Article

Theory, Culture & Society

0(0) 1–19
Sylvia Wynter’s ! The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:

Theory of the Human: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0263276420936333

Counter-, not journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Post-humanist
Zimitri Erasmus
University of the Witwatersrand

Abstract
How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and
teleological accounts of the human? To grapple with this question I clarify five key
concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the autopoie-
tic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on parts of Wynter’s
oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations with Anthony Bogues. Wynter
invents a Third Emergence of the world to mark the advent of the human as a hybrid
being. She challenges Western conceptions that reduce the human to biological
properties. In opposition to Western teleology, her counter-cartography of a history
of human life offers a relational conception of human existence which pivots around
Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s call for a concep-
tion of the human made to the measure of the world, not to the measure of ‘Man’.
This makes Wynter’s theory counter-, not post-humanist.

Keywords
autopoiesis, black thought, Anthony Bogues, the human, posthumanism, sociogen-
esis, Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter’s transdisciplinary approach offers an audaciously imagi-

native and critical synthesis of ideas from opposing intellectual histories:
European Enlightenment thought and anti-colonial black radical
thought. She thinks across a wide range of disciplines – systems thinking
in biology, history, physics, anthropology, cognitive science, literature
and the arts – to advance a poignant critique of Western humanism
and to urge reflection on what it means to be human. How does Sylvia
Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and

Corresponding author: Zimitri Erasmus. Email: Zimitri.Erasmus@wits.ac.za

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

teleological accounts of the human? To address this question I clarify key

concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the
autopoietic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on
parts of Wynter’s oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations
with Anthony Bogues1 to suggest ways to think with these concepts.
In opposition to Western teleology, Wynter’s counter-cartography of a
history of human life offers a relational conception of human existence
which pivots around Frantz Fanon’s (1986) theory of sociogeny.
Sociogeny is understood here as a craft (not a method) of (mis)aligning
the dynamics between, on the one hand, the relations that constitute the
interdependence of organic and animal life as a whole and, on the other,
the symbolic realms of human life – a craft of relational existence among
humans socialized into different symbolic orders. Wynter draws on Aimé
Césaire’s call for a conception of the human ‘made to the measure of the
world’ (2000: 73), not to the measure of ‘Man’. This makes her theory
counter-, not post-human.
A cultural theorist, artist, scholar and critic, Wynter is one of the few
living and one of the few women intellectuals from the black, radical
anti-colonial tradition of her time. Born of Jamaican parents in Cuba
in 1928, she attended primary and secondary school in colonial Jamaica,
and pursued tertiary studies in Madrid and London. She taught at the
University of the West Indies at Mona in the 1960s and at the University
of California, San Diego, in the 1970s. From the late 1970s through to
the late 1990s she lectured at Stanford University, where she retired as
Professor Emerita. On 11 May 2020 she turned 92 in Texas, where she
lives with her son.
Two related innovations are specifically Wynterian. The first is a Third
Emergence (Wynter, 1997): the advent of human life in a non-linear
making of the world. This idea arises from her synthesis of (a) Ilya
Prigogine’s idea that the birth of the universe and that the beginnings
of biological life respectively mark the First and Second Emergence of
the world; and (b) Ernesto Grassi’s argument about the birth of human
as distinct from – not superior to – animal life (Wynter, 1997).
The second is her conception of the human as a hybrid being: both
biological/organic and symbolic/myth-making.
Sylvia Wynter’s critical conceptual intervention is evoked by her inter-
est in European Renaissance humanism’s break from the idea that the
world is made by God, which she calls the ‘de-godding’ of the social
(Wynter, 2003: 311). She postulates that what the world needs now is
an intervention of that order suited to predicaments of our time.
She makes such an intervention when she excavates figures of the
human in Western thought to reveal their racialization, universalization
and normalization by violent imposition and erasure; to reveal Europe’s
making of Man the master and savior of all and everyone. For her, the
human in Western thought is represented historically by European Man.
Erasmus 3

Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century drawing Vitruvian Man – which

depicts a Greco-Roman man’s body as guide to the proportions of the
universe – is emblematic of this representation. The figure ‘Man’, for
Wynter, morphs from Judaeo-Christian Man, for whom the world is
ordered by the divine, to rational-political Man of a civic order inaugu-
rated by the European Renaissance (‘Man 1’ of the 15th and 16th cen-
turies). ‘Man 1’ in turn morphs into the figure of the European
Enlightenment which remains hegemonic today, namely, bio-economic
Man, for whom the world is ordered by nature and by the market (‘Man
2’ of the late 18th and the 19th centuries) (Wynter, 2015). Her innova-
tions are grounded in a critique of the 1492 colonial conquest of the
Americas (Wynter, 1995) and of the 19th-century invention of biological
race as its legitimation. The history of slavery in the New World and the
ways slaves and former slaves negotiated life in the face of being torn
from their social milieu, in the face of the commodification of their
humanity, and of the physical, existential and epistemic violence of
slavery, lead her to explore figures of the human outside the Western
episteme, figures that are not ‘Man’.

‘The Human’, not ‘Humanism’

Humanism is a vast, nebulous and contested field. The civic humanism of
Europe’s 16th-century Renaissance and the liberal humanism of its late
19th-century Enlightenment have each been criticized by anti-colonial
intellectuals for their hypocrisy as reflected in slavery, colonialism, its
civilizing mission and the violence that accompanied these projects
(Césaire, 2000; Fanon, 1986; Majeke, 1952). Alongside this critique,
anti-humanist thinking in the academy since the 1960s (structuralism,
post-structuralism, postmodernism and certain forms of post-colonialism
and post-humanism) has eroded humanism as an intellectual tradition.
In response to this trend, the first decades of the 21st-century have seen
challenges to the conflation of all versions of humanism with the worst
aspects of Europe’s liberal humanism and to the hegemony of anti-huma-
nist thought (Alderson and Spencer, 2017; Halliwell and Mousley, 2003;
Radhakrishnan, 2008; Said, 2004; Sekyi-Otu, 2019). For Edward Said
(2004), as for Timothy Brennan (2017) and Ato Sekyi-Otu (2019), the
abuses of humanism by Eurocentrism, imperialism and literary elitism do
not preclude recuperation of the core principles of humanist practice.
These are that the historical world is designed by humans, not given
by God or nature. Physical, cultural, mental and emotional work and
interaction on the part of humans provide the connective tissue between
human experience and the material world (Brennan, 2017: 1) that enables
humans to understand and to change the world we make. Such self-
understanding is constituted by critical self-reflection and is always
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

‘incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable’ (Said,

2004: 12).
Notwithstanding the arguments for recuperating these core principles,
for Anthony Bogues, one misreads Wynter when one conflates
‘humanism’ as an ideology borne of Europe’s Enlightenment and ‘the
human’ as a figure in the anti-colonial black radical tradition (Bogues,
interview, May 2018). For Wynter, humanism is the secular ideology
particular to Western bourgeois Man which presents itself as universal
(1976: 83). In opposition to this ideology she elaborates Fanon’s concep-
tion of the new human. To this end, Wynter’s Third Emergence allows her
to extend Maturana and Varela’s (1980) theory of autopoiesis (self-
(re)generation) to the cultural activity of human life and to conceive of
the human as hybrid.
For Maturana and Varela, changes in a living system involve its
autonomous regeneration of the defining relations that constitute it as
distinct from its milieu and from other living systems, both of which
change, too. They write:

Ontogeny and evolution are completely different phenomena, both

in their outlook and in their consequences. In ontogeny, as the
history of the transformation of a unity, the identity [understood
as the process by which a system is realized] of the unity, in whatever
space it may exist, is never interrupted. [If it is, the living system will
die.] In evolution . . . historical change . . . is a succession of identities
[understood as properties of life] generated through sequential
reproduction . . . and the pattern of realization of these [successive]
unities exists in a different domain than the unities that embody it. . .

[Significantly] . . . Reproduction and evolution . . . arise as secondary

processes subordinated to [living systems’] existence and operation
as autopoetic unities. (Maturana and Varela, 1980: 104, 112)

In other words, a living system (and for Wynter, this includes cultural
formations as living systems) exists because it regenerates itself. Its dif-
ferential forms of existence are produced by and dependent on its self-
regeneration. Life and cultural formations are made by the systems that
embody it, not by a force external to such systems. This makes life and
culture sustained and changing processes of becoming.
This approach focuses on the ways life comes into being – more than
on its biological evolution, hereditary properties or molecular structure –
and postulates that these ways yield generative possibilities for interde-
pendence among living systems, and between living systems and artificial
biological and technological designs. For Maturana and Varela (1980),
autopoiesis is the singular feature that distinguishes living from
Erasmus 5

non-living systems. This theory holds that organic systems synergistically

garner life from the changing relations between the physiology, sensor-
ium and milieu (space, time, co-living systems, synthetic matter and
machines) of the organism. Thus, various modes of life are engendered
by unstable and open-ended processes that bring living systems and non-
living entities into dynamically symbiotic relation.
Like all living systems, the new human as a cultural construct is, for
Wynter, made of largely autonomous (albeit necessarily contextualized)
processes and practices, and cannot be reduced to properties. This ren-
ders human thought and consciousness both embodied and socially
embedded. She writes:

. . . human orders of representation enable us to live and actualize

the conceptions of being human, and therefore to be conscious of
[and] to experience being in their . . . terms, only because of our
capacity to turn theory into flesh. (Wynter, 2000: 40, emphasis in
the original)

Thus, culture is an autopoietic process (Wynter, 2015: 197) by which

humans constitute themselves as subjects within specific physical, histor-
ical, psychosocial and power formations that are themselves shaped by
human design. Culture as symbolic practice distinguishes the human from
other living systems, but not in hierarchical fashion. Moreover, locally
specific cultural praxes of making what it means to be human must
be socio-poietically situated. In other words, such praxes must be located
within the fields of meaning and of political and material relations of
a particular historical moment in a particular place (1976: 78–80).
For example, Christian Europe’s construction of the human (Man 1)
needs to be located within the political, discursive and material relations
produced by its conquest of the New World in the 16th-century.
Similarly, Western bio-economic Man (Man 2) needs to be located
within modernity/coloniality which is marked by the confluence of
racism as a structure of power and knowledge, capitalist social relations,
the Darwinian notion of evolution and the articulation of its discourse of
the survival of the fittest with capitalist notions of competition.
This conjunctural understanding of Man – an idea produced by a con-
stellation of continuous, embodied and located historical processes – coun-
ters the hegemonic bio-centric and evolutionary conception of the human
as born of a succession of events. For Wynter, this conception demands
that the Third Emergence be ‘lost’ and ‘non-seeable’ (1997: 501).
For Bogues (interview, May 2018) ‘there is no Third Event
[Emergence]’. My reading, however, concurs with that of Jason
Ambroise (2018), namely, Wynter (1997) clearly states that she invents a
Third Emergence as a discontinuity in the emergence of life (not a linear
continuity) during which the new human as symbolic and as biological
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

being are co-emergent. Contrary to Ambroise’s reading of the biological

realm of Wynter’s hybrid human as ‘determined by . . . laws of bioevolution’
(2018: 847, 851, 853, emphasis added), my interpretation suggests that she
does not draw on evolutionary but, as I have shown, on systems biology.
The distinction between evolutionary and systems biological frames is
conceptually significant because of the ways each lends a different under-
standing of the beginnings and proceedings of life. This difference is clearly
articulated in Maturana and Varela’s (1980) distinction between ontogeny
and evolution noted above. The autopoietic approach of systems biology
lends coherence to Wynter’s arguments even if she sometimes slips into
deterministic language.
I reinterpret Wynter. First, true to autopoiesis as a process, I assume
that she conceives of the making of the world as a symbiotic and rela-
tional process. To know the world as matter is itself cultural and human.
Science itself is a cultural and historical discourse, not an extra-soicietal
and extra-human force. Western thought, however, presents science as
objective and therefore outside of the hybrid human domain. Wynter
accepts the First Emergence (the birth of the universe). In my reading,
she returns to the Second Emergence neither for romantic nor scientistic
recovery, but in order to reconceptualize the human given its limited
representation by European science as a bio-rational-economic being.
This brings her to invent the Third Emergence of human life as bio-
mythical. Stretched to its farthest meaning, her proposal for a ‘new
science’ can be read as a way of knowing – not only the human,
but life – which postulates that human, animal, and organic life-systems
co-create the world in this technological and information age.

The Autopoietic ‘Overturn’ and the Human as

‘Sym-bio-lic Being’
Wynter weaves together this Third Emergence, Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela’s (1980) theory of living systems (autopoiesis) and
Frantz Fanon’s (1986) theory of sociogeny. This tapestry leads to her
second innovation: a conception of the human as a hybrid being: both
biological/organic and symbolic/myth-making. I refer to this as Wynter’s
‘sym-bio-lic being’. It allows her to delink from the accepted truth pro-
duced by Eurocentric evolutionary science: that organic and human life
proceed in linear, hierarchical and increasingly complex fashion through
hereditary processes that involve predetermined biological properties. By
this way of knowing, human life is continuous with biological life forms
(species) of the Second Emergence, a way of knowing that enables a
racialized taxonomy that places ‘primitive peoples’ (Native Americans
and Africans) at its base and their ‘civilized’ counterparts (Europeans) at
its apex. Wynter’s Third Emergence, her ‘human as hybrid’ and her
critique of Eurocentric knowledge allow for a counter-mode of coming
Erasmus 7

to know that troubles the racialized premises of this knowledge and

facilitates a non-anthropocentric conception of the human as part of
discontinuous but interrelated processes that engender various modes
of life.
What makes the autopoietic an ‘overturn’ and what does it have to do
with the human as hybrid? The ‘overturn’ refutes current truths about the
human as a primarily biological being and reinvents its contours.
For Wynter, our biology or ‘bodyhood’ is the condition of, not the
basis for, our being human (Wynter, 2015: 211). The ‘overturn’ enables
Eurocentric knowledge about human life to be rewritten:

Human life . . . rather than being defined in a relation of pure con-

tinuity with biological life [the founding myth of Western evolu-
tionary thought] is re-defined as having come into existence only
on the basis of the . . . discontinuity . . . with the genetic pro-
grams . . . that motivate . . . behaviours of all forms of purely biolo-
gical life. [The Third Emergence] was . . . the rupture by means of
which, having evolved its unique capacity for the use of language,
this form of life crossed a threshold after which it would come to
motivate . . . its behaviours through the mediation of the Word.
(Wynter, 1997: 501, emphasis in original)

For Wynter, this re-writing involves (over)turning the figures of Man 1

and Man 2 into objects of inquiry from three perspectives: the expanded
theoretical perspective of autopoiesis, the significance of socio-poetic
location, and the perspective of ‘livity’: in other words, from the lived
experience of dominated and liminal people (Meeks, 2002: 166; Roberts,
2014: 190; Wynter, 1977) and from the perspective of the speaking dead
(Bogues, 2012: 34). Her objective is to ‘overturn’ Man 1 and Man 2 as
representations of all modes of being human (Wynter, 2015: 193). To this
end she re-examines the moment when all forms of biological life emerge
(the Second Emergence) to suggest that only one element of the human –
its physical, organic and biological existence – is accounted for in
Europe’s cartography of the human (Wynter, 2000). This mapping
enables pressing human life into a racialized taxonomic grid, a practice
against which she writes.
Her counter-cartography maps a history of human life onto specific
African and African-diasporic modes of praxis that suture natural and
symbolic birth, life and death through ritual. These modes of life are
concerned not with evolutionary time, but with the co-constitution of
genres of time: womb- and body-time; memory- and dream-time; planta-
tion- and plot-time; freedom- and symbolic-time (Wynter, 2000). This
counter-cartography offers a new figure of the human: a bio-mythic
being ‘born of the womb . . . [and] reborn [through story] . . . homo nar-
rans’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 34, 44, 68, 69). Wynter writes:
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

‘our ‘‘stories’’ are as much a part of what makes us human . . . as are our
bipedalism and the use of our hands’ (2015: 217, emphasis in original).
These stories are shaped by people’s specific socio-poietic locations.
Her conception of the new human is grounded in a synthesis of
Fanon’s and Maturana and Varela’s theories. Fanon distinguishes
between the ‘corporeal schema’ (ontogeny: the body’s implicit knowledge
of itself in relation to its milieu) and the ‘historico-racial schema’ (socio-
geny: the meanings of lack attached to black bodies and of wholeness
attached to white bodies in the colonial imagination; the internalization
or epidermalization of these meanings). He argues that the alienation of
the black person arises from the violent non-alignment of these ontogenic
and sociogenic schemata in an anti-black world. Wynter (2015: 102)
places this Fanonian idea in conversation with Maturana and Varela’s
distinction between the organic autopoietic space (in which organic life is
self-generated: ontogeny) and the ‘heteropoetic space of human design’
(the domain of language and representation: sociogeny). Combined, her
counter-cartography of human life (Third Emergence, womb and story)
and her conception of the corporeal, autopoietic and socio-poietic
domains as interlinked lead her to the human as hybrid: bios and
mythos. This is one way in which Wynter elaborates Fanon’s (1986:
13) assertion that ‘[b]eside phylogeny and ontogeny there is sociogeny’:
in addition to the physiological existence of the human body, it has a
symbolic, social existence and each shapes the other.
Furthermore, the ‘overturn’ troubles the conception of humans as
‘created beings’ and insists that as self-reflexive autopoietic ‘beings who
create’ (Wynter, 2001: 33, emphasis added) ourselves and the world, we
need to reclaim responsibility for what we project onto other-worldly
hands: God, Nature and the market. Wynter’s new human (read not
from the Second Emergence as is ‘Man’, but from the Third
Emergence) is hybrid from the moment that it comes into the world.
Thus, human life ‘cannot pre-exist [its] cosmogonies’ (Wynter, 2015:
213). This new hybrid human is always already an agential being with
the capacity to come to know and to represent the world. Humans so
capacitated do not (as Eurocentric knowledge would have us believe)
emerge with the onset of Europe’s Enlightenment humanism and its
natural and human sciences (sciences of ‘Man’). This turn to the new
human as always already hybrid implies that new forms of knowledge
must necessarily be hybrid, too. Wynter draws on Césairé (2000), Fanon
(1986) and Maturana and Varela (1980) to argue that such forms need to
attend to the constitutive relation between, on the one hand, the human
as a living system and a vitally material being (ontogeny), and, on the
other hand, the human as a symbolic, ‘languaging’ being of ‘the Word’
(sociogeny). The objective of this reconstituted knowledge is to move
beyond the limits of sciences of ‘Man’ (Wynter, 1990: 356) towards de-
colonial or counter-humanist ways of coming to know human forms of
Erasmus 9

life in their inter-related symbiotic and sym-bio-lic relations with other

such forms.

Sociogeny
Each of the concepts expounded on above contributes to Wynter’s (2001,
2015) elaboration of Fanon’s (1986) theory of lived experiences of the
effects of colonial power: sociogeny. He foregrounds the racialized psy-
chopathologies of the colonial symbolic order and makes politics and
culture (in the broadest sense of this term) primary, not biology. Wynter
accentuates the ways in which metropolitan epistemologies – grounded in
a racialized conception of the human as an evolved natural being and of
Man as the generic form of the human – regenerate these psychopathol-
ogies. Both Fanon and Wynter call not only for the end of colonialism,
but for the end of ways of knowing and seeing that enable, legitimate and
perpetuate this system of domination. Their work illustrates that neither
the colonized nor the colonizer is trapped in these psycho-socio-struc-
tural circumstances.
In her exposition of sociogeny, Wynter adapts the Newtonian concep-
tion that all of nature is made of the same matter. By analogy, she argues
that all of culture is made of the same process, namely autopoietic repre-
sentation. Thus, cultural meanings are to human life what genetically
programmed behaviour is to animal life. Moreover, matter, culture and
life are each expressed in various genres. For Wynter (2000: 57; 2001),
while each genre of the human is shaped by its particular history, context
and cosmogeny, all genres of the human are governed by ‘the code of
symbolic life and death [which] is a transcultural [and transhistorical]
constant’ that serves as a transversal ‘law’ of human life.
In this vein, Lewis Gordon (2008: 87) defines sociogeny as ‘the orga-
nisation of meaning [which] does not only affect life but also constructs
new forms of life’. It refers to the ways lived experience of intersubjective
relation and of the life of power ‘set the framework for the layers and
layers of concepts and practices that constitute the social world’
(Gordon, 2006: 250). Relation is central to sociogeny. It includes the
geopolitical constitution of social relations; the ways social and political
structures produce such relations and the subjectivities that emerge from
this crucible; the ways humans experience, inhabit, refuse and change
such relations; and the possibilities for making new subjectivities from
this experience, habitation, refusal and change. This makes invention
part of the sociogenic process. If, as Wynter postulates, autopoiesis is
about the relations that organize both organic life and symbolic human
life, sociogeny is the meta-organization of these two sets of relations (not
of meaning only, as Gordon posits) in ways that are either aligned or
misaligned, depending on the particular social positioning of a person or
social collective. She writes: ‘[t]he mode of social relations – and not the
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

mode of production – . . . determines the ‘‘functional value’’ of differen-

tiated social beings’ (Wynter, n.d.: 730). Sociogeny is about the interface
between the body and the world. Fanon’s analysis of the psychopathol-
ogies of colonialism and Wynter’s analysis of black cultural practices
reveal the violent misalignment of an anti-black symbolic world with
the black body and black civilizations.
For Wynter, the stories we live by and dream of shape what we do and
make ‘the human’ a set of practices. Sociogeny underlies the stories with
which we think, for which we fight, and the stories that differentiate our
lives. It is about the resources we draw on as we make our lives with what
we find in a configuration of power at a particular time. Sociogeny is
premised on the idea that humans bring social formations into being and
that history is about both memories and futures. Because it includes the
stories we struggle for, sociogeny is not only about the conditions that
oppress us but also about those that facilitate practices of freedom. For
Anthony Bogues, ‘the fundamental thing in Fanon is . . . when he says
‘‘Besides ontogeny there is sociogeny’’. That’s it. Everything else [in
Wynter’s thought] flows from that’ (Interview, May 2018).

Counter-, not Post-humanist

Which Genealogy?
My clarifications and reinterpretations of Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the
human reveal that two concepts with which she thinks – auto-poiesis and
hybrid being – have become part of the vocabulary of mainstream post-
humanist thought which emerged in the 1990s. Like humanism, posthu-
manism is a vast, differentiated and proliferating field. I do not attempt a
critical review of either a part or the whole of this field. This task is
beyond the scope of this paper. Nor do I set out to provide a point-
by-point comparative analysis between Wynter’s work and that of
any one key posthumanist thinker, or of posthumanist thought in
general. Instead, I want to point to the absence in mainstream posthu-
manism of an engagement with the geneaology of critical theory
from which Wynter draws. Notwithstanding overlapping concepts,
themes and concerns between posthumanist and Wynterian thought,
the former reproduces hegemonic power/knowledge relations as it
re-centres and remains grounded primarily in European Anglophone
and Francophone political theory.
For example, the preface to the Posthuman Glossary edited by Rosi
Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (2018: xiv) claims that posthumanist
thought is the second generation of critical theory, and implies that
radical epistemologies of the 1970s are the first. This genealogy does
not account for radical epistemologies that emerged from plantation
and domestic slavery, anti-colonial struggles, and scholarly engagements
with these histories. It suggests that what Anthony Bogues calls ‘Black
Erasmus 11

Critique’, understood as much older and wider than ‘race’- and postco-
lonial-studies of the 1970s, is not part of critical theory. Similarly, Cary
Wolfe traces two genealogies of mainstream posthumanist thought –
systems theory of the late-1940s and early 1950s and post-structuralism
of the 1960s and 1970s (2010: xii) – leaving unacknowledged Wynter’s
specific engagement with these theoretical developments. In this regard,
Zakiyya Iman Jackson (2012), a scholar of African American Studies,
provides an eloquent argument about the significance of afro-modern
counter-conceptions of the human for a critical reading of posthumanist
scholarship. Sylvia Wynter builds on these counter-conceptions and on
pre-1970s radical epistemologies.
Given the place from which I have come to think – Africa (specifically,
southern Africa) and its diaspora – these epistemologies, while not the
first, are an earlier generation of 20th-century Black Critique and
critical theory. These ways of knowing otherwise are buried in scholarly
and artistic explorations of slave narratives and of local and diasporic
cultural forms produced from what Wynter calls ‘the underlife’ (n.d.:
670–90) of modernity/coloniality. They are buried in historical novels
such as Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved (1988). They are buried in pamphlets and speeches of resistance
against colonial domination and in practices of everyday life and of free-
dom ‘drown[ed] out’ (Hartman, 2019: 52) by libraries and official
archives.
In other words, posthumanist thought is neither the first to think ‘the
human’ anew nor is it the first to critique euromodernity’s bifurcation of
human and animal life which produces the figure of ‘Man’ as master of
the physical world and measure of all things human. Jackson (2012)
reminds us that this critique is made much earlier in the 20th-century
by anti-colonial black radical thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Leopold
Senghor, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and, later, by Sylvia Wynter. For
example, Wynter situates the emergence of euromodernity’s nature/cul-
ture divide within the history of Spain’s conquest of the New World and
of European imperialism. She notes that the change in European Man’s
relation to nature marked an unprecedented change ‘in the very concept
of culture’ (1976: 82) in the Western imagination. She reminds us that for
Senghor, culture emerges from a relational process which involves both
the integration of the human with the natural environment and the adap-
tation of the environment to human needs. Wynter argues that the
expansion of Western civilization and the simultaneous emergence of
capitalist relations reduced culture to one part of this relation – the
adaptation of the natural environment to the needs and desires of
‘Man 1’ and ‘Man 2’ in particular. Moreover, Europe’s hierarchical dis-
tinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ and its new definitions of
Nature – arable and cultivated land versus ‘the jungle’ – mapped (even if
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

not always unambiguously) onto its racialized conceptions of Self and

Other, the latter embodied in ‘the Native American’ and ‘the African’.

Racially Differentiated Animality

In The Birth of a Jungle, Michael Lundblad writes about literature and
culture in the United States at the turn of the 20th-century. He notes
ways in which the then emerging hegemony of the Darwinist-Freudian
‘discourse of the jungle’ constructs beastliness in relation to both human
and non-human animals and produces ‘animality as ‘‘naturally’’ violent
in the name of survival, and heterosexual in the name of reproduction’
(2013: 23, 1, 2). He argues that the simultaneity of the ‘discourse of the
humane’ in relation to animals on the one hand, and widespread lynching
of black Americans on the other, reveals ways in which ‘animality is
essentially ‘‘elevated’’ over blackness’ (Lundblad, 2013: 27, 138) in the
US at the turn of the 20th-century.
Lundblad’s (2013: 121–56) delineation of the ‘discourse of the jungle’
and its imbrication with the ‘discourse of the humane’ reveals the raciali-
zation of animality and its complex and shifting articulations with class,
gender and sexuality. For example, in his analysis of Tarzan of the Apes,
the famous text by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1914, he shows that
bourgeois, white men are constructed as innately able to restrain their
animality with reason and rationality. Classed, gendered and racialized
superiority conferred on these men by bourgeois social arrangements
endows them with the capacity to treat human and non-human lesser
beings ‘humanely’. In contrast, working-class white men lose restraint
on their animality because of their class. Such restraint on the (white
male) human’s supposedly animal instinct to kill and on his regression
into the immoral practice of cannibalism is, however, lost only when work-
ing-class white men’s survival is at stake. In sum, white men who ‘take a
walk on the wild side’ are seen as virile and chivalrous while the ‘wildness
of the African’ is savage. In this move, ‘white [male] animality . . . [is]
exempted from black savagery’ (Lundblad, 2013: 153). In the ‘discourse
of the jungle’, black men are innately amoral and savage. They lack
reason, rationality and morality to restrain their animality and hence
need to be humanized (become ‘Man’) through colonialism’s civilizing
mission. Black savagery manifests in indiscriminate killing and cannibal-
ism, both of which are laced with innate hysteria, hatred and a desire to
torture for pleasure. Colonial humanizing discourse folds back on itself as
it constructs this affective field as the inherent cause for the infinite deferral
of the savage’s graduation to ‘becoming ‘‘Man’’’. On the contrary, for the
most part white men’s killing is constructed as quick, clean, calculated,
dispassionate, and in self-defense. Congruent with Sylvia Wynter’s theory
of the human, Lundblad (2013: 15) posits that in contrast to Wolfe’s
(2010) abstract and philosophical approach to ‘the posthuman’, these
Erasmus 13

differentially racialized constructions of animality foreground the histori-

cally situated cultural politics and praxis of what it means to be human.
Similarly, Jackson (2012) suggests that mainstream posthumanist thought
obscures the complex place of the specifically gendered and sexualized
animalization of black people in colonial humanism: black people as the
missing link, the living line between animal and human, the hypersexual
animal-within-the-human. Moreover, she posits that a more capacious
human subject formed by relations with more than just the human species
– Braidotti’s conception of the posthuman subject (2019: 42) – already
emerges from afro-modern identifications of co-being with animals as a
counter-genre to ‘Man’ as Europe’s epitome of the human. And, I would
add that these ways of doing ‘the human’ produce a counter-epistemology
to the Eurocentric consideration of ‘Man’ as ‘either the origin or the end of
all thought’ (Wolfe, 2018: 357). These identifications, Jackson notes, afford a
radical critique of the racialized Western notion of the-human-as-imperious-
sovereign versus the animal as abject (2012: ii). Furthermore, for her, 19th-
century Europe’s unsolicited conferral of black people’s belonging to the
biological human species is neither at odds with euromodernity’s racially
differentiated animalization nor with its humanization of black people.
Instead, Europe’s ideas of ‘race’ and of ‘species’ are co-constitutive.
Together, they produce the violent expectation that black people assimilate
into the normative genre of the human, ‘Man’, and be cast as ‘Man’s’
animal-within in order to lend coherence to this conception of ‘the
human’ (Jackson, 2012: iv–viii). Given this, key posthumanist thinker
Rosi Braidotti’s call for ‘becoming animal’ (2013a: 67) reads as an iteration
of Western universalizing discourse: ‘becoming Man’ upturned to ‘becoming
animal’. This call begs a series of questions. In which ways might the racia-
lization of animality in the ‘discourse of the jungle’ be perpetuated in post-
humanist arguments for ‘becoming animal’? How does ‘becoming animal’
account for the afterlife of modernity/coloniality in which racialized differ-
ence continues to render poor and black people’s bodies more susceptible to
treatment as specimens, data and waste? What does ‘becoming animal’
mean, politically, for black people’s positioning in the realm of existence?

Genres of ‘Hybrid Being’

Drawing on Jackson (2012) and Lundblad (2013), I have shown some
ways in which an engagement with afro-modern counter-conceptions of
‘the human’ points to the limits of mainstream figurations of ‘the posthu-
man’ for people historically considered to be Man’s Other. In addition,
‘the hybrid human’ of posthumanism is of a different genre than the
human as hybrid in Wynterian thought. For example, for Cary Wolfe

the ‘human’ is the product of processes that are . . . inhuman and

ahuman . . . For the ‘human’, what makes us ‘us’ . . . is always already
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

on the scene before we arrive, providing the very antecedent

conditions of possibility for our becoming ‘human’. In a fundamen-
tal sense, then, what makes us ‘us’ is precisely not us . . . human
beings are prosthetic beings. What we call ‘we’ is in fact a multi-
plicity of relations between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, ‘inside’ and
‘outside’, organic and non-organic, things ‘present’ and things
‘absent’. (2018: 358)

In contrast, drawing on Judith Butler, Wynter sees ‘the truth. . . of our

being human as ‘always a doing’ . . . [a] praxis’ (2015: 196), not a product.
As noted earlier in this paper, for Wynter, ‘we humans cannot pre-exist
our cosmogonies or origin/myths/stories/narratives’ (2015: 213). In other
words, what makes us human is not always already there before we
arrive. Instead, drawing on David Leeming, Wynter posits that ‘we
humans make use of cosmogonies or origin stories/myths in order to
‘‘tell the world’’ and ourselves ‘‘who we are’’’ (2015: 196). For her,
human being is not simply augmented by a ‘not us’, as in Wolfe’s
(2018: 358) prosthetic being. Instead, as Wynter puts it, ‘the who of the
We that we are’ (2015: 196) is always genre-specific. In other words,
embodiment and embeddedness are both storied and situated.
Furthermore, the over-riding focus of posthumanism’s figuration of
hybrid being lies at the nexus of human-organism-animal-thing-machine
(nouns) in the context of advanced capitalism. This figuration does not,
however, consider that in early capitalism and for the master, the slave is
already animalized, ‘thingified’, and put to labour as if he or she were a
machine. These are practices (not nouns) that enable the master’s con-
ception of the slave as a hybrid being – both property and person
(legal constructs). In other words, racial slavery produces a genre of
the human – the slave – whose humanity is exploitable and disposable.
In contrast to the hybrid being of posthumanism and of the master,
Wynter’s over-riding focus when re-figuring the human as hybrid lies
at the nexus of womb-word-symbol-practice (verbs). For her, being
human is not a noun (Wynter, 2015: 199).
Wynter’s genre of hybrid being emerges from counter-significations
on the part of slaves and former slaves, to two violent conversions inau-
gurated by the colonial practice of ‘nigger-breaking’ (Wynter, n.d.:
583–616) on the slave plantation. The first conversion is of people of
the African continent from members of heterogeneous polities into com-
modities – homogenized as ‘the negro’ – to be bought, broken, sold and
disposed of. Thus the slave is converted from a socially defined status to a
biologically or naturally defined state embodied in ‘the negro’. This is
accompanied by the conversion of the wombs of African women from
symbols of life to a totalized receptacle for the reproduction of slaves.
The second conversion is from ‘the negro’ to ‘native labour’ (cheap wage
labour) (Wynter, n.d.: 149–66). Significantly, slaves and former slaves
Erasmus 15

made ‘counter-worlds’ (Wynter, n.d.: 184) in response to and despite this

violence. They used words, songs and symbols to re-human themselves,
to ‘make strange soil home’ (Wynter, n.d.: 18) by inscribing themselves
onto the plantation, and to re-constellate communities of belonging,
remembrance and resistance through new cultural practices (Wynter,
n.d.: 1–24). Colonialism’s violent conversions of the people it constructed
as Other, forms of resistance to this violence, as well as forms of life
pressed into the world despite it, are what for Wynter (n.d.) constitute a
‘black metamorphosis’, the title of her unpublished monograph.

Closing Thoughts
In this paper I foreground Wynter’s attempt to disinter premises outside
of the Western episteme – of which mainstream posthumanism is a part –
from which to understand ‘the human’. Lundblad’s (2013) and Jackson’s
(2012) analyses and Wynter’s theory of the human suggest that main-
stream posthumanist thought comes from a different spatio-temporal
location, from a different place in the geo-politics of knowledge and
emerges for a different purpose. If the post-humanist offers ‘an expansion
of the terrain in which [the human] is constituted’ (Braidotti and Fuller,
2019: 10) to produce a form of knowledge about the human and his/her/
their inter-relationship with technological and digital worlds, the counter-
humanist subverts the terrain itself. The counter-humanist is concerned
with modes of knowledge forged on the other side of Man’s power and
from ‘forms of social life . . . which emerge in the world marked by nega-
tion, but exceed it’ (Hartman, 2019: 62). She writes for the human
negated by Man; for the human for whom Man, from its inception,
was and remains always already a limit. She asks: Whose idea of the
human are we ‘post’? For whom and where is the posthuman condition
not a crisis, but an inspiration (Braidotti, 2013b: 195)? Who and which
places in the world pay the price for this inspiration?
Wynter’s conception of biological (the born; the emergent) and sym-
bolic life (the made; meaning) as distinct but pervious suggests that while
both meaning and matter are vibrant, matter does not speak back to
power in the same way that humans do. For example, to paraphrase
Wynter, when property – embodied in a slave – rebels, it asserts its
human status (n.d.: 79). She draws on Fanon’s concept of sociogeny to
centre structural power differences: to understand ‘race’ as a system of
meanings that (re)invents bio-cultural human markers as symbols that
represent relative social power; to understand what it means to be human
for those on the other side of power; and to insist on the possibility that
struggles for freedom enable a re-appropriation of the power to define
the human. This makes her conception of the human counter-, not post-
humanist. This is the value of reading Wynter alongside contemporary
conversations about the human. Her work departs from posthumanist
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

scholarship because she locates the figure Man socio-poietically: as

emerging from the history of the conquest of the New World and
from euromodernity’s subsequent racialization of the human. Fanon’s
concept of ‘sociogeny’ shapes this departure because it demands an epis-
temic rupture with colonial conceptions of the human and urges a
redirection to counter-conceptions of the human produced from the per-
spective of ‘livity’.
In contrast to bio- and onto-centric conceptions of ‘the human’,
Wynter (n.d.: 693) sees ‘the human’ as a primarily symbolic being. The
storied forms of human sociality or ‘means of socialization’ are made
possible by discourses about relations between the biology of the human
body, the organic and the physical terrestrial environment which these
bodies inhabit, and the social and technological worlds that humans
create. She suggests that biological and technological life are subordinate
to the symbolic orders of human life when she writes that ‘the only life
humans live is a symbolic life’ (Wynter, 2000: 47, 51). While she works
toward the articulation of science with poietic knowledge (McKittrick
et al., 2018: 869), she sometimes slips between her idea of the human as
hybrid and her argument that we are primarily (if not solely) symbolic
beings.
Nevertheless, her reinvention of the human offers a robust challenge to
the hegemonic 20th-century idea that humans are 99 per cent the same
genetically and that regardless of history and lived experience, this scien-
tific fact makes all of us human. She challenges this and earlier European
iterations of a biological conception of our ‘common humanity’, each
inflected with cultural meanings from as early as 16th-century Europe.
For her, rational thought and physiological and genetic sameness in
themselves do not account for what makes us human. The symbols we
create do. Contrary to the transcendental pan-humanist implication of
the notion of genetic sameness, or for that matter, the pan-humanimalist
implication of ‘becoming animal’, Wynter sees these symbolic creations
as varied, changing and contested, thus giving ‘the human’ different
meanings. This is the core of what she refers to as ‘genres of the
human’: symbolic orders made by humans (not types of human that
are reproduced or replicated) that shape and integrate modes of material
provision, of using technology, of social organization and modes of con-
sciousness. These genres affect the well-being of all that lives in the pre-
sent and in the future. Within each genre the human is doubly
autopoietic, a figure with two integrated living bodies – organic and
symbolic. Thus, the human is constituted simultaneously by the defining
relations of the body’s organic realm and those of the cultural realm.
Genres of the human arise from the specific relational dynamics between
those relations that constitute each of these realms.
Living beings bring forth their worlds by what they do. Life is univer-
sal. Its modes are pluriversal.
Erasmus 17

Acknowledgements
The research for this work was funded in part by Wits University’s Mellon Grant for
Advancing the Professoriate. I am grateful to Anthony Bogues for our conversations and
to the reviewers for their extensive and insightful comments.

ORCID iD
Zimitri Erasmus https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1528-0992

Note
1. Anthony Bogues is a critical intellectual and a scholar of the black radical
anti-colonial intellectual tradition and of Wynter’s work. He is director of the
Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island. I am grateful to him for hosting me at the Center during May
2018, for guiding me to and through the corpus of Wynter’s work, and for
granting me the opportunity to interview him on 9, 18 and 29 May.

References
Alderson, David and Spencer, Robert (eds) (2017) For Humanism: Explorations
in Theory and Politics. London: Pluto Press.
Ambroise, Jason R. (2018) On Sylvia Wynter’s Darwinian heresy of the ‘Third
Event’. American Quarterly 70(40): 847–856.
Bogues, Anthony (2012) And what about the human? Freedom, human eman-
cipation, and the radical imagination. Boundary 2 39(3): 29–46.
Braidotti, Rosi (2013a) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2013b) Yes, there is no crisis. International Journal for History,
Culture and Modernity 1(2): 187–199.
Braidotti, Rosi (2019) A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities.
Theory, Culture & Society [Special Issue: Transversal Posthumanities] 36(6):
3–29.
Braidotti, Rosi and Fuller, Matthew (2019) The posthumanities in an era of
unexpected consequences. Theory, Culture & Society [Special Issue:
Transversal Posthumanities] 36(6): 31–61.
Braidotti, Rosi and Hlavajova, Maria (2018) Introduction. In: Braidotti, Rosi
and Hlavajova, Maria (eds) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Brennan, Timothy (2017) Introduction: Humanism’s other story. In: Alderson,
D and Spencer, R (eds) For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics.
London: Pluto Press.
Césaire, Aimé (2000) Discourse on Colonialism, Pinkham, J (trans). New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Christiansë, Yvette (2006) Unconfessed. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Fanon, Frantz (1986) Black Skin, White Masks, Markmann, CL (trans).
London: Pluto Press.
Gordon, Lewis R. (2006) Is the human a teleological suspension of man?
Phenomenological exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and biodicean
reflections. In: Bogues, Anthony (ed.) Caribbean Reasonings: After Man
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Towards the Human – Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter. Kingston: Ian Randle
Publishers.
Gordon, Lewis R. (2008) The phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness.
In: Mngxitama, Andile, Alexander, Amanda and Gibson, Nigel C. (eds) Biko
Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Halliwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy (2003) Critical Humanisms: Humanist/
Anti-Humanist Dialogues. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya (2019) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate
Histories of Social Upheaval. New York, London. W.W. Norton and
Company.
Jackson, Zakiyya Iman (2012) Beyond the limit: Gender, sexuality, and the
animal question in (Afro)modernity. PhD Thesis, African American Studies
(Film Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality), University of California,
Berkeley.
Lundblad, Michael (2013) The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era
U.S. Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Majeke, Nosipho (1952) The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest.
Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. (1980) Autopoiesis and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.
McKittrick, Katherine, O’Shaughnessy, Frances H. and Witaszek, Kendall
(2018) Rhythm, or on Sylvia Wynter’s science of the word. American
Quarterly 70(40): 867–874.
Meeks, Brian (2002) Reasoning with Caliban’s reason. Small Axe 11: 158–168.
Morrison, Toni (1988) Beloved. London: Picador.
Price-Mars, Jean (1983) So Spoke the Uncle. Washington, DC: Three Continents
Press.
Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan (2008) History, the Human and the World Between.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roberts, Neil (2014) Violence, livity, freedom. Small Axe 43: 181–192.
Said, Edward (2004) Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sekyi-Otu, Ato (2019) Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. New York:
Routledge.
Wolfe, Cary (2010) What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Wolfe, Cary (2018) Posthumanism. In: Braidotti, Rosi and Hlavajova, Maria
(eds) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Wynter, Sylvia (n.d.) Black metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World.
Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York, Institute for
the Black World Records, Sylvia Wynter Papers.
Wynter, Sylvia (1976) Ethno or socio poetics. Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics 2(2):
78–94.
Wynter, Sylvia (1977) ‘We know where we are from’: The politics of black cul-
ture from Myal to Marley. Paper presented at the Houston Conference,
Texas, November.
Wynter, Sylvia (1990) Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s meanings: Un/silencing the
‘demonic ground’ of Caliban’s ‘woman’. In: Davies, Carol Boyce and Fido,
Erasmus 19

Elaine Savory (eds) Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Wynter, Sylvia (1995) 1492: A new world view. In: Hyatt, Vera Lawrence and
Nettleford, Rex (eds) Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New
World View. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Wynter, Sylvia (1997) ‘Genital mutilation’ or ‘symbolic birth’? Female circum-
cision, lost origins, and the aculturalism of feminist/western thought. Case
Western Reserve Law Review 47(2): 501–552.
Wynter, Sylvia (2000) Africa, the West and the analogy of culture: The cinematic
text after man. In: Givanni, June (ed) Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema:
Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image. London: British Film Institute.
Wynter, Sylvia (2001) Toward the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the
puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be ‘Black’. In: Durán-
Cogan, Mercedes F. and Gómez-Moriana, Antonio (eds) National Identities
and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America. London: Routledge.
Wynter, Sylvia (2003) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom:
Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR:
The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.
Wynter, Sylvia (2010) The Hills of Hebron. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers.
Wynter, Sylvia (2015) The ceremony found: Towards the autopoetic turn/over-
turn, its autonomy of human agency and extraterritoriality of (self-)cognition.
In: Ambroise, Jason R. and Broeck, Sabina (eds) Black Knowledges/Black
Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
Wynter, Sylvia and McKittrick, Katherine (2015) Unparalleled catastrophe for
our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In:
McKittrick, Katherine (ed.) Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Zimitri Erasmus is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University

of the Witwatersrand. Her book, Race Otherwise: Forging a New
Humanism for South Africa (Wits University Press, 2017), conceptualizes
the boundaries between racial identities as thresholds to be crossed
through politically charged acts of imagination and love.