What Is It Like to Be a Human?

: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoiesis

Max Hantel

philoSOPHIA, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 61-79 (Article)

Published by State University of New York Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0003

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/694762

Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (10 Jul 2018 08:52 GMT)
 What Is It Like to Be a Human?
Sylvia Wynter on Autopoiesis

Max Hantel

Sylvia Wynter argues throughout her work for “the elaboration of

a new science,” a methodological shift emerging at the conf luence of the
natural sciences and the study of culture that radiates from the embodi-
ment of “material-semiotic” systems (Wynter 2003, 328; Haraway 1991, 207).
Refusing the distinction between a descriptive project and transformative
ethical and political commitments, a new “science of the Word” demands
alternative imaginaries of seeing and saying that render posable urgent
questions confronting humanity today, particularly concerning the partial
incorporations and violent denials striating the collective entanglement of
such a humanity in the first place. She intensifies the trajectory of research
initiated by Frantz Fanon in 1952, when he redirected the human sciences
with his brief but profound declaration, “Beside ontogeny and phylogeny
stands sociogeny” (Fanon 1967, 4).
And yet, fifty years after Fanon’s push toward a new science, in a survey of
the scholarship engaging the ongoing destruction of black and brown bodies
and their collectivities, Clyde Woods finds one procedure primarily at work.
He asks: “Have we become academic coroners? Have the tools of theory,
method, instruction, and social responsibility become so rusted that they can
only be used for autopsies?” (Woods 2000, 63). An autopsy indexes a kind
of verifiable witnessing, etymologically referring to a “seeing for oneself.”
Woods’s haunting question concerns the optical structure of truth in our (de)
gradations of the human that separate the privileged observer, symbolically

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 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)?

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 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

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 oeconomicus, embodied in the bourgeois Western white male overrepresenting
all humanity through the violent demarcations of colonial difference. “The
social behaviors that were to verify this topos of iconicity which yoked the
Indo-European mode of being to human being in general . . . would be carried
out by the complementary non-discursive practices of a new wave of great
internments of native labors in new plantation orders and by the massacres of
the colonial era . . . different forms of segregating the Ultimate Chaos that
was the Black” (Wynter 1984, 37). Today we are mired in Man2, a biocentric
order hinging on the Color Line to quarantine the space of otherness in the
global South, positing a natural causality for neoliberal economics in which the
subject becomes the subject-entrepreneur investing in not only market forces
but also their own genetic stock.
Within this onto-epistemological regime, the stakes of deploying scien-
tific concepts become clear. As Wynter confidently acknowledges: “So, if the
biocentrists are right, then everything I’m saying is wrong; but, if I am right,
I cannot expect them to accept it easily” (Wynter 2015, 2015). It is not then a
simple flight of fancy or the elegance of scientific metaphor that compels us
to articulate Fanon’s concept of sociogenesis through a cellular and neuro-
biological process, but the very matter of the matter at hand: what method
is up to the task of not only describing embodied consciousness in the world
but also changing it? This question challenges the naturalistic fallacy at the
heart of the biocentric order where ontogenetic fantasies evacuate the ethical
and political content of neoliberal immiseration and colonial violence. If the
biological development of an organism within the limited telos of its genetic
code, ensconced by Man2 in economic theory, determines the horizon of the
human, then there is no struggle to be had. Instead, this essay follows Fanon
through Wynter in a struggle for “the real leap . . . introducing invention into
existence” (Fanon 1967, 179).
Thus, Fanon and Wynter suggest that we can most clearly trace human
being in the moment and movement beyond status quo overrepresentations of
Man. Section I pursues this twinned work of probing and creating through
a sociogenetic analysis of the “mind-body” problem in terms of autopoietic
consciousness and the liminal subject. The residual limits of an exclusive and
autonomous human frame are engaged in section II, a necessary reflexivity
demanded by sociogenesis. This section claims the power of a revolutionary
humanism attuned to nonhuman landscapes, a difficult but ultimately genera-
tive tension at the heart of liminal political ecology.

Sociogenesis in the Train Car or Feeling Human

The sociogenetic method diagnoses how particular “descriptive statements”

of the human, such as Man2, become the totalizing standard for human

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 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

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 methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which
methods devour themselves” (Fanon 1967, 5). To study sociogeny demands
a lived practice of describing consciousness that is simultaneously objective
and subjective. Thus, in her actualizing of a sociogenetic method and its
implications, Wynter turns to a later chapter in Black Skin, White Masks,
“The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” to trace how Fanon registers his
self-consciousness in both the first and third person and ultimately realizes
the inextricability of those perspectives.
Wynter’s section headers in her essay, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle:
Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience,” plot how this progression
takes place. First, she addresses Fanon’s description of subject formation for the
French Caribbean black before he visits France in the section titled “Stop acting
like a Nigger!” The title comes from Fanon’s explanation of how symbolic
codes imposed on the French Caribbean through colonialism manifested in a
common admonishment for youth failing to act appropriately (Wynter 2001,
33). The idea that one should (and could) stop acting like the Negro—in the
sense of the figural zero-degree of legitimate humanity—established a distance
between a black person in the Antilles and the organizing force of the color line
in the overrepresentation of Man2. Wynter traces Fanon’s profound point that
the development of normal human consciousness is in fact the development of
a white-male-bourgeois-colonial consciousness. Within her understanding of
the sociogenic principle, the color line is continually strengthened in the minds
of these Antillean children through a feedback loop between neurobiology and
racialized culture: “[I]f the mind is what the brain does, what the brain does, is
itself culturally determined through mediation of the socialized sense of self, as
well as of the ‘social’ situation in which this self is placed” (Wynter 2001, 37).
A black person in the Antilles, in other words, prior to their trip to France and
insofar as they effectively distance themselves from the figural Negro Other,
develops a white sense of self, or an “I” that self-expresses through the exclusive
claim to being of Man2.
The title of the next section comes from Fanon’s arrival in Paris and the
eruption of the third-person in consciousness: “Look, a Negro! ” As Fanon
is ontologically shackled to his body through epidermalization, he also
comes to realize, according to Wynter, that blackness is only the negative
dialectical term to whiteness, and nothing more. The Negro as ontological
lack is “woven” from anecdotes and pseudoscience; within the coordinates
of the color line, it is only from these elements that Fanon might “construct
himself . . . in order to verify the truth of the others’ glances” (Wynter 2001,
42). His self-experience, it becomes clear, is no longer what he is but what
he must be according to the rhetorically mediated neurobiological formations
that overrepresent the visual phenomenology of whiteness as the universal
experience of the world.

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 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

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 their very survival, they expose the limits of that genre of the human and
prophesize a new human beyond the toxic fantasy spewed by this dragon.
This question of survival, one Lorde would repeat as a refrain in her poem
“A Litany for Survival,” represents a fundamental problematic of Wynter’s
oeuvre. As Lorde puts it there, “It is better to speak/remembering/we were
never meant to survive.” It is in the fault lines borne of the friction between
these two idioms of survival where Wynter finds the autopoietic force of the
current descriptive statement of Man and the disequilibrating force of chaos
introduced by liminal subjects.
Following Varela and Maturana, she contends that every human order is an
“autopoietic, autonomously functioning, languaging, living system” (Wynter
2015, 32). For Varela and Maturana, an autopoietic system is a “homeostatic
machine” defined relationally rather than in terms of essential component parts,
such that it “continuously generates and specifies its own organization through
its operation as a system of production of its own components . . . under
conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations
(Maturana and Varela 1980, 79).” The systemic survival of a given descrip-
tive statement occurs autonomously through the self-organization of human
society, in other words, and the governing codes are retroactively projected as
natural such that the process of organization appears automatic and stable—the
appearance of stability creates self-stabilization as a secondary effect. The
system self-corrects according to established codes of symbolic life and death to
maintain dynamic equilibrium. If one sees Man2 as autopoietically instituted,
for instance, perturbations like a labor strike or collectivization or a black
power movement require political solutions that appear as self-corrections.
The tortuous rhetorical language of “Right to Work” legislation, for instance,
which destroys collective bargaining power for unions in the United States of
America, discursively casts its anti-labor effects as the natural (and so apolitical
and acultural) defense of citizens to buy and sell their possessive individualism
as they “always have” (Greenhouse 2011, A1). This is the power of the pre-given
structure of political opposition in the United States where Democrats and
Republicans stage various local conflicts while both remain committed to the
maintenance and expansion of global neoliberalism.
The autopoietic view aids in the “elaboration of a new science” by bringing
rhetorical and physical structures into intimate and mutually contouring
contact. The persistent impasse, of course, concerns the limits of a homeostatic
model based on closed systems defined by self-correction and stable replication.
If Man2 stably auto-institutes, how do we go beyond the word of Man toward
the human? As the introduction argues, autopoiesis suggests an alternative
mode of seeing and knowing no longer separated from being, the observer now
entangled in the world observed. The problem then is the meta-epistemological
structure such that a component relationally instituted at a certain level of

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 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

Wynter puts it similarly, suggesting that we cannot “normally gain cognitive

access to the higher level of the genre-specific auto-poietic living system of our
status quo structured social worlds” (Wynter 2015, 32). It would seem Wynter
runs into another explanatory gap through relying on a model of consciousness
determined by rules of organization that we cannot hope to transform precisely
because “we” are already instituted as a “we” precisely by those same rules. At
the end of the previously quoted essay, however, Varela hints at a possible but
apparently out of reach resolution: “. . . a change in experience (being) is as
necessary as change in understanding if any suturing the mind-body dualisms
is to come about” (Varela 1976, 67). Crucially, the second sense of survival
given earlier, taken from Sandoval and Lorde, interjects itself at this point
making possible precisely the kind of meta-cognition “normally” impossible
in an autopoietic system: the liminal subject.
Fanon’s experience on the train car exemplifies the power of liminality to
reveal the truth of the system and to trace its outside. In the moment of “Look
a Negro,” Fanon’s mind and body cleave together and apart as his “normal
consciousness,” auto-instituted as white in the full sense of Man2, is confronted
by a black body and diagnosed as autophobic. This experience of profound
alienation is simultaneously generative, according to Wynter, who describes it
as the reaching of a threshold from which the liminal subject can generate a
force of disalienation.

That negative identity entails for us a spearheading role in the counter-

exerting thrust to regain the now lost motives of the self-interest of the human
species. In other words, it is the very liminality (on the threshold, both in and
outside) of our category-structure location within the present “field of play”
of the discursive symbol-matter information system that gives us the cognitive
edge with respect to such a far-reaching transformation. (Wynter 1987, 237)

She expands on the sense of the liminal proposed by anthropologist

Asmarom Legesse to describe subjects on the threshold of a new world in the
midst of cultural ritual, but with regard here to the very boundaries of symbolic

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 life and death that characterize human being. The liminal subject assumes
a structural role at the limit of the overrepresentation of Man, indexing
an outside to our current descriptive statement by their very existence and
paradoxical survival under conditions of systemic negation or assimilation. As
Wynter describes it, the liminal subject “does not have to inquire into the truth.
He is, they are, the Truth” (Wynter 1994, 70). Hence, the “cognitive edge” she
describes is like a three-dimensional boundary marker traced by a subject who
is positioned as illegible or inhuman within their own auto-instituting codes
yet paradoxically survives as a human, abyssally different from other humans
and nonhumans alike.
In this sense, liminality necessarily expresses through a particular body
but is not reducible to physicalism. 3 Thus, the “cognitive edge” Wynter
describes differs slightly but importantly from notions of “epistemic privilege”
in feminist standpoint theory where the diverse identities of investigators
promise “less partial and less distorted” perspectives (Harding 1991, 56).
The cognitive edge of the liminal subject introduces the processual, dynamic
relation between embodiment and standpoint that does not lay claim to an
inherently revelatory perspective so much as makes the alienated body the
point at which the overrepresentation of Man necessarily touches its outside.
At this threshold of symbolic life and death, we can attend to the fragments
of experience as they light up like a hologram, any single point revealing
the interconnected image of Man2. Wynter’s theory of the liminal is not a
rejection of standpoint theory then, but a relocation of the standpoint into a
spatio-temporal model of embodiment that makes epistemology always already
onto-epistemology. The body becomes an ambivalent landscape of sinew and
sentiment, an unceasing process of blockages and openings enduring systemic
survival and transformation.
To be clear, the momentary event of liminality does not, in and of itself,
undermine the overrepresentation of Man even as it makes possible such a chal-
lenge by bringing into stark but fleeting relief the limits of the current episteme
and the existence of an outside. Drucilla Cornell has analyzed this distinction
in Fanon as the difference between spontaneous and ethical violence, where
spontaneous violence boils over out of the “claim that one is human and can
fight back.” The challenge of decolonial philosophy for Cornell, represented
in some sense by the move from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of
the Earth, is to not let the opening snap shut: “The violent struggle must self-
consciously grasp itself as part of the creation of a new national culture, which
is inseparable from the becoming of a people out of their own self-mobilization”
(Cornell 2014, 126). Hence, the liminal is not in and of itself revolutionary in
Wynter’s deepest sense of that term: overthrowing the current overrepresenta-
tion of Man and embracing a humanism open to multiple, coeval genres of
human being. Throughout her work, she gives examples of this back and forth

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 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?

Ecosystemic Catastrophe and the Political Ecology of Man

Reconceiving the liminal subject as a corporeal site of dynamic creativity and an

opening to reimagine collective life, Wynter insists that disrupting the autopoiesis
of Man2 takes us to the planetary scale of environmental destruction. Indeed, the
fundamental role of antiblack violence and neoliberal accumulation in Wynter’s
schema is structurally intertwined with the becoming-disposable of earth. Take,
for instance, her open letter to colleagues in 1994 after the brutal beating of
Rodney King, the acquittal of the police officers involved, and the so-called
Los Angeles Riots that followed. King, she wrote, fell under a commonly used
category within the Los Angeles Police Department’s administrative machine:
N.H.I. or “No Human Involved.” Most commonly applied to unemployed black
males from the inner city, the N.H.I. label served a taxonomic function far
beyond just an exceptional episode of individual racism or bad taste; to Wynter,
the logic of N.H.I. conveys the deep and fundamental truth about the political
economy of racialization, both in the United States of America and globally.
Strikingly for Wynter, the logic of N.H.I. and the blind spot it produced extends
beyond just intra-human hierarchy: “[T]he category . . . embodies a plight, which
like that of the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment, is not even posable,
not to say resolvable, within the conceptual framework of our present order of
knowledge.” She continues,

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”

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 of the globe and their jobless archipelagoes, as well, at the national level, of
Baldwin’s “captive population” in the urban inner cities, (and on the Indian
Reservations of the United States), have not been hitherto easily perceivable
within the classificatory logic of our “inner eyes.” In other words, the two
phenomena, that of the physical and that of the global socio-human environ-
ments, have been hidden costs which necessarily remained invisible to the
“inner eyes” of the mode of subjective understanding generated from our
present disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities. (Wynter 1994, 60)

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

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 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

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 sometimes uses the term “ontologism” to describe this processual movement
between ontology and ethico-politics, suggesting their deep but nonlinear
imbrication (Wynter 1997). In this sense, the overrepresentation of Man is
itself a multispecies and ontologically open political technology—whether
neoliberalism’s uptake of efficiency models from the world of cybernetics,
bioprospecting, and biotechnology in the reorganization of race and indi-
geneity, or the bees of the War on Terror—and so mapping the terrain of
human and nonhuman relations is ultimately a tactical question as well, one
we ought not cede to the military-industrial complex or global corporate
agriculture.7 In other words, concrete assemblages with nonhuman forces
reciprocally affect different autopoietic processes that may regenerate the
overrepresentation of Man or enable and inhabit worlds becoming otherwise
(and often, both).
How to reconcile this insistence on multispecies autopoiesis with Wynter’s
rejection of biocentrism, encapsulated by Fanon’s clear declaration: “I grasp
my narcissism with both hands and I turn my back on the degradation of
those who would make man a mere mechanism,” which Wynter paraphrases
as, “the human is not a mere [biological] mechanism” (Fanon 1967, 23;
Wynter 2015, 23). This statement is not a rejection of all biological continuity
between humans and nonhuman animals or environments, but instead an
insistence on simultaneous continuity and discontinuity not reducible to
physicalism (or really any determinism). Multispecies autopoiesis as I have
described it insists on an ontologically indeterminate embodiment neither
predictable in advance nor circumscribed by human fantasies of sovereign
control. The latter is particularly important to note because the biocentric
description is not just a neutral scientific edifice, but the cleaving of Darwin
with Malthus, the naturalization of the ontologism of homo oeconomicus. And
so, the argument against biocentrism phrased in terms of narcissism need not
be an argument for hierarchy, but can be an argument for the irreducibility
of the human to putatively “natural” mechanism. Multispecies arrangements
do not erase the borders between different genres of the human much less
different species. Instead, it defends abyssal difference as the beginning
of ethical engagement, an acknowledgment of both co-constitution and
undeniable opacity.
Fanon’s narcissism is about grasping an “I” as an open, relational totality at
multi-scalar levels of a body. That is, rejecting that his only destiny is “the white.”
It is not the narcissism of anthropocentrism or mastery over the nonhuman world,
two integral dictates of the overrepresentation of Man2. Perhaps unexpectedly,
then, to fulfill Fanon’s mission we must make sociogenesis a more capacious
category where narrative language, or mythoi for Wynter, is a crucial aspect of
human autopoiesis but does not exhaust its potential mechanisms.

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 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)

If sociogenesis occurs at the level of master codes of life and death, it

should be clear here that the elephants are experiencing and perceiving
the thresholds of what they consider life in their community, responding
to changing conditions not through genetic pre-prescription but through
cognitive processes we cannot fully apprehend. From the perspective
of abyssal difference, we cannot claim to know what this means for the
elephants, or claim to speak for them unproblematically; however, just as
we f ind ways to articulate a cross-genre sense of being human, we must
find ways to do justice to these cross-species struggles through and against
the overrepresentation of Man.
Barbara Noske argues that these scenes of mass violence can mark
elephants intergenerationally, suggesting the transmission of not only trauma
but modes of relation between elephants and human others. 8 She recalls a
1919 massacre of elephants in Addo, a park in South Africa, that unsuccess-
fully attempted to annihilate 140 members of a herd. Somewhere between
sixteen and thirty of the elephants survived. The resulting herd, up to four
generations removed from that event, exhibit profound fear of humans and
uncommon aggression toward their presence, suggesting that they have
“transmitted information about our species” between the generations (Noske
1997, 111–12).
To end here by drawing a scene of survival across the boundaries of
species and life form in the vocabulary of Wynter’s humanism does not
represent a conclusion in the neat sense of generalizing sociogenesis as a
model for all living creatures, f lattened out through degrees of cognition.
Instead, it illuminates how human sociogenesis—particularly as it produces
the overrepresentation of Man through a caesura between the sociohuman
and the environmental—claims to know in advance what counts as a
consciousness holding ethical weight. Rendered formally, it becomes an
ontologism that prefigures ontology to close off ethico-political transforma-
tion. As Haraway elegantly puts it,

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 Ways of living and dying matter: Which historically situated practices of
multispecies living and dying should flourish? There is no outside from which
to answer that mandatory question; we must give the best answers we come to
know how to articulate, and take action, without the god trick of self-certainty.
(Haraway 2008, 88)

To take seriously this reoriented entanglement of “doing and knowing” devised

from Wynter, Haraway, and Fanon means attempting to pose the question of
planetary environmental destruction through a liminal political ecology rather
than through the recursive circuits of the biocentric description of Man2. At
the spatio-temporal point of embodiment, those who were “never meant to
survive” engage the powerful interpenetration of colonial power, economic
exploitation, and environmental degradation (conditions faced by much of the
world since at least the fifteenth century) and generate new ways of making
livable worlds.
Rutgers University

Notes

1. For an extended discussion of this differentiating force, see Wynter’s brilliant

reading of the famous Valladolid Debate of 1550 between Bartolomé de las Casas
and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the humanity of natives in the Spanish colonies.
Importantly, while I have described the representational shift here in schematic
terms, it is imperative to remember that these are not simply clean substitutions
but palimpsestic transformations. The Christian narrative of the mark of Ham, for
instance, which explained African peoples’ darker complexion through their rela-
tionship to Noah’s accursed son, enters into the circuitry of ratiocentric thought
to consign Africans to the zero-point of rationality (Wynter 2003, 283–303).
2. For others on the limits of autopoiesis, particularly as a useful model for feminist
and antiracist approaches to materialism see, Patricia Clough, “The Affective
Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds.
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 215–17; John Protevi, “Beyond Autopoiesis: Inflections of Emergence and
Politics in the work of Francisco Varela,” in Emergence and Embodiment: Essays
in Neocybernetics, eds. Bruno Clarke and Mark Hansen (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008), 94–113.
3. Invoking Fanon’s experience of the body requires, again, the cautious insistence
on the irreducibility of liminality. In asking how specific bodies, tensed between
the two senses of survival I have proposed (systemic and oppositional), become
the vantage for imagining the world otherwise, there is a risk of methodologically
looping back into a biocentric understanding of Man2. As Katherine McKittrick
queries, “How are discussions of race and space and knowledge tethered to an

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 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.

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 8. Thanks to Stephen Seely for bringing this work to my attention; he cites Noske in
his unpublished work, “Differential Individuations: The Techno-Poetics of Racial
and Sexual Difference.”

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