Professional Documents
Culture Documents
What Is It Like To Be A Human Sylvia Wyn
What Is It Like To Be A Human Sylvia Wyn
Max Hantel
61
coded on the side of life, from the marginalized populations already given
over to death, present and future cadavers laid out f lat for inspection.
In this essay, I want to trace how Wynter deploys Fanon’s sociogenetic
approach in a manner that turns precisely on such an alternative optic imagi-
nary, a restructuring of the relationship between perception, knowledge, and,
ultimately, the very symbolic codes of life and death that define (human)
being. To shed the role of the coroner, Wynter articulates sociogenesis through
the concept of autopoiesis as coined and theorized by Francisco Varela and
Humberto Maturana. Autopoiesis repositions the observer, the object of obser-
vation and the experience of truth, imagining a circular and self-perpetuating
relationship in which “seeing for oneself ” is not simply to adjudicate reality but
to experience it and make sense of it through the same domain of the seeable
and sayable that defines “oneself ” and is, in turn, partially created by “oneself.”
“All doing is knowing,” they assert, “and all knowing is doing” (Maturana
and Varela 1992, 27). Seen this way, the bodies and collectives excluded from
the ethical weight of human existence tell us more than just a forensic tale, as
they form part of the circular organization of experience and, hence, being.
This move from autopsy to autopoiesis is where Wynter begins, following the
experience of those subjects given over to death within a certain regime of being
human/human knowing. Far from confirming the truth of that regime, these
“liminal subjects” conjugate alternative imaginaries that open a relationship to
a world-otherwise.
The demand for a world-otherwise emerges from the historically specific
structure of this world defined by the “overrepresentation of Man” or the substi-
tution of a single genre of being human for the generic category of Human
Being. Wynter deploys her approach to a new science to excavate the process
by which humans in their multiplicity are reduced and negated in the name
of a normative, homogenous, singular Human, generally through different
pedagogical tactics, political economic techniques, and somatic violence.
Wynter begins her investigation in the fifteenth century, periodizing subse-
quent onto-epistemological shifts from one regime of the human to another,
beginning with the move from the “Christian” to “Man1.” These labels index,
in a particular epoch, the “governing codes of symbolic life/death,” as well as
the imaginary and material boundary projects defining difference cartographi-
cally realized in a “space of otherness” (Wynter 2015, 37; Wynter 1989, 642).
The epochal significance of 1492 for Wynter, both in its historical facticity
and as a site of contemporary historical investment, usefully adumbrates
this approach. In her essay “1492: A World View,” Wynter considers the
controversy over the meaning of Columbus’s voyage and the perspectival
polarization of either conquerors or conquered, asking instead, “can we therefore
begin . . . from a new view of 1492 based upon this still-to-be written history
of how the human represents to itself the life that it lives” (Wynter 1995, 8)?
62 philoSophia
She proposes that Columbus challenged the insular cartography of Christian
cosmology, which divided the world into habitable and uninhabitable zones and
rendered earthly forms incommensurable from the divine. Through his voyage,
Columbus helped build a new tradition premised on a homogenous earth and
a planetary Christendom tying together the world’s population: “All was now
one sheepfold, and if not, was intended to be made so. Above all, the seas that
would make this possible all had to be navigable ‘Mare’” (Wynter 1995, 28).
This vision of a newly shared world bequeathed by Columbus has as its condi-
tion of possibility, moreover, a rethinking of the centralization of the state as
the primary organ of collective belonging and the means of universalizing the
“we” of Christendom. Following the lay humanists of the Renaissance such as
Pico della Mirandola who located redemption in reason, political subjectivity in
relation to emergent state forms became the means by which man expressed the
will imbued in him by God (Wynter 2003, 277). In terms of Wynter’s model,
the result is a transition from a Christian theocentrism to a secular-religious
hybrid, Man1 or homo politicus.
This new worldview remapped the earth, no longer on the axis of habit-
ability, but rationality. The space of otherness descended from the heavens
and colonial forces organized newly “discovered” populations of natives and
Africans according to a hierarchy of reason rather than the binary system of
salvation. The onto-epistemological coordinates of Christianity sanctioned
slavery in the case of “ just title,” when someone rejected their savior and made
themselves an enemy of Christ. Under the overrepresentation of ratiocentric
Man, however, certain populations serve as “natural slaves”: the Iberian
empires, for instance, positioned indigenous Americans along a continuum
where Europeans represent the highest order of being and dark Africans
represent the lowest and final step before animality.1
So where and who are “we” now? Wynter’s answer to this question—the
transition from Man1 to Man2—justifies the rigorous attention to the specific
components of her new science of the Word. The rise of the biological sciences
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rearranged the divinely created order
of being into a scientifically objectifiable natural order. As “life” becomes the
object of science, through the work of Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
and most importantly, Charles Darwin, “a mutation would occur to a new
bio-ontological form . . . the lack-state of the fullness of being was now to
be that of the Lack of a mode human being, the Indo-European, now made
isomorphic with Being human itself ” (Wynter 1984, 36). A narrow reading of
Darwinian evolution as natural selection combined perniciously with Thomas
Malthus’s theory of resource scarcity and population density to install a simul-
taneously eugenicist and economic view of the human: Man2. This thoroughly
natural organism finds symbolic life through accumulated capital and selected
genetic traits. Wynter calls this a “biocentric” descriptive statement, or homo
64 philoSophia
consciousness. For Wynter, borrowing from Thomas Nagel, consciousness
only exists in an organism if “there is something that it is like to be that
organism. . . . We may call that the subjective character of experience” (Wynter
2001, 30). Nagel’s take on the now classic hard problem of consciousness asks
how subjective experience arises from objective physical states. For Evan
Thompson, this framing of the question ultimately relies on maintaining the
distinction between mental and physical processes, rendering a sound and non-
reductive answer impossible. Instead, he insists, “We need to focus on a kind
of phenomenon that is already beyond this gap. Life or living being is precisely
this kind of phenomenon” (Thompson 2004, 384). The way Thompson recasts
the hard problem—he articulates it as a “body-body” problem rather than a
“mind-body” problem—resonates with Fanon’s landmark exploration of his
subjective experience from within the “crushing objecthood” of racism (Fanon
1967, 82); in the case of specifically human consciousness, I argue that Fanon’s
introduction of the racialized body resolves the chasm between objective and
subjective description. If we follow Wynter in understanding the overrepre-
sentation of Man2 as our contemporary condition, this gesture by Fanon is
a necessary condition to approach the problem at all. Wynter’s deft reading
of Nagel through Fanon suggests that the concept of autopoiesis alone, as
offered by Thompson, is inadequate without a deeper sense of the historical
and geographical production of certain bodies as always already trapped in the
explanatory gap once we ask, “What is it like to be a human?”
Fanon coins sociogenesis in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks as
a response to the human sciences in both their descriptive and political impli-
cations. He challenged Freudian theory, and psychoanalysis more generally,
which had itself reacted to the phylogenetic theories of human differentiation
(or species level, naturalistic view of human development) with an ontogenetic
theory of individual development. Prevailing theories of man and society, he
suggests, have not painted a complete portrait of racialized subject formation
because of a failure to articulate methodological individualism and structural
determinism together as part and parcel of a multi-scalar latticework. “It will
be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. . . . But
society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man
is what brings society into being. . . . The black man must wage his war on
both levels” (Fanon 1967, 4). Thus, he places “sociogeny beside phylogeny and
ontogeny” in a call for a “sociodiagnostic” that can articulate his consciousness
at both levels and render his experience a resource for (and even event of )
transformation (Fanon 1967, 4).
Of course, these brief but suggestive cautions in Black Skin, White Masks
prove the extent of Fanon’s direct commentary on sociogeny. Indeed, he
goes on in the very next page to warn against the reification of method as an
end unto itself. In a sage self-declaration of dereliction, he writes: “I leave
66 philoSophia
Fanon’s investigation of the autophobic consciousness is made possible by the
sociogenic principle: purely cultural explanations mask the embodied force of
racialization and so understate how cultural formations congeal into ontological
statements in a transcultural manner while biological models cannot account
for the cultural specificity of different systems of metaphysical life/death that
activate the neurobiological reward system instituting a subject’s sense of self.
The sociogenic principle takes the “nature-culture” interface itself as its object
of study: a transcultural constant (in other words, an aspect of humanity’s
autopoietic existence) of the specific cultural modalities of the human self
correlated with neurological and biochemical states (Wynter 2001, 60). The
entire cognitive architecture of human consciousness is at issue in sociogenetic
emergence and, importantly, no longer isolated from social or environmental
factors that might make it transparently intelligible like a straightforwardly
mechanistic model of input and output. So, Fanon’s study of a singular black
man cannot be reduced to either an individualist phenomenological frame or a
purely structural, even species-wide humanism where agency and consciousness
prove epiphenomenal.
Thus, the question becomes both how to identify crucial rhetorical-
neurobiological feedback loops in the production of human consciousness and,
importantly, how to introduce change or imagine the system transforming. In
other words, sociogenesis concerns the tense vacillations between two senses of
survival: the conservative character of survival at the level of systemic analysis
and the disruptive effect of survival at the level of embodied cognition.
The first sense articulated in Wynter comes primarily from the cybernetic
theorist Gregory Bateson who defines it to mean, “that certain descriptive
statements about some living system continue to be true through some period
of time (Bateston 1972, 345). The life/death codes of Man2 described earlier
constitute a descriptive statement in this sense. Chela Sandoval, on the other
hand, describes survival from the vantage point of systematic exclusion: “In
attempting to repossess identity and culture, US feminists of color during the
1960s and 1970s, US punks during the early 1980s, peoples of color and queers
during the 1990s developed survival skills into technologies for reorganizing
peoples and their collective dreams for empowerment into images-turned-fact”
(Sandoval 2000, 34). Audre Lorde puts these two senses together in “The
Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by writing: “For to
survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn
this first and vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human
beings” (Lorde 2012, 42). Almost paradoxically, registering the structural
impossibility of survival for those bodies and populations marked for various
forms of death and decay proves the most important survival tactic Lorde
invents. Under current conditions of what it means to be human, in other
words, there can be no survival for those to whom Lorde writes; and yet, in
68 philoSophia
organization is constitutionally incapable of seeing itself in terms of a higher
level of organization. Varela saw this as the core problem in any attempt to
discuss human experience through autopoietic organization:
The obstacle to be surmounted in this process is nothing less than the cogni-
tive homeostasis of each of us, the tendency to stick with our interpretation of
reality, entrenched and made stable by emotions and body patterns. To work
through the veil of attachments, and to see (experience) reality without them
is part of the process of unfoldment. (Varela 1976, 67)2
70 philoSophia
where liminal subjects introduce chaos into the established order but ultimately
are reabsorbed into the reigning descriptive statement of Man, such as the
initially radical force of affirmative action as an epistemological break becoming
the stable expression of liberal inclusion and partial incorporation (Wynter
1984, 40). Thus, revolutionary humanism must begin with liminal subjects but
only proceeds through a collective struggle that seizes on the opening to the
outside and refuses the homeostatic balancing of the normative order. In the
next section, I want to follow Wynter’s challenge to a specific limit within her
own thought: can we imagine a beyond to the current descriptive statement of
Man without fundamentally reordering the relationship between humans and
nonhuman others? Or, put differently, does a failure to consider this boundary
foreclose the invention of new ways of living together that Wynter might call
revolutionary humanism?
I come now to the final point of my letter to you. Jesse Jackson made the point
that the uprising of South Central L.A. “was a spontaneous combustion - this
time not of discarded material but of discarded people.” As is the case with the
also hitherto discardable environment, its ongoing pollution, and ozone layer
depletion, the reality of the throwaway lives, both at the global socio-human
level, of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the “favela/shanty town”
The parallel she draws here is not just metaphorical, between people treated
like trash and a trashed environment, but instead operates at the somatic level
of embodying symbolic codes of the human expressed through a geographical
landscape that precedes and exceeds us. So how to expose those hidden costs
and draw a contour line between ecological destruction and the constitutive
negation of non-white bodies?
She makes clear a necessary connection between humanism beyond the
word of Man and a fundamental rethinking of political ecology, both in
terms of how humans relate to nonhumans and the environment and how
the outside to the current episteme is geographically expressed. As she
elucidates this twinned effect of the overrepresentation of Man, however,
the “environmental” and “socio-human” impacts, it is not always clear how
those parallel series ever touch much less become co-constitutive. Put more
strongly, Wynter’s privileging of narrativization and linguistic representation
as the primary if not exclusive mode of domination sometimes serves to starkly
separate these two series and smuggle in a hierarchy of the socio-human over
the environmental that betrays her own aims. Thus, in some sense reading
Wynter’s political injunction against her ontological foundations, I want to
suggest that a more capacious and vibrant account of the political ecology of
humanism is necessary to struggle against the geographically embodied force
of the overrepresentation of Man2.
Consider the oppositional figure Wynter uses to bring into relief human
difference and make stark the unique power of representation.
So here you have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. For
we are not purely biological beings! As far as the eusocial insects like bees are
concerned, their roles are genetically preprescribed for them. Ours are not,
even though the biocentric meritocratic IQ bourgeois ideologues, such as the
authors of the Bell Curve, try to tell us that they/we are. (Wynter 2015, 33–34)
Let me be clear here that my argument supports the primary point of this cita-
tion: humans are not purely biological beings. As Wynter stakes out, moreover,
we must be incredibly mindful of drawing contour lines between the human
72 philoSophia
and nonhuman world in the context of racialization as it is currently derived
from a neo-Darwinian iteration of capitalist inequality. Hence, the suspicion
of any declarations of “posthumanism” or a flat ontology drawing humans
onto a level with nonhumans without first addressing intra-human hierarchy
(see Jackson 2014; Hantel 2012). Without resorting to a facile and dangerous
biocentrism, then, I want to tarry with this stark demarcation between humans
as praxis and bees (and different kinds of animals more broadly) as genetically
preprescribed to examine what generative directions for sociogenetic analysis
it might close off.
I want to suggest that the bright line drawn by Wynter between humans
and nonhumans replicates a problematically closed view of autopoiesis as
solely human, instantiating an unnecessary yet powerful hierarchy between
the socio-human and the environmental. Or, put simply, autopoiesis is always a
multispecies affair. Donna Haraway convincingly argues: “Individuals and kinds
at whatever scale of time and space are not autopoietic wholes; they are sticky
dynamic openings and closures in finite, mortal, world-making, ontological
play” (Haraway 2008, 88). 4 So the human-animal boundary project, far from
a naturally occurring bright line, must itself be politically produced at certain
moments in time. As an opening and a closing, it means there is nothing
self-evidently emancipatory about alliances with the natural world, merely
that the way we imagine singularly human autopoiesis takes place through,
with, and against nonhuman forces and entities that precede and exceed us.
Again, autopoiesis is multispecies.5 This point redirects Wynter’s mobilization
of autopoiesis against the biocentrism of Man2 in at least two ways.
First, it suggests that the distinction between humans and nonhumans as
autopoietic versus genetic smuggles back in some of the genetic determinism
of the biocentric description of Man. While Darwin did not rely directly on
genetics, of course, the neo-Darwinian synthesis that undergirded twentieth-
century life science research posited a reductively gene-centered view amenable
to the sorts of racialized, neoliberal technologies of the self Wynter targets. The
theory of autopoiesis emerges alongside new research in developmental biology,
evolutionary biology, and epigenetics to challenge this genetic determinism
most famously embodied by Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene.”6 Autopoiesis
operates across life forms, from bacteria to insects, to plants, to humans and
suggests modes of evolutionary change not reducible to the genome. Thus,
Wynter appropriately wields this powerful epistemological tool against the
limits of genetic determinism but lacks a more capacious engagement with the
forces of evolution.
And second, grounding these narrative processes in a specific landscape
full of nonhuman others where embodiment remains visceral forgoes the
seeming self-evidence of redescription as emancipatory and forces us to take
into account the frames and boundary projects we inevitably take up. Wynter
74 philoSophia
Take, for instance, this scene from the Central African Republic, where
forest elephants have been slaughtered by the hundreds and harvested, even
while still alive, for their ivory:
Turkalo had been wondering how elephants, with their highly developed
emotional intelligence, coped with the poaching. One day, she told me, an
emaciated calf collapsed and died in the bai. In a kind of funeral procession,
a hundred elephants trooped by her body, many of them touching her with
their trunks. One of them . . . put the calf ’s leg in her mouth and repeatedly
tried to yank her up. (Canby 2015, 40–41)
Notes
76 philoSophia
analytics of embodiment that can only posit black knowledge as biologic knowl-
edge?” (McKittrick 2016, 4).
4. Haraway is actually critiquing autopoiesis writ large here. While I am sympathetic
to the broad dismissal, I think Wynter’s much more capacious and dynamic sense
of autopoiesis, when supplemented by this multispecies intervention, sufficiently
answers Haraway’s critique. In her new work, Staying with the Trouble: Making
Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway dedicates a chapter to a critique of autopoiesis
in favor of “sympoiesis.” In future research on Fanon’s and Wynter’s sense of
sociogenesis, I hope to argue that this deceptively simple dismissal of “the self ” is
politically inadequate in the face of the overrepresentation of Man as a cognitive
and affective structure. For now, I merely take this concern as a point of departure
to conceive Wynter’s humanism as a rethinking of political ecology.
5. Indeed, the very cybernetic theories that Wynter relies on emerged in deep
relation to the close study of bees along with other eusocial insects. Gregory
Bateson, for instance, the originator of the concept of “descriptive statement”
that is central to Wynter’s argument on auto-institution of genre, was a key
member of the Macy Conferences in cybernetics between 1946 and 1953. “The
conferences synthesized much of the interest in research into animal worlds,
affects, and technological systems” (Parikka 2010, 121). Jussi Parikka points
out that cybernetics, while often discussed in terms of a human-machine
interface, emerges in this moment through a discourse of experimental biology
particularly centered on eusocial insects like ants and bees as creative, natural
technics to solve social problems. Bateson sought out the kind of holistic theory
of patterns that Wynter takes up in response to the inextricable intertwining of
the world that I am here calling multispecies autopoiesis. He famously asked,
“What is the pattern that connects? What pattern connects the crab to the
lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to
you? What is the pattern that connects all living creatures? ” (Bateson 1979, 8).
Thus, descriptive statements of the human are always inextricably intertwined
with nonhumans. Any human genre is not just a political question but a chal-
lenge of political ecology.
6. It is worth noting here that Wynter herself approvingly cites Richard Dawkins,
specifically his distinction between replicators and vehicles, in her essay on the
sociogenic principle (48–49). The point is not merely to quibble with Wynter’s
citations but to suggest that the fundamental incompatibility of autopoiesis with
these other ontologies of life poses a political problem for how we think with
liminal subjects in going beyond Man.
7. I would add that working in this vein also carries the risk of one’s descriptive
projects being translated into political technologies of domination. Eyal Weizman’s
now famous work on the Israeli Defense Force’s use of Deleuze and Guattari
comes to mind: “Walking Through Walls,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/
weizman/en.
Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton.
. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale: Jason Aronson.
Canby, Peter. 2015. “The Elephant Watcher.” The New Yorker (May 11), https://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/elephant-watch.
Cornell, Drucilla. 2014. “Fanon Today.” In The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and
Social Theory of Human Rights, edited by Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121–36.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Markmann. New
York: Grove Press.
Greenhouse, Steven. 2011. “Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions.”
The New York Times: A1 (January 4).
Hantel, Max. 2012. “Posthumanism, Landscapes of Memory, and the Materiality of
AIDS in South Africa.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1/2: 251–56.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New
York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2014. “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race
and Posthumanism.” Feminist Studies 39, no. 3: 669–85.
Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco J. Varela. 1992. The Tree of Knowledge: The
Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambala.
. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: Realization of the Living. London: D. Reidel
Publishing.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2016. “Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made
measure.” Cultural Geography 23, no. 1: 3–18.
Noske, Barbara. 1997. Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. Vancouver: Blackrose
Books.
Parikka, Jussi. 2010. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Thompson, Evan. 2004. “Life and mind: From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology.
A tribute to Francisco Varela.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 381–98.
Varela, Francisco. 1976. “Not one, not two.” Coevolution Quarterly 12: 62–67.
Woods, Clyde. 2002. “Life After Death.” The Professional Geographer 54: 62–66.
78 philoSophia
Wynter, Sylvia. 2015. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species?: Or to Give
Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Interview with Katherine
McKittrick. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine
McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards
the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New
Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257–337.
. 2001. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of
Conscious Experience.” In National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin
America, edited by Antonio Gomez-Moriana and Mercedes F. Duran-Cogan,
30–66. New York: Routledge.
. 1997. “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth’: Female Circumcision, Lost
Origins and the Aculturalism of Feminist / Western Thought.” Case Western
Reserve Law Review 47, no. 2: 501–52.
. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse and the Origin of the
Americas, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
. 1994. “No Humans Involved.” Forum N.H.I 1, no. 1: 42–74.
. 1989. “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the
Antilles.” World Literature Today 63, no. 4: 637–48.
. 1987. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and
Beyond.” Cultural Critique 7: 207–44.
. 1984. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” boundary 2 12, no.
3/13, no.1: 19–70.