Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter (1928–) is a Jamaican philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose work, developed across many decades and a wide range of disciplinary registers, articulates one of the most sustained critiques of the modern Western subject available in contemporary thought. Born in Cuba and raised in Jamaica, she trained at King’s College London, worked as a dancer with Boscoe Holder’s company, wrote novels and plays for the BBC’s Caribbean Service, and entered academic life through Spanish literature and Caribbean cultural theory before settling at Stanford, where she taught for decades.

¶Core ideas

• The overrepresentation of Man. Wynter’s foundational thesis is that the modern Western secular subject — Man, in two successive overrepresentations (Man1 of the rational political subject, Man2 of the bio-economic subject) — has been mistaken for the human itself, with the consequence that other genres of the human are positioned as the constitutive outside Man requires.

• Genres of the human. Wynter argues that the human is constituted not just biologically but as a genre, a culturally-symbolically produced form of being. Different genres of the human — Indigenous, African, Asian, peasant, women — were not subhuman precursors of Man but other actualizations of human-being that the overrepresentation suppresses.

• The sociogenic principle. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Wynter develops the claim that the human is constituted by phylogeny (species), ontogeny (individual development), and sociogeny (the symbolic-cultural order in which subjects are formed). Sociogeny is not supplemental to the biological; it is part of what humans are, and any science of the human that ignores it is failing at its object.

• The demand for a new descriptive statement. Wynter’s project is not the inclusion of additional figures within Man’s frame but the construction of a different frame — a new descriptive statement of the human, “after Man.” This is theoretical, political, and scientific work simultaneously, and Wynter does not believe the three are separable.

¶Significance for cybernetic postliberalism

Wynter is a foundational upstream source for the framework. The genring operations cybernetic postliberalism analyzes presuppose Wynter’s overrepresentation as their structural condition. The framework’s account of californication is, in one register, the account of how the overrepresentation of Man is reproduced affectively under platformal-energetic conditions. The framework draws on Wynter most explicitly in its analyses of the subject-formations the apparatus produces and of the colonial-racial register that runs through every other register.

¶Key texts

• “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument” (2003)
• “1492: A New World View” (1995)
• “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory” (2006)
• “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter” (with David Scott, Small Axe 8, 2000)
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Katherine McKittrick, ed., 2015)