Review Essay: The Underlife of the Dialectic: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoeisis and Epistemic Rupture

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations.

The Underlife of the Dialectic: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoeisis and Epistemic Rupture ¹

It is difficult to rehearse the immense contributions of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter to radical anticolonial thought. I am not inclined to lament Wynter’s unattributed contributions to political theory, since much of what motivates such an inclusion is a desire to address the pitfalls of normative disciplines so that their presence and lifespan is made more durable. It is not necessarily the exclusion of Wynter and other “‘tremulous” ² thinkers that impoverishes political theory as a site of contemplation, but rather it is the desire to incorporate such thinkers and delink them from their own intellectual lineages—a harvesting of brilliant Black minds—so that the discipline might live to see another day. This would be contrary to Wynter’s commitment to discarding disciplinary allegiance(s). It would also be contrary to her insistence that the seductions of disciplinarity was one of the mechanisms that led to the betrayal of the initial “transgressive intentions” of the Black Arts Movement and Black studies, and the pitfalls of mistaking such disciplinary recognition for the adoption of a new governing text and cognitive schema in pursuit of a referent-we formation—what she called, “mistaking the map for the territory.” ³ I am, however, inclined to discuss how Wynter has much to offer those of us thinking about the histories of concepts, and how her methodological imaginativeness offers an example of how to abandon discipline and, in so doing, find our way toward what she calls an “ecumenical politics of the propter nos homines.” This is where I will begin in my discussion of the importance of Sylvia Wynter’s heretic methodologies and undisciplining of our core epistemic assumptions inside of and against normative disciplinary enclosures. The central claim in this essay is the following: the works of Sylvia Wynter offer us a crucial blueprint for thinking about emancipation epistemologically and methodologically as well. This is because Wynter’s work(s) retain an understanding that there is in fact a way out of our most dire predicaments, without falling into the trap of historical inevitability that undergirds dialectical thinking. Additionally, Wynter’s work(s) offers us a way to understand how negations are not simply the constitutive other to a particular category or thesis, but rather the spring-well from which such an emancipatory project might emerge in the first instance. In particular, I consider how her works offer myself and others a way to betray the dialectic, teleological time, and the problem of inevitability in certain methodological approaches in political theory.

St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott wrote that the poets of the New World had a “contempt for historical time.” ⁴ So much about historical time, which also justifies the poet’s contempt, is enclosed by its attempts to regulate or routinize life itself. I am reminded of Derrida’s assertion that the invention of clock time is one and the same as the invention of the death penalty itself. ⁵ Yes, political theory has a time “problem.” Many of us engaged with Marxist and Marxian paradigms, in particular, have been enclosed by our own theologization of the dialectic, and, even in that enclosure, the dialectic is burdened not only by linearity but by an additional problem in my estimation: the manner in which dialectics takes inevitability for granted.

This frustration with linear time is a sentiment that is foregrounded by Dr. Martin Luther King in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he writes:

It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. ⁶

What Dr. King identified in this incredible passage is a problem with liberal narratives concerning progress and emancipation: that the problem itself (be it racial slavery, segregation, militarism, etc.) is not inevitable, but rather a product of our interventions in historical processes. The same goes for any possible antidote. Nothing at all in our understanding of the world, and its vast and varied histories, is inevitable.

Political theory’s other time problem is that of beginnings. One might say the discipline’s preoccupation (if at all) with beginnings is steeped in what Jacques Derrida called a desire to be “the first to see, and the first to remind.” ⁷ Because of this desire, beginnings are, ironically, frozen in time and not understood as elastic and requiring rearticulation depending on the historical moment. The result is the conviction that concepts are either historical in a way that suspends them in their moment of inauguration, or that they should be seen as transhistorical. Unburdening ourselves of such theological assumptions of beginnings as fixed might open up a different pathway for understanding the unfolding of concepts over time, and permit space for not only multiple beginnings but also for a recognition that we can intervene in our own categorical assumptions by creatively altering our representation of these beginnings, of these particular conceptual histories and semio-linguistic tendencies in political theory and other disciplines as well.

When one is committed to thinking about Black life in the Americas, the search for empirical beginnings is often a labyrinth that does not concede historicity to standard historical time or to the dialectic (when considering how contradictions emerge). Dionne Brand writes, “too much has been made of origins . . . if I reject origins, I have also to reject its mirror.” ⁸ Derek Walcott echoes this, writing that “we make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.” ⁹ For Wynter, the heartbreak that accompanies these attempts to fix our origins is supplanted by a desire to understand and ultimately transform the manner in which we represent (or tell stories about) those origins. In doing so, she, at once, recognizes that the desire or pursuit of empirical origins (be it for concepts or other things) is always already a failure, while also recognizing that there is something crucial about the narration of such origins that offers alternate sightlines for our current predicament(s) vis-a-vis our governing text(s) and epistemic codings. Wynter’s thinking and writing has taught me, as a somewhat “wayward” ¹⁰ political theorist, that not only do concepts have histories, but those histories are initiated and promulgated by origin stories. Her monumental essay, The Ceremony Found, is crucial in this regard and teaches us that, not unlike our physical bodies, no concept precedes the story we tell about it. She writes, “we humans cannot pre-exist our cosmogonies or origin myths/stories/narratives any more than a bee, at the purely biological level of life, can pre-exist its beehive.” ¹¹

Where dialectics offer us a beginning that presumes the presence of a category or concept, which is then negated by the inevitable appearance of its antithesis and contradiction(s), Wynter’s inspired methodological intervention of autopoeisis offers us a way to consider what might happen when—as is the case with Black peoples in the Americas—the starting point is a negation, such as the Middle Passage? Could something spring forth from a negation? Following this provocation, I will offer some thoughts on how Wynter’s conceptualization of autopoeisis offers a way for us to distend the dialectic—stretch it to the point of swelling, expand it to its outermost limit, and offer a way—for those of us working in and alongside political theory to recognize that our storytelling capacities are our most important reservoir for breaking, heretically, from our epistemological assumptions and possessive attachments to categories that grow more anemic as we “drift . . . towards unparalleled catastrophe.” ¹²

Returning to my question: What happens to a dialectical reading of a category, concept, or history when the starting point is a negation? Can something spring forth from a negation and, if so, how? To respond to this question I will offer a glimpse into Wynter’s conceptualization of autopoeisis as a way to trouble the overdetermined and almost theological attachment to dialectics in Marxian political theory and philosophy (as well as its companion paradigms). Before doing so, I offer this passage from Wynter’s unpublished monograph, Black Metamorphosis, to first respond to the question of whether the presence of a category or concept could spring forth from a negation. She writes:

The African who sailed across the Middle Passage suffered a sea change. Transformed into a negro, a commodity, his human response was to negate this transformation. That culture that he was to create would spring out of the imperative of this negation. It was imperative, this dynamic that set in motion the process by which the Negro became at one and the same time, the neo-native of the New World. ¹³

Black Metamorphosis was written in the 1970s and is the hinge between Wynter’s earlier works of cultural criticism and literary studies and her later works on New Studia, the Third Event, and cognitive science(s). ¹⁴ What springs forth from the negation also travels along a historical schema, but in a different manner than the dialectic would understand it. Indeed, in Black Metamorphosis, Wynter writes that it is in the transplantation of Africans in the New World that the “dialectic begins.” ¹⁵ In her later works, particularly after her relocation to the United States and her interlocutions with various strands of Black studies scholarship, she expands on this movement of our culture-specific modes of relation and cognition through history and slowly releases the dialectic in favor of her articulations of autopoeisis. I return to “The Ceremony Found,” where she draws on the works of Chilean evolutionary biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who used the framework of autopoeisis to describe the manner in which living creatures are bound in a system that generates and reproduces itself through itself, ¹⁶ in a manner that is separate from its environment but conditioned by it nonetheless. In this way, living organisms reproduce at a systems level until environmental disruptions are triggered at the level of the structure (or environment), which then transforms the physical and alchemical expressions of the system (without destroying it). ¹⁷

In a remarkable display of antidisciplinary textuality, Wynter has extended Maturana and Varela’s conceptualization of autopoiesis to our current predicament(s)—that of man’s overrepresentation and our need to delink Black life from its presence as the archipelago of its “human otherness.” ¹⁸ Wynter also offers us a way of considering how our human existence developed via ruptures caused by heretic statements ¹⁹ (the Copernican, Darwinian, and the unfinished Fanonian/sociogenic statement). The third, and unfinished, event prompted by Fanon’s declaration of sociogeny is, according to Wynter, the key to our recognition that our bioevolution was co-constituted alongside our emergent faculties of language via “laws of auto-institution,” or autopoeisis, ²⁰ in which the organization (our humanness) self-institutes lawlikely (i.e., in a manner that governs the text it imposes on human life) and changes in its alchemical properties when a rupture is introduced at the level of the environment/structure (i.e., our descriptive statement). ²¹

But what does autopoeisis do for our thinking? Wynter argues that the appearance of a rupture (or the antithesis/negation in dialectical terms) is not a fundamental part of the organization but brought about by changes in the structure (environment), which then alchemically impacts the natural progression of reproduction, one that is lawlikely. If we are persuaded by this account of structural change, then it is paramount that we heed Wynter’s assertion that these ruptures are brought about by heretic statements, which initiate a new origin story and clear the path for a new descriptive statement concerning our humanness. This would mean that the next possible rupture on our horizon—the Third Event, ²² initiated (yet not completed) by Fanon’s sociogenic statement—will not be brought about by the inevitable and dialectical appearance of an antithetical/heretic statement but by poeisis in another sense: the heretic offerings of poetry, expression, culture, or the very same things that spring forth from the negation of the Middle Passage.

Yes, we have a knowledge system that implements and rearticulates itself lawlikely over and over—but the fact that we can betray it (as in, identify and call attention to it) means we can also betray it (that is, violate its confidence in itself as a system and ultimately break with it). Wynter continues, writing that:

There is always something else besides the dominant cultural logic going on, and that something else is constituted another—but also transgressive—ground of understanding . . . not simply a sociodemographic location but the site of both a form of life and of possible critical intervention. ²³

Yes, ruptures in our thinking happen, but not because it is the natural or assumed progression of history. These breaks occur when we assert a radical perspective, offer heretic statements, harness poetry and the Word ²⁴ to throw our assumptive manner of historical thinking into crisis. This is the underlife of the dialectic, “subterraneanly subversive to its surface reality.” ²⁵ It bears repeating, once again, that Sylvia Wynter is not a political theorist, and she is not invested in extending the lifespan of any academic discipline. The growing interest in her work(s) in political theory must be concomitant with a recognition that a true internalization of her paradigms would mean the end of the discipline (and indeed, all disciplines) altogether. Until that moment, we can begin with unburdening ourselves of one theoretical pillar that has normalized a conceit in our time-sense: that of the dialectic’s naturalization of inevitability, which obstructs our ability to endeavor that great “leap” ²⁶ that might lead us into a different time, and onto a different clock.