Plasticity and Fungibility

On Sylvia Wynter’s Pieza Framework

Max Hantel

In an assessment of C. L. R. James’s “popular aesthetics” in his novels and

autobiographical writing, Sylvia Wynter argues that he resolves the “class/
race and class/sex dispute by revealing each as aspects of the language
of the other.”1 This revelation comes in the form of the pieza conceptual
frame. Named for the pieza, the standard unit of measurement created by
Portuguese slave traders in the sixteenth century for African slaves, the
pieza frame highlights the invention of human fungibility at the outset
of the slave trade and the global economic system it would generate. The
exchangeable, standardized Black body becomes “the general equivalent
of physical labor value against which all the others could be measured.”2
Importantly, on Wynter’s reading of James, the pieza framework initiates
a fundamental transformation in political-economic and philosophical
accounts of the human such that it quickly spreads beyond the specifics
of a particular transaction category and even beyond the historical period
of transatlantic slavery. “In the Jamesian system, the pieza becomes an
ever-more general category of value, establishing equivalences between a
wider variety of oppressed labor power.”3 How does the figure of the pieza
born in the sixteenth century and tied here to questions of labor resolve
the triangulation of class, race, and gender? And in what ways does it live
beyond its specific historical use if, writing in 1992, Wynter proposes the
pieza framework as a crucial theoretical intervention opening up “a vision
of life that unfurls new vistas on a livable future, both for ourselves and
the socio-biosphere we inhabit”?4
These questions run against the grain of Wynter’s most recent work,
as well as the increasingly vast secondary literature that focuses on her the-
ory of the “overrepresentation of Man.” In such work, aesthetics, political

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 economy, and such categories as race, class, or gender emerge through a
simplified account of neuroplasticity that takes the form of feedback loops
between cultural codes and the various neurochemical systems they acti-
vate or deactivate. To be clear, her inimitable oeuvre represents some of
the most important ongoing provocations to the humanistic sciences and
continues to inspire imaginings of a world otherwise. She returns us to
the question of the human in new and profound ways that are particularly
important in this moment of ecocrisis. Indeed, as the final quotation in
the last paragraph suggests, she has continually shared with us (whether
anyone would listen or not) a forceful critique of the violent entanglement
of the denial of humanity and environmental destruction. Thus, my con-
cern in this article is to reemphasize the central importance of the pieza
framework in Wynter’s theory of the human and to recontextualize the
neurobiological turn in Wynter studies in terms of the invention of human
fungibility. Without such a reordering, her powerful critique of the rela-
tionships among race, gender, and political economy ends up reduced to a
mechanistic neuroplasticity that localizes the historical effects of slavery,
colonialism, and capitalism in the brain while narrowly imagining collec-
tive transformation as a reordering of neural reward pathways.
Reading Sylvia Wynter’s work against itself is an important exercise
at this moment when her approach to a science of the word has rightfully
invigorated new materialist thought and feminist science studies. Her cri-
tique of Man is mobilized against the flattening tendencies of the so- called
ontological turn, particularly as the latter assumes a seamless transfer-
ence between descriptive projects and ethicopolitical commitments. Take,
for instance, the critical condensation around the Anthropocene, deeply
invested in interrogating the - cene (from kainos, “new”) aspect of the
current crisis with markedly less attention to the slow sedimentation of
anthropos over the past five hundred years. Wynter’s many decades of
sensitive attention to the texture of human strata have made her work a
vital part of correcting this myopic imbalance, especially as she began
connecting the violent production of Man to climate crisis as early as her
open letter concerning Rodney King in 1994.5
I have written in other contexts about how Afro- Caribbean thought
is expropriated and exported for general consumption, uprooted from
lived landscapes and put into circulation as a colorful commodity, or what
Edouard Glissant called “flowers without fragrance.”6 This concern is
not a call for Caribbean philosophical purity or an argument that Afro-
Caribbean thinkers are reducible to their bodies and the land. Instead, it is
an attempt to trace how the political economy of fungibility, the ontologiz-
ing technology Wynter calls the pieza framework, shapes critical discourse
and political possibility under neoliberalism. As Wynter’s work becomes a

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 trajectory unto itself in feminist science studies, the seeming isomorphism
of description and transformation in new materialism and the flattened
ontology of the human against which she has written so eloquently risks
being reanimated in the form of the neuroplastic species, the cerebral
human qua human, the self as feedback loop.7 The result, as I argue here,
is a domesticated critique of the overrepresentation of Man that fails to
challenge racial capitalism and recapitulates the now mainstream division
between economics and identity politics, a strategic chasm in which our
ability to imagine new collective futures is lost. Wynter’s elaboration of
the pieza framework is a warning for how quickly a vision of the world
otherwise can become a source of neoliberal regeneration and how a new
critique of political economy must begin with the ruthless rejection of
fungibility in its many guises.
Section 1 recapitulates Wynter’s theory as it is generally under-
stood and begins to assess the role of neuroplasticity, and science more
broadly, in the secondary literature on her work. I also suggest how the
theories of the brain and biology on which she relies introduce tensions
in her descriptions of human plasticity that circumscribe an effective cri-
tique of the pieza framework. Section 2 examines how the reliance on a
mechanistic account of human neuroplasticity produces an impoverished
view of the now fraught debates over Wynter’s relationship to feminism.
Within the simple input- output systems of codes and biochemical reac-
tions described in section 1, race is conceived as a master code supplant-
ing gender, rendering the latter epiphenomenal while calling into question
feminist political projects as always caught within the coordinates of Man.
This simplified account obscures Wynter’s own much more complex writ-
ing on the historical and conceptual relationship between race and gender.
In section 3, through further exposition of the pieza framework, a more
complex triangulation of race and gender and political economy emerges,
suggesting the ongoing importance of the pieza framework to the trans-
formations of neoliberal capitalism and racialized control society.

1. Who Are We? Approaching the Neurobiological in Genre Studies

How did people in Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century respond
to the question, Who are we? This is (one place) where Wynter begins
her profound meditations on the human and humanisms. She argues
that the dominant understanding of human being in medieval Latin-
Christian Europe produced a theocentric answer. “We” lay people are
fallen, marked by original sin, and so subordinated to a church and clergy
that possess the only route to true knowledge of the cosmos. Wynter calls
these dominant orders descriptive statements, following Gregory Bateson,

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 to index how they self- stabilize over time like a living system maintaining
homeostasis. And so, the theocentric descriptive statement she calls the
Christian drowns out all competing answers.
A shift occurs in the fifteenth century, however, and a perturbation
in the Christian descriptive statement becomes a profound disruption. The
Christian is destabilized to the point of incoherence, and a new descriptive
statement emerges as the dominant order of being and knowledge: ratio-
centric Man. The lay humanists of the Renaissance, led by Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola and his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496), propose
a hybridly religious- secular figure put here on a shared Earth to “make
of himself what he willed to be.” We are now men of reason, looking for
earthly salvation in emergent state forms and systematically mapping
global space and peoples. A debate ensues: if reason is what separates and
indeed elevates humans above nature, what about the “Indians” of the
New World or the children of Ham in Africa? Different empires put their
own spin on it but together create a world economic system made possible
by ontological degrees of humanity.
Another perturbation: ratiocentric Man had held on inelegantly to
an origin story from the previous descriptive statement. We are Men of
reason, yes, but created and chosen by God to reign over the earth and the
many creatures that lack our perfectibility. Charles Darwin would breach
the human/animal divide, again remapping human difference in terms of
biology through his theory of evolution. Along with the life sciences come
more sophisticated forms of demography and economics as a science of
scarcity, producing the new figure of biocentric Man (Man2, for Wynter,
to ratiocentric Man’s Man1). At the turn of the twentieth century, how
do “we” now answer the question? We are biological creatures caught
in a natural struggle for resources and only confirm our relative success
through the accumulation of wealth. If the Great Chain of Being under
the order of Man1 denied the humanity of the colonized, the enslaved,
and the “primitive” because of their lack of rationality, the order of Man2
sees mass dispossession and material deprivation as confirmation of evo-
lutionary dysselection along a global color line.
This rendering of Wynter’s central historical argument is schematic
but reflects her fundamental concern: is a different, nonreductive, “ecu-
menically human” answer possible to the question, Who are we? Through
successive onto- epistemological regimes (Christian, Man1, Man2), a sin-
gle genre of being human has substituted for generic referent of human-
ity. Just as Mirandola and Darwin destabilized the dominant descriptive
statement of their day, what perturbations to the system of Man2 might
today generate a fundamental transformation that outstrips homeostatic
regulation and produces a new conception of the human?
One might step back here and ask why Wynter uses the cybernetic,

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 biochemical, and neurobiological language of descriptive statements,
homeostasis, perturbations, and phase- changes. Indeed, you could follow
the narrative shift from Christian to Man1 to Man2 in many explanatory
grammars: singular great men of history, shifts in material conditions of
production and subsequent cultural struggles for hegemony, responses to
external shocks brought on by ecological contingencies. Instead, Wynter
proposes a biosemiotic theory that requires an account of neuroplasticity,
relying precisely on the scientific tools of description formed in the wake
of Man2. Here is her summary of this method as it combines biological-
cognitive studies of cultural formations with Richard Dawkins’s universal
Darwinism:

Central to the study of these bio-implementing conditions will be that of the

co-functioning of each cosmogonically chartered, sociogenic replicator code’s
system of positive/negative, symbolic life/death meanings with the biochemi-
cal or opiate reward/punishment (i.e., placebo/nocebo) behavior motivating/
demotivating system of the brain (Danielli, 1980; Goldstein, 1994; Stein,
2007). For this biochemical system of reward and punishment in our uniquely
human case, as proposed by the above, is systemically activated by each such
sociogenic code’s representation of symbolic life and death. 8

The centuries-long story of the transition from Christian to Man1 to Man2

is animated by an input- output system of feedback loops between the brain
and (primarily) rhetorical and symbolic descriptive statements. There is a
replicator code of symbolic life and death that spreads and regenerates by
activating a neurochemical reaction in the brain, specifically opiate reward
pathways. This model is explicitly in line with Dawkins’s “selfish gene,”
since Wynter suggests that the replicator-vehicle distinction essential to his
theory obtains for sociobiological laws of culture under current conditions.
So just as organisms defined as vehicles serve as the site of natural selection
for the replicators inside (namely, DNA molecules in various compositions),
human beings have also subordinated themselves to cultural replicator codes
(such as race, gender, class, and sexuality).9
Dawkins might agree with the above, since it neatly mirrors his work
on memes as a nongenetic form of natural selection that recapitulates the
vehicle-replicator distinction in the realm of culture. It is here, however,
where she parts ways with Dawkins, because the memetic analysis is pre-
cisely an effect of the “overrepresentation of Man” in her telling. Or, more
simply, while the replicator codes may indeed have a deterministic effect
on the otherwise irrelevant vehicles for biological creatures, humans are
not actually subordinated to their cultural replicator codes; we simply
believe ourselves to be. Here, the other element of her scientific model, the
biochemistry of endogenous opioids, returns to produce a way out of the
seeming dilemma of being a mere vehicle working for a code.

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 While Dawkins’s thoroughgoing Darwinism might just work for the
rest of life, humans have a distinctly Lamarckian flair: the “performative
behavioral- enactment of ourselves.”10 This revolutionary transformation
suggests a new answer to the question of who we are. By embracing the
“empirical reality of our collective human Agency and . . . fully realized
cognitive autonomy as a species,” we can “consciously now remake” those
descriptive statements that have continually substituted a single genre of
human being for the whole of humanity.11 We created these sociogenic
replicator codes; we can change them.
As is already clear, there is a tension in her historical account of the
overrepresentation of Man insofar as she relies on the onto- epistemological
commitments of a Man2 descriptive statement to interpret the longue durée
of human history and make the case for a true humanism. Formally speak-
ing, this tension is fundamental to many debates in critical theory: we
construct our visions of transformation and emancipation in the language
of the present. How else could we? In Wynter’s case, however, neuroplas-
ticity takes on a much more specific and important role. Neuroplasticity,
and more precisely our awareness of it and mapping of its mechanisms,
represents the condition of possibility for a new descriptive statement and
an ontological shift in human being as profound as the emergence of lan-
guage 200,000 years ago. By taking control of the rhetorical-neurological
feedback loops in the brain, “we humans no longer need the illusions of
our hitherto story-telling, extra-human projection of that Agency.”12 With
the illusion lifted by contemporary neuroscience research, a new answer
to the question Who are we? emerges: “A hybrid biological and meta-
biological species” that consciously and collectively creates “a new kind of
planetarily extended cum ‘intercommunal’ community.”13
Across the breadth of the secondary literature on Wynter, the neu-
robiological scaffolding of her theory is differentially emphasized. As with
any great thinker, there is the quick footnote version of Wynter, increas-
ingly popular, that tends to grasp onto the seductive directness of her
cybernetic neuroscience to quickly signal a materialist or scientifically
inflected cultural studies. In more extended treatments by some of her
most insightful interlocutors, different articulations of the neurobiological
are at work. Take, for example, four brief discussions from recent work
that, when juxtaposed, create a helpful continuum for approaching the
science question.
First, David Marriott argues that Wynter’s deployment of science
ultimately traps her theory in the very regime of overrepresentation she
wishes to transcend because of her reliance on neuroscience as an empiri-
cal and transparent window into human existence (even as she occasion-
ally expresses caution against positivism or acknowledges epistemological
limits). “By writing history as scientific text, Wynter moves toward a posi-

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 tion that implies that scientific method exceeds narratives (even those of
racist illusion), but science also forecloses the textuality of history (and so,
presumably, that of rhetoric).”14 Thinking with Marriott, then, we might
register the somewhat jarring effect of reading Wynter’s full-throated cri-
tique of Darwinian “biocentric” accounts of the human undergirded by
Richard Dawkins, who represents perhaps the apotheosis of the Darwin-
ian synthesis.
Second, Alexander Weheliye seems to agree that the neurobiologi-
cal approach brings with it considerable risk if read as an empiricism,
but he posits a strategic reason for its deployment separated from any
specific truth to this or that scientific claim. As he puts it, “Wynter’s
description of the autopoiesis of the human stretches Fanon’s concept
of sociogeny by grounding it in an, albeit false or artificial, physiological
reality.”15 The discussion of an opiate reward system is not necessarily
true, nor does it need to be on this reading, but it points to how socio-
genic codes like race, class, or gender, as part of the master code of the
overrepresentation of Man, “become anchored in the ontogenic flesh.”16
While Weheliye does not extend the argument, one could plausibly assert,
then, that any scientific theory of the nature- culture interface would serve
just as well. The fact that Wynter tends toward two Darwinists (Richard
Dawkins and Gerald Edelman) rather than, say, various contemporary
neo-Lamarckians, is incidental.
Third, Katherine McKittrick lays out the ambivalent but generative
role of science in Wynter’s thought, tracing how Wynter simultaneously
outlines the “always already” racializing effects of (Western) science with
the possibility for drawing scientific discourses into the struggle for a
“cognitive leap.”17 We need not cede the terrain of scientific discourse to
those who continue to deploy it along racial and colonial lines: “Scientific
racism cannot have the last word.”18 Indeed, for McKittrick, to accept
a stark division between the objective world of science and the creative
world of arts and the humanities is to reify a key component of the over-
representation of Man. On this reading, Wynter is indeed intentional and
careful about the scientific structure she builds and its empirical validity
but crucially understands this as a two-way conversation and a site of
agonistic collaboration.
Fourth, Demetrius Eudell looks closely at the neurobiological sub-
strate of Wynter’s theory, centering the opiate reward system (and the spe-
cific studies cited by Wynter) as the key to a theory of overrepresentation:
“Linked to the functioning of the human code, as the research on addic-
tion conducted by the neurobiologist Avram Goldstein has revealed, are
adaptive behaviors driven by a reward and punishment mechanism in the
brain in which a natural opioid system is triggered with the performance
of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviors.”19 Eudell focuses on the relevant neuro-

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 transmitters in this theory (“probably beta- endorphin”), articulating
Wynter’s intervention vis- à-vis the scientific scaffolding of her footnotes
to foreground neurochemical-rhetorical feedback loops as the empirical
basis for a new humanism.
To be clear, these brief summaries do not adequately convey the rich-
ness of each discussion, all from thinkers to whom I am deeply indebted.
And I do not pose them to try to adjudicate who wore it best, so to speak.
Instead, the four positions I have schematically sketched form a sugges-
tive continuum to describe the deployment of neurobiology in Wynter’s
work: scientism, false (but useful), ambivalent (and generative), empirical.
And of course, the four positions are not neatly separable. In general, they
all share an account of genre studies that primarily focuses on two key
aspects (with differing evaluations): first, rhetorical-neurobiological feed-
back loops as the material structure of sociogenic replicator codes forming
the engine of overrepresentation; and second, the disruption and possible
rewriting of those codes by liminal subjects. Liminal subjects, as the name
implies, exist inside the system of overrepresentation through their con-
stitutive exclusion and so index and create the push to a radical outside.
The metabiological human Wynter describes — homo narrans, the
marriage of bios and mythos — is clearly a “cerebral subject.”20 Even as she
critiques the biological reductionism of Man2 (primarily the reduction to
genetics represented by DNA as master code), she posits the path beyond
through the unique capacities of the prefrontal cortex and the simultane-
ously transhistorical and culturally specific power of opioid reward sys-
tems in the brain. 21 She clearly and powerfully suggests that humans are
not actually subservient to the rhetorical codes to which they give up their
agency; cognitive autonomy means achieving self-recognition as cerebral
subjects and so taking up the challenge of transforming the “replicator
codes” of “symbolic life/death” that strengthen and regenerate through
our neural reward pathways.
In a sense, Wynter’s account here of neuroplasticity is not plastic enough.
As Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb argue, “The distinction between gene-
like replicators and phenotype-vehicles breaks down. .  .  . Behaviors and
ideas (memes) are reconstructed by individuals and groups (vehicles).”22 In
maintaining the distinct separation of replicator codes, as abstracted, from
the localizable brain, as the vehicle for such codes (like race or gender), she
implicitly relies on the interchangeability of different bodies and a hard bor-
der between the brain as self and the world around it.23
The result is that when Wynter describes humans as enacting the
self through “genre- specific” codes (such as race, gender, sexuality, class),
a scalar confusion results. If these are all “codewords for genre,” how do
they congeal (or not) into the overall replicator code Man?24 Is the master
code a site of emergence, or is it what determines the code words from

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 above? While the complexity of her work and her appeal to cybernetic lan-
guage suggest more than simply an additive model at work (race + gender +
class), the input- output system of a neurochemical “good” and “bad” in
the brain backgrounds embodiment in specific social- ecological systems
and foregrounds the code itself. The result is a mechanistic, bloodless
understanding of the struggle over replicators that fails to describe how
race and gender constitute Man. The next section outlines this tendency
in Wynter’s work, as well as in Wynter studies more broadly, giving par-
ticular attention to how this neurobiological turn obscures the importance
of gender as a language of embodiment in much of her previous work.

2. From Gender to Genre

Many of her interlocutors, and indeed Wynter herself at certain moments,

take a definitive interpretive stance on the role of gender in genre studies.
“Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with ‘genre’ and
say ‘gender’ is a function of ‘genre,’ they don’t want to hear that.”25 This
seemingly oppositional or prioritized reading of gender studies and genre
studies forms the basis for the contemporary interpretation of Wynter’s
“genre studies” — the study of human kinds — as a project concerned pri-
marily with racialization. At best, feminism represents a “subset within
[Wynter’s] analysis of Western humanism and the consequences of its
racially based definition of ‘man.’ ”26 Put more strongly, perhaps the order-
ing principle of a racially derived human “leads [Wynter] to the repudiation
of gender analytics as such” or even that “Wynter’s conclusions ultimately
lead to a repudiation of feminism as a site of emancipatory imagining.”27
I begin with Wynter’s own words here because I want it to be clear
that these are not unreasonable positions. In her most recent published
work, Wynter again clearly states a relationship between gender and race,
this time in terms of transcendence rather than priority or epiphenomena:
“In our specific Western-bourgeois, ethno- class case, the gender code is
transcended by the code of class. Yet, by further extension, both the class
and gender codes are themselves transcended by the founding sociogenic
replicator code of symbolic life/death enacting of the West’s Man in its
second reinvented form, as a founding divide/code to which we give the
ethno-taxonomic term race.”28 Descriptively, Wynter suggests here that
the “founding,” or what she has elsewhere called the “master” code of our
current iteration of Man — Man2, or biocentric homo economicus — is race;
thus, all other code words for genre (class and gender, but also sexual ori-
entation and religion) become ultimately legible through the master code.
Race, in other words, provides the “genre d’coherence” or the axis along
which all other demarcations of difference rotate. 29
Of course, this position, as it gets taken up by her various interlocu-

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 tors interested in repudiating gender analytics or reading gender studies
out of genre studies, seems to tidy up some messy contestation in advance.
What are race and gender in this model? Or if they should be thought as
becomings rather than beings, as “always a doing,” are race and gender
structurally the same, that is, formally repetitive codes with different con-
tent?30 And how do these genre- specific codes congeal diachronically?
We have seen the (metaphorical?) language of transcend, replace, function,
integrate, and take priority.
These questions remain generatively open if one considers the full
scope of Sylvia Wynter’s work. For instance, in a 2006 interview, she uses
a similar lexicon but seems to posit a strikingly different direction for
political and theoretical elaboration: “I am trying to insist that ‘race’ is
really a code-word for ‘genre.’ Our issue is not the issue of ‘race.’ Our issue
is the issue of the genre of ‘Man.’ It is this issue of the ‘genre’ of ‘Man’ that
causes all the ‘- isms.’ ”31 Rather than genre being reducible to race during
the reign of Man2, or even determined by it, genre here is conceived as the
more capacious term that in fact makes race legible through its broader
relationships to all the - isms. Yet, clearly, the relationship between race
and gender could not be described here as simply an aggregate that, along
with class and religion and sexual orientation, adds up to a genre. How,
then, does one register genre as emergent?
Perhaps what most complicates the triangulated relationship among
race, gender, and genre is Wynter’s consistent articulation of gender as
a “foundational archetype”: “Within the overall enactment .  .  . gender
is itself — while only one member class — a founding member class.”32 In
this telling, the etymological intimacy between gender and genre is no
accident, as gender is a sort of originary site of genre distinction. Gen-
der produces not only differentiation within a given genre or descriptive
statement of the human but also differentiation as such in the terms of
Wynter’s definition of human beings as homo narrans or, hybridly, bios/
mythos. That is, we humans are a “symbolically encoded mode of living
being” unlike any other.33 Gender proves foundational to this event of ori-
gin in at least two ways mentioned by Wynter that suggest her provisional
definition of the term.
First, paraphrasing Anibal Quijano, she posits at least some biologi-
cal substrate for gender: “As Quijano rightly insists, race — unlike gen-
der (which has a biogenetically determined anatomical differential cor-
relate onto which each culture’s system of gendered oppositions can be
anchored) — is a purely invented construct that has no such correlate.”34
Given how Wynter mobilizes Judith Butler’s concept of performativity to
animate her idea of genre, it might feel slightly disorienting to see gender
located in “anatomical differential,” a terra firma compared to the pure
invention of race. 35 Of course, she does not say that the anatomical dif-

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 ferential correlate is determinate or knowable, simply that gender oppo-
sitions appear transculturally and always anchored to the body in some
way. 36 To put it in slightly different terms, gender is not reducible to this
or that particular body but is always expressed through bodies: “While
the gender opposition had served to enact the biological/symbolic code by
enabling it to be anchored and mapped onto the anatomical differences of
the sexes, and therefore had been the archetypal form of all such codes, it
is not the code itself.”37 Thus, Wynter seems to understand gender as the
emergence of genre as such because it introduces a fundamentally human
cleaving, locally producing corporeal meaning while generally creating
the conditions of possibility for other codes to produce differentiation.
The second and related aspect of gender that explains its founda-
tional status for Wynter is that, within any genre (the auto-instituting of a
specific we), we become subjects “first. . . . at the familial level in terms of
our gender roles.”38 While she does not clarify this point extensively, one
can assume that it means our hybrid status is first experienced through
the symbolic elaboration of subjectivity within a kinship group, taking
us beyond mere genetic kinship toward more complex groupings. Inter-
estingly, in the same interview, Wynter suggests that the suppression of
the maternal was, at least at one point, the fundamental means of this
symbolic elaboration, “this given that the individual subjects — together
with their fellow initiates — are all now reborn of the same origin story rather
than of the womb.”39 Gender is originary, then, as the site of the biological
and symbolic cleaving, because symbolic codes of (good) life supplant
the biological life of the genetically encoded womb. This story is, perhaps
surprisingly, similar to Luce Irigaray’s work on the suppression of the
maternal in the creation of a sexual difference economy of One.40 What
changes, however, is that a global system of enslavement and colonialism
transforms the symbolic codes of life and death such that the originary
meaning of gender takes shape through race: “In consequence if, before
the sixteenth century, what Irigaray terms as ‘patriarchal discourse’ had
erected itself on the ‘silenced ground’ of women, from then on, the new
primarily silenced ground . . . would be that of the majority population-
groups of the globe.”41 While this might suggest that the prioritized read-
ing of race and gender is sound, Wynter again makes clear that a cipher of
substitution or sublation is not at work: “With the shift to the secular, the
primary code of difference now became that between ‘men’ and ‘natives,’
with the traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ distinctions now coming to play
a secondary — if none the less powerful — reinforcing role.”42 As the next
section illustrates, the shift that occurs in the sixteenth century is inven-
tion of the political technology of the pieza framework, or the creation
of a standard measurement of value for human chattel that could render
enslaved persons fungible.

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 In “Women on the Market,” Irigaray describes the exchange of
women as the “unknown infrastructure” of the symbolic order.43 As pre-
viously quoted, Wynter considers the omission of slavery and colonization
in this story of the economy of sexual difference crucial, because it misses
a transformation that took place in the sixteenth century where Western
“ontologism” became defined by distinctions between Man and Native
and Black. Beyond recourse to a depth model, then, how do we insist on
the ontologizing force of slavery and colonialism and still consider Wyn-
ter’s own description of cross- genre power of gender?
For Wynter, under the order of Man1 and Man2, the Black woman is
never thought of as woman in the first place. The fundamental argument
for genre rather than gender is that, until Man is challenged in a mutual
praxis of being human, there will be no such human being as woman that
is not thoroughly racialized. This rethinking of feminism from decoloni-
zation renders Irigaray’s analysis of exchange in “Women on the Market”
historically incomplete. Instead, following Wynter, the terms of exchange
fundamentally shift with the institutionalization of slavery and the con-
comitant processes that institute the law of the father as always already
the white colonizer. This shift speaks to what Wynter calls “the seminal
importance of the Atlantic slave trade” in the construction of a “multi-
layered system of global domination characterized by a plurality of points
or bases of resistance.”44
Here, Wynter pushes us to interlink the gendered dynamics of the
seminal — the father’s seed, the exclusively patrilineal account of the
human that relies on the invisiblization of the maternal body in the name
of the self-propagating Man — to the process of racialization through
enslavement. Thus, this historical conjunction renders monoconceptual
frames inadequate to the descriptive task of accounting for overrepresen-
tation and the ethical task of overcoming it. Instead, Wynter proposes the
pieza framework, shifting the terms of Irigaray’s “Women on the Market”
in a fundamental way:

The pieza was the name given by the Portuguese, during the slave trade,
to the African who functioned as the standard measure. He was a man of
twenty-five years, approximately, in good health, calculated to give a certain
amount of physical labor. He served as the general equivalent of physical
labor value against which all the others could be measured — with, for exam-
ple, three teenagers equaling one pieza, and older men and women thrown
in a job lot as refuse.45

As Man1 becomes the reigning Western ontologism, it rearticulates the

terms of exchange between assigned categories of “male” and “female”
according to the dominant life/death distinction of Man (as generic
human) and his native/negro others. The pieza framework focuses on

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 the body evacuated of meaning and subordinated to all other categories
of social meaning so that it can mediate socioeconomic exchanges under
a specific genre. The Black body as the zero point of humanity is what
enables the mode of domination, slavery, and colonialism, which in turn
animates the Marxist category of the mode of production: “The pieza
framework required a repositioning of the mode of production in relation
to the mode of domination. The former becomes a subset of the latter.”46
Beyond just a narrow critique of Marxism, the pieza framework articu-
lates how genre studies works as a pluriconceptual theoretics beyond even
the powerful but limited imaginary of intersectionality as a spatial model
where multiple, independent axes converge.
First, the pieza framework explicitly draws upon Michel Foucault’s
theory of power as fluid and mobile, strategic but nonintentional, showing
how the reigning descriptive statement of Man functions. That is to say,
any single axis of oppression, indeed the very notion that we can imagine
a “single axis” in isolation, looks much different through the world of the
pieza framework inaugurated in the fifteenth century. A single axis like
race or class or gender enters into relations of becoming only through
a dual process. First, it is animated by the dominant code of symbolic
life and death that makes it a meaningful distinction in the elaboration
of a specific human kind. So if Man stands in as the generic referent of
humanity, a category like race is mobilized vis- à-vis the regeneration of
that descriptive statement rather than in the name of the category itself.47
Hence, the pieza framework established by Portuguese traders through
economic- symbolic feedback loops and globalized through the Atlantic
slave trade becomes the immediate field of emergence for other differ-
ences to register as coherent demarcations. One can imagine this histori-
cal scenario logically, in the sense that the post-1492 ontologism of Man
described by Wynter renders all judgments of gender or class difference
seeable and sayable through specific forms of racial difference — such as
the preceding discussion of “Black women” where one cannot imagine
positioning them as women alone (vis- à-vis sexual difference) untouched
by racialization in the context of Man1 or Man2.
Second, the animation of the socioeconomic field by a specific ontol-
ogism also means a given differentiation takes hold in the autoinstitution
of the human only by way of multiple sites of oppression. If no one cat-
egory has meaning outside of the dominant code of life and death, the
corollary is that one category’s valence — in the literal sense of its power
through combination — can be traced only through how it pervades the
material- semiotic body by way of multiple sites of oppression. The subjec-
tivizing power of race, in that sense, takes hold through its coarticulation
with a category like gender such that what it means to embody the femi-
nine symbolic order is simultaneously the autoinstitution of whiteness.

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 This point speaks to Wynter’s wariness of contemporary feminism for
how it invisibilizes the constitution of woman- as-whiteness such that it
ends up thinking within the ideological coordinates of the overrepresenta-
tion of Man. To address ourselves to one immobile axis of differentiation,
or even to imagine that one could neatly divide up axes of differentiation
and freeze them in place until the moment of intersection, is precisely an
effect of overrepresentation, a second- order ideological structure of the
descriptive statement of Man taken as its truth. The pieza framework
establishes a mode of understanding the simultaneous persistence and
dynamism of identity categories like race, class, and gender, their unceas-
ing processes of becoming that still anchor the powerful hold of the reign
of Man.
Notably, the pieza framework is a crucial moment of transforma-
tion in Wynter’s view when the terms of economic exchange became
defined by an ontopolitics of the human. The fungible mediating term of
the pieza — the standard enslaved Black — becomes the site of relation for
global economic expansion that is both condition and result of modernity/
coloniality. This taxonomy of the pieza as the standard unit by which
differences across race, class, gender, and nationality can be understood
installs gradations of value at the level of the human and an economy of
scarcity and comparative advantage at the level of the body in a manner
that outlives the specific accounting function of this or that standard unit.
Insisting on the pieza framework, instead, is about understanding why
the kind of deracialized exchange of women proposed by Irigaray or the
desexualized and deracialized exchange of labor exploitation proposed by
Karl Marx fails to adequately diagram the economy of life and death after
1492. Importantly, moreover, it also exposes the limits of a critical frame
focused exclusively on a metaphysics of Blackness, because the pieza’s
fungibility is mobilized only in relation to multiple modes of identification
and position (a sort of perverse checklist akin to Audre Lorde’s insistence
on age, race, sex, class)48 and insofar as it moves through processes of
exchange. With that in mind, the pieza framework is not simply passed
down through the generations unchanged by historical contingency or
untouched by political- economic feedback loops. It represents the starting
point for a dynamic way of understanding the global economic spacing
of racialization through multiple sites of difference. And to return to the
previous section’s discussion of neurobiology, the pieza framework also
challenges the appearance of the vehicle/replicator distinction as gaining
coherence through an inevitably racialized conception of the interchange-
able body. Using an input- output model of mechanistic neuroplasticity
to describe a sociogenic code like race moving from brain to brain fails
to engage this multiplicity that Wynter herself insists on. If the pieza is
the source of extractive value, then it recursively shifts along with the

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 political- economic phase changes it engenders; that shift is not the clean
process of copying or substitution but instead the messy palimpsests of
rearticulation.
Hence, from the contemporary vantage point, Wynter identifies dif-
ferent phases of the development of colonial capitalism as a network of
accumulation and the concomitant pieza category that enables exchange:
circulation (the African slave), production (the worker), consumption (the
consumer). She argues, “This international network .  .  . leads to .  .  . a
differential ratio of distribution of goods and of rewards, which in turn
provides additional legitimacy. The institutionalizing of this ratio results
in its lawlike functioning to code differentiated identities.”49 In this sense,
the pieza framework lies at the heart of Wynter’s entire theory because it
is the figure that engenders the overrepresentation of a single descriptive
statement through its fungible capacity to exchange multiplicity within
an economy of the One: the assignment of a pieza category as the condi-
tion of a certain political economic structure and its attendant distribu-
tion of material and discursive value autoinstitutes a specific ontopolitical
description of the human. This connective power of the pieza and the
palimpsestic overlap between multiple positions has a dual effect that ren-
ders it both the site of a given descriptive statement’s regeneration and the
possible demonic ground from which to conjugate alternative intergenera-
tional imaginaries.
To concretize the first point, consider the figure Wynter briefly men-
tions as the pieza of neoliberal capital’s extractive value, which serves
not only an economic function but also an ontopolitical function as the
technology of overrepresentation’s corporeal inscription: the consumer.
How does the development of the figure of the consumer as the measure
of the human draw on, rearticulate, and reanimate the extractive value of
the enslaved body in a manner that strategically modulates the color line
and reifies uneven geographies of life and death? How is consumption, in
other words, human praxis under the overrepresentation of Man2 specifi-
cally in a manner contingent on the localizing effects of colonialism but
still consistent with a global mode of ontologism? And what happens to
a view of neoliberalism if we extend Wynter’s argument that domination
precedes accumulation in the formation of political economic circuitry?

3. Neoliberalism as Racialized Control

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault describes the movement from classical

liberal economics to neoliberal economics in postwar Europe and the shift
to a US-led consensus. The development of homo economicus recalibrates
the population biopolitics of the nineteenth and early twentieth century
around the individual as economic actor who defines (evolutionary) suc-

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 cess in terms of efficient optimization and material accumulation. The
new political rationality Foucault describes goes beyond a set of economic
reforms and instantiates a new triangulation of the economy, the state, and
its citizens. As Wendy Brown summarizes the mutation, “Neoliberalism
does not conceive of either the market itself or rational economic behavior
as purely natural. Both are constructed — organized by law and political
institutions, and requiring political intervention and orchestration.”50
Free subjects of classical economics demand only the negative freedom of
nonintervention to successfully pursue their naturally occurring greed;
the aggregate of individuals left alone in such a way achieves the optimal
conditions of the invisible hand of the market. Neoliberal politics traffics
in much of the same language of classical economics but sees a prop-
erly entrepreneurial citizen- subject as something to be fostered across all
spheres of human activity, such that traditional divisions between eco-
nomic and noneconomic aspects of life dissolve. Homo economicus, the
neoliberal subject par excellence, brings economic optimization to bear
on everything from sex and kinship to recreation and exercise through
tactics of marginal efficiency gain consistently inscribed across discursive
formations of subjectivitzation, including the family, psychology, criminal
justice, the classroom, and the university, along with new developments in
digital technology and social media. These tactics all intertwine through
strategic material accumulation above all else. The state serves as but
one more economic actor, leaving self-regulation as fostered by different
spheres of neoliberal subjectivization to citizens rendered as entrepreneurs
of consumption. That is, they accumulate wealth in the register of tactical
consumption that further optimizes their good moral standing as eco-
nomic successes. In Wynter’s terms, material accumulation becomes the
crucial measure of one’s humanity under the conditions of Man2.
One way of describing this interface of accumulation and measure-
ment is what Gilles Deleuze calls the development of the “control soci-
ety,” in which the individual of classical liberalism is disaggregated and
recomposed as a “dividual.”51 The dividual emerges from manifold statis-
tical tools for capturing the body’s capacities and predictively shaping the
translation of the virtual into the actual. One cannot formally describe the
dividual in the abstract because it is a precise data point across all its mea-
surable connections to demographic ranges, with specific intersections
of data streams given political meanings at different moments. One can
certainly imagine, however, a dividualized subject composition emerging
from various measurements: spatial mobilities, monetary transactions,
medical risk profiles, education background, earning potential, quantita-
tive ideological beliefs, security challenges — the list could go on indefi-
nitely, and indeed, the dream of control society is exactly to make such a
list endlessly flexible and totalizing such that no aspect of life (actual or

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 virtual) escapes capture. This phase of capitalism is “no longer directed
toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets.”52
What I want to suggest is that the historical development Deleuze
describes is best understood in relationship to Wynter’s parallel elabora-
tion of the pieza framework and its refiguration from the enslaved body
to the laboring body to the consuming body. The control society’s simul-
taneous creation and targeting of the dividual, based on a shift from pro-
duction to products, is most intimately associated with the creation of
market profiles based on the quantification of every aspect of life and
its monetization (that is, identifying virtual sources of profit and invent-
ing concepts and technologies that actualize the movement of capital).
It is, in other words, a subjectivization primarily through consumption,
recasting other functions of sovereign governance like social welfare or
security and policing through the metrics of privatization and optimal
choice. Hence, Deleuze acknowledges but leaves tellingly unanalyzed the
uneven geographies of control, cautioning against an overgeneralization
of the dividual as a mode of subjectivization or a clean narrative of pro-
gression from sovereign power and biopower: “One thing, it’s true, hasn’t
changed — capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme
poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control
will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushroom-
ing shantytowns and ghettos.”53 To route this challenge through Wynter’s
work, the question is how to link the emergence of control societies as a
specific technology of Man2 (reifying and targeting populations consid-
ered human under neoliberal regimes of accumulation) to the great major-
ity of the world systematically negated by their lack of a relevant market
profile. As Doreen Massey puts it in her study of refugees, the working
class, and urban slums, “At one level they have been tremendous contribu-
tors to what we call time- space compression; and at another level they are
imprisoned by it.”54 Deploying Wynter’s pieza framework here recasts the
consumer, structurally parallel to the figure of the dividual, as the source
of extractive value under neoliberal capitalism in a manner contingent on
the earlier production of the enslaved body and so always already racial-
ized in the global sense of Man2, but not reducible to race alone.
To reiterate the argument so far, I am contending that the pieza
figure is at the heart of genre studies, indeed Wynter’s entire theory of
overrepresentation, because it is the key site for the regeneration of spe-
cific descriptive statements of the human. It gives historical and embodied
specificity to the abstract language of codes that usually dominates dis-
cussions of how race, gender, and other sites of difference fit together in
Wynter’s work. Political economic analysis from the structuring position
of the pieza as a historical and conceptual body cleaves exchange to pro-
cesses of racialization such that the fungibility of bodies conceived in neo-

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 liberal terms emerges from a deep history of enslavement and subsequent
transformations of the slave trade, rendering the pieza category a pluri-
conceptual site useful for strategically directing multiplicity toward the
reification of a single descriptive statement. Thus, genre studies routed
through pieza requires an account of multiple sites of regeneration — race,
class, sex, sexuality — but does not simply flatten out difference because
it still identifies the key source of extractive value in a given episteme of
Man.55 The pieza framework posits that regimes of domination precede
networks of accumulation such that the ontologism enabling exchange
haunts political economy even when the formal regime of domination col-
lapses or shifts. The consumer of neoliberalism as the new symbolic code
of life and death is thus intimately tied to the history of enslavement and
colonialism. This reordering of domination and accumulation, moreover,
means that no demarcation of difference remains untouched by processes
of racialization after the historical events of 1492 and the reimagining of
human kinds in the sixteenth century.

4. The Pieza as Praxis

Working within a pluriconceptual framework here, it is clear that the

struggle against the overrepresentation of Man requires a multiscalar and
heterogeneous approach to human genre. The figure of the pieza is one
way to understand how oppositional movements and new imaginings of
the human become partially incorporated into emergent regimes of being
as sites of extractive value in global neoliberalism. Indeed, the very inven-
tion of the fungible enslaved body can itself be read today in neoliberal-
ism as a sort of metapieza, promising the symbolic life of accumulation
through the consumption of symbolic death.
Take, for instance, the work of Dorothy Roberts as an illustration
of how the pieza of the consumer under neoliberal control societies ties
together race and sexuality through the optimal navigation of market con-
ditions. She examines the simultaneous foldings of racial and sexual dif-
ference through reproductive politics and reprogenetics. As she argues,
“The recent expansion of both reproductive genetic screening and race
based biomedicine .  .  . signals a dramatic change in the racial politics
of reproductive technologies.”56 Whereas her earlier work examined how
racial domination rendered reproductive justice a Manichaean world of
white and black, new developments in genetic technology articulated
through neoliberal notions of personal responsibility even at the molecu-
lar scale promise a new mode of incorporation for racially marked bodies.
Through new marketing schemes, the development of race-based medi-
cine, and parallel “discoveries” of racial genomics, “women of color are
now part of the market and cultural imaginary of the new reprogenetics . . .

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 with the expectation that women will use these technologies to manage
genetic risk.”57 In this example, the pieza framework of the consumer
redeploys sexual difference as a specific technology of racialization that
furthers the entrepreneurial self at the heart of neoliberalism all the way
down to the most minute biological scale.58
Roberts’s study of the new biocitizen makes clear that fungibility
as understood by Wynter is essential to mapping the incredible plastic-
ity of our reigning descriptive statements, as well as the capture of the
neuroplastic liminal subject by racialized control. Roberts traces the new,
booming business of genetic ancestry services, particularly their market-
ing toward African Americans through the promise of repairing lost roots
and reconnecting to a cultural lineage stolen by slavery. In the terms of
the pieza framework, new genetic technologies serve as an avenue for the
reincorporation of formerly radical struggles, as neoliberal biocitizens can
privatize and heal the violence of the past through consumption. Notably,
this mode of consumption also generates vast new stores of biometric
data that form part of the flexible apparatus of control societies and the
production of dividuals.
Roberts’s warning returns us to the question of the search for a neu-
robiological substrate in Wynter’s work: “These technologies promote a
racial identification that depends more on common biology than on the
common struggle for social justice. It is now more critical than ever to
recognize the difference.”59 Making the pieza framework central to a read-
ing of Wynter is another way to remain vigilant of this difference empha-
sized by Roberts. Wynter brilliantly describes how New World views have
emerged over the past five hundred years only to be transformed from the
possibility of a true humanism into an ethnoscience providing adaptive
truths for a specific genre of Man. A liminal opening, in other words,
became canalized for the reinvention of striated degrees of humanity and
the regeneration of a new descriptive statement. This tension in Wynter’s
work, between the profound critique of ethnosciences across history and
a seemingly straightforward belief in neuroscience today as a means to
mobilize neuroplastic mechanisms, helpfully brings into relief how the
liminal subject is a dynamic and specific figure, rather than self- evidently
emancipatory or transparent, defined by both openness and capture.
In her unpublished manuscript Black Metamorphosis: New Natives
in a New World, Wynter argues that the historical emergence of the pieza
framework not only laid the groundwork for the “later large- scale objec-
tification of all into producer/consumer” but also created the resistant
structure of negated humanity still with us today.60 The liminal subject,
in other words, is not just an empty category at the limit of any abstract
definition of the human but instead immanent to the Middle Passage as
an ontologizing technology; this subject grasps what Wynter calls the

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 “underlife” of slavery, resymbolizing the Middle Passage as a “transship-
ment” of culture.61 Hence, because the pieza framework is “abductive” — it
spreads laterally across the globe as the world system of slavery and colo-
nialism takes up the name of globalization and neoliberalism — the pro-
cess of turning humans into pieza and the simultaneous struggle against
fungibility still define the parameters of how the liminal subject indexes a
beyond to the current overrepresentation of Man.

Notes
1. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 81.
2. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 81.
3. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 81.
4. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 89.
5. Wynter, “No Humans Involved.”
6. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 52; Hantel, “Rhizomes and the Space of
Translation.”
7. For a discussion and critique of Wynter’s taxonomy of species difference,
see Hantel, “What Is It Like to Be a Human?”
8. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 211.
9. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 220.
10. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 221.
11. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 242.
12. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 245.
13. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 217, 194. To be clear, Wynter argues that,
without poetics, any “science of the word” will remain half- starved. My concern is
the implicit ordering in which cognitive autonomy, even if it is described poetically,
appears on the scene only vis- à-vis the cerebral subject’s self-recognition. Poetics
seems to take on meaning only through the neurobiological, whereas the neurobio-
logical, even if it is epistemologically insufficient, becomes supracultural.
14. Marriott, “Inventions of Existence,” 81.
15. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 27.
16. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 27.
17. McKittrick, “Axis, Bold as Love,” 149.
18. McKittrick, “Axis, Bold as Love,” 149.
19. Eudell, “ ‘Come On Kid,’ ” 240.
20. Ortega and Vidal, “Mapping the Cerebral Subject.”
21. Wynter cites Avram Goldstein, for instance, a specialist on addiction who
considers the “delicately regulated [natural- opioid] system perfected by evolution
over thousands of years to serve the survival of all species” (“Ceremony Found,”
218).
22. Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions, 205.
23. This indifference to the specificity of the vehicle is, of course, not the
same structure as the fungibility of the pieza framework. However, it does raise a
challenge to the politics of genre studies, which, as I argue in later sections, begin at
the moment of the human challenge to fungibility in the assertion of an irreducible
specificity in a shared field of being.
24. Wynter, “Proud Flesh Inter/Views,” 5.
25. Wynter, “Proud Flesh Inter/Views,” 23.

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 26. Toland-Dix, “Hills of Hebron,” 58.
27. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 40; Barnes, Cultural Conundrums, 142.
28. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 224.
29. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 196.
30. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 196.
31. Wynter, “Proud Flesh Inter/Views,” 15.
32. Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 33.
33. Wynter, “Ceremony Found,” 217.
34. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 264.
35. “We know of this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gen-
der from Judith Butler. I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are
always a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human. . . .
Why not then the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations
as, in our contemporary Western/Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender,
race, class/underclass, and across them all, sexual orientation?” (Wynter, “Unparal-
leled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 33).
36. In this sense, her understanding of gender feels closer to a tradition of
corporeal feminism described by such feminist philosophers as Elizabeth Grosz,
Drucilla Cornell, and Stephen Seely, who instead might use the language of sexual
difference, sexuate being, or eros. A discussion of this is beyond the scope of this article,
but I hope to shed some indirect light on it as we consider the fungible body and the
body’s resistance in Wynter’s pieza framework, as well as the role of cybernetics and
biology in her outlining of a genre framework. One clear site of distinction worth
mentioning here, however, is that Wynter describes gender only as “oppositional,”
a position that the aforementioned corporeal feminists respectively critique. How
would genre studies shift if the gendered body Wynter describes could be resymbol-
ized outside of oppositional pairs or, indeed, if the many ongoing resymbolizations
that resist or avoid binary could be recognized in the first place?
37. Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” 186.
38. Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 33.
39. Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 68.
40. I have briefly addressed this connection in Hantel, “Toward a Sexual Dif-
ference Theory of Creolization.”
41. Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” 363.
42. Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” 358.
43. Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 171.
44. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 80.
45. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 81.
46. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 84.
47. Frantz Fanon puts this point similarly in his caution against sclerotic analy-
ses of race that fail to keep up with the protean qualities of racial domination: “We
must look for the consequences of this racism on the cultural level. Racism, as we
have seen, is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression
of a people” (Toward the African Revolution, 33).
48. Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” 114.
49. Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 82.
50. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of American Democracy,” 85.
51. Deleuze, Negotiations, 180.
52. Deleuze, Negotiations, 181.
53. Deleuze, Negotiations, 183.
54. Massey, “Power- Geometry,” 62.

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 55. Though beyond the scope of this article, one of the motivating factors in
taking up the pieza framework was the circular discussion after the 2016 US presi-
dential election about whether to use an economic or identity politics frame in trying
to understand the rise of Trump. The pieza framework helpfully suggests that such a
separation is a product of the reigning descriptive statement of Man2.
56. Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies,” 786.
57. Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies,” 786.
58. This reading of Wynter certainly runs against the ongoing elaboration of
the field of Afro-pessimism. Her theory of overrepresentation is variously claimed
and critiqued by proponents of Afro-pessimism. Clearly, her understanding of Black-
ness, at least in the context of the pieza framework, is incompatible with their view
of Blackness qua violence. See Douglass and Wilderson, “Violence of Presence.”
59. Roberts, Fatal Invention, 257.
60. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 508.
61. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 69, 666.

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