratory stories of the Orisha by noon, and chug down the obsidian contents of an Ayahuasca cup by night, while espousing a systems theory analysis.
In modern framings, we often treat worldviews as things people hold, as if they were stable perspectives, mental lenses, or belief-systems that individuals can swap at will. This makes it seem as if the self is the sovereign chooser of perspectives, the agent who surveys a buffet of cosmologies and selects what resonates.
But this logic presumes a self that exists before the world: a self outside worlding. A self with clean hands. Transcendent and unspoiled by the poetics of the material.
What if, instead, worldviews are not views from worlds but the ways worlds come into view? What if your sense of self, your seeing, your feeling, your very intelligibility as a “someone” are not possessions within a worldview, but part of an accommodation process issued from it, co-conditioned, emergent, and entangled?
In this light, belief is not interior assent. It is not a voluntary act. Not a stable set of notions that churn and toil and heave and ho in our heads. It is what I call ‘apolief’, distributed across the ecocognitive textures of the world, smeared across weather and grammar and gesture. To say “I believe” is already a condensation of countless more-than-human negotiations.
To “switch worldviews” then is not like changing glasses. Or running the privileged finger down the golden fonts of a fine restaurant’s menu. It is more like entering another ecology entirely. Or being entered. And such an entry can only ever happen with cracks, displacements, hauntings.
Participation is not necessarily enlistment and selves do not have worldviews. Beliefs are not things we own. Indeed, you can ‘believe’ something quite fervently and still be enlisted in ecocognitive operations that are seemingly in direct opposition to one’s published and private convictions.
Worldings are a spiriting-away. They work by dispossession, by ontological apostasies and sensorial fugitivity. By cracks and stirrings beneath the floorboards of Being. The elephant isn’t in the room. It’s the room.
Báyò Akómoláfé
