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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375852 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 810 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sylvia Wynter
On Being Human as Praxis
By Katherine McKittrick
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7585-2
CHAPTER 1
Katherine McKittrick
YOURS IN THE INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE
Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living
Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities.... And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms. SYLVIA WYNTER, "THE POPE MUST HAVE BEEN DRUNK, THE KING OF CASTILE A MADMAN"
People ask me, "Why don't you write an autobiography?" But I have never been able to think that way. My generation I think, would find it impossible to emphasize the personal at the expense of the political. SYLVIA WYNTER, "THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF HUMANISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH SYLVIA WYNTER"
The epigraphs that begin this introduction draw attention to a challenge: How to introduce the analytical, creative, and intellectual projects of Sylvia Wynter, as well as her biographical narrative, all at once, while also looking forward, noncircuitously and without anticipatory repetition, to the essays and conversations within? The challenge folds over, too, to notice the extensive and detailed corpus Wynter has put forth—more than two hundred texts and presentations—which comprise dramatic plays, translations, essays, plenaries, symposia, and creative works. Her work speaks to a range of topics and ideas that interweave fiction, physics, neurobiology, film, music, economics, history, critical theory, literature, learning practices, coloniality, ritual narratives, and religion and draw attention to epistemological ruptures such as the secularization of humanism, the Copernican leap, Darwinian modes of biological representation, Fanonian sociogeny, the 1960s. The depth with which she reads texts and her innovative approach to thinking through the ways in which we live and tell our stories have resulted in an intellectual oeuvre that patiently attends to the ways in which our specific conception of the human, Man, curtails alterative models of being, the fullness of our interrelated human realization, and a new science of human discourse. Across her creative texts and her essays, Wynter demonstrates the ways in which a new, revalorized perspective emerges from the ex-slave archipelago and that this worldview, engendered both across and outside a colonial frame, holds in it the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.
While readers unfamiliar with Wynter's work can turn to any number of her essays and enter the conversation from a variety of perspectives, much of her vast and detailed writing life is tracked and explored by both Wynter and David Scott in his incredible interview, "The Re-enchantment of Humanism," in Small Axe. In this interview Wynter's experiences as an anticolonial figure emerge not as inciting the political vision put forth in her writings but rather as implicit to a creative-intellectual project of reimagining what it means to be human and thus rearticulating who/what we are. The process of rearticulation is important to highlight because it underscores relationality and interhuman narratives. Here, the question-problem-place of blackness is crucial, positioned not outside and entering into modernity but rather the empirical-experiential-symbolic site through which modernity and all of its unmet promises are enabled and made plain. With this, stands Wynter's subjective-local-specific-diasporic anticolonial unautobiography (see the second epigraph here), articulated alongside the physiological—neurochemical-induced—wording of hope and desire within the context of total domination (see the first epigraph). Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny/a new science of the word.
Wynter's anticolonial vision is not, then, teleological—moving from colonial oppression outward and upward toward emancipation—but rather consists of knots of ideas and histories and narratives that can only be legible in relation to one another. Here it is crucial to notice that her oeuvre can be compared to and in conversation with Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, Elsa Goveia, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, C. L. R. James, and Edouard Glissant, among others; this is an intellectual project that, therefore, practices co-identification and cocitation and honors the conceptual frame it promises. It is through reading across texts and genres, knitting together and critically engaging a variety of intellectual narratives from the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, and art worlds, as these insights are produced in the shadow of colonialism, that Wynter's anticolonial insights come forth. These knots of histories and ideas and relational narratives, together, emerge in different ways throughout this collection. Painstakingly avoiding an overview of key themes in Wynter's work—Man1, Man2, sociogeny, the science of the word, propter nos, autopoiesis, counterdoctrines, adaptive truths, archipelagos of poverty—I draw the reader's attention to the essays within, which touch on, extend, and converse with these concepts and, in very different ways, join Wynter in opening up the possibility of a new science of human discourse: "a sense that in every form that is being inscripted, each of us is also in that form, even though we do not experience it. So the human story/history becomes the collective story/history of these multiple forms of self-inscription or self-instituted genres, with each form/genre being adaptive to its situation, ecological, geopolitical."
The Essays
This is a project that speaks to the interrelatedness of our contemporary situation and our embattled histories of conflicting and intimate relationalities. The project is about how our long history of racial violence continues to inform our lives and our anticolonial and decolonial struggles. The work thinks about and interrogates how the figure of Man—in Wynter's formulations—is the measuring stick through which all other forms of being are measured. And, it is a work that seeks to ethically question and undo systems of racial violence and their attendant knowledge systems that produce this racial violence as "commonsense." This is not a project of reviling and thus replacing Man-as-human with an ascendant figure; rather it draws attention to a counterexertion of a new science of being human and the emancipatory breach Wynter's work offers. The writers here work closely with the writings of Sylvia Wynter, bringing into focus the ways in which she asks us to think carefully about the ways in which those currently inhabiting the underside of the category of Man-as-human—under our current epistemological regime, those cast out as impoverished and colonized and undesirable and lacking reason—can, and do, provide a way to think about being human anew. Being human, in this context, signals not a noun but a verb. Being human is a praxis of humanness that does not dwell on the static empiricism of the unfittest and the downtrodden and situate the most marginalized within the incarcerated colonial categorization of oppression; being human as praxis is, to borrow from Maturana and Varela, "the realization of the living."
The collection begins with the dialogic text "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations" (cited in this introduction simply as "Conversations"). Building on a discussion and interview that began in 2007, Katherine McKittrick has since spoken and written with Wynter about various aspects of her research and writing. A call-and-response, this piece might be thought of as an extended prologue to the collection: a narrative that sets the stage for the collection's essays by drawing attention to key themes and concepts in Wynter's work; and, a prefatory conversation that highlights Wynter's voice within the context of the collection as a whole. Indeed, the call-and-response is doubled, with Wynter and McKittrick "calling" and "responding" to one another in "Conversations," while "Conversations" provides a context for the remaining essays that, as a whole, bounce off of, riff toward, and particularize Wynter's larger project. As it contextualizes the collection as a whole, "Conversations" is also a narrative that extends beyond Wynter's earlier writings. Completed in early 2014, it begins the collection but might also be read as a text that closes the collection and opens up Wynter's most recent insights—for it is here that she pushes us to think carefully about the ways in which our capacity to produce narrative as physiological beings allows us to critically re-envision our futures in new and provocative ways.
This is followed by two essays that work through the broader conceptual claims that Sylvia Wynter makes in relation to colonialism, coloniality, history, and the ethics of being human. Denise Ferreira da Silva's "Before Man: Sylvia Wynter's Rewriting of the Modern Episteme," is one of the first discussions to think extensively about Wynter's research alongside that of Michel Foucault. In her essay, Silva traces Wynter's reading of the ways in which a racial presence is necessary to the expansion, development, and implementation of imperial order and the production of Man-as-human. Here, as in Wynter's work, Silva puts pressure on Foucault's archaeology of knowledge and tables of difference by drawing attention to the ways in which the violence of conquest and colonization are implicit to modernity. Walter Mignolo's contribution, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?," explores the cognitive shifts incited by Copernican and Darwinian epochs in order to address the ways in which Sylvia Wynter's project itself is situated outside our present order of knowledge. Wynter's perspective and therefore her reading practices, he suggests, are decolonial scientia in that she situates herself beyond the crass body politics of colonial knowledge in order to foster adjoined human needs. Mignolo's essay traces the ways in which Wynter's unveiling of reality—as a naturalized autopoietic social system—allows her to read particular moments, from C. L. R. James's Marxism and Fanon's sociogeny to 1492 and the rise of scientific reason, anew.
Bench Ansfield's "Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment," draws on Wynter's insights to think through the ways in which urban recovery projects and urban studies approaches to post-Katrina New Orleans are bound up in a teleological promise that reproduces sites of blackness, poverty, and struggle as perpetually and naturally condemned. Extending Wynter's discussion of "1492: A New World View" and the ceaseless geographic workings of colonialism, Ansfield asks that we recognize the ways in which post-Katrina New Orleans is a location of ongoing politicized struggles that demand a home life: antidemolition struggles, the right to return, the right to stay, as practices that are deeply entwined with an ethics of recognizing alternative claims to humanness. Katherine McKittrick's essay, "Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science," explores the ways in which science and scientific knowledge emerge in the writings of Sylvia Wynter. Looking at the scientific contours of creative labor, the essay concludes with a discussion of Jimi Hendrix, music making, blackness, and scientific-mathematic knowledge to illuminate Wynter's call to envision the human as bios-mythois and being human as praxis. Nandita Sharma's "Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization" focuses on the ways in which displaced and migratory communities—populations who are identifiable as "immigrants" rather than "indigenous"—are, through the language and theorizing of "settler colonialism," produced as colonizing subjects. By dwelling on Wynter's discussion of propter nos, Sharma suggests that the inequalities produced through colonialism not be conceptualized vis-à-vis the Manichaean categories of "native" and "nonnative" but rather through the planetary interhuman consequences of 1492 and the resultant shared experience of, and thus resistance to, terror.
Rinaldo Walcott's contribution, "Genres of Human: Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitics, and the Caribbean Basin," reads the Caribbean basin in relation to European modernity. Working with the writings of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and JacquesDerrida, among others, Walcott argues the Caribbean region does not offer an easy unified articulation of sameness through difference but rather a space where the constant negotiation of particularities—extending outward from colonial brutalities—produces an ethics of being "yet to come." Carole Boyce Davies's "From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project" invites a complex and unique reading of Wynter's dramatic play not only because she unearths the intellectual provocations found in practices of creativity—her culling of Wynter's theoretical-scholarly insights that are embedded in Maskarade is meaningful—but also because she suggests that such practices of creativity are, for postslave black/Caribbean communities, ways to imagine and bring forth integrated and soldered human and environmental alternatives to the crude mechanics of capitalism that arose from plantation slavery. Indeed, we can notice in the essays by Boyce Davies and Walcott, if read alongside Sharma's contribution, how Wynter's work draws attention to the ways in which transatlantic slavery—violent displacement—enforced the necessity of blacks to plant themselves as indigenous to the New World. This kind of insight importantly troubles the politics of claiming land alongside racial particularities and takes what is now being called "settler colonialism" in a different direction.
Demetrius Eudell's essay, "Come on Kid, Let's Go Get the Thing": The Sociogenic Principle and theBeing of Being Black/Human," closes the collection and situates Wynter's insights within the context of black intellectual history. Eudell's essay surveys key themes that emerge in Wynter's writings and across black studies, and underscores how particular thinkers have, either in part or to a large extent, challenged the overrepresentation of Man. Eudell's essay traces the ways in which black subjects negotiate biocentric racial scripts in relation to their own inventions of blackness. The essay uncovers the ways in which Wynter's insights on sociogeny help clarify the process through which blackness—as we know it—becomes a reality.
Yours in the Intellectual Struggle/The Realization of the Living
Over many, many hours Sylvia Wynter generously shared an analytical story that was insightful, creative, prodigious, urgent. The analytical story put forth both in "Conversations" and in her other works is not simply an intellectual treatise; the ideas uncover a synthesizing mind at work. Put differently, throughout and within her essays and ideas, Wynter does not simply convey a set of ideas; rather, she demonstrates the difficult labor of thinking the world anew. Wynter's ideas are, in a sense, invariably verbs, encoded with active thought processes grappling with the magma of far-reaching challenges—including the unresolved/unsolved problem of race—which has come to confront us as a global human species collectively living with, through, and against the West's incorporating expansion. To engage her research and ideas is not, then, to take up a purely discursive text; rather, her work reveals intellectual life and struggle, with Wynter bringing into focus the dimensions of human life itself through her intensely provocative intellectual concerns and the correlated practice of cognition: a mind at work/everything is praxis.
The title of this introduction, "Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living," is meant to signal how we might read the work of Sylvia Wynter and the essays collected here. Many letters Wynter has posted to me, and others, over the years have closed with the words "yours in the intellectual struggle" and have inspired a world that imagines change. But the struggle to make change is difficult within our present system of knowledge; the struggle can, and has, reproduced practices that profit from marginalization and thus posit that emancipation involves reaching for the referent-we of Man. Thus, "yours in the intellectual struggle" bears witness to the practice of sharing words and letters while also drawing attention to the possibilities that storytelling and wording bring.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sylvia Wynter by Katherine McKittrick. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix1. Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living / Katherine McKittrick 1
2. Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations / Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick 9
3. Before Man: Sylvia Wynter's Rewriting of the Modern Episteme / Denise Ferreira da Silva 90
4. Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human? / Walter D. Mignolo 106
5. Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment / Bench Ansfield 124
6. Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science / Katherine McKittrick 142
7. Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolinization / Nandita Sharma 164
8. Genres of Human: Multiculturalism, Cosmo-politics, and the Caribbean Basin / Rinaldo Walcott 183
9. From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project / Carole Boyce Davies 203
10. "Come on Kid, Let's Go Get the Thing": The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black / Demetrius L. Eudell 226
Bibliography 249
Contributors 275
Index 277
What People are Saying About This
"The magic of human life, suspended in the strife between terror and beauty, exhaustion and sustenance, carnage and carnival, has never been more fully and richly illuminated than in the priceless oeuvre of Sylvia Wynter. Thanks to Katherine McKittrick, that work receives its own full and rich illumination in a rigorous, intellectually expansive, and beautifully written set of essays that extends Wynter’s commitment to human life and the earth that bears it."