Structure, Break, and Man in Sylvia Wynter

A comparative analysis of Sylvia Wynter and French structuralisms

Introduction: Epigraphic Vision

Within the first sentence of Sylvia Wynter’s 1989 article on “Disenchanting Discourse,” we are given two references: one to Michel Foucault and the other to Jacques Derrida. In this same sentence, Wynter tells us of her aim to “integrate [...] several ‘new objects of knowledge,’” and in order to accomplish this act, she will make use of a series of epigraphs (“Disenchanting” 207). My point in highlighting these two aspects of the sentence is the relational model that begins to unfurl in thinking them together. For, the purpose of this paper is to place Sylvia Wynter’s critical project in comparison and contrast with those epistemological traditions being received from France in the later 20th century, and more pointedly, to assert the specificity of Wynter’s project in this horizon of thought. What this opening sentence demonstrates is not only that Wynter is in explicit conversation with those theories but the style of her working relationship with them. That is, Wynter’s work is not a deployment of any of these canonical French theorists — she was after all actively working from a much earlier time —, but rather a redeployment, a rerouting, of those thought frameworks. As we find in that very word of “epigraph,” — coming from the Greek [ἐπῐ-], on/upon, and [γρᾰ́φω], to write —, Wynter’s work writes upon the received past, and just as in the function of the epigraph, her work critically sets out from a point of (en)framing. And finally, in identifying the specificity of her project, there is the fact of idiosyncrasy of the epigraph; namely, the epigraph’s status as transplanted from one context to another, potentially legislative of a new spatial-temporal coordinates, and also its ambivalent status as both a point of extreme particularity yet the ability to totalize all the words that follow it. The epigraph is a point of eccentricity, occupying a liminal point on the edge of the text. We will continue to circulate around this point, but what I mean to indicate in the sense of idiosyncrasy are its associations to the individualized, stylized, aesthetic, affective dimensions of life, a singular point of enunciation — and to be taken as proximal to Wynter’s own term of “minority discourse.” For, it will ultimately be my argument that it is Wynter’s particular attention to the aesthetic that makes the distinguishing mark of her project.

Critical scholarship on Sylvia Wynter’s intellectual history has tended to highlight how her project builds off the decolonial tradition of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire or puts it into conversation with the work of other Caribbean critical theorists like Édouard Glissant. Such critical backgrounding is no doubt justified and essential to understanding Sylvia Wynter’s project, and the work of Fanon will be especially necessary in demonstrating my argument. I say this in order to better frame the intervention of my paper. Little attention has been paid to the relationship of Wynter to these French theorists. My hope is that this piece will not reduce Wynter to the thought horizon of “provincial” Europe but rather to make her work potentially more intelligible to those within its field and vice versa. I believe such a comparative endeavor holds true to Wynter’s aspirations for thinking our many modes of being human, and that thinking comparatively is essential to the development of such a pluralistic semiotic analytic. As Wynter writes near the conclusion of “Disenchanting,” “the question becomes that of finding a meta-discourse able to constitute the discourse of its own order as an object of knowledge and thus to allow us ‘access to our cognitive domain’” (241).¹ Taking further cue from this, Rafael Vizcaino writes:

Deepening such a conception of the comparative task will assist the carving of a transcultural space and the search for the postsecular ceremony. In other words, the cross-cultural element inherent in comparative philosophy could illuminate how humans inscribe ourselves as human. Comparative philosophy can then explicitly take up the task of the endless recursivity via self-description that, according to Wynter, will enable humans to consciously determine the codes and narrative schemas that order social life. (85)

The aim of my text is to be one small step forward in this comparative work. This text is also inspired by my experience of reading Wynter in which I found myself grasping after the terms of “decolonial structural humanism” to describe her work, in which, as organizing terms of disciplinary thinking, are all ordinarily taken to be categorically at odds with one another.

In order to conduct this review, I will take up three successive areas of critical interest. First, I will examine Wynter’s relationship to structuralism. Regarding structuralism, there is first the question of structure’s taxonomic composition; that is, how are structures structured? What do they look like? This will primarily involve an engagement with the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and his conception of binary pairs as the basis of any cultural structure. Secondly for structuralism, there is the question of “structural determination,” or in Wynter’s words, “semantic closure.” That is, where are we to locate the point of structure’s enactment and reinforcement? And how totalizing is its grasp? We will refer to Levi-Strauss here again, but Michel Foucault also enters the conversation and forms the bridge to our next major section regarding the critical problematic of the “epistemological break.” The primary focus of this section is on Wynter’s re-writing of Foucault’s historical breaks enumerated in The Order of Things and the ability of Wynter’s work to theoretically account for how such breaks emerge. The last section of the paper will take up Wynter’s theorization of the human and her renewal of a humanist paradigm in comparison to the antihumanist, deconstruction of man in Derrida’s work. It will be my endeavor in each section to demonstrate how a distinct aesthetic dimension returns as the decisive difference of Wynter’s project.

In a sense, there is always a turn towards existential-aesthetics practices as a way of transforming structure. This notion of aesthetics is linked to Fanon’s idea of “sociogeny,” which is a certain psychological/motivational, aesthetic/affective, perceptual structuring plane of human experience. Vizcaíno summarizes the Fanonian point writing:

Wynter’s point here is elucidated by Fanon’s account of his own arrival to the French mainland from the French Caribbean. Upon arrival to the metropole, Fanon fully realizes how he is objectively racialized as a black man by white others. This realization causes in him changes in consciousness and embodiment, changes that alter his sense of self and relation to his own body previously not possible growing up in Martinique. A process of socio-cultural displacement thus reveals that white subjectivity is naturalized in consciousness and embodiment as the normative bearer of humanity in colonized black subjects. The naturalized white subjectivity thereby pathologizes black subjectivity as subhuman at the levels of consciousness and embodiment. (76).

For Wynter, sociogeny comes to be thought of as a question of how we narrate ourselves and thus define a distinctive genre of what it means to be human. Narration as a component of our self-intelligibility defines a transhistorical, universal principle of humanity. This universal aspect of humanity is nonetheless made most legible and visible by the systematic position occupied by that of the black-colonial subject in recent history. The sociogenic principles of the West, its distinct genre of the human, induces or opens up a unique experience for this subject. For, it is located precisely as a kind of constitutive outside for the West; a unique perspective on the West’s semantic schema is made possible. The particular experience of those enslaved Africans brought to the West Indies demonstrates that it is not just about this line of sight on what it means to be human in the extension of the West, but that one may also be forced to generate new genres of being human in order to survive and make intelligible their experience. It is this liminal, outside position relative to the system (or text) that I wish to connect precisely to the position and function of the epigraph stated at the outset. This is the epigraphic vision of Sylvia Wynter’s project.

I. The Character of Structure

The question of Sylvia Wynter’s relationship to structuralism cannot be all that surprising given the amount of times the word “system” appears across her pages, and as a theorist of culture concerned with its operative principles, it was the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who ignited an intellectual frenzy around the concept of the system and its cultural schematizations in the 20th century.² Wynter, like structuralism at its zero-point definition, argues for a position in which cultural codes are produced through the articulation of “differences without any positive terms” (Saussure’s famous definition of a linguistic system). In extending Claude Levi-Strauss’ appropriation of this structuralist insight for cultural systems, Wynter writes that we must avoid “taking the ontological ‘facts’ of ethnicity (non-White and White) as well as of gender, sexuality, and culture as if these were things-in-themselves, rather than ‘totemic’ signifiers in an overall system of resemblances and differences” (“Disenchanting” 217). The structuralist model is the abandonment of the referential theory of language, yet this intellectual gesture is not the stopping point for Wynter. With Wynter, we find already prefigured a dynamism in this system of constraints and ultimately a kind of “performative turn” in thinking structure’s operation.

First, I want to turn more precisely to the relationship between Wynter and Levi-Strauss and how they conceptualize the taxonomic character of culture’s system of differences. To begin this comparison, I rely on Miranda Luiz’s article “A Poetics of Reimagining,” which is the first article to put their work in conversation. Luiz notes that both Levi-Strauss and Wynter share a conception of cultures as constituted not only by a system of differences but especially through matrices in the form of binary pairs. Luiz emphasizes this aspect to draw a distinction between their theories of signification with those of Glissant and Deleuze, but there is enumerated one other distinguishing feature of Wynter’s theory; namely, that it situates this binary pair into a differential field curved by the dynamics of power. For Wynter, there is a not harmony of opposites but a relative ordering of one term in the position of the foundational or majority and the other as the liminal, the periphery, minority. Here where Luiz’s commentary stops, I want to push on the implications of this position.

The differential valence attached to the terms of Wynter’s schematization allows for her to make an intervention into one key critical problem of structuralism: structural determination. By structural determination, I mean the capacity of a given model to totalize a field of interplay, to seal it off from an outside. For structuralism, this is popularly thought of as its inability to think genesis, difference, diachrony, parole, etc. and thus to account for novelty, contingency, and mutation — i.e., the construction of systems as closed.³ To move beyond this, I want to connect Wynter’s foundational-liminal pair with the historical particularity of acts of abstraction. In what Wynter refers to as the “mechanism of absolutization,” there is a process in which a system “auto-hierarchizes and auto-regulates itself” (“Disenchanting” 219). Wynter uses the example of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to demonstrate this operation — the way in which a certain position within the system of differences comes to be privileged as a universal point of observation. This is another way of stating Ellisons’ concept of the regulatory “inner eyes.” The inner eye is above all the figure of ideology. Wynter speaks of how the purpose of the inner eye is to render certain subjects invisible. This veiling is essential to the self-maintenance of the system. This is also for instance how there might be a multiplicity of subject-positions, but there is yet an inner eye which sets the very terms of the debate, enframes the site of possibility, and establishes coherence and self-sameness. I will have recourse again to the question of the inner eye when discussing rupture and Foucault, but what I mean to underscore in the shift Sylvia Wynter introduces is that this stabilizing function, closure principle, is not an abstraction experienced equally.

The difference with Wynter is that we cannot treat the given positions within a system-ensemble as opaque, flat signifiers within the architecture of a wider machinery, an experiential-less calculus, but the generation of these abstract positionalities for the system’s self-coherence and replication, are lived and inhabited modes of being in the world. The code is experienced differentially. As I will discuss with Foucault later on, the code is not a vacillation among a set of zombified relays, it is articulating and lively. This is the critical move that Wynter’s foundational-liminal valuation introduces. For Wynter, the cultural regulative code is one of an active self-production — as her turn to autopoiesis underscores. With Levi-Strauss, there is the tendency of the coded oppositions to be universalized. Certain cultural distinctions, like speech and writing condensed onto primitive and civilized, are inappropriately elevated, and the production of one particular position’s perspective is projected as the archimedean point. With this comes the potential of a prescribed narrative development about the course of humanity. Yet with Wynter, it is not simply that the cultural code structures can be otherwise, which is no doubt essential to her argument, and an ensuing decolonial turn away from universality; while particular codes must be “provincialized,” it is the fundamental narrative scope of humanity that comes to be a universalized principle. Throughout her work, Wynter emphasizes that “humans inscript and institute themselves/ourselves as this or that genre of being human” (“Unsettling” 277). Which is to say that not only are there “strong” cultural forces in humanity’s self-cognition and reproduction, but that it is an ongoing act of narration about ourselves to ourselves.⁴ Further, the codes are themselves narrative constructs. It is on these terms that I wish to read for a performative turn of the structure in Wynter’s elaboration of the existential-aesthetic dimension of social life and the production of the human. The “descriptive statement” is always a “performative enactment” (“Unsettling” 263). In pointing to this performative dimension, I am trying to underline that the dramatics necessary to the abstracted cultural codes, binary forms and supposed oppositions, are sustained through local enactments which have a differential (affective-existential) reception.

The differential field of the center-periphery is not the only way of locating this dynamism, or “participatory epistemology,” inherent to discursive formations and its further relation to structuralism. In a section of “Disenchanting Discourse,” when detailing her view of the connection between the aesthetic regulatory code and the biological reward system, Wynter makes reference to two distinct terms: i) the potency signifier and ii) the opiate-inducing signifier. These are not necessarily distinct signifiers but functions which are attached to a signifier. In fact, for Wynter, it is the condensation of these two functions which is essential to a cultural code’s self-maintenance and reproduction. To Wynter writes:

Accordingly, what Girard calls the ‘dynamic structure of desire’ is none other than the ‘fake’ motivational system by means of which the desire for the signifier of potency specific to each culture or form of life, once enculturated in its systemic subjects as on opiate-inducing signifier in the context of the analogic of founding narrative schemas, functions to induce the collective set of behaviors of human subjects, behaviors which in turn bring each criterion/model of being into autopoetic living existence (“Disenchanting” 230, my emphasis).⁵

I will have later recourse to the conditioning relationship between the signifier and human behavior, but whereas Wynter in “Disenchanting Discourse” spends more time discussing the role of the opiate-inducing function (enchantment), I want to delineate the efficacy of this separation of functions. In Wynter’s direct invocation of these critical terms, they nearly collapse into one another, yet maintaining the distinction of the potency signifier is crucial to the transformative, liberatory capacities of her thought. Further, it is through a Levi-Strauss and the field of the aesthetic that this point can be made.

While the concept of the binary opposition dominates the reception of Levi-Strauss’ structuralist thinking, his anthropological studies lead him to producing more varied kinds of configurations.⁶ One of those other frameworks is the signifier of “mana.” In a description that sounds almost like Wynter’s disenchantment of Man, Slavoj Žižek describes Levi-Strauss’ as trying to “demystify mana, reducing its irrational connotation of a mythical, magical power to a precise symbolic function” (99). The symbolic function that mana performs is the ability to capture the overflow/inadequacy of language. Keeping with Žižek, it “sutures” the field of meaning closed through its placeholder/stand-in function for non-meaning/excess of meaning as such.⁷ It stops up the possible contamination from the “outside” or instability in the structure’s integrity. We can immediately see how with the term, we are circulating around that similar peripheral-outside position of Wynter’s framework. The move I would like to make in highlighting a distinction of the potency and opiate-inducing is that by putting some pressure on the cultural valence of that term “mana,” we can read for how distinctive religious practices of diasporic subjects in the Caribbean produced their signifiers of potency which did not necessarily fulfill the opiate-inducing function of colonial signifying regimes. I am thinking centrally here of Obeah practices as religious-medical rituals which subjects not only took refuge in and means to make sense of the world around, but as narratives like Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack show, the formation ritual objects (e.g., mackandals), were ways of acquiring power/potency. Like Wynter’s correspondence between the two functions, I think that these signifiers start off as fulfilling a potency function before being “enculturated” into an opiate-inducing one. The step from one to the next is perhaps when one acts in such a way as to legislate the potency into a cultural whole (from part to whole). In Obi, Jack’s move to revolutionary fervor. I am not trying to say that it produces the racist trope of “mad desire.” The specification of the opiate-inducing function is that specifically that it becomes the point of desire on which the reproduction of the system takes off. The site of (bio-)symbolic investment. With Wynter, I think we see here once again the emphasis on the embodiment and performance of the signifier in the generation/reproduction of a structural totality, and specifically, I am trying to extend here that function and specific experience of the peripheral in enacting a possible gesture of re-writing. From here, we can now turn more specifically to the character of this break and the fact of its enunciation through Wynter and her forwarding of Foucault’s theory of archaeology.

II. The Subject of the Epistemological Break

When one reads Wynter and has a familiarity with Foucault, it is difficult not to see a continuous stream of connections between. Wynter’s explicit references to Foucault tend to be invocations of turns of phrases, spliced in fragmentary quotations throughout her work, it is rather the way in which both bring into view the relationship between discourse and behavioral, bodily comportment. In relation to the function of the opiate-inducing signifier, Wynter speaks of a “signifier criterion of well-being” that comes to regulate the autopoetic (re)production of the bio-cultural order. Such a framing seems not too far a step from some of Foucault’s elaboration of the biopolitical. In this section, my aim is moreso to elaborate how Wynter and Foucault both take up the question of rupture. I want to examine not only how Wynter’s readings of specific historical ruptures compare with Foucault's — especially as she is pulling from The Order of Things — but also how epistemological rupture becomes a stronger principle of Wynter’s work than Foucault. This again takes its cue from the idea of looking in on the system opened up by the liminal position, minority discourse — its placing on the outside and self-awareness that can induce a moment of reimagining, “re-semanticization,” a new ceremony. Foucault’s positioning of his methodology recapitulates the absolutization error of Levi-Strauss’. Further, it is precisely this structural or epistemological assertion of Wynter’s which opens its own historical break, a “Third Emergence” in the history of the human, whose specific coordinates will be elaborated in the final section alongside Derrida.

We can begin by considering first the way in which Foucault describes his aim and the actual execution of his method. In the preface to his monumental The Order of Things, Foucault writes:

The fundamental codes of a culture — those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices — establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. [...] between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge [...] in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being. The present study is an attempt to analyze that experience. (xx-xxi).

Foucault’s delineated aim of describing the experiential fact of structuration, of order’s activity, holds great resonance with the dynamism of Wynter’s structure. With the execution of Foucault’s method though, he fails to enumerate any position by which one may act by. Foucault’s method requires that he remain agnostic on this question of the change’s entry into the structure, and instead, his analysis must always be conducted from an ever-evasive, anonymous subject position. It is precisely because Foucault is trying to delineate a “pure order” at play. As Gilles Deleuze writes of Focault’s method, it aims at “a ONE SPEAKS [that comes first], an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects” (55). Just as in my reading of Wynter beyond Levi-Strauss though, there is no account of the meaning or possible efficacy of the differing positions’ experience in the feedback of order’s activity of determination.

One way of further elaborating this point is to consider Foucault’s famous analysis of the Las Meninas painting by Diego Velazquez. Foucault reads the painting as a distillate depiction of how representation or knowledge functioned in modernity. Central to Foucault’s analysis is its element of mise-en-abyme; that is, it is not just that the painting is from the perspective of its spectator, but the scene depicted is such that it is a painting of the spectator’s very inclusion. For Foucault, Las Meninas thus shows the ways in which modernity captures and structures our gaze (the referred to dimension of pure order or the anonymous subject). The analysis of the painting is to demonstrate the ways in which the latent ordering principles and semantic schemas of modernity are determinative of our experience. The failure I am trying to point to in this method/analysis is that there is no point of escape or epistemological rupture — one could never “think otherwise,” outside its terms. While Wynter’s gesture is also not that of a total intervention from the outside, she is able to maintain a position of fecundity on interior through the liminal positionality of the black-colonial subject. Foucault treats the experience of the painting/modernity’s subject inclusion into the picture as a universal, uniform experience. With Wynter, we are able to consider and have methodologically at hand, a theory which is able to account for the fact not all subjects are incorporated equally. The further motivation behind my turn to this painting analysis by Foucault is that it is precisely Wynter’s different approach to the role of aesthetics in human life that renders this disparity and its efficacy apparent.

We can draw out this comparison between their works further in taking up Wynter’s development of Foucault’s reading of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. For both, Don Quixote marks the moment of epochal shift in humanity’s self-understanding and ideas about knowledge, and specifically, the emergence of modernity. Foucault writes, “With all their twists and turns, Don Quixote's adventures form the boundary: they mark the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contain the beginning of new relations” (46). Similarly, Wynter speaks of “the first form of that secular mutation at the level of ‘regulatory human feelings,’ which the novel's new generic onto-aesthetic field had effected, in the moment of the originary rupture caused by Cervantes's novel Don Quixote” (“Disenchanting” 209). Where Foucault’s analysis reads the novel for its specific transformation in society’s spontaneous philosophy of language, Wynter is able to pinpoint the decidedly aesthetic (and in turn, racial) implication of this change. Wynter is able to render salient the inscription of a universal image of man/thought in the figure of Don Quixote (“the overrepresentation of Man” as she refers to it). Foucault is not unaware of the biological idealism that emerges in modernity, its central to The Order of Things, but Wynter’s analysis shows how a certain aesthetic mode being is dually implicated in the absolutization of this image. Foucault never delineates where the break intervenes from or how it emerges. Wynter’s attention to aesthetics allows us to read an unique poetical invention jettisoning off from the structure’s inscription into experience/consciousness.

Along this line, the power of the aesthetic in Wynter’s come to the fore perhaps most with her work on C.L.R. James. Crucial to the power of the aesthetic to transform or rewrite conditions is “Jamesian Poiesis.” Wynter partially develops this idea in her “In Quest of Matthew Bondsman,” but I want to just briefly indicate how Jamesian poiesis can also help us to make sense of the potency/opiate function distinction and the intervention of the aesthetic. In her article, Wynters analyzes cricket as a form a Jamesian poiesis whereby an aesthetic image is able to hold within itself a multiplicity of perspectives. In my view, the figure of L’Ouverture also functions as a Jamesian device (in his monumental Black Jacobins), where a variety of populations are able to find their pluralistic expression in the emblem that is L’Ouverture. What we find in the figure of L’Ouverture is someone who wields the potency-signifiers of republicanism to achieve his own ends. L’Ouverture’s precise positioning with regard to the signifiers and discourse of republicanism enabled him to have a greater mobility and to act tactically. He’s not only able to achieve some standing in France but among the colonial population as well. I think we could then read the transformation himself into an opiate-inducing signifier through the legislation of a new political order (where “all are black”) in the founding of the Haitian Republic. My point in bringing this up here is that it is again by way of aesthetic-embodied consciousness that a distance with regard to the hegemonic order emerges and creates a site of possible transformation.

We can now turn back to the phrase of Wynter’s I opened this section with: “signifier criterion of well-being.” Foucault’s biological idealism, inflation of Man, cannot take account of the black-colonial subject’s experience, or if it does, it can only code it as death. For, the black-colonial subject falls outside the well-being criterion, the image; it is in fact formed on the basis of this subject’s very exclusion or coding as ill/profane. Foucault might be able to recognize this fact, as Wynter does, but he does not really leave room for the reciprocal response of the individual coded into that experience. The panoptic view fully incorporates that subject into its domain and terms, like in Las Meninas; all forms of resistance can be turned back into the very means of the system’s re-articulation. Individuals are not mere puppets of power and history’s determining force though. Wynter demonstrates a different kind of capacity to act, one which is made possible through the aesthetic yet is developed in close analysis of the composition and effect of structural forces. The turn to a “Third Emergence” in the history of humankind in Wynter is enabled by this poetical, performative dimension.

III. The Writing of “Man”

Now if Levi-Stauss and Foucault help us to frame the critical problematics of structure’s composition, the line of determination, and possibility for transformation, in the sea of twentieth-century structuralist critics, Jacques Derrida is perhaps the one who emphasized most the inability of structure to capture all and its inherent instability. The comparative line I want to chart with regard to Wynter is how deconstruction relativizes the very distinction between text and experience, nature and culture. I want to read the deconstruction of language alongside the plural semiotic that characterizes Wynter’s idea of the “Third Emergence.” Ultimately, Wynter’s call for an “autopoetics of the flesh” or a new human science of the word is not reducible to the deconstructionist move though.

Derrida and Wynter both point to the fundamentally linguistic-ness of our being. For Wynter, humanity — especially as it is to now know itself in the time of the third emergence — is defined by the condition of homo narans; that is, it is to know itself specifically as a being of narration: “the performative enactment of this new ‘descriptive statement’ [...] enormous act of expression/narration” (“Unsettling” 263). Like Wynter’s project, deconstruction aimed at making salient the constructedness of those descriptive statements (e.g., phallogocentrism). Derrida’s project further elevates a specific logic of textuality, différance, the trace structure, into a speculative principle of thought and man’s self-conception. While there is some similarity to be found in both of their textual principles (différance’s relation to the foundational-periphery scheme in Wynter), their turns to language enact different effects on the status of the human. Deconstruction would call into question anything like the substantiality of nature. It would seek to critique the notion of an “originary environmentalism” or “original humanicity,” to borrow eco-deconstructionist Matthias Fritsch’s term. In Derrida, nature will collapse into textuality. In Wynter, textuality/narration comes as a bio-emergent phenomenon. Wynter’s move is able to preserve the relative autonomy of the biological from the textual while still putting them into a unique and essential relation to the formation of the human. I think an eco/bio-deconstructionist reading through the lens of Wynter would trace material logics impressions into language and the reciprocal feedback onto the body rather than asserting a universal textual principle for all of reality.⁸

Zimitri Erasmus’ article takes up in close detail Wynter’s positioning with regard to the question of humanism and her specific turn to the biological sciences. Their article situates Wynter’s unique claim to “the human” not only in her intellectual history (its development of Fanon’s theory of sociogeny and the role of Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis) but also against more contemporary turns to post-humanism. It argues that Wynter posits a counter-humanism instead.Wynter’s counter-humanism is defined as the human being constituted in locally specific aesthetic practices, whereas contemporary post-humanisms understand the human through a more universalizing lens of the imbrication of humanity and techno-capitalism. Wynter’s counter-humanism wants to forward the view of a plurality of modes of being human and not as another evolutionary step in the development of the Western (bourgeois) subject. This is the specific qualification of the “counter-.” Unlike deconstruction, which in line with these other post-humanisms would collapse the human into the background forces, Wynter wants to keep the human in relief. The third emergence, the counter-humanism, is to open the space for a diverse set of “‘descriptive statement[s]’ in whose terms humans inscript and institute themselves/ourselves as this or that genre of being human” (“Unsettling” 277). The third emergence is the historical site of holding open this semiotic pluralism, many genres of being human.

Deconstruction also sees the textuality of our being, but Wynter’s autopoetics of the flesh, new science of the word, frames our active writing of ourselves into being. Sociogeny emerges as a distinct plane of social existence where the human is dually understood as bio-mythic. In Wynter’s “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” she frames this new science as:

A science of human systems which takes the laws of figuration of human systems as its objects of inquiry must, therefore, adopt a synthetic rather than categorized approach to its subject. In order to study their rhetor-neurophysiological laws of functioning, it must above all breach the distinction between brain/minds, the natural and the human sciences. For one of its major hypotheses is that systems of figuration and their group-speciating Figuration-Work essentially constitute the shared governing rhetor-neurophysiological programs or abduction schemas through which human Group Subjects realize themselves as boundary maintaining systems. (44)

It is through the dual articulation of these dimensions in “the bio-aesthetic system of figurations,” that Wynter’s theoretical framework is able to be more attentive to lived conditions and particular historical experience (“Ceremony” 36). The role of the differential experience, the formation of the outside-limit position and its unique perspective is part and parcel of her formulation of the semantic scheme and its imbrication with the biological system. Without the experience of black-colonial subjects in the discursive formation of the West, we could not affect this epistemological rupture and the positing of a new disciplinary orientation that Wynter calls for. Exactly along these lines, Wynter writes:

The Studia must be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an "outer view" which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject; must be re-formulated as a science of human systems, which makes use of multiple frames of reference and of Valesio's proposed rhetorical techne — the techne, perhaps of a rhetor-neuroscience? — to attain to the position of an external observer, at once inside/outside the figural domain of our order. As such a new cognitive mechanism it must, as we have proposed, take as its proper sphere what Gowlett calls the “long perspective” of the hominid-into-human self-making/modeling/figuring, as this is documented and enacted in narrative representations, in art and ways of life, and in the laws of functioning of human behaviors which enable the autopoesis of each mode of the human. (“Ceremony” 56)

With Wynter, we do not fall back into the slide and chasm of the signifier, but we are to work towards a speculative science of the word.

Whereas secondary literature on Sylvia Wynter tends to focus on her intellectual placement within decolonial theory, the purpose of this paper was to situate her work in relation to twentieth-century French structuralism (Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida). Three general critical problematics were taken up to conduct this comparative analysis: 1) structural determination/composition, 2) epistemic rupture, and 3) the status of Man. At each of these moments, I tried to show how Wynter’s work is in clear discussion with these structuralist problematics and aims to build upon them, but further, I tried to demonstrate how Wynter’s particular intervention into these questions is made through a turn to an existential-aesthetic domain of humanity’s self-production. Wynter never abandons the terms of structuralism instead she writes of the lived embodiment of structure, the differential experience of abstraction, a perspectivity to the positions of the grid. Epigraphic vision refers to the specific perspective of the colonial subject opened up by the enactment of Western cultural schemas. At a variety of critical levels (from historical experience to theoreticism), Wynter is engaged in a move of “epigraphy.” Wynter’s work ultimately identifies possible routes out of traditional structuralist aporias through this perspective while also calling for a more speculative structuralist theory founded on thinking its performance and (re)production in time — the structure in the specificity of its historical experience.⁹

This is a preliminary draft for a potential journal article.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Minnesota University Press, 1986.

Erasmus, Zimitri. “Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human: Counter-, not Post-humanist.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 6, 2020, pp. 47-65.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage, 1994.

Fritsch, Matthias. “Carnophallogocentrism and Eco-Deconstruction.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2023, pp. 21-42. 

Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton University Press, 1972.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Works of Marcel Mauss. Routledge, 1987.

—. Mythologiques, vol. 2, Plon, 2009.

Luiz, Miranda. “A Poetics of Reimagining: The Radical Epistemologies of Wynter and Glissant.” The CLR James Journal, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 2020, pp. 155-161.

Vest, Jennifer Lisa. “The Promise of Caribbean Philosophy: How It Can Contribute to a ‘New Dialogic’ in Philosophy.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, pp. 3-34.

Vitale, Francesco. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. SUNY Press, 2018.

Vizcaíno, Rafael. “Sylvia Wynter’s New Science of the Word and the Autopoetics of the Flesh.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1, 2022, pp. 72-88.

Wynter, Slyvia. “In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey.” Urgent Tasks, no. 12, 1981.

—. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond.” Cultural Critique, no. 7, 1987, pp. 207-244.

—. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” boundary 2, vol. 12/13, 1984, pp. 19-70.

—. “Unsettling the Coloniality Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257-337.

Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2014.

1. Similarly, Vizcaíno attributes the idea to Jennifer Vest: “that the cultural multiplicity at the core of all Caribbean philosophy should be the basis of a ‘metaphilosophical move’ that can redefine the practice of philosophy beyond its historical and conceptual Eurocentrism” (Vizcaíno 72; Vest 6).

2. For an account of the structuralist concept of “system” see: Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton University Press, 1972.

3.  I say popular because there were structuralisms that focused on this problem from within its own terms (e.g., Cercle de Epistemologie) — never mind the inexistence of “post-structuralism,” the movement label capturing this critique, within France.

4.  I use “strong” here to indicate those sociological theories which regard cultural structures as having an autonomous existence and efficiency that cannot be reduced to the economic, political, social, etc., distinction elaborated by Jeffrey C. Alexander in his The Meanings of Social Life.

5.  Additionally, Wynter writes, “Here we differ from Girard in one crucial respect. For we propose that it is precisely by means of rhetorical conventions encoded in narrative orders of discourse that each system-specific signifier of potency is constituted as an opiate-inducing signifier of desire” (“Disenchanting” 230). 

6.  Bucking the traditional interpretations of his application of structuralist analysis, Levi-Strauss writes in his Mythologiques, “structural analysis does not reject history. On the contrary, it grants it a preeminent place, one owing to the irreducible contingency without which we could not even necessity. For insofar as behind the apparent diversity of human societies, structural analysis claims to back to fundamental and common properties, it foregoes explaining not particular differences which it can account for by specifying in each ethnographic context the laws of invariance that govern their production, but rather the fact that these differences given virtually as compossibles are not all confirmed by experience and that only some of them have been actualized. To be viable, an investigation completely focused on structures begins by bowing to the power and inanity of the event” (408).

7.  “A fundamental situation perseveres which arises out of the human condition: namely, that man has from the start had at his disposition a signifier-totality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signifier, given as such, but no less unknown for being given. There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative the signifiers to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s effort to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification [...] that distribution of a supplementary ration [...] is absolutely necessary to insure that, in total, the available signifier and the mapped-out signified may remain in the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the exercise of symbolic thinking” (Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss 59).

8.  Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction is exemplary of this latter route. He locates the Derridean trace structure in recent theories of epigenetics. Interestingly, his argument is also predicated on the giving to genetics an “interpretative” (read: narrative) function to gene activity.

9. It has been said that in order for thought to be decisive thought, it must be “black thought;” in this sense, Wynter produces a kind of “black structuralism.”