Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-KnowledgeVolume 5Issue 3 Reflections on Fanon Article 23

6-21-2007

On the Obsolescence of the Disciplines: FrantzFanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a New Mode ofBeing HumanKaren M. GagneSUNY Binghamton, kgagne@binghamton.edu

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Recommended CitationGagne, Karen M. (2007) "On the Obsolescence of the Disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a New Mode of BeingHuman," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 3, Article 23.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol5/iss3/23

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

But they don’t want to get to the fun-damental issue. Once [Fanon] has saidontogeny-

and

-

sociogeny

, every dis-cipline you’re practicing ceases to ex-ist.

--Sylvia Wynter (2006b: 33)

This article discusses the difficult butnecessary task of letting go of our currentdisciplinary boundaries in order to evenbegin to understand the

who, what, why,when and how

in which human beings work

as

humans beings. Sylvia Wynter argues

that when Frantz Fanon made the littlestatement “beside phylogeny and ontog-eny stands sociogeny” in

Black Skin, WhiteMasks

(1967) he effectively ruptured ourpresent knowledge system that ouracademic disciplines serve to maintain, bycalling into question “our present culture’spurely biological definition of what it is to

be

, and therefore of what it is

like to be

,human” (Wynter 2001: 31). This rupturethat Fanon caused remains

the

space,Wynter argues, that will necessarily moveus out of our present Western/European/

Karen M. Gagne is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Binghamton University. She is completing her dis-sertation, entitled “Poetics as a Guerilla Activity: Towards a New Mode of Being Human.” Gagne is theauthor of “Fighting Amnesia as a Guerilla Activity: Poetics for a New Mode of Being Human,” in HumanArchitecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (2006); “Falling in Love with Indians: the Metaphysicsof Becoming America,” in CR: The New Centennial Review (2003); and co-author of “On Coloniality andCondemnation: A Roundtable Discussion,” in Proud Flesh: The New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, andConsciousness (http://www.proudfleshjournal.com) (2003).

On the Obsolescence of the DisciplinesFrantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a

New Mode of Being Human

Karen M. Gagne

Binghamton University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

kgagne@binghamton.edu

Abstract: This article discusses the difficult but necessary task of dismantling our disciplinaryboundaries in order to even begin to understand the who, what, why, when and how of humanbeings. Sylvia Wynter argues that when Frantz Fanon made the statement “beside phylogenyand ontogeny stands sociogeny” in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1967) he effectively rupturedthe present knowledge system that our academic disciplines serve to maintain, by calling intoquestion “our present culture’s purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore ofwhat it is like to be, human” (Wynter 2001: 31). This rupture that Fanon caused remains the space,Wynter argues, that will necessarily move us out of our present Western/European/bio-eco-nomic conception of being human whereby the Self requires an Other for its definition, toward ahybrid nature-culture (2006a: 156) conception that needs no Other in order to understand Self(1976: 85).

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bio-economic conception of being humanwhereby the

Self

requires an

Other

for itsdefinition, toward a hybrid nature-culture(2006a: 156) conception that needs no

Other

in order to understand

Self

(1976: 85).If we do not move

beyond

, as we havealready moved

through

, our present disci-plines, the maintenance of which functionsto insure our present world order, then wewill never be able to properly deal with allthe local and global crises that we confrontand the study of which sociologists makeour life’s work until we first see these strug-gles as different facets of the “central ethno-class Man vs. Human” struggle (2003: 260-1). These crises, Wynter notes, not the leastof which includes the possibility of ourspecies extinction, the sharply unequaldistribution of the earth’s resources,poverty, AIDs, and the like, must be seen asthe direct effects of the sharp imbalancebetween the two

cultures

(Snow 1993[1959]) or two

languages

(Pocock 1971: 6)between the natural sciences, on the onehand, and the humanities and the socialsciences, on the other (Wynter 1995: 2).

That we have been unable to reach“another landscape”—as proposed byAmiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) in the 1960s—inorder to “exoticize” Western thought tomake visible its

laws

whereby we would beable to unfix the sign of

blackness

from thesign of evil, ugliness, and the negation of

whiteness

, has been for two reasons. Theseare, according to Wlad Godzich (1986) asquoted by Wynter, first, “the impervious-ness of our present disciplines to phenom-ena that fall outside their pre-definedscope” and, second, “our reluctance to see arelationship so global in reach—

between theepistemology of knowledge and the liberation ofthe people

—a relationship that we are notproperly able to theorize” (Wynter 2006a:113).

The shift

out

of our present conceptionof

Man,

1

out of our present “WorldSystem”—the one that places people ofAfrican descent and the ever-expanding

global, transracial category of the home-less, jobless, and criminalized

damned

as thezero-most factor of

Other

to Western Man’s

Self

—has to be first and foremost a culturalshift,

not

an economic one. Until such arupture in our conception of being humanis brought forth, such “sociological”concerns as that of the vast global and localeconomic inequalities, immigration, laborpolicies, struggles about race, gender, class,and ethnicity, and struggles over the envi-ronment, global warming, and distributionof world resources, will remain status quo.The rise of the disciplines would come toensure the maintenance of the MasterConception of the Western epistemologicalorder; in the present day, this order wouldin turn produce the classificatory systemwhereby jobless Black youth would be cate-gorized as “No Humans Involved.” Therole of academics in reproducing thissystem is perhaps best articulated inWynter’s brilliant article by this title—as anopen letter to her colleagues (1992).

The “rise of the West” by way of itscontact with a “New World” outside ofEurope, and the “specific idea of order”—an order that was to be effected and repro-duced at the deepest levels of human cogni-tion—was the result of this newrelationship. Just

how

a rupture in the thencurrent order of papal order by the then“liminal Others” of that order was madepossible by this new relationship with the“New World”—along with the followingrupture that would occur in the 19

th

century—needs to be properly investigatedif we are to ever have any permanentimpact on our contemporary battles against

1

Wynter proposes that there are two phasesof Man which she labels Man1 and Man2. Man1emerges in the late 15

th

/16

th

Century throughthe 18

th

Century and whose order of being is

po-litical

; Man2 replaces the political mode of beingwith a new

bio-economic

order of being. A moredetailed overview of these two phases is laid outby Greg Thomas in “Sex/Sexuality & SylviaWynter’s

Beyond

…:Anti-colonial Ideas in ‘BlackRadical Tradition’” (2001: 112).

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slavery, colonialism, and movements forjustice and freedom.

Wynter’s 40-year archaeologicalproject in human thought, particularlyduring the last 25 years, stems from herreading and development of FrantzFanon’s concept of “sociogeny,” that heproposes in

Black Skins, White Masks

(1967:11). What Fanon does is to offer an explana-tion for the “double consciousness” livedby Blacks in the Diaspora that was articu-lated by W.E.B. Dubois. Fanon does this,Wynter poses, by calling into question “ourpresent culture’s purely biological defini-tion of what it is to

be

, and therefore of whatit is

like to be

, human” (Wynter 2001: 31). From Fanon’s statement, “Beside

phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociog-eny,” Wynter develops the concept of a“sociogenic principle” (sometimes writtenas “sociogenetic principle”) to refer to andcontrast with the purely biological“genomic principle” used to define the“species specific” codes of purely organiclife. Fanon’s conception of the human thusbecomes for Wynter a truly revolutionaryone—revolutionary as in causing a perma-nent alteration or rupture. This newconception, according to Wynter, was asdisruptive of the present order of knowl-edge as that of the previous ruptures inintellectual though—those effected byCopernicus (and Columbus) in the 15

th

century and by Darwin in the 19

th

century. In her words, there are three intellec-

tual revolutions that define our “modern”world: the Copernican, the Darwinian, andthe Fanonian. This last revolution, Wynterargues, has yet to be completed (Eudell andAllen 2001: 7). There was a brief moment inthe 1960s when it might have beencompleted within the context of the globalBlack Power Movement (with its threearms: Black Arts, Black Aesthetics, andBlack Studies) and anti-colonial strugglesof the Third World. These movementsoffered the “initially penetrating insights”that called into question the structures of

the global world system and the nature ofthe “absently present framework whichmandated all their/our respective subjec-tions.” Within this brief hiatus, the disci-plinary apparatus and its boundarieswould challenge the range of anti-colonialand other intellectual movements, particu-larly by the Black Studies, Black Arts, andBlack Aesthetic Movements—all part of theBlack Power Movement—before thesemovements were “re-coopted.” As Wyntershows, these insights presented their ulti-mate failure, “in the wake of their politi-cally activist phase, to completeintellectually that emancipation” (2006a:112-113).

Wynter argues that the reason for thisfailure is that the psychic emancipationinitiated by these movements for that briefhiatus “had been effected at the level of themap rather than at the level of the territory”(118). The systemic devalorization of black-ness and overvalorization of whiteness areonly functions of the “encoding of ourpresent hegemonic Western-bourgeoisbiocentric descriptive statement of thehuman” (Ibid). This is part of an overalldevalorization of the human being itself“

outside

the necessarily devalorizing termsof the biocentric descriptive statement of

Man

, overrepresented as if it were that ofthe human” (119).

The territory, then, is that of the insti-tuting of our present ethno-class or West-ern-bourgeois genre of the human, on themodel of a natural organism. This model isenacted by our disciplines. The disciplines,Wynter writes,

must still function, as all humanorders of knowledge have donefrom our origin on the continent ofAfrica until today, as a language-capacitated form of life, to ensurethat we continue to know ourpresent order of social reality, andrigorously so, in the adaptive‘truth-for’ terms needed to

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conserve our present descriptivestatement. That is, the one thatdefines us biocentrically on themodel of a natural organism, withthis a priori definition serving toorient and motivate the individualand collective behaviors by meansof which our contemporary West-ern world-system or civilization,together with its nation-state sub-units, are stably produced andreproduced. This at the same timeensures that we, as Western andwesternized intellectuals, continueto articulate, in however radicallyoppositional a manner, the rules ofthe social order and its sanctionedtheories. (2003: 170-171)

But, it is this model that is ruptured byFanon. Wynter’s fight, then, has beenprecisely to move us all towards thecompletion of the intellectual/conceptualtransformation that was initiated by Fanon.If “we”2 study what brought about theprevious two revolutions we will have abetter understanding of how we can fullyrealize the next one.

Even though we are still within theeffects of Darwin’s “local if now global”bio-economic conception of the human,Fanon, like Copernicus and Darwin, hasshown us the door out by the single sugges-tion that subjective experience could occurfrom the neural processes of the brain.From his own experience as Western-educated colonized subject moving fromthe Caribbean to France, Fanon questionedhow a subjective experience “as-a-feature-in-itself” could simultaneously depend on“underlying physical processes.”3 ForWynter, Fanon’s conception becomes

crucial for imagining how it might be possi-ble to take the “leap of faith” necessary tomove out of our present Western mode ofconsciousness and way of being. The term“Western,” of course, can no longer bethought of as a racial term, and would needto include all “ex-native colonial subjects”raised in, educated in/by, and otherwisesocialized in/of/by the West, like Fanonhimself (Wynter 1976: 83).

The conceptual breakthrough ofCopernicus in astronomy and the voyagesof Columbus cannot be understood outsidethe “general upheaval” of Renaissancehumanism and the rise of the new systemof the modern state, which replaced thefeudal order. Likewise, the conceptualbreakthrough of Darwin cannot be under-stood outside a parallel social and intellec-tual upheaval from the 18th centuryonward (Wynter 1997: 158). Columbus heldthe then counter-premise that “God couldhave indeed placed lands in the Westernhemisphere and therefore ‘all seas are navi-gable,’” and Copernicus held the thencounter-premise that the earth moved, bothparts of the sequence of counter-thinkingthat allowed the intelligentsia of WesternEurope to break with the regime of truththat had legitimated the geography of theLatin-Christian Europe. These both thenfostered the rise of the physical sciences.The magnanimity of this rupture would bemet again in the 19th century with Darwin’schallenge to the hegemonic premise of thedivinely designed “origin of the species.”According to Wynter, Darwin’s “counterpremise of the origin of species in theprocess of bio-evolutionary Natural Selec-tion opened the frontier of the biologicalsciences and made our now increasinglyveridical rather than adaptive knowledgeof the bio-organic level of reality” (1997:158).

Wynter argues that we must come toterms with the Janus-faced reality of both ofthese ruptures. The events of the latefifteenth century, with the Columbian

2 The “we” that Wynter speaks of and towould be the “liminal Others” to Western Man.

3 Wynter cites David Chalmers in “The Puz-zle of Conscious Experience” (1995: 80-83) andThe Conscious Mind: In Search of a FundamentalTheory (1996).

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voyages and Darwin, must be seen both as a“glorious achievement and as the first act ina process of undoubted genocide/ethno-cide/ecocide, as well as of an unrivaleddegree of human subjugation.” If so consid-ered, we will then be able to move tocomplete the second half of the partialautonomy of our cognition as a species bybreaking the barrier between the culture ofthe natural sciences and the cultures of thedisciplines of individual and social behav-iors (1997: 146; 2003: 263). Wynter writes:

So the academic system that youhave gifted the “natives” withcould seem, at first glance, to bemerely a Trojan Horse! But note theparadox here. That Word, while an“imperializing Word,” is also theenactment of the first purely de-godded, and therefore in thissense, emancipatory, conception ofbeing human in the history of ourspecies. And it is that discontinuitythat is going to make the idea oflaws of Nature, and with it the neworder of cognition that is the natu-ral sciences, possible. So there canbe no going back to a before-that-Word. So as ex-native colonial sub-jects, except [when] we train our-selves in the disciplinary structuresin which that Word gives rise,[and] undergo the rigorous ap-prenticeship that is going to be nec-essary for any eventual break withthe system of knowledge whichelaborates that Word, we can in noway find a way to think through,then beyond its limits.(2000b: 159)

In assessing the production of knowl-edge from the late 15th century voyages toAfrica and the “New World,” it is our“present definition of what it is to behuman” that became then and nowequated with Western Bourgeois Man (Bio-Economic Man since the 19th century). This

emergence was the result of a mutation thatoccurred within the previous Judeo-Chris-tian conception of what it was to be human.Wynter begins her “Argument” in the early1970s in agreement with Immanuel Waller-stein who locates a mutation in the late 15th

and early 16th centuries, the “X” factor ofwhich was with the arrival of Columbus inthe Americas and the acquisition of this“new land” and new relationship with“Nature.” This mutation would lead to therise of capitalism as a world-system.4

However, Wynter departs from Waller-stein’s analysis by asserting that the muta-tion that took place, in which capitalismwould emerge as the world order, was notfirstly an economic shift, but a cultural one.The emergence and reproduction of thecapitalist world-system was the centraleffect of a prior cultural mutation—theWestern-bourgeois formulation of ageneral order. There was already a “secu-lar” conception of being “human” that wasa break from the former “sacred” concep-tion, or order of knowledge. In otherwords, it is not first and foremost the modeof production—capitalism—that controlsus. While it does indeed do so at anoutward and empirical level, for theprocesses to function, they must be firstdiscursively instituted. These processesmust be regulated and at the same timenormalized and legitimated (see Wynter,2000, p. 159-160).

What does control us is the economicconception of the human, which is, ofcourse, that of Man. This conception isproduced and reproduced by the “nowplanetary” academic disciplines. Theeconomic conception represents the firstpurely secular and operational public iden-tity in human history (160), an identity that

4 See Wynter’s reference to Wallerstein’sThe Modern World System: Capitalist Agricultureand the Origins of the European World Economy inthe Sixteenth Century (1974: 15, 85-87) in her 1976article entitled “Ethno or Socio Poetics” (1976:79-81).

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requires that we behave as producers, trad-ers or consumers. Our economic identityreplaced our former political following ourformer theologial conception of “human.”The economic apparatus, as Wynter notes,is a function of that identity, not the otherway around (Wynter 2006b). We cannot seeit as such because we are in it, in the bio-economic mode of being and conceiving ofthe human; we need to get outside of it inorder to see how it works.

The enormity of the task before us,getting outside of our economic conceptionof “human,” should not be taken lightly.Even the most positive of the critics of bothFanon and Wynter cannot completelyescape the need to re-ground himself withinthis economic paradigm. Lewis Gordon haswritten extensively about both Fanon andWynter, and recently analyzed Wynter’sarticle “Towards the Sociogenic Principle:Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of ConsciousExperience, and What It Is Like to Be‘Black’” (2001) in his article entitled, “Is theHuman a Teleological Suspension of Man?Phenomenological Exploration of SylviaWynter's Fanonian and Biodicean Reflec-tions” (Gordon 2006). Even he, however,cannot help but need a more grounded“economic solution” to Wynter’s “episte-mological project.” Elsewhere, Gordonstates,

Although Sylvia Wynter qualifiedher conclusions by reminding usthat we should work through epis-temological categories and ‘notmerely economic’ ones, her discus-sion so focuses on the question ofconceptual conditions that it is diffi-cult to determine how those eco-nomic considerations configureinto the analysis. (Gordon 2004: 79;my emphasis)

Wynter’s and even Fanon’s “callings,”Gordon argues, require the “empirical vali-dation” of scholars like Irene Gendzier for a

more practical solution to the global prob-lems, for example. Gordon writes,

…Gendzier poses the followingconsideration. The critics of devel-opment have pointed out what iswrong with development studies,particularly its project of modern-ization, but their shortcoming isthat many of them have not pre-sented alternative conceptions ofhow to respond to the problemsthat plague most of Africa andmuch of the Third World. Think,for example, of Wynter’s call for anew epistemic order. Calling for it isnot identical with creating it. This isone of the ironic aspects of the epis-temological project. Although it isa necessary reflection, it is an im-practical call for a practical re-sponse. (81; my emphasis)

Not only is the “practicality” of aneconomic solution is required to validatethe “impracticality” of the “epistemologi-cal project,” but calling and creating5 areplaced back firmly in their disciplinarydivisions and one is never the other. To saythis, however, is to miss the “territory” ofWynter and Fanon altogether.

In 1999 and 2000, Sylvia Wynter was in-vited to give the keynote address to the 2nd

and 3rd Annual Coloniality Working GroupConference at State University of New Yorkat Binghamton. The culmination of thesetwo keynote speeches, published in 2003,was entitled “Un-Settling the Coloniality ofBeing/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward theHuman, After Man, Its Over-Representa-tion” (Wynter 2003).6 In her two keynotesand in the article, Wynter engaged those

5 I have argued elsewhere (2006) that callingand creating should not be treated as separateactivities, since calling most certainly is creatingin the guerilla poetics of Wynter and so manyothers that would make their mouth like a gun,to use the words of Paule Marshall.

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who had been present at both events, aswell as other scholars of the SUNY-Bing-hamton academic community from a vari-ety of disciplines. The 2000 conference title,“Un-Settling the Coloniality of Power,”was in reference to a concept proposed byAnibal Quijano, a faculty member at Bing-hamton at the time as well as an invitedspeaker at the 1999 conference. It was thehis notion of “Coloniality of Power,” thesubject of his 1999 address as well as the ti-tle of a subsequent published article (2000)that the Colonality Working Group took astheir main theme. Wynter, in her 2000 key-note address, while paying tribute toQuijano’s foundational concept, compli-cated the matter of “Coloniality” and hencethe central theme of the conference, by in-sisting that coloniality is never merely aquestion of “Power.” Wynter renamed theissue for her audience with the four-partheart-of-the-matter concept of Colonial-ity—that of “Being/Power/Truth/Free-dom”—and proceeded to illustrate why itwas indeed a four-part, and not a one-part,discussion.

To Wynter, the divide between sciences(in which the social sciences appear partial)and the humanities remains solid (1971;

1984; 2000c; 2003; 2006a). This division,which comes out of the rise of Humanismand the Aesthetics movement, keeps every-one of us from making any real sense ofhow humans actually work. Wynter citedC. P. Snow’s argument in 1959 about the“Two Culture” divide between the “literaryintellectuals” and the “natural scientists”and argued that the persistence of thisdivide in the post-1945 period has beenrecently refuted by Immanuel Wallersteinand an interdisciplinary team of scholarscalled the Gulbenkian Commission. In1996, this team produced the GulbenkianReport on the Social Sciences (Gulbenkian-Commission 1996).

Despite these interventions,7 Wynterargues, it is still the case that while thenatural sciences have made much progressin explaining and predicting the nonhu-man world, the disciplines of the socialsciences and the humanities are still unableto account for the parameters of the collec-tive human behaviors that shape our collec-tive world, including the large-scaleinequalities and degradation that thesecollective behaviors have caused (2003:270). Wynter argues that this is because—asa result of the new conceptualization ofEuropean Man from Christian Man toWestern Man as a direct outcome of a revo-lutionary new relation to Nature out of thecontext of the large scale exploitation of theNew World—whole areas of cognitionwere no longer accessible (except throughart):

As western man “pacified” NewWorld nature, eliminated the “sav-

6 Wynter has had a long relationship withscholars at the State University of New York atBinghamton. It was here that she was invited toher first conference in the United States, around1971 (2000b: 171-172). She has returned to giveother addresses, including in November 1998 ata 3-day conference honoring the life of WalterAnthony Rodney, entitled “Engaging WalterRodney’s Legacies: Historiography, SocialMovements and African Diaspora” where shegave the most profound speech I had everheard. Her keynote speeches at the 1999 and2000 conferences were a continuation of an ex-change with Immanuel Wallerstein and mem-bers of the Gulbenkian Commission, that tookplace at Stanford University on June 2 & 3, 1996,at a symposium, “Which Sciences for Tomor-row? A Symposium on the Gulbenkian Com-mission Report: Open the Social Sciences.”Wynter’s contribution was a challenge to theconclusions of this report, and her talk was enti-tled, “To ‘Open/Restructure’ the social sciences?Or a New Science of the Human, of the Word? Toreenchant the World? Or to disenchant ‘Man’?”

7 Along with the project of the GulbenkianCommission, Wynter addresses the efforts ofHerbert Simon and his followers in a special is-sue of Stanford Humanities Review called “Bridg-ing the Gap” when she argues that like Simonwe are condemned to repeating the same divi-sions that we set out to dissolve if we merelytake a “cognitive approach to literary criticism”and keep our disciplinary languages intact(1995).

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age,” penned them up in reserva-tions, he did the same with wholeareas of his Being. Indeed it wouldbe difficult to explain the extraordi-nary nature of his ferocity if we didnot see that it was, first of all, a fe-rocity also wrought, in psychicterms, upon himself. Westernman—as defined by the bourgeoi-sie—restained [sic] those areas ofBeing whose mode of knowingcould sustain the narrative concep-tualization (the heraldic vision) ofhis new world picture, but elimi-nated, penned up on reserva-tions—those areas of cognitionwhich were, by their mode ofknowing, heretical to the conceptu-alized orthodoxy that was re-quired. (1976: 83)

“What is to be done?” and “What canwe do?” we ask as activists and intellectu-als—as cultural workers—with the “educa-tion” we have gotten. Again, we must recallpart of the quote from Wynter that Iincluded above:

So as ex-native colonial subjects,except [when] we train ourselvesin the disciplinary structures inwhich that Word gives rise, [and]undergo the rigorous apprentice-ship that is going to be necessaryfor any eventual break with thesystem of knowledge which elabo-rates that Word, we can in no wayfind a way to think through, thenbeyond its limits.(2000b: 159)

The eventual break will come fromintellectuals (such as Fanon) themselves, aswas done in the previous two ruptures.Specifically, since it has been intellectuals,particularly those within the academy, whohave served so well in their roles in main-taining the Western-bourgeois system of“Man,” it is proposed that in bringing

about the “heretical leap” Wynter speaksof, intellectuals will have to play key roles.It is the “Western educated” intellectuals—“all of us” as Wynter argues—that thereforeneed to be radically re-educated.

Redefining humans not as bio-evolu-tionary beings—as we have done “eversince Darwin”—but as a hybrid of “bio”and “logos” that actually define us ashuman beings, we make our Enlighten-ment-to-Darwinian way of being humanobsolete. When this happens, a new modeof being human (“After Man”) will be putforward, one that does not require an“Other” to contrast the “We” of the West.As the hybrid bio-cultural creatures that weare, Sylvia Wynter shows us, we impose anew “autopoiesis.” Our grasping thisprocess will cause a new rupture of a greatmagnitude, enabling us to leave our presentconception of Man. While poetics, in ourpresent conception, is confined to the“leisurely humanities” in WesternAcademia—or to a “calling,” and is under-stood as a “thing” and not an action or anevent, poetics would then be alternativelyregarded as the action by which humanswork to create themselves anew. A new“science of the human”—a “science of theWord” would then illuminate this process.Without this new base, which would breakdown our present disciplinary boundaries,our efforts at serious social change remain afutile endeavor.

Each human system auto-institutes it-self, “effecting the dynamics of an autopoi-etics, whose imperative of stablereproduction has hitherto transcended theimperatives of the human subjects who col-lectively put it into dynamic play” (1984:44). At the same time that humans createthe system they live in, they also create themechanisms that make the system work“automatically,” in a way that we can nolonger see why and how those mechanismsare functioning. A system of self-definition,a rhetorical process, integrates itself with theneurophysiological mechanisms in the

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brain. The areas of cognition that would al-low us to see how the system works, orhow change can occur, are suppressed inorder to keep the system from actuallychanging. How this process operates is sug-gested by the term “autopoiesis,” coined byHumberto Maturana and Francisco Varela(1972), from their work in biology. Wynterargues that while we know somethingabout “self-correcting” processes from thenatural sciences, we know very little abouthow it works in humans.

In order to understand the workings ofthis process, we need to begin a new“science of human systems,” a transdisci-plinary operation that needs to have itsbase in the literary humanities because it ishere that we would be able to re-enact anepistemological break, similar to that“founding heresy of the Studia Humanita-tis,” when the discourse of Humanism andthe institutionalized system of lay learning“came into being as a counter-exertingforce” to the orthodox Absolutes of the lateMiddle Ages. This can occur by appropriat-ing a Jester-like position of “externalobserver”—that is, liminal--position thatwould be necessary to make our presentepistemology obsolete (1984: 52). Thiswould, however, require going beyond orworking outside the disciplines as a wholesince the disciplinary traditions—from thenineteenth century Western conception ofliterature as the juxtaposition of its “HighCulture” to that of anthropology’s “primi-tive”—require that literature (all art) haveno public utility and nothing “real” tocontribute to “the needs of mankind” (45-46).

The Black experience in the New Worldhas been paradigmatic of the non-Westernexperience of the native peoples. This expe-rience constituted an existence which dailycriticized the abstract consciousness ofhumanism. The popular oral culture whichthe blacks created in response to an initialnegation of this humanness, constitutes, asculture, the heresy of humanism; and that is

why black popular culture—spirituals,blues, jazz, Reggae, Afro-Cuban music, andhip hop—and its manifold variants haveconstituted the underground cultural expe-rience as subversive of the status quo West-ern culture as was Christianity to theRoman Empire. For it was in this culturethat the blacks reinvented themselves as awe that needed no other to constitute theirBeing (1976: 85).

If the rise of the demise of the feudalorder and the subsequent scientific revolu-tions were made possible by the layhumanists of the Renaissance Europe goingback to Greece and Rome in order to find analternative secular model of being human,beyond a “theocentric” conception of theorder, then…

…so too, in order to find an alter-native model of our present bio-centric and ethno-class one, ourintellectual revolution will beginby going back to the continent ofAfrica where the event of singular-ity to which I give the name of theFirst Emergence—that is, ouremergence from subordination tothe genetic programs which pre-scribe the behaviors of purely or-ganic life, and our entrance insteadinto the behavior programmingmechanisms of the Word/ofMyth—first took place. Doing so inorder to bring into existence whatAimé Césaire first proposed in1946 as a science of the Word, inwhich the study of the Word…willcondition the study of nature (ofthe neuro-physiological mecha-nisms of the brain)…(Wynter2000c)

Wynter asks, 500 years after the 1492voyage, “can an analogous premise be putforward that there are laws of culture thatshould hold in the same way for the nowhegemonic and globalized culture of the

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techno-industrial West as they have servedfor all human cultures hitherto?” (Wynter1997: 143). Further, Wynter inquires,

If, as Clifford Geertz pointed out,our contemporary culture shouldbe recognized as being but one lo-cal example ‘of the forms humanlife has locally taken, a case amongcases, a world among worlds,’ cansuch laws now be seen as being ap-plicable to this ‘local culture’ (how-ever now globalized) as to allothers? Are there laws that func-tion for our contemporary world-systemic order in as prescriptive amanner as they do for all the tradi-tional cultures that Western an-thropology, through its criticalsifting of the data provided by ‘na-tive informants,’ has so lucidlycharted, dissected, deciphered, andanalyzed and so eloquently led usto comprehend? (Wynter 1997: 143)

What Wynter is asking is that in thesame way as Newton makes his “analogyof Nature” that is always consonant withitself, could we also infer and predict froma parallel “analogy of Culture” that is alsoalways consonant with itself (Wynter 1997:144)?

If we applied the mountains of gath-ered date from the study of cultural bodiesof non-Western cultures to our own West-ernized cultural body (whose processes oftextualization still remain opaque to us, asthe severity of our global crises reveal),could we decipher the laws governing itsinstitutions and stable replication as a self-organizing and “languaging living sys-tem,” to use the term of Maturana andVarela (Wynter 1997: 144)? Wynter allowsus to pursue this further:

Contemporary physicists have en-abled us to imagine a singularity/Event by which the universe and

time came into existence together(making it meaningless to ask whatcame before the universe). Can weimagine a parallel Event/singular-ity by which, as both the Cama-roonian scholar Théophile Obengaand the Italian scholar ErnestoGrassi propose, the human speciesfirst emerges in the animal king-dom? Can we imagine this event aseffecting a rupture with the prima-cy of the genetic constraints on itsbehaviors, by substituting in theplace of the gene the “sacred signs”or governing code of the Logos, theWord? (Wynter 1997: 144)

To further the comparison, we couldsubstitute the place of time with the emer-gence of value, culture, and mind, thosethings that could only have come into exist-ence with the emergence of the capacity forlanguages, “which had empowered thebranch of the primate family who were itsbearers to move outside the geneticallyregulated order of nature (ordo naturae) andto put in its place the culturally institutedorder of words (ordo verborum)” (Wynter1997: 144).

Given the role of “defective Otherness”that is analogically imposed upon the peo-ples and countries of Africa and the blackdiaspora by the representational apparatusof our Western world-system, central towhich is that of the cinematic text, the chal-lenge to be met by the black African, and in-deed black diasporic, cinema for thetwenty-first century will be that of decon-structing the present conception of the hu-man, Man, together with its corollarydefinition as homo-oeconomicus—to de-construct both, the order of consciousnessand the mode of the aesthetic to which thisconception leads and to which we normallythink, feel and behave.

The proposed deconstruction musttake as its point of departure the FirstEmergence of fully human forms of life, as

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an Emergence that was later to be attestedto some 30,000 years ago by rock paintingsat multiple sites, including by the GrottoApollo of Namibia, “as an explosion whosedynamic moving images bear witness tothe presence of the representational appa-ratus inscripting of their ‘forms of life’, oftheir culture-specific modes … of beinghuman” (Wynter 2000a). Wynter’s hypoth-esis is that our origins must be placed inRepresentation rather than in Evolution,which would redefine the human outsidethe terms of our present hegemonic West-ern-bourgeois conception as a purely bio-economic being which pre-exists the eventof culture—this would, of course, call for anew poetics. This poetics is to be that ofhomo culturans/culturata, that is, as the auto-instituting because self-inscripting mode ofbeing, which is, in turn,

reciprocally enculturated by theconception of itself which it hascreated; the poetics, in effect, of ahybrid nature-culture, bios/logosform of life bio-evolutionarily pre-programmed to institute, inscriptitself, (by means of its invented or-igin narratives up to and includingour contemporary half-scientific,half-mythic origin narrative of Evo-lution), as this or that culture-cen-tric (and, as also, in our case, class-centric) genre of being human. (26)

Ernesto Grassi defines the linguisti-cally inscribed codes, which when neuro-physiologically implemented can aloneenable us to experience, to be conscious ofourselves as human subjects. These codesdo so by enacting correlated clusters ofmeanings/representations able to mediateand govern directly—through a bio-chemi-cal reward and punishment system of thebrain which functions in the case of purelyorganic forms of life—to motivate and de-motivate the ensemble of behaviors that areof adaptive advantage to each species. How

exactly, in the case of humans, does the me-diation by the verbal governing codes andtheir clusters of meaning, their recoding ofthe behavior-motivational biochemical andpunishment system specific to purely or-ganic forms of life, take place? What are thelaws that govern their mediating and re-coding function? To answer this, Wynterproposes that traditional (i.e., pre-Islamic,pre-Christian) cultures of Africa are the‘cultural bodies’ best able to provide uswith the insights into what the laws thatgovern this mediation, and, thereby, our be-haviors, must necessarily be. In the case ofour contemporary Western world-system,we need to decipher what must be the gov-erning code and its related, representa-tional system which now functions toinduce our present global collective ensem-ble of behaviors, and seek instead anothercode based on the analogy of culture, onethat is always consonant with itself (27-28).

V. Y. Mudimbe argues that it isprecisely in the terms of the “mirror” of theWest, and its “epistemological locus”—whatever one’s culture of origin, given wehave been educated as academics, film-makers, critical subjects, etc., even when“oppositionally so”—we have remainedwithin, and therefore unable to see theterms of our own self-representation. Sucha perspective would require, Wynterargues, the effecting of a radical discontinu-ity not only with the deepest levels of West-ern thought (which Marxism, feminism,and any nationalism has been unable todo), but with all human thought hitherto—including that of traditional African“cultural universes” within the frameworkof their own rationality. This is necessary toensure the creation of a “transculturallyapplicable mode of discontinuity” thatWynter called the “Second Emergence”(44).

Citing African scholar ThéophileObenga in 1987, Wynter argues that weneed to employ the same strategies used bythe lay intelligentsia of fifteenth-century

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Europe when they ignited their intellectualrevolution—that of Renaissance human-ism. In other words, the strategy that en-abled the then “Others” of the religiousorder to move outside the limits of theirmode of being human, beyond the then he-gemony of the religious medieval Christianworld, that required them to reconceptual-ize their past in new terms, will be the samestrategy that will be required of thepresent-day “Others” of our present or-der—and order in which Africans havebeen made to represent the “zero denomi-nator.” Just as a re-conceptualization by thelay intelligentsia of fifteenth-century Eu-rope required a return to and revalorizationof their pre-Christian Greco-Roman intel-lectual heritage in order for them to pro-pose a new conception of their past whichwould give rise to a new image of the earthand conception of the cosmos that wouldbe indispensable to the emergence andgradual development of the natural sci-ences, “a new mode of human cognition”(45), a reconceptualization by the Africanintelligentsia around the world and a re-turn to and revalorization of their Africanintellectual heritage8 would be a necessarystrategy for effecting a move outside ourpresent mode of being human. Obenga pro-poses that…

…if the intelligentsia of Africa areto bring an end to the ongoing ago-ny of the continent, they will alsofind themselves compelled to re-conceptualize the history of Africa,as outside the terms of our present‘epistemological locus’ and its ‘cul-tural universe’; and to do so by go-ing back to the First Emergence ofthe human out of the animal king-dom, and then to the full floweringof the consequence of this First

Emergence in the Egypt of the Pha-raohs. (Wynter 2000a: 45)

However, challenges Wynter, this willhave to b4e done differently than that of the“great civilization” syndrome of contempo-rary bourgeois scholarship. Instead, writesWynter, we need to instead begin systemat-ically emphasizing the earlier and “mostdazzling” and “most extraordinary” phaseof this history—in which the history ofAfrica converges with the origin of thehuman (See also Joyce 2005; Joyce 2006).

We have our work cut out for us, this isfor sure. Wynter’s call for us to completethe Fanonian rupture seems an impossibletask from our present visionary scope—stuck in the disciplines. However, itremains only the most practical job at hand.

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