Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis?

 Towards the Autopoetic 
Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto 

The  Greek  roots  and  related  roots  of  cosmogony  are  genos/genea  (race,  family,  genealogy, 
genesis),  gonos  (offspring),  kosmos  (cosmos,  universe).  Thus,  cosmo­logia,  or  cosmology,  the 
study  of  the  cosmos,  and  kosmos  and  gonos  or  cosmogony.  In  our  creation  myths  we  tell  the 
world, or at least ourselves, who we are. [David Leeming, Myth: A Biography of Belief, 2002]. 

A U.N. climate panel is set to release a smoking­gun report soon that confirms human activities 
are to blame for global warming and that predicts catastrophic global disruptions by 2100. [Time, 
“A Warming Report: Scientists to show new evidence”, January, 2007 Emphasis added]. 

But who, we? [Jacques Derrida. “The Ends of Man” in Margins of Philosophy, 1982] 1 

My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem; but 
that  problem  was,  as  I  continue  to  think,  the  central  problem  of  the  greatest  of  the  world’s 
democracies  and  so  the  Problem  of  the  future  of  the  world.  [W.E.B.  DuBois,  “Dusk  of  Dawn”, 
cited by Denise Ferreira da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race, 2007; Emphasis added]. 

What  if  we  did  not  know  where  we  are  and  who  we  are?  What  if  all  previous  answers  to  the 
question of who we are were merely based upon the application of an answer given long ago, an 
answer that does not correspond to what is perhaps asked in the question now touched upon of who 
we are? For we do not now ask about ourselves ‘as human,’ assuming we understand this name in 
its  traditional  meaning.  According  to  this  meaning,  man  is  a  kind  of  ‘organism’  (animal),  that 
exists among others on the inhabited earth and in the universe. We know this organism, especially 
since we ourselves are of this type. There is a whole contingent of ‘sciences’ that give information 
about  this  organism—named  man—and  we  collect  them  together  under  the  name 
‘anthropology.’[Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 1981/1998; Emphasis added]. 

What  is  by  common  consent  called  the  human  sciences  have  their  own  drama…[A]ll  these 
discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, 
absolutely nothing—and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to 
imagine  that  he  is  different  from  the  other  “animals.”…This  amounts  to  nothing  more  nor  less 
than man’s surrender….Having reflected on that, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I turn 
my back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere [biological] mechanism….And 
truly what is to be done is to set man free. [Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 1952/1967]. 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Almost a quarter of a century ago, twenty­three years ago to be exact, I wrote an essay 

for a special issue of boundary 2,  edited and introduced by William Spanos—“On Humanism 

and the University, 1: The Discourse on Humanism” 2 . Both Spanos’ far­reaching introduction, as 

well as the essays of individual contributors, can be seen from hindsight, to have been written in 

1 
This quote was not included in the draft sent on 6/7/07. 
2 
[Vol. XII, no. 3/Vol XIII no. 1. Spring/Fall 1984]

­ 1 ­ 
the lingering afterglow of what had been the dazzling, if brief, cognitively emancipatory hiatus, 

made possible by the synergy of the multiple forms of spontaneously erupting uprisings of 

“Otherness”, that had emerged in the wake of the social uprisings  during the 1950’s and 60’s in 

the US. 

However, these movements internal both to the United States and to its fellow Western­ 

European, and Euro­American nation­states, were themselves only a part of the more 

comprehensive planetarily extended series of anti­colonial struggles, which, initiated before the 

Second World War, were to gather momentum only in the wake of the ending of that war.  These 

as struggles directed against the then still imperial nation­states of Great Britain, France, the 

Netherlands and Portugal, all of whom had between them, ensured that by “1900 more than half 

of Asia, 98% of Africa” (as well as most of the ex­slave plantation archipelago islands of the 

Caribbean), were “under direct colonial rule”. Consequently if from the mid­nineteenth century 

until 1920, “more than 450 million people in Africa and Asia” had been reduced to being 

“native” subjects of the West, their reduction to secondary inferiorized Human Other status, had 

been effected at the same time as “some 8.6 million square miles in Africa and Asia had been 

acquired by Europeans” (as well as by a post­1898 U.S.) “in the name of progress”; 3  of Manifest 

Destiny, its biocosmogonic/bioevolutionary and therefore now purely secular behavior­ 

necessitating “opium of the people” belief system. 4 

It was in the dynamic context of the vast self­mobilizing processes of the Anti­Colonial 

Revolution 5  as directed against the empirical effects of “this gigantic thing called colonial” 6 , that 

not only had the emergence of a multiplicity of “forms of otherness in a continuum of being” 

3 
(Westad, 2005 
4 
J.F. Danielli, citing Marx in his seminal 1980 paper, “Altruism and the Internal Reward System, or ‘The Opium of 
the People’” in Journal of Social and Biological Sciences, vol. 3 no. 2 (April 1980). 
5 
(Westad, 2005) 
6 
(Lamming, 1953)

­ 2 ­ 
extended across the globe, but that the specific local form of this which had erupted in my own 

island of Jamaica beginning in the late Thirties, had cut across my childhood and early 

adolescence; determining what was to be the trajectory of my life, and work. 

However, it was only to be in the wake of the Black American students’ Fifties/Sixties 

struggle, in the U.S., for the establishment of Black Studies in the U.S. University system, that I 

had been provided with a Black perspective of Otherness from which to explore the issue of 

race; and with it the why of the West’s institutionalization, since the nineteenth century of the 

bio­climatically 7  phenotypically differentiated Color Line, one drawn between in W.E.B. 

DuBois’ terms “the lighter and the darker races” of humankind, 8  and at its most extreme 

between White and Black.  That is, as a line made both conceptually and institutionally 

unbreachable, with this thereby giving rise to an issue, which as Aimé Césaire of the 

Francophone Caribbean island of Martinique pointed out in his letter of resignation from the 

French Communist Party, in 1956, was one whose historically instituted singularity, that to 

which we gave the name of race, could not be made into a subset of any other issue, but had 

instead to be theoretically identified and fought in its own terms (Césaire, 1956). 

It was the institutionalized perspective of Black Studies in the terms of its original 

Fifties/Sixties intentionality, which by making the exploration of this issue in its own specific 

Otherness terms possible, had led to my own contribution to the still memorable “Discourse on 

Humanism” volume. The very  topic  of the volume, as conceptualized by its editor, William 

Spanos, provided a collective conceptual framework, that of the critique of mainstream 

academia’s legitimating discourse of humanism; yet as a discourse whose, role from its then 

emancipatory, secularizing Renaissance Origins had paradoxically, also given rise to the issue of 

7 
Arsuaga, 2002 
8 
DuBois, 1903/2003

­ 3 ­ 
“race” when seen its own terms. That is, to its discursive negation of co­humaness, on the basis 

of its projection of the Aristotelian concept of by­nature difference 9  between its own “Western 

humanity” as the ostensible embodiment of the normalcy of being secularly human, 10  and all 

other groups, who were now to be, therefore, logically classified and institutionalized as that 

“humanity’s” Others, i.e., as homunculi (or little men).  The then title of my essay, as a projected 

negation of that “by­nature difference” form of negation, was to also provide, its Sartrean 

“fundamental project”. The title was therefore taken from the very fine poem, “Speaking of 

Poetry”, by John Peale Bishop, a poem in which he makes use of the tragically foiled outcome of 

the love relation and brief marriage between Shakespeare’s Desdemona and Othello, to get at the 

heart of the historically chartered and institutionalized, U.S. and overall Western dilemma, its 

both discursively and empirically institutionalized Color and correlated Rich/Poor (now also 

developed/under­developed, North/South) Lines/Divides, and the hitherto non­findability of a 

ceremony to breach them. 

In his editorial introduction to the 1984 volume, William Spanos, after placing my essay 

in the section entitled The Question of Origins, summarized what the essay attempted to do. He 

noted that it provided “a revisionary interpretation that traces the historical itinerary of the Studia 

Humanitatis from its profoundly disturbing origins in the Renaissance to its reconstitution as a 

9 
The Spanish monarchy was to legitimate its claim to the ownership of the vast expropriated territories of the 
Americas and the Caribbean on the basis of this Aristotelian derived concept of a “by­nature difference” between 
Spaniards/Europeans as Aristotle’s natural masters on the one hand, and the indigenous peoples on the Americas 
(classified generically as Indians), as natural slaves. This politico­juridical claim to legitimacy was intended by the 
monarchy to displace and replace the 1493 Papal Bull which had legitimated its claim in religious­Christian terms as 
that of the right of all Christian kings to expropriate the lands of non­Christian kings, since these lands were terra 
nullius (the lands of no­one). In parallel humanist terms, transported Black African slaves, whose slave and trade 
goods status had been initially religiously legitimated in terms of the Biblical Origin­Story of the curse laid by Noah 
upon his son Ham’s descendants, to be the slaves of his brother’s descendants, were also classified as “civil slaves,” 
whose “just” slave status, was also due to their by­nature difference—i.e., they were “disobedient by­nature”. See 
for this Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, and Jacob Pandian’s “Anthropology” and The Western 
Tradition: Towards an Authentic Anthropology (Prospect Heights, IL, Waveland Press, 1985). 
10

­ 4 ­ 
disabling orthodoxy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” And that it also proposed “the 

need to retrieve its heretical essence as rhetoric for the post­modern historical conjuncture.” 

If we add to the word postmodern, which is itself still an intra­Western conception, the 

word post­colonial, which is now necessarily an intra­human one, the essay—i.e., “The 

Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism”—looked at from hindsight, can indeed be seen to 

have put forward some major insights with respect to both aspects of the above project. In my 

attempt, however, to in effect, reenact Renaissance humanism’s original heresy—as it had been 

effected in a situation specific to the ethno­phenotypic peoples of the late medieval Latin­ 

Christian (and thereby Western) Europe, and so enacted by their then lay or secular 

intelligentsia’s “back to the pagan Greco­Roman classics,”  invention of revalorized Man, as a 

now entirely separate concept/self­conception from that of the post­Adamic “fallen natural man” 

instituting of the medieval Christian subject, my own heresy had remained incomplete. In that, 

what revalorized Man’s (in its first form as homo politicus or political ruler/subject of the state) 

new Studia Humanitatis had then been enacting/elaborating, was an epochally new, because 

secularizing 11  (i.e., degodded, desupernaturalized) answer to the question of who we are. 12  Doing 

so, over against what had now come to be, by then, the ossified Scholastic orthodoxy of 

medieval Latin­Christian Europe’s order­instituting/order legitimating theologically absolute 

answer to the same question. For me to reenact this heresy completely, therefore, and no longer 

in intra­Western terms, but, instead, in the terms of our now contemporary planetarily extended, 

and thereby intra­human situation, one brought into existence over the past 500 years precisely 

11 
The term secular is one specific to Christian theology, as a term of Otherness, referring to the post­Adamic fallen 
world of Time. Degodding/desupernaturalizing are therefore analogical terms that are non­Christian­centric and 
thereby universally applicable. 
12 
Epigraph 5

­ 5 ­ 
on the basis of Renaissance humanism’s initially enacted heresy,  my essay can be seen in this 

respect to have, in the end, failed. Failed in the terms of its title, to “find the ceremony.” 

This  following Intervention sets out to retrieve that failure by means of  the  elaboration 

of the proposal that the 1984 essay’s Ceremony­not­quite­found­then, is now the dialectically 

reenacted heresy of the Ceremony’s Found’s now narcissistically revalorizing 13 —this therefore 

outside the limits of Renaissance humanism’s Man, in its now second reinvented, and 

transumptively inverted, biologically absolute, 14  homo oeconomicus form, this form itself in its 

now post­Sixties, post­1989, planetarily institutionalized, neo­Liberal fundamentalist expression. 

In effect, therefore, its (i.e., the Ceremony Found’s) ecumenically human, because Fanonianly 

hybrid, and as such, epochally new and emancipatory answer to the question of who we are. 15  As 

an answer, therefore, able to separate the being of being human (in its hitherto innumerable local 

particularities) from our present globally hegemonic, and homogenized conception of being 

human in the now purely secular, because biocentric 16  terms, of Man, in its now second 

reinvented, since the nineteenth century, concept/self­conception as Liberal/Neo­Liberal 

humanism’s homo oeconomicus, in the reoccupied place of the Renaissance “lay intelligentsia’s” 

original invention of Man in civic humanist terms as homo politicus). Yet like the latter, also 

now rhetorically discursively, and institutionally over­represented and enacted as if its 

13 
See Epigraph 6 
14 
Harold Bloom points out that the rhetorical figure of “transumption or metalepsis is the legitimate and traditional 
name in rhetoric for what John Hollander calls the “figure of interpretive allusion.” Transumptive chains point 
toward the “diachronic concept of rhetoric, in which the irony of one age can become the ennobled synecdoche of 
another. “Whilst transumptive chains abound, certain central linkages…vital to tradition, and the crossings over in 
and between traditions, keep to the continuity going by means of its retroping of earlier tropes.” (H. Bloom, The 
Breaking of the Vessels, Chicago, 1982; emphasis added). 
15 
Epigraph 5 and 6 
16 
Biocentric terms in the transumptively inverted reoccupied place of medieval Latin­Christian Europe’s theocentric 
ones that had been the a priori ground of its pre­Renaissance, theo­Scholastic order of knowledge.

­ 6 ­ 
prototype’s member class of being human were isomorphic with the class of classes 17  of our 

species being; its referent “we” thereby also isomorphic with the referent” “we…of the horizon 

of humanity.” 18  It is against this background, that I write this manifesto of the Ceremony Found. 

The Intervention as The Manifesto of the Ceremony Found 

A PREAMBLE 

The first part of the title—Human as noun? Or being human as praxis? takes its point of 

departure from Judith Butler’s seminal insight put forward from two of the perspectives of 

Otherness which emerged out of the Fifties/Sixties uprisings.  Her insight that once we dispense 

with the priority of man and woman as abiding substances, it is no longer possible to subordinate 

dissonant gendered features—(such as a man with feminine features who nevertheless retains 

“the integrity of his gender”—as “so many accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is 

fundamentally intact.” This therefore means that “if the notion of an abiding substance is a 

fictive construction,” one that is therefore “produced through the compulsory ordering of 

attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of 

17 
See for this, the formulation made by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell with respect to the difference that exists 
between a class of classes (i.e., “machinery”) and a mere member of the class (i.e., tractors, cranes, etc.). In this 
context, the rhetorical strategy, that cited earlier, and as defined by Paolo Valesio as that of the topos of iconicity, by 
means of which the West’s humanist invention of the concept of Man, at the same time over­represented that 
concept as if its member class were a universally applicable one. It is this over­representation that has enabled the 
West to institute its world­systemic domination on the basis of its conceptual and empirical globally institutionalized 
absolutization of its own genre­specific member class as if it were isomorphic with the class of classes definition(s) 
of our species being. Nevertheless, the West itself was to be no less entrapped by the Janus­faces consequences of 
this topos of iconicity over­representation, than the rest of us, whom it was to make into Human Other status­ 
functions enacting (if post­colonially, and post­Sixties, with our own mimetic intellectual complicity) of this over­ 
representation; one as indispensable to Man in its specifically bourgeois ruling­class (or ethno­class) reinvented 
form, as it had been to that, (in its then eighteenth century civic humanist, and landed gentry ruling group form) of 
homo politicus, which its new prototype and correlated New Studia’s bio­episteme was to displace/replace. 
18 
See for this, as well as for Epigraph 3, Jacques Derrida’s, brilliant calling in question of this over­representation of 
the West’s invented concept of Man, in his “The Ends of Man,” a 1968 Conference talk published in The Margins of 
Philosophy 1982.

­ 7 ­ 
man and woman as noun, is called into question, seeing that such dissonant features resist 

assimilation into the ready: made framework of primary nouns and subordinate adjectives.” 

Furthermore, if “these substances are nothing other than the coherences contingently created 

through the regulation of attributes, “it would therefore suggest that “the ontology of substances 

itself is…an artificial effect.” Nevertheless, given the imperative nature of the production of the 

ontology of substance as an “artificial effect” this would ensure that while “[i]n this sense gender 

is not a noun, neither can it be “a set of free­floating attributes.” This, given that the ”substantive 

effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender 

coherence.” As a result, while gender roles (of men as well as of women) prove to be 

performatively enacted, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be”—and, one can add 

here also subjectively experienced to be—“this is only made possible by the “regulatory practices 

of gender coercion” as effected within the terms of  the “inherited [Western] discourse of the 

metaphysics of substance”.  With the result that while “gender is always a doing” it is “not a 

doing by a subject who might be said to pre­exist the deed” (Butler 1990, 24­25). 

My own leap­frogging hypothesis here, put forward within the terms of the Ceremony 

Found’s new answer, is that Butler’s illuminating insight with respect to gender roles is true in 

other ways. First, it is true with respect to a range of other, also performatively enacted roles, and 

therefore of their respective ontologies of class substance, sexual orientation substance, and of 

course and centrally so, of the closely correlated ontologies of “race substance,” and as well, of 

the also projected to be genetic non­homogeneity of “Rich (eugenic)/Poor (dysgenic) 

substance” 19 —with Darwin advising in this respect, the non­procreation of the Poor, who 

because, by implication, naturally dysselected are not able to “avoid abject poverty for their 

children.” While at a world systemic level, the also ostensible ontology of 
19 
(Darwin 1871, 1981, p.

­ 8 ­ 
developed/underdeveloped substance,” correlated with that of the also projected 

eugenic/dysgenic non­homogeneity of substance between we who inhabit the planet of the 

suburbs/exurbs on the one hand, and those who inhabit the planet of the slums 20  on the other. 

Finally, however, it is true, only because of the larger truth of which all such performatively 

enacted roles are mutually reinforcing functions. The truth, that is, of our being human as praxis. 

This seeing firstly, and in general, that if as David Leeming points out, it is by means of our 

cosmogonies, or origin­stories that we tell the world, or ourselves who we are, 21  we are able to 

do so only because it is also by means of them, that we are enabled to behaviorally auto­institute 

and thereby performatively enact ourselves as the who of the we (or fictive mode of kind) that we 

are. Specifically, therefore the truth of our being human in the now planetary homogenized terms 

of the West’s Man, in its second, biohumanist homo oeconomicus reinvented concept/self­ 

conception, thereby within the terms of its now purely secular if no less also fictively 

constructed, (by means of the socio­technology of our humanly invented, then retroactively 

projected origin­stories or cosmogonies 22  and thereby autopoetically instituted, subjectively 

experienced and performatively enacted genres 23  of being hybridly, human. This in the terms of 

20 
Davis 
21
22 
In our case, the “part­science, part­myth” cosmogony of Evolution as elaborated in Darwin’s 1871 The Descent 
of Man. 
23 
The term genre which derives from the same root etymology, as gender, meaning kind, is here being used to 
denote, different, always auto­poetically instituted and fictively constructed kinds of being¸ and thereby of 
performatively enacting oneself as optimally a “good man or woman of one’s kind,” in genre­coherent terms; of 
which gender coherence is itself always and everywhere a function. Specifically, therefore, the genre of being 
human, in the terms of Man’s second reinvention, as biohumanist homo oeconomicus (as a reinvention initiated in 
the later eighteenth century by Adam Smith and the other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, even if one not 
fully actualized until the nineteenth), as a genre whose new ruling class status’ code of symbolic life or “economy of 
greatness” [Adam Smith, ]) was now the ownership and market accumulation of the mobile property of capital, 
projected as the then “metaphysical source of life” (Godelier, 1999) in the reoccupied place of the earlier pre­ 
bourgeois ruling group, the landed gentry, together with its slave­owning plantocracy in the Caribbean; for whom 
the oeconomy of Greatness (as the incarnation of Man in its still first phase as homo politicus of the State), had been 
the ownership of immobile freehold landed property, pari passu, in the Caribbean, with the ownership of an also 
fixed labor stock, that of “Negro” slaves. See for this, J.A.G. Pocock, “Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo­ 
American Thought,” in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. (Chicago and 
London, The University of Chicago Press, 1989). See also, Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift. 1999.

­ 9 ­ 
Frantz Fanon’s 1952 epochal redefinition of the human from the only perspective from which 

such redefinition was to be generable; that of the perspective of Ultimate Otherness (to being 

human in the terms both of the West’s first invented and second re­invented concepts of Man), 

this Ultimate Otherness as one existentially lived by all descendants of the ex­slave archipelago 

of the post­1492 Western New World. This “ultimate otherness” as constructed from the early 

sixteenth century onwards as the founding underside of what was to become our now planetarily 

extended, and purely secular Western and westernized world system.  One that would give rise to 

the existential experience of a WEB DuBois, a half a century earlier, when he had recognized 

that, in order to realize himself as fully American, and therefore ostensibly as fully human, he 

had—although being in class terms, a normative highly educated professional, and as such, a 

proper Western bourgeois self—to, at the same time, also subjectively experience himself as a 

Negro; and therefore to experience this latter, as a dissonant anomaly to being human in the 

terms of his normative self, to experience himself, thereby as a Problem 24 .  In other words, to 

normally be reflexly aversive not only to his own phenotypic/physiognomy, but also to the 

alternative autopoetic field (or “culture” in Western terminology) of his own people, as well as to 

its quite other “sorrow songs,” its lumpen poetics of the blues, of jazz. A world therefore as 

proscribed then, as was to be, “the rotting whitewashed house” described by David Bradley, 

several decades after, that was the Black Culture Center placed on the nether edge of the 

campus 25 ).  As an “underside” reality, therefore, that would have to be subjectively experienced 

by him, as, the chose maudite, central to the “order of sacrifice and/or of language” 26  instituting 

of the normalcy of his proper self on the genre­specific model of that of the Western bourgeoisie. 

24 
Epigraph 4 
25 
Bradley, 1982, as cited in the original 1984 Ceremony essay 
26 
Julia Kristeva, in “Women's Time” in Signs, 7. no1.

­ 10 ­ 
 Parallely, for Fanon as both a French imperial “native” subject, growing up in the island 

of Martinique, and thereby existentially, like all his peers, experiencing it as “normal to be anti­ 

Negro—Don’t behave like a nigger!”, his mother would admonish him when growing up—but 

also as a “specific intellectual” in Foucault’s sense of the term, who was also a psychiatrist at the 

beginning of his vocation, and thereby having to prepare himself to deal with the profound self 

alienation both of his black patients as well as of other to be colonized native patients, as he 

would later have to do with those of a then still settler­colonial French Algeria. At the same time 

however, his own experience of the anomaly of being human, in White and Western bourgeois 

terms, while also a “Negro”  was reinforced on the basis of his reading of a religious/cum 

ethnographic study of a group of Black Africans 27 , who had still managed to remain auto­ 

centered, (that is, with their society still then closed off from the homogenizing “flood of 

[Western] civilization,” thereby with their still being able to experience themselves as being 

human,  within the terms of their own autopoesis, that is their own still genre­specific mode of 

mythically or cosmogonically chartered auto­institution). As Fanon had noted, because the latter, 

growing up, exactly like a French bourgeois child, as a normal child at the center of his own 

family, of his own world, although of the same biogenetic phenotype, which would have led to 

his being classified by the West, as a “Negro” or as Negroid, 28  could never subjectively 

experience himself as a “negro”; thereby, as an anomaly to being human, as he and his peers, and 

his patients because all now incorporated into Western civilization, and therefore into its 

chartering cosmogonic complex, had had to continue to so experience themselves.  This 

comparison had then helped Fanon to make an epistemological break, one analogous to 

27 
Father Trilles, L’ame de Pygmée d’ Afrique as cited by Fanon, in the chapter 6, entitled “The Negro and 
Psychopathology” in Black Skin, With Masks Trans. C.L. Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 
28 
See for this Luca Cavallo­Sforza, et al. The History and Geography of the Human Genome. (Princeton, New 
Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994).

­ 11 ­ 
Copernicus’ earlier and also profoundly counter­intuitive statement that “although it may seem 

absurd, the earth also moves”(that is, that it was not, as in the Christian Creation story, divinely 

condemned to be fixed and motionless at the center of the universe, as its dregs, as the abode of 

the post­Adamic Fallen natural man, being thereby having to be of a corruptible physical 

substance, non­homogenous with the incorruptible physical substances of the always 

harmoniously moving bodies of the celestial realm)—and to propose the following in his book 

Black Skin/White Masks. 

Firstly that the self­alienation experienced by himself and his Black and other “colored” 

patients (i.e., those on the negative side of the Color Line), could in no way be “an individual 

problem.” Rather it was clear, that over against Freud’s and indeed the human sciences',  as a 

whole, purely ontogenetic perspective, that is their purely biological conception of the human, 

that instead being human, empirically entailed that besides phylogeny and ontogeny, “there 

stands sociogeny.” It therefore followed that if himself and his Black peers and/or patients had 

been instituted as subjects, not in their own cosmogonically chartered auto­centered terms, but in 

those of the contemporary West’s genre­specific mode of sociogeny (in the terms therefore, of 

what I shall further define here as that of the latter’s governing, replicator sociogenic code of 

symbolic life/death, or in Lévi­Straussian terms, of the “cooked and the raw” 29 ) and had thereby 

come to be, and, therefore, to preconceptually experience ourselves in terms of the White masks, 

that were phenotypically normal only for the specific subset hereditary variation of the human 

species that are Europeans (if at the same time, normal in class terms for both the European and 

westernized non­European bourgeoisie), this is only so because of a larger and universally 

applicable phenomenon. Which is that, all human skins can only be human, by performatively 

enacting themselves/ourselves as human, in the always already cosmogonically chartered terms 
29 
Claude Levi­Strauss

­ 12 ­ 
of their/our sociogenic, and therefore symbolically encoded, and fictively constituted/genre­ 

specific Masks, or replicator codes of symbolic life/death. This given that if, unlike the Primates, 

human groups are alone able to transcend the narrow genetically determined preset limits of 

eusocial kin­recognizing inter­altruistic behaviors, and to attain instead to far higher levels of 

cooperation and organization, 30  they/we are able to do so only by means of our ability—through 

the earlier co­evolution with the brain of the emergent properties of language and narrative, to 

autopoetically institute ourselves, through the medium of our retroactively projected origin 

stories or cosmogonies, as symbolically made similar; that is by being “re­born” that is, initiated, 

in the terms of each such Origin­Story’s mandated/inscribed, sociogenic code of symbolic 

life/death, as now, behaviorally, kin­recognizing, inter­altruistic, and thereby cooperating 

members of the same fictive kind, that is of the same artificially (i.e., non­genetically) speciated 

genre or Mask of being human. 

In this context, therefore, the imperatively overall “regulatory practices” which call, for 

the sub­set “regulatory practices” instituting of all the roles, including gender, which together 

constitute the overall mode of auto­institution enacting of such a genre of being human, here 

specifically in the terms of the second reinvention of Man in its now biohumanist homo 

oeconomicus  concept/self­conception, are practices that at the same time function to enact the 

latter's sociogenic code of naturally selected/naturally dysselected and/or eugenict dysgenic 

symbolic life/death. With this, therefore, making it clear that, while being human is not a noun, 

30 
See with respect to cooperation, the rebuttal by Martin Novak, the Director of the Program for Evolutionary 
Dynamics at Harvard, that the processes of Evolution can be restricted only to processes of Selection, as maintained 
by Darwin who, defined the latter as the only directive agency of change. Novak adds to selection, the additional 
processes of mutation and cooperation, arguing further that “cooperation is essential for life to evolve to a new level 
of organization.” In the same way, therefore, as “[s]ingle celled protozoa had to cooperate to give rise to 
multicellular animals, so “[h]umans had to cooperate for complex societies to arise” [If in my own terms for all 
human societies beginning in Africa with the nomadic form of small­scale societies were to be invented and 
institutionalized]. See for Novak, Carl Zimmer, “Scientist at Work,” in Science Times, New York Times, July 31, 
2007.

­ 13 ­ 
neither can it be, to paraphrase Butler, “a set of free­floating attributes,” if the individual subject 

is to be made to experience her/himself in the genre­specific terms of each society's mode of 

auto­institution as such a subject; thereby to reflexly desire to  realize her/himself in the terms of 

its discursively, positively marked (and therefore, opiate reward activating) code of symbolic life, 

and at the same time to be aversive to, and thereby, detach her/himself from all that is the 

negation of that sociogenic self—that is, from the negatively marked liminally deviant or as (in 

our case, nigger/ now ghetto nigger) 31  embodiment of the normal self’s Lacanian Lack­of­being, 

its symbolic death. 32  That is, the “raw” to the former's “cooked” (in Lévi­ Straussian terms) or in 

Aristotelian terms, the zoe  or “bare life” to the bios as the “good life” for the living of which the 

polis exists. 33 

It was in this context, therefore that Fanon, like DuBois before him, and Eldridge Cleaver 

after him, 34  had come to recognize, that it was precisely by their reflexly desiring—as the 

“regulatory practices of genre coherence”  induces them/us to do—to be optimally human in the 

terms of the West’s Man (in its second invented, now bio­humanist phase, also over­represented 

31 
In the wake of the post­Sixties’ incorporation of the Black middle class, including academics as “honorary” 
members of the normative White middle class, and with their former liminally deviant pathological Other place as a 
segregated population coming to be reoccupied, by the inner­city urban ghettoes and their State/Private Industrial 
complex extension, new definitions have come to express the separation of the middle class population, including 
the now status quo interests of the academics and intellectuals—however radical their/our discourse—from the now 
totally damnés de la terre populations—those stranded on a rooftops of Katrina’s New Orleans. Thus while the 
middle­classes self­ascribed themselves in ethnic terms—i.e. African­American—those in the inner cities, and its 
“planet of the slums” prison extension, continue to define themselves as Black. Recently however even Black has 
become divided, between the Poor, but “respectable,” and the ghetto nigger as the ultimate deviant category, the 
systemic production of the chaos of whose jobless/poverty, drug­ridden, criminalized, violent inter­gang warfare 
lives, is lawlikely indispensable to the production of the normative White and middle class order. With this 
Order/Chaos dynamic being, as Uspenski et al (cited in the original essay) point out, lawlikely indispensable to the 
institution of all human societies, as Maturana and Varelas autopoetic languaging living systems. 
32 
While it is J.F. Danielli, who first identified the role of discursive practices, whether religious or secular, whose 
semantic activation of the opiate reward/punishment system of the brain function to induce and motivate all our non­ 
genetically based inter­altruistic, kin­recognizing and therefore order­integrating behaviors—in his earlier cited 
essay, “The Internal Reward System or the ‘Opium of the People’” 1980, the functioning of this system with regard 
to the motivation and demotivation of all species in species­specific behavioral terms, has been clearly laid out by 
Avram Goldstein, in his book, Addiction: From Biology to Public Policy (New York: W.W. Freeman, 1994). 
33 
See for this, Malcolm Bull, “Vectors of the Bio­politicals” in New Left Review no. 45, May June 2007, pp. 7­27 
34 
In his Soul on Ice

­ 14 ­ 
as the first had been, if it were as isomorphic with the being of being human, this by means of the 

same topos of iconicity 35 ), as if, therefore its ethno­class mode of being human (given the 

similarity of sound between the word man and human) were isomorphic with the being of being 

human in the terms of the “we men”/ [we women] of Derrida’s “horizon of humanity” 36 —that 

had led to their being induced to be reflexly aversive to their own, and their population’s skin 

color and Bantu phenotypic physiognomy, itself now always already instituted—together with 

their population's origin continent of Black Africa—as the discursively/semantically negatively 

marked (and therefore opiate­punishment activating) 37  embodiment, of symbolic death, within 

the terms of the sociogenic code of symbolic life/death that our cosmogonically chartered and 

biologically absolute answer to the question of who we are, dynamically enacts. (This as 

lawlikely as the category of the non­celibate Laity had been made to embody, before the 

revolution of Renaissance humanism, the symbolic death of the Fallen Flesh, as the Other to the 

symbolic life of the Redeemed Spirit incarnated in the category of the Celibate Clergy, within the 

then terms of that order’s answer to the question of who we are, and as then theo­cosmogonically 

chartered by the Christian version of the Biblical Creation story. 38 

Thus  Fanon, like DuBois before him, and Eldridge Cleaver after him, were to initiate a 

new heuristics—that of the systemic mistrust of their self­evident, subjectively experienced, 

ostensibly instinctive and natural order consciousness, as one in whose terms they had not only 

found themselves  desiring against and being aversive to their Negro selves, and that, in 

Cleaver’s case, to of their population of origin, but had found themselves doing so against their 

35 
(Valesio 1980) 
36 
(Derrida 1968, 1982 
37 
(Danielli 1980) 
38 
See for this, Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination

­ 15 ­ 
own deliberately willed intentionally. 39  It is in this context that Fanon, by identifying the causal 

principle of this subjectively  experienced existential contradiction, as that of the objective 

functioning of the hitherto non­recognized phenomenon of artificially instituted sociogenic 

Masks that are defining of us as being hybridly human (in our specific case that of the White or 

Western­bourgeois Mask of his book’s title); and, thereby, with the systemic intentionality of its 

replicator code of symbolic life/death, serving to structure our subjectively experienced orders of 

consciousness, doing so hitherto, normally, outside our conscious awareness, can be recognized 

to have been thereby overturning one of the fundamentals of the West’s inherited philosophical 

tradition—that of the ostensibly indubitability and self­determined nature of consciousness as 

experienced by the Cartesian ego cogito. 

Given, however, that all such sociogenic codes or Masks are always already inscribed in 

the terms of our chartering cosmogonies or origin narratives as the indispensable condition of our 

being able to autopoetically institute ourselves as genre­specific fictive modes of eusocial inter­ 

altruistic kin­recognizing kind, (as for example, those of our present bourgeois modalities such 

as that of the “White Race” on the one  hand, with all other “races” being its Lack, and on the 

other, and post­colonially, our present plurality of nation­state fictive modes of kind, all of 

whose members are thereby origin­narratively co­identified, this co­identification can never pre­ 

exist such each society’s specific mode  of auto­institution and its complex of socio­ 

technologies, by means of which alone, the I of each individual self, is symbolically coded to 

preconceptually experience, and thereby performatively enact itself in the same cloned kin 

recognizing terms as the I of all other members of its referent “we.” Thereby with each such 

39 
See for this also Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. (New York, Soft Skull 
Press, 2005), in which a radical political activist, who experienced himself at moments, reflexly responding in the 
same, so to speak, anti­Black way, this against his, own politically willed intentionality.

­ 16 ­ 
group sharing in, over against all other groups, the same mode of “collective intentionality,” 40 

that of a specific “fictive mode of kind,” in pursuit or in defence of whose actualization, they/we 

are prepared, where necessary, to sacrifice their/our biological lives. 41 

It is in the context of the above therefore, that as Western and westernized 

academics/intellectuals, working in the disciplinary fields of the “human sciences” (or 

Humanities and Social Sciences), that we find ourselves in the predicament identified by Hans 

Weber’s concept of the “webs of significance” that as humans, “we spin for ourselves,” and in 

which we remain (and must so remain) suspended.  The predicament is this :  Seeing that such 

cosmogonic “webs of significance” that we spin for ourselves, are at the same time the 

indispensable condition of our being able to performatively enact ourselves as being, and 

thereby to be, human in the genre specific terms of an I and its referent we—how can we come to 

know the social reality, of which we are a part and which itself functions as the socializing mode 

of auto­institution, in whose field alone we are, recursively enabled to performatively enact 

ourselves in the genre­specific terms of our fictive modes of kind? How can we come to know 

that social reality outside the terms also, of its sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, as the It 42 

about which that social reality orders its hierarchies and role allocations, thereby self­ 

organizing itself as an autopoetic languaging living system? 43  Outside, that is, the necessarily 

40 
See for this, John R. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power 
(New York, Columbia University Press, 2004). 
41 
Thus, the logic by which if today, in Iraq, Sunni, Shia, and Al Qaeda suicide bombers sacrifice their biological 
lives to actualize themselves in term of their origin­narratively chartered symbolic life as Sunni, Shia, or in the case 
of Al Qaeda, as Radical Islamists, this is no less the case of the, for the main part, young U.S. males, sent to invade 
Iraq, and who every day also sacrifice their biological lives in order to actualize, by dying for the flag, the 
“collective intentionality” which gives expression to their shared  historico­cosmogonically chartered sociogenic 
code of symbolic life as “Americans”; and thereby as belonging to the U.S.’ post­Civil War, fictive mode of nation­ 
state kind, to its “imagined community” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and 
Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso, 1983). 
42 
Beer, 1980. 
43 
(Beer 1980)

­ 17 ­ 
circular and thereby cognitively closed terms that are (if only in the last instance) lawlikely 

indispensable to its existential enactment and stable replication as such as a living system? 

It is in this context, therefore, that the “human sciences” of our present order of 

knowledge, whose domain of inquiry is precisely that of the social reality of our present nation­ 

state world system, as well as of that of its local nation­state units, have to be rigorously 

elaborated, and lawlikely so, in terms governed by the imperative of the enabling of its stable 

replication as such an autopoetic and sociogenically encoded living system, and as such, the first 

planetarily extended such  system in human history. With this problematic having led to Louis 

Althusser’s recognition, that as academics/intellectuals (i.e., the grammarians 44 ) of our order, 

who are also its normative middle­class subjects, we must necessarily function to elaborate the 

mode of knowledge production, that is indispensable to its replication as such a system. 45  For, 

although Althusser  continues to identify the overall system, and its mode of autopoetic 

institution in the terms of one of the indispensable, but only proximate conditions of its 

functioning, as such living system—that is one defined in Adam Smith/Marx’s terms, as its 

“mode of economic production,” (rather than, from the Ceremony Found's ecumenically human 

perspective, as that of each such societal system's genre­specific mode of material provisioning, 

this does not contradict his core thesis. 

With as a result, our bio­humanist “human sciences” necessarily calling for our social 

reality and its third and hybrid level of existence, to continue to be known in the same rigorously 

abductive, 46  “world in little” 47  or “knowledge or categories” terms 48  in which both of the other 

levels of reality, the physical and the purely biological, had been millennially and lawlikely 

44 
Legesse 
45 
As cited by William Spanos in his The Ends of Education. 
46 
Gregory Bateson , Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton) 1979. 
47 
(Hocart 1934) 
48 
(Moraes­Farias 1980)

­ 18 ­ 
known, before, that is, the “breaching” of their respective projected divides or Lines 49  onto which 

the sociogenic codes of symbolic life/death, firstly that of the medieval order of Latin Christian 

Europe, its code of Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh, had been projected, (this seeing that as “the 

foundational principle of their orders, such codes cannot be located in the society at large but 

must be projected onto a “space of otherness beyond the reach of human desire and temptation” 
50 
), upon the ostensible incorruptible Celestial/corruptible Terrestrial, Heaven/Earth divide; 

secondly that of the pre­bourgeois landed gentry order of Great Britain (its civic humanist code 

of symbolic life/death as that of autonomous Rational human nature/subjected irrational sensory 

brute nature) as projected upon the, then believed to be, divinely determined, but naturally 

implemented Chain of Being Divide between Humans/Animals, and correlatedly the ostensibly 

perfectibility/degeneracy divide as elaborated by Enlightenment scholars like Buffon, and 

projected between Europeans as phenotypically normal humans and non­European 

phenotypically different populations as their abnormal Human Others. 51  Consequently, with both 

the physical level of reality, in the case of the first and biological level of reality in the case of 

the second, because then having to be put under the same rules of symbolically encoded 

description, as were also those of their respective social socio­hierarchical realities, having to be 

known abductively in the modality of a “mutually reinforcing system of presuppositions,” 52  with 

this then serving to legitimate their structures of domination and subordination. Consequently, in 

whose terms, as the indispensable condition of their respective orders, together with the answers 

which their respective sociogenic codes of symbolic life/death enacted to the question of who we 

49 
Wlad Godzich. Forward to Heterologies: Discourse on the Other by M. de Certeau (Minnesota, University of 
Minnesota Press), 1980. 
50
51 
Sala­Molins, Luis, The Dark Side of Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. Trans. With Introduction by 
John Conteh­Morgan (Minneapolic, University of Minnesota Press) 2006. 
52 
See for this, Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979).

­ 19 ­ 
are, no ceremony could have been found by means of which to breach, firstly the 

Celestial/Terrestrial or Heaven/Earth Divide in the case of the first, and in that of the second, the 

Divide between the projected to be divinely created Rational humans/human nature on the one 

hand, and the irrational animals/brute nature on the other; this as reinforced by Enlightenment 

scholars’ System­of­Nature­Divide between the normal and thereby perfectible Europeans on the 

one hand, and their Human Others who had allegedly degenerated from the natural norm, which 

had continued to be embodied in the former. 

In each case, therefore, with their respective ceremonies only having eventually been 

made findable, firstly by the new civic humanist answer that the Renaissance lay intelligentsia, 

gave to the question of who we are, with their invention of [the concept of] Man, and with this 

then providing the new perspective from which, in the wake of Copernicus’ initial challenge to 

the Celestial/Terrestrial Divide 53 /the ceremony would eventually be found by means of 

Newton’s law of gravitation as a law applicable to the Earth as to the Heavens, since all made of 

the same homogenous substance, of the same matter; with this enabling one, as Newton exulted, 

to extrapolate from that which is near to us, to what that which is far from us, must be. 54 

Secondly, by the new answer that Liberal (or bio­humanist) humanism beginning with Adam 

Smith and other members of the Scottish School of the Enlightenment followed by Thomas 

Malthus’ demographic cosmogony gave to the question of who we are. 55  With, thereby, the 

Ceremony able to breach the hitherto projected “space of Otherness” Human/Animal Divide 

coming to be definitively effected by Darwin’s law of Evolution as put forward in his 1859 The 

Origin of the Species, etc. a law as applicable to humans (if only with respect to the 

53 
See for this, Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 
1990). 
54 
Amos Finkelstein, Theology and Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 
55 
See for this Thomas Malthus’ 1789 Essay on Population (Check Date)

­ 20 ­ 
biological/neurophysiological implementing conditions of being human) as to animals.  (If in his 

“part­science, part­myth” case, 56  also, however, with the Enlightenment’s correlated projected 

perfectibility/degeneracy Divide between Europeans as Nature’s perfectible norm of being 

human, and its non­European others, 57  now coming to be transumed, beginning with his 1871 

The Descent of Man etc. into the eugenic/dysgenic divide that would come to be projected onto 

the “space of Otherness” of the Color Line (or “higher races”/“lower races”) Line; and, 

concomitantly, onto the Rich/Poor Line or Divide, correlated with the Intellectual/Corporeal 

class Divide, itself in turn as correlated with the intellectually superior/intellectually inferior 

Gender line or Divide—all as Lines or Divides whose mutually reinforcing system of 

presuppositions would now come to function as the “space of Otherness” complex onto which 

the code of symbolic life/death, enacting of the then new Western­bourgeois prototype of being 

human, in its second reinvented biohumanist form of Man, as homo oeconomicus. 

If, however, both of these levels were from now on gradually to be freed from having to 

be known in abductive order­stabilizing terms, this was not to be so in our own hybridly human 

case. Since given the existential imperative of our having to continue to know our social reality 

in the terms that we at present do—that is, in the terms of the answer that we now give to the 

question of who we are, as an allegedly purely biological being in whose, nevertheless, genre­ 

specific naturally selected/dysselected code of symbolic life/death terms, we now performatively 

enact ourselves, as secular, and thereby necessarily Western and westernized bourgeois 

academics, and as such, therefore having to know ourselves, in the prescriptive, sociogenically 

encoded structures, of our present order of consciousness, one which pre­defines us as being “of 

56 
Glyn Isaacs, Aspects of Evolution 
57 
Louis Sala­Molins, op. cit.

­ 21 ­ 
this type,” 58 the question with which we find ourselves confronted is the following: how can we 

come to know our social reality, no longer in the terms of the abductive order­legitimating 

“knowledge of categories” system of thought (Althusser’s Ideology) to which the code lawlikely 

gives rise, but, heretically, in the terms of “knowledge of the world as it is”? 59  That is, in the 

same way as Western intellectuals from the autopoetic/cum intellectual revolution of 

Renaissance humanism and its new Studia onwards, have come to know, and brilliantly so, the 

physical and biological levels of reality, in terms of the imperatively open­ended because self­ 

correcting (however, eventually), order of cognition that—as distinct from the new 

instrumentalist, market­oriented techno­sciences, including that of contemporary bio­ 

technology—is that of the physical and biological sciences?    To answer this question as to how 

we can come to know the level of our social reality in the terms of “knowledge of the world as it 

is,” and to thereby realize what had been the originally emancipatory openings of the Anti­ 

colonial Revolution together with the correlated Otherness continuum of the social and 

intellectual movements of the Sixties, before they were aborted, we now turn to the core of the 

manifesto of the Ceremony Found. 

The Concept of the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: 

Thinking Towards Autonomy and the Non­Opacity of Agency 

58 
See for the elaboration of both of these divides, class, gender, as well as the divide between “higher races/lower 
races,” Darwin’s The Descent of Man, etc. With this being so even though he was also very much for the abolition 
of Negro slavery. 
59 
See for this, Moraes­Farias, “Models of the World and Categorical Models: the Enslavable Barbarian, as a Mobile 
Classificatory Label,” in Slavery and Abolition 1 (2): 115­31.

­ 22 ­ 
The proposal of the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn is intended to resolve the predicament I have 

outlined. I have adapted the concept of Turn from, and as a further progression on, the earlier 

paradigm of the Linguistic Turn as put forward in the mid­twentieth century by Western 

academics, and that of Overturn, from the lexicon creatively generated by the “redemptive­ 

prophetic intellectuals” 60  of the Rastafari originally Jamaican millenarian politico­religious— 

now widely extended transnational popular “planet of the slums”—movement. Specifically from 

the counter­cosmogony that underlies the movement in whose logic, words are turned upside 

down—their use, for example, of the inverted term downpression to define the existential 

perspective of their systemic oppression, this given their largely jobless existence.  The  French 

theorist, Granel, makes the parallel point with respect to those categories of the modern techno­ 

industrial nation­state, as well as of the West’s overall secular nation­state world system, who are 

logically excluded, “from all modern politico­philosophical discourse,” because, as such, “the 

waste­products of all modern political practice, whether capitalist or Marxist.” 61 

In addition, however, I use the term counter­cosmogony in a specific sense adapted from 

Conrad Hyers’ brilliant re­reading of the Priestly version of the Genesis narrative of the Hebrew 

Bible, as elaborated by the exiled Jewish priests who had been captive in Babylon at the heart of 

the then Babylonian empire, this in the wake of the conquest of the kingdom of Judah and the 

destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. by the Babylonians. In his study, 62  and by means of a point 

by point reading of the Priests' (or Priestly) version, Hyers reveals how the then entirely new 

monotheistic cosmogony, or Origin Creation­story that it elaborated, functioned as a counter­ 

cosmogony whose narrative structures served to utterly delegitimate the then polytheistic 

60 
See for this, Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics Black Prophets : Radical Political Intellectuals ( NY: 
Routledge , 2003 ) 
61 
(Granel, as cited by JF Lyotard, “Heidegger and the Jews.” Trans., Michel and Roberts Intro. By D. 
Carroll, Minneapolis, Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 93). 
62 
Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science. (Atlanta, GA U.P. 1984).

­ 23 ­ 
politico­religious cosmogonic complex, (together with its pantheon of gods and goddesses, and 

central hero­figure the god Marduk), which had functioned to charter the Babylonian empire, and 

to thereby legitimate its predatory imperial conquests of weaker peoples. Not only is this reading 

an example of the kind proposed by the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, that is, the approach which 

takes  cosmogonies and their Weber­type “webs of significance” which charter us as the “who” 

that we are, as the object of our inquiry, but also its identification as a specific genre—i.e., that 

of a counter­cosmogony projected from, as Maurice Gauchet 63  also points out, the exiled captive 

priests’ then uncompromising “gaze from below” perspective. This as the perspective that led 

them to project the Invisible existence of a now all­powerful sole Creator God, one for the first 

time in human history, now placed entirely outside the cosmos, and as such, the Creator not only 

of the stars and planets, (which rather than they had been millennially held to be, i.e., the religio­ 

polytheistic gods and goddesses chartering of, inter alia, all the then empires, including 

Babylon's), were instead merely created objects, but the Creator also of all humankind, including 

the rulers of the mightiest empires, thereby reducing them to being merely created beings. As 

such, therefore, the source of an entirely new “paradigm of justice” able to transcend all imperial 

paradigms, those then existent, as well as those that were to come. 

With both Hyers and Gauchet’s readings of the Preistly version of Genesis, at the same 

time revealing the parallels with the also desperate “gaze from below” nature of the Rastafari’s 

own projected counter­cosmogony. Thereby, the logic also of the regularity with which the 

Rastafari’s “redemptive­prophetic intellectuals” have taken over and adapted the Biblical 

terminology of the exiled Jewish priests in Babylon—as for example the Reggae singer­prophet 

Bob Marley, in his song “By the rivers of Babylon/ where we sat down and  where  we wept 

63 
See Epigraph 1, Maurice Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion 
(1997).

­ 24 ­ 
when we remember Zion” as well as in other songs such as his Exodus—enabling an analogical 

reading of their counter­cosmogony, so as to also identify what the major elements of our present 

world system’s chartering cosmogonic complex, must necessarily be, given that these would also 

be the elements to which the new “gaze from below,” of those exiled in a new Babylon—that is, 

as a liminally deviant category which, cannot be included within the paradigm of justice 

instituting of our present Liberal­democratic nation­state Western world system and its now 

purely secular order of things, any more than the exiled captive priests could have been included 

in that instituting of the Babylonian imperial order; indeed any more than Barbarian slaves of 

ancient Greek democracy could have been included “in the paradigm of justice” instituting of 

that order, 64 —would have necessarily had to counterpose itself. That is, in its now dynamic 

contemporary quest for a quite other and superior order of justice, to the now purely secular one 

which mandates/legitimates, their exclusion. 

Nevertheless, the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn is also put forward in its own terms as the 

praxis of two proposals. Firstly, that of Aimé Césaire’s proposed new (1946) Science of the 

Word—when at a Conference in Haiti, in a surrealist­cum­Negritude talk entitled “Poetry and 

Knowledge,” Césaire, had begun by pointing out that the natural sciences, for all their 

achievements in knowing how “to utilize the world,” remain “poor and half­starved”; 

fundamentally therefore an “impoverished knowledge” since from its inception onwards, he 

noted, “whatever its other wealth may have been, there stands an impoverished humanity.” 

Nevertheless, he continued, “it is out of this great silence of scientific knowledge” with respect 

64 
Asmaron Legesse proposes that because of the “injustice inherent in human systems,” there is always a 
“liminally deviant” category whose inclusion/exclusion is made to function as the integrating mechanism of each 
order. Since it is through their systemic negation that the normal subjects of the order are able to experience their 
shared normalcy. The analogy with Greek democracy and its liminally deviant category the Barbarian slaves also 
excluded from the ordering “paradigms of justice” instituting of that first form of Western democracy is taken from 
the brilliant insight by the philosopher Bernard Williams. I shall have to track down the reference.

­ 25 ­ 
to our human predicament, that a new form of knowledge, “poetic knowledge” one that returns 

to and begins with the Word, as our “first and last chance” is now possible; one in which the 

Word “promises to be an algebraic equation that makes the world intelligible.” In that, “[j]ust as 

the new Cartesian algebra permitted the construction of a theoretical physics, so too an original 

handling of the Word,” can give rise to “...a new theoretical and heedless science that poetry 

could already give an approximate notion of.” One in which “the study of the Word will 

condition the study of nature.” 

That is, therefore, a new, because autopoetically hybrid form of science—with science 

itself therefore being redefined beyond the limits of the Natural Sciences’ restrictedness to their 

specific domains of inquiry, the physical and purely biological levels of reality (with the latter 

including, of course the physiologically and neurophysiological implementing conditions 

enacting of our always cosmogonically chartered genres of being human, of their respective 

sociogenic codes (Césaire's Word) of symbolic life/death—as one (that is, a science) whose 

specific domain of inquiry is that of a third level of reality, meta­biological and biological, yet as 

one that has hitherto functioned, as such, outside our conscious awareness. Doing so, however, 

according to what can be now recognized—this within the emancipatory openings made possible 

by the new “class of classes” Origin Account enacting of the Ceremony Found’s profoundly 

revalorizing (because based on the negation of the negation of our co­humanness and, therefore, 

on the a priori of the  “irreducible oneness of our species” 65 ), new answer to the question of who 

we are—as laws of auto­institution that are as specific to the functioning of this third level of 

reality as biological laws are specific to the functioning of the second. If, paradoxically, as laws 

65 
Sala Molins, The Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment.  Trans.., Intro., by John 
Conteh­Morgan. (Minneapolis) Univ. of Minnesota Pres, 2006.

­ 26 ­ 
which as the very condition of their functioning as such laws, have themselves also done so 

outside our conscious awareness. 

Consequently, because the telos or aim with respect to this third domain of inquiry is that 

also, as the indispensable condition of finding the Ceremony able to breach the Color Line (in 

effect the “race” or Negation of co­humanness Line) together with its correlated complex of 

projected “space of Otherness” Lines or Divides, is therefore the same in this respect as that of 

the Natural Sciences—that is to work towards a new order of imperatively self­correcting 

(however eventually) thereby open­ended mode of cognition—this will entail the following: that 

Césaire's proposed study of the Word, one based on the “study of nature” from its (the Word's) 

now determinant perspective, and therefore as one whose praxis is that of the Autopoetic 

Turn/Overturn, will begin by transgressing our present order of knowledge’s normally 

conceptually unbreachable divide between, on the one hand, the physical and biological sciences 

(together with the range of techno­sciences to which they have given rise), and on the other, the 

disciplines of the Humanities and the Social Sciences (Fanon’s “human sciences”). And will do 

so by noting that Césaire's study of the Word/of Nature, is one that is itself isomorphic with the 

study of his fellow colonial Martiniquean, Frantz Fanon’s, new object of knowledge, as 

identified in 1952, in the context of his own then epochal parallel redefinition of being human in 

the terms also of our species­specific hybridity; the “study of the word/the study of nature,” 

thereby, as the study of, in Fanonian terms, sociogeny. Therefore as the study of what I have 

proposed is the always already cosmogonically chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic 

life/death, in whose terms, we can alone both preconceptually experience and performatively 

enact ourselves as humans; therefore, as the only auto­instituting species of hybrid living beings. 

This given that as Peter Winch also proposed, the only life that we humans live, is our

­ 27 ­ 
prescriptive representations of what constitutes symbolic life, and what constitutes its Lack or 

mode of symbolic death. Consequently, because each such regulatory code functions in Gregory 

Bateson’s parallelly proposed terms, at the level of the individual subject’s psyche or soul, whose 

“descriptive statement” (as enacted by the codes) must therefore be everywhere imperatively 

elaborated and conserved, (this as the lawlike complement of the genetically enacted and 

conserved descriptive statement of the individual subject’s body), by each society’s system of 

learning, 66  together with the apparatus of its “educational (in effect, initiation) institutions,” 67 

then the “study of the Word” as that of the sociogenic code’s descriptive statement, must 

necessarily, as Césaire proposed, not only correlate with, but even determine the [approach to] 

the “study of nature.” 

The study therefore, in the case of the latter, and within the term of the Autopoetic 

Turn/Overturn, as the proposed praxis of Césaire’s new science, of the 

physiologically/neurophysiological implementing conditions (rather than the basis) of our being 

able to lawlikely performatively enact ourselves as being, hybridly human—that is as both a 

sociogenic and therefore, an already symbolically encoded I, one thereby cloned or made similar 

with, all other members (or I’s) of one’s origin­narratively co­identified, and therefore inter­ 

altruistic, kin­recognizing, eusocially bonded “we” or “fictive mode of kind.” While central to 

the study of the physiologically/ neurophysiologically implementing conditions (not the basis) of 

our being hybridly human—will be that of the co­functioning of each sociogenic code’s origin­ 

narratively cosmogonically chartered system of positive/negative, symbolic life/death meanings, 

with the biochemical or opiate reward and punishment (behavior motivating/demotivating) 

66 
Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose vs. Nature,” The Dialectics of… David Cooper, ed. (London, 
Penguin, 1969). 
67 
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York, Routledge 1990).

­ 28 ­ 
system of the brain 68  With the latter’s systemic activation by the positively/negatively marked 

meanings thereby enacting of each such sociogenic code’s, representation of symbolic life (good) 

and “death” (evil, the lack of being in the terms of that “life”), thereby directly leading to our 

performative enactment as subjects in the always already cosmogonically inscribed and chartered 

genre­specific terms of our “fictive modes of kind. This at the same time as these objectively 

instituted sociogenic codes of symbolic life/death, come to be, as the praxis of the Autopoetic 

Turn/Overturn will make clear, experienced by its subjects as extra­humanly ordained; whether, 

on the one hand, by the Absolute Divine Will (as in the case of the West’s evangelical 

Christianity or of today’s Radical Islam), or whether, in our secular, and therefore Western and 

westernized case, coming to be experienced as natural, instinctive, the expressions of [the trope 

of] “human nature.” As such, thereby held to be no less extra­humanly, ordained, either, as 

earlier by the Enlightenment’s “Nature’s Will” or later by the Will of Darwin’s Evolution, as 

expressed in his The Descent of Man’s, as that of the “unerring powers of natural selection.” 69  In 

effect, by on the one hand, the Argument from Divine Design, in religious terminology, and on 

the other, in secular but no less determined by a projected extra­human Agency, the Argument 

from the Design of Natural Selection and Dysselection, in ensuring the “survival of the fittest” 

and the extinction of the non­fit 70 

Which therefore means that as the condition of the enacting of the code at both levels 

(that of the Word, the ordo verborum [order of Words] and that of “nature” the ordo naturae, 

68 
See J.F. Danielli; ob. cit.; Avram Goldstein, Addiction: From Biology to Public Policy (New York: W.W. 
Freeman, 1994); Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious 
Experience, and What It Is Like to Be a Bat,” in M.F. Durán Cogan and Antonio Gómez Moriana, National 
Identities and Socio­political Change info in Latin America (New York, London: Routledge, 2001). 
69 
Darwin, The Descent of Man, or Selection in Relation to Sex. 1871/1981. ). Hans Blumenberg, The 
Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. R. Wallace. 1983 
70 
See in this respect, Darwin’s speculation (in his The Descent of Man , etc.) with respect to the ostensible 
teleological inevitability of the extinction of the lower races such as (the original pre­settler, pre­immigrant) 
Australians, and “negroes” by the “higher races.”

­ 29 ­ 
each level has to lawlikely and intricately cohere; — as a form of finely calibrated non­linear 

coherence, in order to activate and together implement the genre­specific order of consciousness 

(or mode of mind), integrating of each human group’s specific fictive mode of kind, its I or its 

We. As in the case of our now secular, and therefore Western or westernized secular nation­state 

fictive mode of kind, on the one hand, or on the other, that instituting of the U.S. Evangelical 

Christian Right’s both religious and bourgeois­national mode of fictive kind on the other, and 

with the hybridly conflictual yet also reinforcing nature of their respective Origin­stories, that of 

Creation and that of Evolution 71 —a logical corollary follows; one that calls for the meta­ 

systemic functioning of Césaire’s proposed hybrid science of the Word as that of the sociogenic 

Fanonian code, and/for the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn as its praxis. 

This corollary is that in each human societal order, as based on its cosmogonically 

chartered and genre­specific fictive mode of kind, both what Althusser defines as each such 

order’s mode of knowledge production, and the archaeologist McNeill, as its (mode of) 

“representational arts” or aesthetic production, must necessarily be cognitively and aesthetically 

(i.e., psycho­affectively) closed. If that is, the positive/negatively marked meanings of the code 

are to be stably and systemically synchronized with the functioning of the biochemical or opiate 

reward and punishment system of the brain, as the condition of the subjects of the order, 

performatively enacting themselves/ourselves as being human, in the genre specific terms of 

each such codes’ positive/negative system of meanings. For “meaning,” as the physicist David 

Bohm insists, is—because of its ability to directly affect matter, positively or negatively, that is, 

by means of its, after Butler, “genre’d practices of regulatory coercion”), being. 72  Its ability 

therefore to motivate the always cosmogonically inscribed and chartered genre­specific 

71 
See for this, Michael Ruse, The Evolution­Creation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University 
Press, 2005). 
72 
David Bohm, Interview in Omni, 1987.

­ 30 ­ 
positive/negative terms, of each sociogenic code’s mode of symbolic life/death, as the code 

which structures our normative orders of consciousness, and thereby, each order’s ensemble of 

individual and collective behaviors. In the case of our own naturally selected/dysselected code, 

with both Virginia Woolf in 1929 and Carter G. Woodson in 1935 coming to parallel 

conclusions—each from their specific perspectives of Otherness, gender anomaly in the case of 

the first, race/phenotype anomaly in the case of the second, together with the Black U.S. 

population to which he belongs—with respect to the systemic nature of the technologies of 

positive/negative representations of the specific order of knowledge, 73  which produces them as 

such anomalies, each in their respective relatively inferiorized and ostensibly genetically, 

therefore naturally dysselected, determined places. The one with respect to her British imperial 

ruling upper class male peers, all then discursively and empirically institutionalized as ostensibly 

the generic sex 74  and thereby the normal gender, the other, like the rest of his Black U.S., then 

collectively segregated, systemically subordinated and inferiorized population, with respect to 

the White Euroamerican (optimally WASP or Anglo­American) population, this latter 

discursively and empirically institutionalized, as ostensibly the generic human phenotype, and 

thereby as such, the incarnation, at one and the same time, of being both normally American, and 

by extrapolation, of being ostensibly, normally human. 75 

73 
Virginia Woolf actually uses the word cocaine to describe the “rush” that angry male professors get when 
writing books whose purpose was to assure them of their own male intellectual superiority, with this further 
motivating them to write more books, as it motivated their non­academic peers to build empires and “civilize 
natives.” See her A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, Fl., Harcout). 
74 
See for the concept of generic, Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (YEAR), where she points out that the use of 
the pronoun he to refer to both men and women scholars, constitutes the male sex as the generic sex, by veiling its 
male attributes. Equally the secular West by using Man as interchangeable with human constitutes its own 
population as the generic human and its own bourgeois class as the generic class, by veiling on the one hand its 
ethno­phenotypic attributes, and on the other the class attributes of in both cases its mode of knowledge production 
as well as of aesthetic production. 
75 
In the above context, if Carter G. Woodson had pointed out (in his book, The Mis­education of the Negro) 
that in the curricula of American schools, the systemically negative representations of the Black population and 
their/our continent of origin, Africa, as contrasted with the systemically positive representations, of the White 
population and of their origin continent Europe, directly functioned to motivate the latter and to demotivate the

­ 31 ­ 
 While if we see these systemic positive/negative representations as themselves a central 

part of the “mutually reinforcing system of presuppositions” enacting and lawlikely so, of the 

West’s Man in its second, since the nineteenth century, Liberal/Bio­humanist conception/self­ 

conception, both Woolf's and Woodson's insights with respect to the role of knowledge in the 

ordering and legitimating of their respective and correlated subordinate roles, as roles instituting 

of their/our societies, opens up onto a universally applicable hypothesis. In that if, as the 

archaeologist McNeill has proposed, in all human societies from the smallest, and thereby, most 

simple, to the most extended and thereby, more complex—the role normally played by the 

representational arts (the mode of their aesthetic production), has always been that of explaining 

the world, not in the terms of factuality, but instead, in “the terms of religious schemas of some 

mythology,” (that is, in the terms of their respective order­instituting cosmogonies or origin 

stories, whether religious, and as in our case, secular), and as schemas which then function to 

constitute the reality of each genre­specific autopoetic field or languaging living system as that 

of the “independently real,” this, is no less true of our Althusserian “modes of knowledge 

production.” Not, however, the latter's role as ostensibly determined, by Althusser’s “mode of 

economic production” concept adapted from Marx who, in turn, adapted it from the 

quintessentially bourgeois intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment, including centrally Adam 

Smith 76 —but rather its systemic, genre­specific, role in explaining/describing the world of its 

former, Claude Steele, together with a fellow social psychologist, has carried out a series of tests, which proves the 
role that negative stereotypes play in demotivating Black and other students. Unlike Woodson, however, Steele does 
not recognize the fact that the negative stereotypes are not arbitrary, but are lawlike representations of our present 
order of knowledge. See Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and Intellectual Test Performance 
of African Americans” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995. Vol. 69, no. 5, pp. 797­811. See for 
Woodson, The Miseducation of Negro. (Chicago, 1933) 
76 
J.G.A Pocock, “Anglo­American Civic Humanism” in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political 
Though and history. Chacago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp 101­102. What he demonstrates 
here, is that because each mode of production was now supposed to teleologically displace the one that preceded it 
within the terms of the Scottish School invented historical cosmogony, it was no longer the political state that was 
the institution determinant of human history; that therefore the pre­bourgeois, ruling caste landed gentry’s code of

­ 32 ­ 
social reality, together with the latter's role allocations, structuring hierarchies, and correlated 

ratios of distribution of the collectively produced “goods” and the “bads” in the lawlikely relative 

quantitative degrees necessary to their stable reproduction, as such role allocations, and 

hierarchies, not in the terms of factuality, but instead in the terms of a religious, (and in the case 

of the West, a secular) schema, specific to the origin­story or cosmogony chartering of each 

society’s fictive modes of kind, and correlated sociogenic genre of being human. 

Overall, therefore, within the terms of the new answer that the Ceremony Found gives to 

the question of who we are—that is as a Fanonianly hybrid uniquely auto­instituting mode, of 

living being, we cannot as hitherto always relative genres of hybrid living being, pre­exist our 

cosmogonies, or origin myths/stories/narratives. Seeing that if, as Leeming seminally points 

out, 77  such cosmogonies function to enable us to “tell the world and ourselves who we are,” they 

also, function even more crucially, to enable us to autopoetically institute ourselves as the genre 

specific “We” or fictive mode of kind, that each of us (as a thereby always already 

sociogenically and therefore symbolically encoded and cloned “I”) 78  will from now on, 

symbolic life, as that of homo politicus, and its Ideal identity, as that of the virtuous citizen able to make autonomous 

decisions for the “common good,” through its control of the state, now had to be replaced, pari passu, with the rise 
of the bourgeois enterprise of manufacturing (and of what was to be the Industrial Revolution), which in terms of the 
“mode of production” schema, has been represented as inevitably fated to displace the Agrarian or large­scale 
commercial agriculture, which was the enterprise of the ruling caste of the landed gentry. This schema was therefore 
intended to legitimate the new bourgeois self­conception invented as that of homo oeconomicus; thereby as one 
ostensibly, whose economic decision making and self­interested pursuit of the accumulation of capital as the means 
of production of manufacturing/the Industrial Revolution, was now institutionalized as being isomorphic with the 
“common good” redefined in the terms of Smith’s title, as The Wealth of Nations; this represented mode of the 
imagined “common good” thereby coming to be indispensable to the Western bourgeoisie’s securing and stable 
replication of its ruling class status, as well as of the hegemony of the Western world system in its now ethno­class 
configuration. 
77 
See Epigraph 1 
78 
Thus the paradox that it is only in the terms of the West’s secularizing philosophical cosmogonies that an 
ostensibly pre­social “I” or individual subject in a “state of nature” can be enabled to autopoetically institute itself as 
such a subject; at the same time as, in the cases of Locke and Hobbes, for example, both as such subjects were 
cosmogonically chartered as, members of the “We” of a then post­medieval politically absolute monarchical 
England/Great Britain.

­ 33 ­ 
preconceptually experience and therefore performatively enact ourselves to be—and therefore 

are. 

Consequently, if as Sylvia Yaganisako and Carol Delaney propose, 79  given the fact that 

such “[o]rigin stories” are, the world over, “the prime locus for a society’s notion of itself,” that 

is, for “its identity…world view and social organization,” then the wide range of all such origin 

stories, this including both the “now dominant [religion­Christian] origin story of Creation as 

narrated in Genesis,” 80  as well as, from the nineteenth century onwards, the secular Origin­story 

(and, therefore, the Darwinian “part­science, part myth” bio­cosmogony) of Evolution—should 

all be treated “neither as false tales, nor as possible windows into the real true origins but as 

representations of origins.” With the result that, given that each such “representation of origins” 

once enacted must lawlikely function as the determinant of a non­recognized principle of 

cosmogonic/sociogenic causality, that is, as the second symbolically encoded “set of 

instructions,” of the genre­specific behavioral self­programming schema structuring of the 

normative order of consciousness of each such “fictive mode of kind,” whose “truth” 81  is then 

circularly and empirically verified by the ensemble of individual behaviors, which that 

consciousness serves to induce/motivate, a corollary follows. This is that it is only by means of 

their genre­specific opiate activating behavior motivating/demotivating magma of 

positive/negative meanings, or Imaginary, 82  as ones inducing of the individual and collective 

79 
In the Introduction to their edited collection of essays, Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural 
Analysis (1995). 
80 
One therefore, as they add, “common to both Jews and Christians, and in a slightly different way to 
Muslims.” 
81 
That is, W.E.B Dubois’/McWhorter’s “abstract general truth” (1944, 1968), Paul Veyne’s “program of 
truth,” Foucault’s “regime of truth” (insert reference, dates). 
82 
Cornelius Castoriadis, defines the Imaginary of each human society, as, that magma of images and 
encoded premises, which while providing, “collective values of unitary meanings are logically unprovable.” In his 
talk/essay, “Imaginary Creation in the Social­historical Domain” in Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the 
Stanford International Symposium (Sept. 14­16) Stanford, Anma Libri, pp. 140­61. An excellent example of the

­ 34 ­ 
behaviors of their subjects, that each such society, in turn, is enabled to performatively enact 

itself as an autopoetic (languaging) living system, in Maturana and Varela’s definition of all such 

systems; 83  this at the same time, as each living system self­organizes itself about the It or genre­ 

specific sociogenic  code of symbolic life/death, in whose terms its subjects preconceptually 

experience and performatively enact themselves as such genre­specific subjects. This 

analogically to the way in which, at the purely biological level of existence, the living system 

that is the beehive also self­organizes itself about the species­specific DNA code or genome of 

the bee. 

Given, therefore, the lawlike nature of the existentially driven circularity or recursive 

self­referentiality of our chartering and order instituting cosmogonies, specifically with respect to 

the functioning of our cosmogonies' “representation of origins,” this necessarily results, for the 

subjects of each such order in a normally unresolvable cognitive dilemma. One recently 

identified by Yaganisako and Delaney, as it has come to function in our contemporary case as 

now purely secular, and therefore as such, necessarily either Western or westernized academics 

and/or intellectuals; if doing so with specific reference to anthropologists. For while the latter, 

they write, “often include in their accounts, origin stories of the people they study,” given that 

they had come to recognize “after Malinowski, that an intimate connection exists between the 

word, mythos, the sacred tales of a tribe,” on the one hand, “and their behaviors” (i.e., “their 

ritual acts, their moral deeds, their social organization, and even their practical activities”) on the 

other, nevertheless these same anthropologists “hesitate at the threshold of their own, reluctant to 

explore their own origin myths whether religious or secular.” Here they then go on to make the 

above, was the failure of all attempts by other scholars to prove the post­Sixties, order­restabilizing neo­Darwinian 

bio­cosmogony, of Hernnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve etc. to be wrong. 
83 
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. 
Foreward by Sr Stafford Beer (Boston: Reidel Publishing Co., 1980).

­ 35 ­ 
further point, that this reluctance on the part of anthropologists is a lawlike one, since one which 

they share with the peoples they study (and who are classified, generically as their “native 

informants”). This given that they too, (i.e., the anthropologists) “treat their own stories of 

origin” (i.e. that of Creation and Evolution) as “taboo—set apart and sacred,” as do all human 

groups. If doing so in the case of the former, in now non­religious terms, and, instead embedding 

this view in (the ostensible objectivity of) “an evolutionary paradigm.” Yet one which is itself 

generated from their own “part­science, part myth,” 84  Darwinian biocosmogonic representation 

of origins of Evolution—that is, as one whose “part science” aspect does indeed, not only 

correctly describe the origins of the physiological/neurophysiological implementing conditions 

of our being hybridly human, but the origins also of the co­evolution of the emergent properties 

of language and narrative with the brain, as the  properties that were to be the indispensable 

conditions of our coming to be the uniquely auto­instituting mode of living being that we are— 

with this representation, however, taken as, and mistakenly so, to be, true also of the origins of 

our being [hybridly] human, with this now serving to charter and legitimate their projection of 

the notion that their own origin myths “are in some sense, real and true.” This given that in their 

Origin­story of a process to which they abductively, 85  give the name human evolution, 86  “first 

there were myths,” then there “were religions” (both now “relegated to a dim past”), as stages 

that we have now outgrown, in order to replace them both with “science.” 

With this genre­specific bourgeois or ethno­class “representations of origins” thereby 

making anthropologist logically unable, normally, to see him or herself as in anyway coeval, as 

84 
Glyn Isaccs, Aspects of Evolution, in D.S. Bendall. Evolution from Molecules to Man (New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 1983). 
85 
See for the concept of abduction, as a form of totemic (or “knowledge of categories of thought”) Gregory 
Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1970. 
86 
The abductive transfer of the processes of Evolution from the second level of purely biological life to the 
historical processes of autopoetic transformations specific to the third level of our hybridly human reality, functions 
to teleologically legitimate our present Western­bourgeois world system as the ostensible climax/end of history

­ 36 ­ 
Johannes Fabian was to seminally observe, 87  with the other human groups who were/are the 

objects of study; and thereby to be seen as fully—if differently, co­human—with themselves. 

This seeing that to do so, would call for them/us to accept the relativization of their/our own 

“part science, part myth” origin­story together with its autopoetically instituted genre of being 

human, and nation­state cum Western civilizational “fictive mode of kind,” as that empirically of 

mankind, itself rhetorically overrepresented, in the biocosmogonic terms of our Darwinian “part 

science, part myth” Origin Story “representation of origins,” as if it were that of humankind(s). 

Therefore, as if, to extrapolate from Jacques Derrida’s penetrating1968 conference presentation, 

“The Ends of Man,” “there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so 

naturally links the ‘We’”—not only of his fellow philosophers, as well as of Yaganisako and 

Delaney’s fellow anthropologists, but also the we of all ourselves who as secular, and therefore 

necessarily, either Western or westernized middle­class academics and/or intellectuals, are all 

cosmogonically chartered by the same evolutionary paradigm—to the “we men,” in the horizon 

of humanity” (Derrida, p. 116). 

Further, therefore, with this over­representation (i.e., of our ethno­class [i.e., Western­ 

bourgeois] mode of referent “we” (and its world­systemic nation­state modes of 

Breadwinning/Investing/capital accumulating/consuming middle classes), as being isomorphic 

with that of the “we” of the ecumenically human, being made possible only by the fact that, as 

Derrida also point out, in our discourses “there is little practice of the history of concepts,” with 

this meaning that “the history of the concept of ‘man’” itself is never examined; and, with it, the 

history also, of the concept of secularizing Man’s discursively invented and objectively 

institutionalized series of Human Others, as identified by Jacob Pandian (1988). That is, firstly, 

87 
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (              )

­ 37 ­ 
the concept of the “Negro”/the “Negress” (negros/negras in Spanish, together with the concept 

of Indians/Indian squaws (indios/indias in Spanish), with this in turn followed from the late 

eighteenth century onwards, by a second series of Human Others, all classified generically as 

natives (men and women); with all being made to function as the embodiment of the (concept of) 

the Native Other to the True Human Self of the West’s second reinvented (concept of) Man. 88 

While it is this systemic non­recognition of the invented nature of these concepts, which serves 

to ensure, as Derrida further notes, that everything continues to occur “as if the sign ‘man’ had 

no origins, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit”. 89  As if therefore Man’s embodied 

signifiers of Otherness as the negation of its self­concept, whether in its original Renaissance 

civic humanist form, as homo politicus, or in its later bio­humanist form as homo oeconomicus— 

that is, as if the latter’s Human Other institutionalized signifiers of symbolic death, i.e., Negro, 

Indian, Natives, niggers, (indeed, “White Trash” or Trailer park trash), together with Welfare 

mom, ghetto Black, as the extreme expression of the global category of the non­Breadwinning 

non­taxpaying “planet of the slums” Jobless Poor, not to say at the world systemic level, the 

Otherness category of the “underdeveloped” 90  also all themselves had “no historical, cultural, or 

linguistic limit”; that is, no cosmogonic, and therefore no autopoetically instituting limits. 

The proposal here, however, is that, in the above context, this oversight, in our own now 

Western and westernized case as secular middle class academics, is one which functions for us, 

according to the same laws of human auto­institution, to which, together with all other human 

groups, we have been (normally) subordinated from the Event of our Origin; this as a form of 

subordination that however needs to be recognized, within the terms of the Ceremony Found’s 

88 
Jacob Pandian, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Towards an Authentic Anthropology (1988) 
89 
(Derrida, 1968, 1982, p. 116) 
90 
See for this Sylvia Wynter, “Is Development a Purely Empirical Concept, or also Teleological? A 
Perspective from “We­the­Underdeveloped” in Aguibou Yansane, Recovery and Sustainable development in Africa. 
(Greenwood Press, 1996).

­ 38 ­ 
new post­Darwinian Origin Account, enacting of its new answer to the question of who we are, 

as having been precisely the price paid for that emancipatory First Emergence that was defining 

of the Event of our origin as a uniquely hybrid mode of living being on the savannas of today’s 

Black Africa. So that, when, for example, the anthropologist Peter Wilson describes the event of 

“one primate genus” coming “to develop” (what he defines in Westerns ethno­taxonomic terms 

as “culture”), by means of which the human populations of the species were to, from now on 

“make themselves the object of their own thought, and subject themselves to  their own humanly 

devised procedures,” 91  this is the same process identified by Nietzsche as that of “man’s labor 

upon himself” by means of which, through the “morality of mores” he would make his behaviors 

calculable and to be depended upon, 92  (his behaviors, in effect, lawlike), both refer to the same 

phenomenon. That is, to the fact that our own now continued subordination  to our own now 

humanly invented rules, had had its origin in an Event that was both biological and meta­ 

biological; and as such, in addition to the First Event of the origin of the physical universe, and 

the second of the origin of purely biological forms of life, one that was now the Third Event. 

Consequently, given that this is also the Event that the paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga 

describes—in his book, The Neanderthal’s Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers (2002)—as 

the one by which “[t]he first modern humans in Africa, although surrounded by other [hominid] 

populations as robust as the Neanderthals of Europe, took a different evolutionary route, an 

alternative strategy to solve ecological problems” by “developing a brain specialized in the 

manipulation of symbols” together with “…articulated language at the service of a unique 

capacity to…tell stories and create fictitious worlds” 93 —these as were/are the stories in whose 

91 
Peter J. Wilson: Man, The Promising Primate: The Conditions of Human Evolution (1983). 
92 
Neitzche, ref. Kaufman, ed. 
93 
Juan Luis Arsuaga, The Neanderthal’s Necklace: In Search of The First Thinkers trans. A. Klatt (New 
York, Four Walls—Two Windows­, 2002) p. 307

­ 39 ­ 
chartering integrating schema and/or “fictitious worlds” they/we were to be enabled to 

autopoetically institute themselves/ourselves as now symbolically encoded, and thereby 

artificially made similar as inter­altruistic, eusocially kin­recognizing, and thereby cooperating 

fictive modes of kind; this beyond the narrow preset limits of all forms of purely genetically 

determined eusocial conspecificity. Thereby with our “stories” being as much a part of our 

being, as the imperatively artificially co­identifying eusocial species that we are, as for example, 

are our bipedalism, and the use of our hands. This, then as, the Event of the origin as specifically 

human modes of living being, as a now hybrid (i.e. biological and meta­biological) species, as 

one therefore, no longer behaving, only according to the laws regulatory of [purely] biological 

life, but also according to laws of human auto­institution specific to our also third and hybrid 

level of existence. 

The caveat here, however, is the following: that with our First Emergence from— what 

would have been otherwise, our total Primate mode subordination, as far as the limits of our 

inter­altruistic kin­recognizing bonding, and cooperating eusocial behaviors, are concerned—to 

the DNA code of our species genome, had imperatively called for a two­pronged price to be paid. 

The first that of the fact that because our now cosmogonically chartering codes of symbolic 

life/death, as the newly hegemonic determinant of our eusocial behaviors, this in the overall 

context of each such story or cosmogony’s, (in their then first matrix form), religiously enacted 

behavior­necessitating (i.e. motivating/de­motivating) schemas or programs, had to be able to 

activate the opiate reward and punishment biochemical implementing mechanisms of the brain 94 

94 
See Avram Goldstein, Addiction: From Biology to Drug Policy, [New York: W.H. Freeman, 994], where 
he writes, 

In summary, a natural opioid system exists for signaling both reward (probably by beta­ 
endorphin)  and  punishment  (by  dynorphins)…We  can  speculate  that  reward  systems  drive 
adaptive  behavior  in the  following  way.  They  signal  “good”  when  food  is  found and  eaten  by  a 
hungry  animal,  when  water  is  found  and  drunk  by  a  thirsty  animal,  when  sexual  activity  is

­ 40 ­ 
(in the terms appropriate to each such code’s genre­specific religious creeds’ “what is to be said” 

as well as to its rituals prescriptions as to “what is to be done),” 95  this had therefore called for the 

subjects of each such creed’s and its chartering origin story to normally remain subjected to its 

schema as the condition of being who they/we are. Concomitantly, with this also calling—as a 

function of inducting/motivating the requisite forms of inter­altruistic kin­recognizing behaviors, 

instituting of each such creed’s fictive mode of kind—for the laws regulatory of such behaviors 

to be ones able to ensure that the structuring of our chartering cosmogonic narratives or origin 

stories, and thereby of the now genre­specific human sociogenic code of symbolic life and death 

which they inscribe/mandate, be ones rigorously analogous (with respect to each such origin 

narrative’s behavior­motivating/de­motivating story­line) to the purely biological laws 

regulatory of what Goldstein defines as this “delicately regulated [natural opioid system] 

perfected by evolution over thousands of years to serve the survival of all species.” Thereby, as 

schemas able to ensure the systemically activated co­functioning of the good/reward, 

bad/punishment natural opioid mechanism of the brain, with the positive/negative magma of 

meanings enacting of its genre­specific sociogenic code of symbolic life/death; in effect, the 

systemic co­functioning of the code’s regulatory second set of instructions, with the first set of 

promised  and  consummated,  when  a  threatening  situation  is  averted.  They  signal  “bad”  when 
harmful behavior is engaged in or when pain is experienced. These signals become associated with 
the  situation  in  which  they  are  generated,  and  they  are  remembered.  Thus,  the 
conditioning…seems to represent the necessary process by which an animal learns to seek what is 
beneficial and avoid what is harmful. This delicately regulated system was perfected by evolution 
over millions of years to serve the survival of all species (Goldstein, ibis., p. 60, Emphasis added). 

95 
See Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, Univ. of 
Pennsylvania Press, 1980). Here, however Grassi’s thesis makes it clear—over against Goldstein’s thesis that the 
biochemical behavior­regulatory system functions for humans in the same species­specific appropriate/non­ 
appropriate terms as it does for purely biological species, by showing that the specifically human code would have 
functioned in creed­specific (therefore genre­specific) terms for humans; as it now does in the terms of our now 
purely secular Liberal humanist bio­cosmogonically chartered creed enacting of the West’s second reinvented 
concept of Man in now bourgeois, homo oeconomicus Breadwinner/taxpayer, Liberal­democratic terms.

­ 41 ­ 
instructions of our species DNA code regulatory of the functioning of our brain’s natural opioid 

system. 

It is in this context that N.J. Girardot, by his identification of the [behavior­ 

motivating/demotivating schema] defining of all religions—that is, as a schema based on the 

projection of a “general order of existence” together with, firstly a postulate “of a significant ill,” 

or “affliction”  this followed, in turn, by the specific creed’s prescribed behavioral pathways put 

forward as the “cure” of each such “ill,” then further giving as an example, Christianity’s 

postulate of a significant “ill” as that of post­Adamic mankind’s enslavement to “Original Sin,” 

therefore, with redemption or salvation from this “ill,” only being attainable by means of 

Christian baptism, followed by the Christian convert/subjects adhering to the prescriptive 

behavioral pathway laid down, by the Christian Church—can be seen to have, also identified the 

lawlike way in which each such cosmogony’s, and its behavior­programming schema (whether, I 

shall add here, religious, or as in our case secular with the transumed postulate of Malthusian 

Natural Scarcity and Darwinian Natural Selection reoccupying the place of enslavement to 

Original Sin 96 )  must therefore, be narratively elaborated, according to specific rules. That is, 

according to the same “good/bad” (story­line) terms, by means of which “the natural opioid 

system,” as defined by Avram Goldstein, functions directly and unmediatedly, to 

motivate/demotivate, the species­specific behaviors of all forms of [purely] biological life. This 

therefore means that what Girardot has identified, if not in these terms, 97  is the reality of the 

empirical functioning of laws specific to our third level and hybrid level of reality, as the level 

96 
See for this Max Stackhouse, in his Foreword to Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From 
Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001). See also H.G. Brennan 
and A.M.C. Waterman eds. Economics and Religion: Are They Distinct? (Klower Academic Publisher, 1994). 
97 
Girardot puts forward his thesis, in terms adapted from the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, in his religious 
studies approach to the study of Taoism, a Chinese religion. See for this, N.J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early 
Taoism, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983). I have freely paraphrased his major thesis.

­ 42 ­ 
itself only brought into existence by means of our behavioral praxis of being hybridly human. 

These, therefore, as the laws of auto­institution, which have hitherto functioned to ensure, that as 

the first price paid for our rupture with purely organic life, in order to auto­institute ourselves as 

human, in behaviorally self­programming, and therefore Fanonianly hybrid bios and 

mythos/logos (theologos, now­biologos) terms, we continue, and imperatively so, to remain, 

normally, as subordinated to our humanly invented cosmogonically chartered, sociogenic codes 

of symbolic life/death, these as the new replicator codes enacting of our genre­specific fictive (or 

artificially speciated) modes of kind, as all forms of purely biological living beings must remain 

subordinated to the biological laws, and DNA replicator codes 98  governing of their species­ 

specific behaviors—this including their eusocial cooperative kin­recognizing behaviors. 

In consequence, the second price that had had to be paid for the rupture of our First 

Emergence, has been from then until today, the fact that the limits of each genre­specific origin­ 

story, because the limits also of the limits of the degrees of subjectively experienced psycho­ 

affective inclusiveness defining of each such inter­altruistic mode of fictive mode of kind, also 

functions at the same time, as the imperative boundary of psycho­affective closure defining of 

each such referent we, of its us, as over against the they and the not­us. Consequently with all the 

wars, whether small­scale or large­scale, being waged from then on until now, not in terms of 

purely biological preservation, but instead in those of, on the one hand, the imperative 

preservation, or on the other, the exalted magnification, (this latter as in the case of all imperial 

wars) of each genre­specific group’s mode of symbolic life/death, instituting of its fictive mode 

of kind, over against that of other groups. At the same time, as lawlikely correlated with the 

genre­specific mode of psycho­affective closure, defining of the limits of the referent We of each 

98 
See for the concept of replicator codes, Richard Dawkin’s essay “Universal Darwinisim,” in D.S. Berdall 
ed. Evolution from Molecules to Man, (Cambridge) Cambridge University Press, 1983.

­ 43 ­ 
such group, and its fictive mode of kind, has been the no less imperative functioning also, of 

what can be defined as that of the law of cognitive closure. That is, as this law functions at both 

the level of purely biologically species­specific modes of living being, and as well as, 

analogically, at that of the hybrid level of the genre­specific modes of living being that are our 

own. This, therefore, as the also supplementary price paid for the rupture effected by means of 

our First Emergence, from the subordination of the limits of our eusocial cooperative inter­ 

altruistic kin­recognizing behaviors to the genetically pre­set limits defining of the primate 

family to which we, partly, belong. 99 

As a result, therefore, if, as the cognitive scientist, Gerald Edelman has pointed out with 

respect to the functioning of the purely biological laws which govern all species­specific 

behaviors, that because each organism must, lawlikely  “know” its environment in terms which 

conserve its genetically determined, “descriptive statement” of what it is to be that organism, 

and, must therefore, selectively, both categorize and know its environment in the species­specific 

“good/bad” terms that are adaptively advantageous to its realization and survival as such an 

organism, this means that the way each such organism “knows” and experiences reality, through 

its species­specific “perceptual categorization system,” can in no way be concordant with the 

way that reality is outside its species­specific viewpoint, 100  this was also to be the case with 

respect to the laws of human auto­institution that govern our genre­specific behaviors. In that we 

too, from the Event of our origin, must, if now doing so, as a now hybrid mode of living being, 

also selectively know and categorize our environment in the “good/bad” terms which ensure the 

conservation of our cosmogonically chartered code of symbolic life/death, and its second set of 

99 
See for an excellent description of the origin of this law, that of cognitive closure, even where he does not 
define it as such, Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1992). 
100 
Gerald Edelman, in Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York, Basic 
Books. 1987).

­ 44 ­ 
instructions’ descriptive statement of what it is like to be that genre­specific mode of living 

being; in terms, therefore, that are adaptively advantageous to its realization and survival as such 

a being. Thus the fact that the way in which we humans “know” and experience our social 

environment through our cosmogonically chartered sociogenic code’s genre­specific “perceptual 

categorization system” (Althusser’s Ideology), can also be in no way concordant with the way 

that reality is outside our sociogenic code’s genre­specific viewpoint. Which therefore meant 

that in response to an existentially imperative “reasons of being” we too have, hitherto—as far as 

our knowledge of the social reality of the autopoetic (languaging) living system, which called for 

us to know that reality in the good/bad terms of our genre­specific code’s correlated behavior­ 

motivating/demotivating schema that is the condition of our behavioral performative enactment 

as each such cosmogonically chartered mode of being human and its “fictive mode of kind” or 

referent we—had to also to remain, normally, subordinated to the law of cognitive closure 

defining of all forms of living being. 

This is therefore the fundamental cause of the “cognitive dilemma” identified both by 

Yaganisako and Delaney ,and Derrida, in the case of Western secular academics, like ourselves. 

In that, once according to the laws of human auto­institution the cosmogonically 

inscribed/chartered, sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, autopoetically instituting of our 

genre specific fictive mode of kind—has been institutionalized, thereby determining the mode of 

institution of the social reality of the specific autopoetic languaging living system, which is 

reciprocally, that is circularly and recursively, that genre­specific code’s condition of existence, 

as the former is of its, we must necessarily know that social reality not in the terms that are 

concordant with the way that reality is, outside our present genre­specific codes view point, but 

instead, as it must rigorously be known (from the inside) in the adaptively advantageous

­ 45 ­ 
“good/bad” “perceptual categorization system” (Althusser’s Ideology) terms indispensable to the 

dynamic enactment and stable replication, both of our contemporary local “nation­state” sub­ 

unites, and their fictive modes of kind, and as well, of the macro world system of the West in its 

now bourgeois or ethno­class configuration—that is, in its planetarily extended, and no less 

“fictive mode” of Liberal/Neo­Liberal democratic, civilizational kind. 

It is therefore in this context, that of the overall price paid for the Event of our First 

Emergence as an autopoetically instituting hybrid mode of living being, that the far­reaching 

hypothesis put forward in 1999 by the French anthropologist, Maurice Godelier—when linked 

on the one hand, to the “particular wrong” put forward by W.E.B. Dubois in Epigraph 4—that is, 

to the wrong of himself, like the rest of the Black U.S. population at that pre­Sixties time, having 

to experience themselves, as a then disenfranchised, and apartheid/segregated anomalies to being 

[White] American in the greatest [Liberal] democracy on earth (one defined in Western 

bourgeois [or ethno­class] terms, as a democracy of equal Breadwinners cum job­holding 

taxpayers) and thereby correlatedly, within those same terms, as also anomalies to being fully 

human, and on the other, to the “general wrong”, 101  identified in Epigraph 3, that of the 

catastrophic threat now posed to our very survival as a species by the ongoing and accelerating 

processes of non­naturally driven processes of global warming and climate change—alerts us to 

the dimensions of the new mutation that is now urgently called for. That is, that of our Second 

Emergence this time round, from our continued subordination, as the price paid for that of the 

Event of our First Emergence—to our own humanly invented autopoetically instituted Origin 

narratives, and thereby to the latter’s mandated/prescribed replicator sociogenic codes of 

symbolic life/death—itself as an Emergence whose mutation can only be effected, from within 

the terms of the Ceremony Found’s new post­humanist Origin account and answer (one beyond 
101

­ 46 ­ 
the limits therefore of, our present world system’s now globally hegemonic and homogenized 

answer and therefore inter alia, its empirically enacted, order­instituting bio­cosmogonically 

chartered Liberal­democratic and ethno­class “paradigm of justice,” against which the 

“redemptive­prophetic” Rastafarian intellectuals of Jamaica have also projected their “gaze from 

below” religio­political millenarian counter­cosmogony; as one in which, Jah, their black God, 

as a new fount of justice, assures them (in one of Marley’s songs) that as sons and daughters of 

Jah, “no one will sit on the sidewalk and beg bread,” no “they won’t”! 

In his book, The Enigma of the Gift, Godelier, on the basis of his in­depth study of the 

Baruya people of New Guinea, 102  puts forward the hybpothesis that although as humans we have, 

from our origins, had, above all else, to first produce ours societies, outside of which we cannot 

live as (nor indeed be) humans 103  nevertheless, while we have always done so, we have at the 

same time, consistently projected our own collective agency—by means of (the socio­ 

technologies) of our “foundational myths,” i.e., our origin/story cosmologies, onto millennially 

varying forms of supernatural agents—whether as nature spirits, deified ancestors, gods, 

goddesses, or whether as the relatively late, historically speaking, respective Invisible Sole and 

Single God(s), of the three Abrahamic monotheisms. Yet in all cases, doing so for the same 

purpose; that of making our own empirical human agency opaque to ourselves. 

Why this imperative? Here Godelier’s excellent in­depth analysis both of the 

“foundational myth” or mythic complex of Origin­stories instituting of the Baruya people (and 

therefore of in my own terms, their fictive mode of Baruya kind), and as well, of the way in 

102 
Translated by Norah Scott, (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999). 
103 
Thus as the historian Bill Christian points out, the first form of (nomadic) social organization have been found on 
the continent of Africa, where almost half of human history was lived, before the first small groups, (carrying with 
them already invented matrix forms of autopoetic technologies instituting of human forms of social organization left 
Africa some 65,000 years ago, going on to people the planet). See for Christian, his The Maps of Time: 
AnIintroduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

­ 47 ­ 
which what is narrated in their “mythology” lawlikely correlates with “what goes on 

[empirically] in [their] society” uncovers a major corollary of the cognitive price originally paid 

for the mutation effected by the Third Event of our Origin as defined by our First Emergence; a 

corollary that continues to function for us (if in the now new terms, of our present Western and 

westernized and thereby purely secular bio­cosmogonically chartered world system) in the same 

analogically lawlike terms, that it does, as he shows, for the Baruya people and what would have 

been, before their colonization by the West, their then totally auto­centered cosmogonically 

chartered society. 

Thereby as his analysis of their society enables us to see, this corollary, is that of the 

existential imperative of the subjects’ of each human society, having to make the empirical 

reality of our own collective human agency (even more so, the reality of our empirically being 

directly responsible for the “good” and the “bad” of each such order, together with the 

distributed ratios of “reward” and “punishment,” and centrally, therefore, for its systemically 

functioning order­instituting  paradigms of justice), opaque to themselves/ourselves. This as the 

non­negotiable condition of their continued existence as such genre specific [sociogenic] 

subjects and fictive modes of kind and correlatedly, that of the continued dynamic enactment and 

stable replication of their/our respective societal orders as autopoetic living systems. With this 

existential imperative, being able to be now recognized as the lawlikely causal principle of the 

specific cognitive dilemma observed in our contemporary case by Yaganisako and Delaney as 

well as by Derrida; at the same time, as that dilemma can now be recognized, in turn, as the 

expression of the unique form that this dilemma has taken in the case of the West. That is as a 

dilemma which in the wake both of Godelier’s hypothesis and of his analysis of the Baruya 

people and their society, can itself be now identified as that of the West’s hitherto theoretically

­ 48 ­ 
unresolvable aporia of the secular; this as the aporia, whose conceptual non­resolvability, is also 

itself directly causal, at the empirical level both of the non­resolvability of the “particular wrong” 

of Epigraph 4 104  as of the only relatively recently recognized “general wrong” of Epigraph 2. 

Therefore, all of whose hitherto proposed “what is to be done’ solutions, must themselves 

continue to function within the logic of our present world systemic society’s variant of the 

“existential imperative” identified by Godelier, as illustrated by his analysis of the “foundational 

myth” instituting the Baruya society, as of the empirical society so instituted. 

His analysis of the Baruya society and people therefore reveals, inter alia, the following with 

respect to the functioning of the universally applicable existential imperative: 

(i)  That the foundational myth that is the overall Baruya mythic complex of Origin­ 

stories, functions, by the very plot­ling of their narration, to validate the projection by the 

Baruya, of their own collective agency onto the magma of supernatural agents (including 

centrally, the Sun) who people their Castoriadis­type Imaginary. 

(ii)  That it is the projection of their own agency onto these latter agents, and as carried 

out by their mythic Origin­stories complex, that then functions to mandate and legitimate, not 

only the respective role allocations structuring of the order, but also as well the inequalities 

between them; most of all, given the politically stateless or a­statal nature of Baruya society (and 

therefore, the relatively egalitarian [i.e., non­stratified] relationships between male members of 

the group), to therefore also legitimate, the large scale inequalities between the men and women; 

104 
This seeing that, if in the wake of while post the Sixties anti­apartheid civil rights movement  a 
contemporary middle class intellectuals like DuBois has been electorally enfranchised, thereby made into an equal 
Breadwinner taxpayer citizen of the Liberal democracy of the U.S., this political incorporation has been made 
possible, only on the basis of the continued electoral disenfranchisement of the Black, Jobless, unskilled, non­ 
Breadwinning, non­taxpaying category of the Black Poor, whose large­scale incarceration, largely on drug­ 
possession charges not only deprives them of the vote, but enables the Black ghetto cum Gulag archipelago prison 
system extension, to reoccupy the pre­Sixties role played by a segregated Black population of all classes. That in 
Legesse’s term of the liminally deviant category of instituting of the normative order of the U.S.

­ 49 ­ 
this together, with in Butler’s terms, the regulatory coercive practices of gender coherence that 

empirically produces this always already mythically chartered inequality. 

(iii)  That given, however, that both the inequalities as well as the regulatory practices of 

gender coercion, to which the women are subjected, are themselves a function of the overall 

regulatory practices of genre­coherence 105  indispensable to the autopoetic institution of the 

Baruya’s mode of fictive kind” (which is the telos of the everyday functioning of the empirical 

society; (as well as of its founding mythic complex, and their/its narrative structures), serves to 

enable the subjects of the order, to experience their respective role allocations as ones which 

because supernaturally, that is, extra­humanly, ordained cannot be questioned (this including the 

role of those who most lose out, the women), and to thereby collectively continue to work 

towards the dynamic enactment and stable replication of the Baruya societal order, one itself 

made to be phenomenologically experienced by them, through the mediation of the mythic 

complex, as the realization of the “true” because (until the coming of the Western colonizers) 

only possible order. 

(iv)  That because, as his analysis further reveals, neither the Baruya society as a warrior a­ 

statal society (that is, without the state’s agencies of enforcement), nor indeed, what I shall 

define in my own terms, as their Baruya fictive mode of kind, (as based on their genre­specific 

gendered sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, itself chartered by the mythic complex), could 

therefore have pre­existed, nor indeed can exist outside that mythic complex, the reason for the 

105 
Although Godelier does not use these terms, he nevertheless documents the difference between the gendered 
form of the divide (that is, in my own terms, of the genre­specific sociogenic code of symbolic life/death) that tends 
to be central to relatively egalitarian or non­stratified societies such as that of the Baruya, as contrasted with, for 
example, that of the stratified society of East Timor, where the gendered form of the divide or code, is transcended 
by another form. One in which a specific clan becomes the governing clan (men and women) over all other clans; 
therefore, with the gendered enactment of this new code now playing, only a reinforcing role: as it also does for 
example in our contemporary Westernized secular societies, where it is transcended by the code of class, with both 
in term transcended by the sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, enacting of the West’s Man in its second 
reinvented form, and to which we give the ethno­taxonomic term of race.

­ 50 ­ 
 existential imperative of their projection of their own agency (that is the projection carried out 

by the Baruya religious practitioners who are all men) onto supernatural agencies in order to 

make their own agency opaque to themselves, becomes clear. 

For although Godelier himself, as a top­flight anthropologist, but also as a Western 

bourgeois subject, instituted as such in the genre­specific bio­cosmogonically chartered terms 

of the now biologically absolute (i.e., on the model of a natural organism) answer that the 

West’s second, reinvented concept of Man, gives to the question of who we are, and therefore, 

as one for which both the reality and relativity of our genre­specific modes of fictive kind, can 

not be recognized to exist, given that this would entail the recognition of the also genre­specific 

relativity of its own answer)—fails to see that what he so excellently describes in his book, 

was/is precisely the autopoetic procedures and socio­technologies instituting of the genre­ 

specific Baruya mode of fictive kind, as such a mode of kind 106  nevertheless, his analysis 

transcends this form of non­recognition. Doing so, by the far­reaching dimension of his other 

recognition that the existential imperative central to the Baruya’s ritual ceremonies, that of their 

systemic making of their own empirical agency opaque to themselves, and, even more so, by his 

realization of the universally applicability of this imperative to all human societies, hitherto. 

For, in effect, what he has come upon, although not specifically identifying it as such, is 

106 
As, for example, his excellent description of the central male initiation ceremonies which, in an originally 
warrior society as that of the Baruya, functions to give a second birth/rebirth to the male age group initiates in the 
gendered form of symbolic life defining of them no longer as “raw” biological males, but as men­of­the Baruya 
fictive mode of kind, therefore for whose defence or exaltation, they will now be prepared to give up their biological 
life. This, at the same time, as Godelier’s description also makes clear, the initiates are made to experience by means 
of the same ritual ceremonies (including their being “fed” with male semen), their biological life as an inferiorized 
negatively marked form of life, one given birth to, by the systemically inferiorized category of the women, together 
with its particularistic “we­of­the­same­womb” genetic kinship loyalty, as a secondary form of life, and therefore of 
kinship loyalty, as contrasted with the political form of kinship based on of symbolic life, into which they are being 
re­engendered by the men. The former life, therefore, as defined by the bio­instinctual tendency towards biological 
self preservation, the desire for which, had to be overridden by the men, by means of their ritual ceremonies’ 
artificial activation of Goldstein’s natural opioid system in terms of the sociogenic code of symbolic life, as itself 
mandated by their foundational mythic complex, and brought into existence by means of the initiation procedures, 
of their praxis.

­ 51 ­ 
 precisely the functioning of the regulatory laws governing all processes of human autopoesis or 

of auto­institution. These as laws, which have, from our origin, prescriptively called for the 

socio­technology of the projection onto extra­human agencies of our own empirically collective 

agency, with the making of the reality of that agency “opaque to ourselves,” being the very 

condition of our being able—as an imperatively eusocial species, depending for our survival, 

realization, on levels of inter­altruistic kin­recognizing cooperation, 107  that now had to be 

artificially induced—to effect the mutation, that was that of our rupture with and first 

Emergence from, the total subordination of our behaviors, to the narrow preset Primate limits of 

kin­recognition/cooperation, as biologically prescribed by the “first set of instructions” of the 

DNA code of our species genome. Of our being able instead, by means of our Nietzschean­type 

“labor upon ourselves,” 108 and its correlated “second set of instructions” to auto­institute 

ourselves as the uniquely hybrid mode of living being that we are. As a result, because it was 

specifically by means alone of our humanly invented 109  and retroactively projected cosmogonies 

or “foundational myths” in their first matrix religious forms—as the forms which, for millennia 

were to mandate/prescribe the “second set of instructions” of the genre­specific sociogenic 

codes of symbolic life/death instituting of our fictive modes of inter­altruistic kin­recognizing 

kind, with this, therefore, ensuring in the case of the Baruya population studied by Godelier, the 

motivation of their behaviors not as biological males/females, but as symbolically encoded 

Baruya­men­and­women, the why of the existential imperative was to be the following: 

(v)  That because our “fictive modes of kind”, together with the cosmogonically 

107 
See earlier the Novak note re: Three aspects of Evolution, mutation, cooperation, ands selection, with the 
latter being only one of its self­organizing processes. 
108 
Nietzsche’s Basic Writings, Ed., by Kaufman. 
109 
E.O. Wilson, the biologist/sociobiologists, while agreeing that as mytho­poetic creatures we live in stories, 
proposes instead, from his biologically absolute perspective, as that of ethno­class Man, that is the brain which 
creates our chartering stories, rather than merely setting constraints on the patterns our chartering Origin stories 
must follow according to the laws of human auto­institution. See for this his Foreword to Loyal Rue’s Everybody’s 
Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution (New York, NY State University Press, 2000).

­ 52 ­ 
mandated codes of symbolic life/death which institute them/us as such kinds, and correlated 

genres of being human, are entities, such as that of the Baruya or, as it is also in the case of the 

“imagined communities” of our present Western and westernized, purely secular to nation­ 

states’ local modes of fictive kind, together with that of the West's macro­world­system of 

civilizational kind in its bourgeois configuration into which they/we are incorporated­­which can 

in no way exist in Nature, nor be given origin to by bioevolutionary processes (as ones that 

would, for example, have enabled such modes of kind to be genetically determined, and thereby 

stabilized), this therefore meant/and means that each human society’s projection of their/our own 

collective agency, for immeasurably long millennia onto supernatural (and therefore, extra­ 

human) Agents, had been, as in many cases, it continues to be a lawlike function of the following 

existential imperative. That is, the imperative to guard against the entropic falling apart of their 

artificially instituted, symbolically encoded fictive modes of kind; against, therefore, the entropic 

disintegration of their societies, each of which as autopoetic living systems, are self­organized 

about the It of their genre­of­being­human, therefore about their also, fundamentally humanly 

invented replicator sociogenic codes of symbolic life/death; this analogously to the way in which, 

at the level of purely biological life, the beehive of the bee self­organizes itself about the It that is 

the DNA replicator code of the bee. Therefore, in our case, with the projection of each code’s 

original source onto a supernatural Agencies (having thereby served as an indispensable function 

of the stabilization of the code, whose positive/negative, symbolic life/death system of meanings, 

once implemented by the biochemistry, of the “natural opioid system” which that system of 

meanings has activated in its genre­specific terms has been transformed into a living entity: into 

“words­made­flesh”.

­ 53 ­ 
 It is in the context of both of Godelier's analysis of the Bauruya, as well of his general 

hypothesis that the far­reaching world implications of Renaissance humanisms original counter­ 

cosmogonic “back­to­the­pagan­classics” invention of Man as a separate notion from Christian, 

and thereby its initiation of what was to the relativization of Christianity's theologically absolute 

answer as one which until then there could have been no other possible answer, can be 

understood. 

In that, in the context of Godelier's hypothesis, what that first act of 

separation/relativization of Renaissance humanism's new answer—its relativization, that is, 

medieval Latin Christina Europe's theologically absolute, and Divinely guaranteed answer, 

together with its projected “space of Otherness” complex which had mapped the symbolic 

life/death Divides of its code upon the physical level of reality 110 —had set in motion, was 

nothing less than the initiation of the processes by means of which the West was to 

desupernaturalize of the extra­human agencies onto which human groups had millennially 

projected the reality of their/our own collective Agency, from the Event of our origin as hybridly 

human, and according to the laws of human auto­institution which had emerged concomitantly 

with that Event/Origin. Thereby with this initiated process, of 

relativization/desupernaturalization, one further enforced by the West's second reinvented 

Liberal humanist answer—in the empirical wake of the U.S. French (Rights of Man vs. 

nobleman) revolutions, together with the slave revolution of Haiti—and as an answer that would 

further lead to the privatization of Christianity's supernaturally guaranteed absolute answer— 

coming to effect a discontinuous rupturing intervention of discontinuity into the millennially 

110 
In addition to the Heaven/Earth Divide the "sacred geography" of the medieval order, had also projected its 
Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh code, onto a Divide between the habitable regions of the Earth, centered on Jerusalem, 
represented as the realm within the Christian God’s Providential Grace and the uninhabitable regions of the Torrid 
Zone, and the Western Hemisphere, both represented as having been condemned to be outside that Grace.

­ 54 ­ 
extended order of human history hitherto. That is, onto the continuous process of the projectionof 

the reality of our human agency onto the magma of humanly invented supernatural Agencies, as 

projections—which from our Origin, had functioned to ensure the opacity, to our normative 

(always already symbolically encoded) orders of consciousness, (each specific to its genre of 

being human and to its respective fictive mode of kind), of the reality of our own empirical auto­ 

instituting human agency. 

To ensure therefore the continued non­autonomy of our cognition with respect to the 

empirical reality of all three levels of existence, with this thereby enabling them to be known (as 

medieval Latin Christian Europe had to “know” the earth to be non­moving because post­ 

adamically­divinely condemned to be fixed at the center of the universe as its dregs, and as the 

Baruya had to know the reality of the Sun as that of the Great Donor/Ancestor of the men, who 

were/are the embodiment of the code of symbolic life, in the same lawlikely abductive terms of 

“a mutually reinforcing system of presuppositions,” that had been indispensable to the continued 

enactment of their genre­specific fictive mode of kind, to their stabilization, together with that of 

their respective social orders, as autopoetic living systems. 

Uniquely in the case of the post­medieval West, therefore, the setting in motion, by 

means of its two new answers, of the desupernaturalization of our projected Agency, was to lead 

to the recognition of the hitherto non­recognized principle of natural causality, in the reoccupied 

place of Christianity's hitherto unchallengeable principle of Divine Causality, and, in its wake, 

with the gradual uncovering of the reality of autonomously functioning laws of nature, as all 

processes of nature came to be recognized as self­organizedly functioning “cursus solitus 

naturae,” 111  With this new principle of causality having made possible the development of, 

firstly, the physical sciences, secondly the biological sciences, whose respective new orders of 

111 
“In the accustomed or customary course of nature”.

­ 55 ­ 
self­correcting, open­ended cognition, would gradually come to free their respective levels­of­ 

existence's appropriate domains of inquiry, from having to continue to be known in the 

abductive terms hitherto called for in order to ensure the existential imperative of guarding 

against the entropic disintegration of our artificially, i.e., autopoetically instituted, sociogenically 

encoded genres of being human, and correlated fictive modes of kind; the against the entropic 

disintegration also therefore, of their respective societal orders as autopoetic living systems. 

Nevertheless, because the West was to effect this epochal desupernaturalization only  on 

the basis of its reprojection of its own human agency, onto two, now no longer supernatural, but 

no less  extra­human  agencies, both chartered as such Agencies by the terms of the humanist 

counter cosmogonies instituting of their respective inventions of  Man—the first reprojected onto 

the extra­human Agency of [the tropes of] Nature/Human Nature, the second onto that, not 

merely of Evolution (but of Evolution, as defined in the terms of Darwin’s biocosmogonic 

charter instituting, in his 1871 The Descent of Man, etc., of the West’s Man in its second 

reinvented and specifically bourgeois form, as a process ostensibly defined exclusively by the 

“unerring powers of Natural Selection”/Dysselection, held to function at the level of human 

reality in exactly the same way it is held as to do at the purely biological level of existence—both 

forms of this reprojection, were to have specific consequences. Not only, that is, were they to 

charter Western humanism’s two secular sociogenic codes enacting of each form of Man (as the 

incarnation of symbolic life), and of its Human Others (as the embodiment of symbolic death), as 

codes, therefore, to which we give the ethno­taxonomic term of race, since they and which can 

be logically enacted only on the basis of the West’s negation of equal co­humanness, with all 

other groups. But, in addition, the very dimensions of the contradiction enacted by the West's 

humanly emancipatory desupernaturalization of Agency, on the one hand, and on the other, with

­ 56 ­ 
its effecting of the former process only on the basis of what was to be the humanly subjugating 

reprojection of its own Agency, onto also extra­human ones, that was to initiate from then on 

until now, the hitherto theoretically unresolvable aporia of the secular, unique to the West. This 

as an aporia that was not only to lead to the Janus­faced consequences of the past five hundred 

years of its imperial (now neo­imperial neo­Liberal) expansions, but continues to be expressed 

by the still ongoing—indeed accelerating—no less Janus­faced consequences to which its 

theoretical  unresolvability, continues to give rise. This including centrally the also hitherto 

unresolvable nature of the particular wrong put forward by DuBois in Epigraph 4, as well as, 

correlatedly the "general wrong" identified in Epigraph 2. 112  With both of their respective 

unresolvabilities themselves (together, correlatedly, with the non­findability of the ceremony to 

fulfillingly wed, in Bishop’s poetic terms, the Venetian Desdemona to the "Huge Moor" Othello) 

being directly due to the cognitive impasse to which its aporia of the secular continues to give 

rise. 

That is, as one by means of which, the West, while coming over the centuries to exercise 

to the fullest, all of its new power to harness the forces of nature, to the imperially expanding 

purposes of its respective ruling groups, as a harnessing that had been empirically made possible, 

by means of the new, self­correcting natural­scientific open­ended order of cognition based on 

the principle of natural causality—with this including the latter’s Pandora' box feat of the 

splitting the atom, this  leading to, inter alia, nuclear weaponry in the form of the atomic bomb, 

on the one hand, and to that of the cracking of the DNA code, this also leading inter alia to 

biological weaponry on the other—nevertheless with respect to its ongoing orthodox cognition of 

the empirical social reality of the planetarily extended world system that it has brought into 

112 
The reference here is to the Marxian thesis that is only when the particular wrong experienced by specific 
groups, coincide with a “general wrong” experienced by all, that revolutionary transformations of the normative 
social order, becomes possible.

­ 57 ­ 
existence, it was to be the invertedly negative, and therefore, humanly subjugating aspect, that 

would come to the fore. In that, as a result of its reprojection of its own, and indeed of all 

humankind’s collective empirical agency, onto two forms of non­supernatural but no less extra­ 

human agencies, not only its own Western academics and intellectuals but also, all of us whom it 

has westernized the image of its own prototype of being human, 113  would, with respect to the 

cognition of the social reality of the planetarily extended world system order that it has brought 

into existence, (and into which we are all Western and non­western, secular and non­secular now 

both bio­cosmogonically and empirically incorporated) continue to take part in and rigorously re­ 

enact, the millennially, supra­millennially conserved existential imperative of the  making 

opaque to ourselves the reality of our collective human agency. Yet, this latter as the very 

existential imperative, that if the West was to, on the one hand, epochally challenge by means of 

the interventionist discontinuity of its relativization of medieval Christianity' theologically 

absolute answer, thereby initiating the desupernaturalization of the entities onto which the reality 

of our human agency had been millennially projected, because it was one that was to be, on the 

other hand, and in the reference frame of the aporia of the secular, effected only on the basis of 

its reprojection of that agency onto new [secular] extra­human ones, it (the West) would be 

compelled to continue to recycle and reconfigure, at the level of that same existential imperative 

113 
If the multiple challenges of the anti­colonial struggles, together with those of the Sixties movements in the 
imperial centers themselves, had originally, when functioning together, called in question, empirically and 
intellectually, the West's prototype of being human in its second reinvented and hegemonically bourgeois concept of 
Man, as, in bio­humanist terms, homo oeconomicus, Frantz Fanon was to precisely diagnose the reasons, especially 
in the case of the non­Western anti­colonial struggles, for our failure (as indeed for my own failure in the 1894 
essay) to reenact the dimension of the autopoetic heresy, now called for. As he wrote in his 1963 Les Damnés de la 
Terre: 

Western Bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt; it 
is a racism which minimizes what it hates. Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the 
proclamation of an essential equality between men, manages to appear logical in its own eyes by 
inviting the sub­men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as 
incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie (Emphasis added).

­ 58 ­ 
(that of making our own agency opaque to ourselves); if now doing so in now far more 

dangerous because (as in the new wave of neo­Liberal thought including economics and 

evolutionary psychology), 114  ostensibly now doing so on natural scientific grounds. 

It is in this overall context that our continued re­enactment of the same existential 

imperative, identified by Godelier, in the case of the Baruya, can now be seen to directly collide 

with another and unique form of that existential imperative, one hitherto unimaginable, yet one 

in direct response to a now "general wrong" one, as briefly indicated in Epigraph 2—which we 

are all now being called upon to confront and deal with, this for the first time in human history, 

as a species; and as such, as the referent "we…of the horizon of humanity.” Our ultimate 

predicament that is, as that of the acceleratingly threatening loss of the climatic­ecological 

habitat conditions, indispensable to our species survival/realization and continued performative 

enactment as the uniquely auto­instituting, hybrid mode of living being, that we are, and 

therefore through whom alone, the self­organizing macro­system that is our planet, Earth, now 

has the paradoxical possibility of becoming at last, through us, fully conscious of itself. If, that 

is, we ourselves are to survive, in spite of the fact that we have so little time left to actualize the 

nature of the hitherto (millennially prohibited) heresy of securing the non­opacity of our own 

agency, and with it, the full autonomy of the new order of cognition that is now imperatively 

called for. This latter as one without whose realization—no effective “what is to be done” 

solution, can be found either to Dubois’ “particular wrong” on the one hand, (Epigraph 4) nor to 

the “general wrong,” as set out above, and both of which are reciprocally, as results of the 

enacting of the same sociogenic code, the causal condition of each other. As is, the non­ 

114 
See for this Susan McKinnon, Neo­Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology 
(Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005).

­ 59 ­ 
findability of Bishop’s ceremony, to breach the Divides enacting of that very same sociogenic 

code of symbolic life/death,  that of the West’s Man, in its second reinvented form. 

For if, as Time magazine reported in January 2007 (Epigraph 2), a U.N. Inter­ 

governmental panel of Natural Scientists, were soon to release “a smoking­gun report which 

confirms that human activities are to blame for global warming” (and thereby for climate 

change), and had therefore predicted “catastrophic disruptions by 2100,” by April, the issued 

Report not only confirmed the above, but also repeated the major contradiction which the Time 

account had re­echoed. 

This contradiction, however, has nothing to do in any way with the rigor, and precision of 

their natural scientific findings, but rather with the contradiction referred to by Derrida’s 

question in Epigraph 3—i.e., But who, we? That is, their attribution of the non­natural factors 

driving global warming and climate change to, generic human activities, and/or to 

“anthropocentric forcings”; with what is, in effect, this mis­attribution then determining the 

nature of their policy recommendations to deal with the already ongoing reality of global 

warming and climate change, to be ones couched largely in economic terms. That is, in the terms 

of our present mode of knowledge production, and its “perceptual categorization system” as 

elaborated by the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences (or “human sciences”) and 

which are reciprocally enacting of our present sociogenic genre of being human, as that of the 

West’s Man in its second Liberal or bio­humanist reinvented form, as homo oeconomicus; as 

optimally “virtuous Breadwinner, taxpayer, consumer, and as systemically over­represented as if 

it, and its behavioral activities were isomorphic with the being of being human, and thereby with 

activities that would be definable as the human­as­a­species ones.

­ 60 ­ 
 Consequently, the Report’s authors because logically taking such an over­representation 

as an empirical fact, given that, as highly trained natural scientists whose domains of inquiry are 

the physical and (purely) biological levels of reality, although their own natural­scientific order 

of cognition with respect to their appropriate non­human domains of inquiry, is an imperatively 

self­correcting and therefore, necessarily, a cognitively open/open­ended one, nevertheless, 

because in order to be natural scientists, they are therefore necessarily, at the same time, middle 

class Western or westernized subjects, initiated 115  as such, by means of our present overall 

education system and its mode of knowledge production to be the optimal symbolically encoded 

embodiment of the West’s Man, it its second reinvented bio­humanist homo oeconomicus, and 

therefore bourgeois self­conception, over­represented as if it were isomorphic with the being of 

being human, they also fall into the trap identified by Derrida in the case of his fellow French 

philosophers. The trap, that is, of conflating their own existentially experienced (Western­ 

bourgeois or ethno­class) referent “we,” with the “we” of “the horizon of humanity.” This then 

leading them to attribute the reality of behavioral activities that are genre­specific to the West’s 

Man in its second reinvented concept/self­conception as homo oeconomicus, ones that are 

therefore as such, as a historically originated ensemble of behavioral activities—as being 

ostensibly human activities­in­general. This, in spite of the fact that they do historicize the origin 

of the processes that were to lead to their recent natural scientific findings with respect to the 

reality of the non­naturally caused ongoing acceleration of global warming and climate change, 

identifying this process as having begun with the [West’s] Industrial Revolution from about 1750 

115 
The institution of initiation as originally invented by the so­called “primitive” peoples of the first nomadic human 
societies of Black Africa, is the institution specific to all human societies, whether given the Greek name of paideia 
or of our education systems. See in this respect, Anne Solomon’s description of the Rock Paintings of the ancient 
San of the Kalahari, some of whose groups have been proven to be genetically nearest to our real life empirical 
human ancestors—that is, not Adam and Eve. Central to these Rock Paintings, she found were initiation 
Ceremonies, many of which were specific to the women. In Scientific American Nov. 1990.

­ 61 ­ 
onwards. That is, therefore, as a process that can be seen to have been correlatedly concomitant 

in Great Britain, both with the growing expansion of the largely bourgeois enterprise of factory 

manufacturing, as well with the first stages of the political and intellectual struggles the British 

bourgeoisie who were to spearhead the Industrial Revolution, to displace the then ruling group 

hegemony of the landed aristocracy cum gentry, and to do so, by inter alia, the autopoetic 

reinvention of the earlier homo politicus/virtuous citizen civic humanist concept of Man, which 

had served to legitimate the latter’s traditionally landed, political, social and economic 

dominance, in new terms. This beginning with Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the 

Enlightenment in the generation before the American, French, and Haitian (slave) revolutions, as 

a reinvention tat was to be effected in now specifically bourgeois terms as homo 

oeconomicus/and virtuous Breadwinner. 116  That is as the now purely secular genre of being 

human, which although not to be fully (i.e., politically, intellectually, and economically) 

institutionalized until the mid­nineteenth century, onwards, when its optimal incarnation came to 

be actualized in the British and Western bourgeoisie as the new ruling class, was, from then on, 

to generate its prototype specific ensemble of new behavioral activities, that were to impel both 

the Industrial Revolution, as well as the West’s second wave of imperial expansion, this based on 

the colonized incorporation of a large majority of the world’s peoples, all coercively 

homogenized to serve its own redemptive material telos, the telos initiating of global warming 

and climate change. 

Consequently, if the Report’s authors note that about 1950, a steady process of increasing 

acceleration of the processes of global warming and climate change, had begun to take place, this 

was not only to be due to the Soviet Revolution’s (from 1917 onwards) forced march towards 

industrialization (if in its still homo oeconomicus conception, since a march spearheaded by the 

116 
See the already cited essay by J.G.A. Pocock

­ 62 ­ 
“symbolic capital,” education credentials owning and technically skilled Eastern European 

bourgeoisie)—as a state­directed form of capitalism, nor indeed by that of Mao’s then China, but 

was to be also due to the fact that in the wake of the range of successful anti­colonial struggles 

for political independence, which had accelerated in the wake of the Second World War, because 

the new entrepreneurial and academic elites had already been initiated by the Western 

educational system in Western terms as homo oeconomicus, they too would see political 

independence as calling for industrialized development on the “collective bovarysme” 117  model 

of the Western bourgeoisie. 

Therefore, with the acceleration of global worming and climate change gaining even 

more momentum as all began to industrialize on the model of homo oeconomicus, with the result 

that by the time of the Panel’s issued April 2007 Report the process was now being driven by a 

now planetarily homogenized/standardized transnational “system of material provisioning or 

mode of techno­industrial economic production based on the accumulation of capital; as the 

means of production of ever­increasing economic growth, defined as “development”; with this 

calling for a single model of normative behavioral activities, all driven by the now globally 

(post­colonially and post­the­1989­collapse­of­the­Soviet Union), homogenized desire of “all 

men (and women) to,” realize themselves/ourselves, in the terms of homo oeconomicus. In the 

terms, therefore, of “its single (Western­bourgeois or ethno­class) understanding” of “man’s 

humanity,” over­represented as that of the human; with the well­being and common good of its 

referent “we”—that, not only of the transnational middle classes but even more optimally, of the 

corporate multinational business industries and their financial networks, both indispensable to 

117 
See the quotation form Fanon on p .39 re the mimetic trap into which all of us, as the former colonized “natives” 
or sub­men, had fallen in the wake of political independence. The phrase collective boarysme was coined by the 
Haitian scholar Price­Mars for the Haitian elites to identify the nature of their failure in the wake of the Haitian 
Revolution, until today

­ 63 ­ 
the securing of the Western­bourgeois conception of the common good, within the overall terms 

of the behavior­regulatory redemptive material telos of ever­increasing economic growth, put 

forward as the Girardot­type “cure” for the projected Malthusian­Ricardo transumed postulate of 

a “significant ill” as that, now, ostensibly, of mankind’s threatened subordination to [the trope] 

of Natural Scarcity, this in the reoccupied place of Christianity of its postulate of that “ill” as that 

of enslavement to Original Sin. 118  With the result that the very ensemble of behavioral activities 

indispensable, on the one hand, to the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a Western and 

westernized transnational ruling class, is the same ensemble of behaviors that is directly causal 

of global worming and climate change, as they are, on the other, to the continued dynamic 

enactment and stable replication of the West’s second reinvented concept of Man; this latter in 

response to the latter’s existential imperative of guarding against the entropic disintegration of its 

genre of being human and fictive nation­state mode of kind. Thereby against the possible 

bringing to an end, therefore, of the societal order, and autopoetic living Western and 

westernized macro world system in it bourgeois configuration, which is reciprocally the former’s 

(i.e., its genre of being human, and fictive modes of kind’s condition of realization, at a now 

global level. 

This, therefore, is the cognitive dilemma, one arising directly from the West’s hitherto 

unresolvable aporia of the secular, that has been precisely captured by Sven Lutticken in a recent 

essay. Despite, he writes, “the consensus that global warming cannot be ascribed to normal 

118 
See for this the earlier cited reference to the Foreword by Max Stackhouse, as he writes, inter alia, [Robert H. 
Nelson’s] insightful historical analysis showed that: 
many of the classic founders of the field of economics not only were guided by theological 
assumptions but also viewed the field in messianic terms. That is, they presumed that the primary 
reason for human pain, suffering, and  death (what theologians identify as a consequence of sin in 
a fallen world) is that we are in a state of scarcity. Moreover, we can only be delivered from this 
perilous existence by the overcoming of material deprivation—a prospect that can only come from 
rightly formulated, rightly believed, and rightly lived principles and policies. Economics can 
deliver us, bring about a redeemed state of affairs on earth, and led us to abundant living—the 
material incarnate form of salvation (Emphasis added).

­ 64 ­ 
fluctuations in the earth’s temperature…[the] social and political components of this process 

have been minimized; man­made nature is re­naturalized, the new (un)natural history presented 

as fate.” And with this continuing to be so because (within the terms, I shall add, of our present 

“single understanding of man’s humanity” and the unresolvable aporia which it continues to 

enact), “[t]he truly terrifying notion is not that [global warming and climate change] is 

irreversible, but that it actually might be reversible—at the cost of radically changing the 

economic and social order…” 119  The changing, thereby, of the now globally hegemonic 

biologically absolute answer that we at present give to the question to who we are, and of whose 

biohumanist homo oeconomicus symbolic life/death (i.e., naturally selected/dysselected) code’s 

intentionality of dynamic enactment and stable replication,  our present “economic and social 

order” is itself the empirical actualization. 

In this context, and as Godelier’s in­depth study of the Baruya (and therefore in my own 

terms, of the autopoetic instituting processes by means of which they collectively produce 

themselves as men and women of their fictive modes of kind), reveals their mode of material 

provisioning (mode of economic production, in the terms of our present bio­episteme, its 

Foucauladian “order of words and things”) is, a genre­specific one, that is, one whose function is 

not to materially provision the Baruya, as biological men and women, but instead to materially 

provision them as (the always already symbolically encoded) men and women of their fictive 

mode of kind, that they are. Consequently because this itself is a function also, of the existential 

imperative of ensuring the dynamic enactment and stable reproduction of themselves and their 

society—this latter as an autopoetic living system, self­organized about the bio­cosmogonically 

chartered replicator sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, as the Barurya’s gendered form of 

the It, which is also the condition of their performative enactment of themselves and their mode 
119 
Sven Lutticken, “Unnatural History” in New Left Review, 45, May/June 2007, pp. 115­132.

­ 65 ­ 
of kind as the (non­natural entity) Baruya, what becomes overturningly clear here, is the 

following: that what we define in our now ethno­class terminology as modes of economic 

production,  rather, than being the determinant factor they are now to be held out to be, are 

instead an indispensable, but only proximate function, of the overriding telos of Baruya society, 

which is that of its mode of auto­institution; in effect, that of its mode of production and 

reproduction of the Baruya’s genre of being human, and, thereby, of its fictive mode of kind. 

In consequence, because I propose, according to the laws of human auto­institution 

regulatory of our third and hybrid level of reality, this can be no different with respect to, in 

Lutticken terms, our present “economic and social order,” this means that our present hegemonic 

mode of material provisioning, (in contemporary terms, our present mode of economic 

production), must, as lawlikely, function (like the Baruya’s) not  to provision the human species 

and their multiple class of classes modes of fictive kind, but instead only to materially provision 

the Western and westernized members of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the middle classes), and to so 

provision them/us, not merely as biological men and women, but rather as men and women of 

their/our fictive nation­state mode of Western (and westernized) bourgeois kind. That is, as 

ethno­class homo oeconomicus men and women who are optimally Breadwinners and as such, 

able­to­consume­consumers (and who also, as Breadwinning taxpayers are the normal, citizens 

of, and therefore imperatively, the normal electoral majority subjects of, the bourgeois political 

order of Liberal democracy). 120  Nevertheless because our present mode of knowledge 

production, and centrally so, the discipline of economics over­represents our present genre­ 

specific mode of material provisioning, that of the Free­market Liberal/neo­Liberal capitalism, 

120 
The U.S. overthrow of Aristide’s Haiti had to do with the fact that while an electoral majority of the Poor can 
exist (as in today’s South Africa) the government of a Liberal democracy can only respond to the interests of the 
middle classes. Aristide’s attempt to respond to his poor electoral mass base threatened therefore, the very logic of 
Liberal democracy; hence his U.S. France/Canada overthrow, with the aid of the Haitian middle classes.

­ 66 ­ 
as if it were a mode of standardized, homogenized globally incorporated economic production, 

able to materially provision not merely Man’s referent middle­class we, but also that of the 

ecumenical “we of the horizon of humanity,” the Report’s author’s logical acceptance of this 

normative over­representation, led to a second derivative contradiction. 

This is so in that, although it documents the fact that as the catastrophic disruptions being 

brought about by global warming and climate change, have begun to be felt, they have begun to 

be felt unequally, that is with the major costs, already being borne by the poorer peoples and 

regions of the planet, this at the same time as their comparative data also make it clear, that the 

unequal differentials of the costs, that are already being borne, and that are expected to rapidly 

accelerate in the future, lawlikely follow the Western world system’s (in, from the nineteenth 

century onwards, its bourgeois configuration), already institutionalized Color Line cum 

developed/underdeveloped Lines (as themselves part of that system’s order­stabilizing projected 

“space of Otherness” complex of Divides, including centrally its White/Black and Rich/Poor 

Divides), and thereby with the highest costs coming to be borne by those on the negative side of 

the development/underdevelopment Line, 121122 —nevertheless the Report’s isolation of the 

processes of global warming and climate change from the interconnected system of underside 

costs to which it belongs, (if due conceptually to our present episteme’s divide between the 

121 
This, as in the case of Black Africa, which although only responsible—as the least “developed” continent—for 
3% of the contribution to the processes driving global warming, has nevertheless already begun to pay the price of 
accelerated drought and large­scale desertification as are other countries such like Bangladesh, Nepal, India and 
China, who are paying the price with large­scale floods together with the poorer parts of the U.S. and the Caribbean, 
who pay the price of intensified hurricanes. This price also includes social conflicts, for example, the ongoing land­ 
grab from, and genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of, Black African Muslim agriculturalists by Arab identified Islamic 
Janjaweed militia in Darfur Sudan has also been made possible in part by the spreading drought driving “process of 
desertification,” now effecting the latter who are cattle­keeping pastoralists. 
122 
For example, the ongoing land­grab from, and genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of, Black African Muslim 
agriculturalists by Arab identified Islamic Janjaweed militia in Darfur Sudan is also made possible in pqrt by the 
spreading drought driving “process of desertification.”

­ 67 ­ 
natural sciences and what are called “the human sciences”), necessarily leads to the partial, not to 

say the irrelevant, nature of its policy prescriptions. 

Seeing that, because this interconnected series of underside costs, can in no way be 

addressed by the Report’s prescriptions for dealing with only one—if the most intractable—of 

these costs, this means that the fundamental principle of causality that underlies the overall 

system of underside costs—a system recently identified by the environmentalist research scholar, 

Gerald Barnley as that on a planetary scale, of a dynamically interacting single global 

problematique, must necessarily be overseen, indeed, remain, normally unseeable. Give that it is 

our specific mode of material provisioning, that of our present techno­industrial mode of 

economic production in its Free Market capitalist modality, and therefore as such, one 

indispensable, from the mid­nineteenth century onwards, until today, to the dynamic enactment 

of the West’s second reinvented concept of Man in its now bio­humanist, homo oeconomicus 

prototype terms, together with its systemic over­representation as being isomorphic with the 

being of being human, that has lawlikely led to Barnley’s global problematique’s interconnected 

series of underside costs, including centrally that of global warming and climate change. These 

as costs, that are the lawlike underside conditions of its (Man’s) now planetarily extended, 

homogenized (now post­Sixties Internet standardized) ongoing dynamic enactment (in iconic 

“American Dream” terms) and stable replication; the costs therefore of our present single 

poverty­hunger­habitat­energy­trade­population­atmosphere­waste­resource global 

problematique. 123  Yet, whose continued enactment, which must remain non­recognized as the 

cause of its costs. 

123 
Paul Hawken, the environmental activist, documents in a recent book the dynamic reality of Barnley’s 
interconnected underside costs—that is, as a system in which while on the one hand, “species extinction, together 
with degrees of human poverty continue to abound,” profits dialectically “continue to soar”—for example, today 
(i.e., 2007) while “[t]he world’s top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80 percent of the world’s people,” the

­ 68 ­ 
 This given that because according to the laws of human auto­institution, as they are can 

be seen to function in the case of the Baruya, the telos  of each human society, is the mode of 

institution of its cosmogonically chartered sociogenic genre of being human (each in terms of its 

sociogenic code of symbolic life/death), this correlatedly with its fictive mode of kind, therefore, 

with each such society’s specific mode of material provisioning, having to be an indispensable 

function of that telos, this means that this is no less so, in the case of our contemporary economic 

and social order’s hegemonic mode of autopoetic institution in the genre­specific terms of the 

biologically absolute, and bio­cosmogonically chartered  answer that Man as homo oeconomicus 

must give to the question of who we are. 

It is therefore the “general wrong” of this global problematique and the imperative nature 

of finding its solution, by means of its bringing to an end, in response to which, together with the 

correlated “particular wrong” of Epigraph 4, (as the wrong which also makes Bishop’s poetic 

Ceremony non­findable), that the Ceremony Found’s new revalorizing answer to the question of 

who we are, initiates the recognition of this hitherto non­recognized principle of causality. That 

is, as that of the autopoetic, because cosmogonic­sociogenic causal principle, which drives all 

our human behaviors, in genre­specific terms; those, therefore, of our cosmogonically chartered, 

symbolically encoded, prescriptive sociogenically encoded forms of symbolic life/death and their 

correlated fictive modes of kinds, whose autopoetic institution they make possible. In effect, the 

retroactive causal principle of each group’s (Yaganisako and Delaney’s) “representation of 

origins” as the Weberian “web that we spin for ourselves,” and outside of which, if we are to be 

same dynamic also ensures that “that asset base is growing 50 times faster than the income of the world’s majority,” 
itself as an acceleration  proportionally linked to that of increasing global warming and climate change. Paul 
Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being, and Why No One Saw It 
Coming (Viking Press, 2007).

­ 69 ­ 
the we who we are—that is, an always fictive mode of a referent we 124 —we cannot live. Nor 

outside the always already mandated sociogenically encoded terms auto­poetically instituting of 

us as that we, can we ever normally know our no less always already cosmogonically chartered 

order of social reality and/or autopoetic living system, outside the genre­specific “perceptual 

categorization system” or mode of knowledge, production that it needs for its own enactment and 

stable replication, as such an order of social reality, and/or autopoetic living system. 

Consequently, if as Godelier’s analysis of the Baruya makes clear, although he, as a non­ 

Baruya, could gain the kind of outside knowledge of their societal order, and  autopoetic living 

system, which enables him both to recognize one of the costs paid for its enactment, that of the 

empirical reality of the violence shown to the women by the men, including their deprivation 

from any access to the levers of power, and as well, to see that this form of injustice inherent in 

Baruya society, is itself, chartered and legitimated by the mythic complex, or “representation of 

origins” instituting of the Baruya as a people, nevertheless, they (the Baruya) could have 

knowledge of their social reality only from the inside. That is, in the emic terms of the mode of 

knowledge production indispensable to the enactment and stable replication of their genre of 

being human, their fictive mode of kind, and of the societal order/living system, which is the 

condition of their being who they are, this according to the laws of human auto­institution, this is 

no less the case with respect to the “human sciences” of our present bioepistemic mode of 

knowledge production. That is, as disciplines whose domain of inquiry is precisely our present 

planetarily extended order of social reality as that of the West’s macro­world system, in its 

bourgeois configuration, and as an autopoetic living system, now incorporating, willy/nilly, of us 

124 
Yet with the caveat that in all forms of highly stratified society such as ours, it is not merely the ruling ideal class 
as Marx proposed, that are those of the ruling class. So also and more comprehensively so, are the ruling 
representation of origins (which gives rise both to the ruling ideas) are always, as in the case of the Western 
bourgeoisie, the representation of origins chartering of the ruling group’s ruling status or “oeconomy of greatness” 
in Adam Smith’s apt phrase.

­ 70 ­ 
all. Thus the specific hitherto theoretically irresolvable issue that I have defined as that of the 

West’s aporia of the secular. In that if by its unique relativization and desupernaturalization of 

the forms of extra­human agency onto which we had millennially projected our own agency, the 

West had enabled the two levels of non­human existence and their domains of inquiry, to be 

freed, by means of the natural sciences from having to continue to be known in the cognitively 

closed, abductive terms called for by the existential imperative hitherto instituting of us as hybrid 

living beings and thereby as a third level of existence, its reprojection of its own human agency, 

onto two other (invented) forms of now purely secular extra­human agency, and reenactment of 

the same millennial existential imperative had entailed a corollary. This that the order of 

cognition of our present disciplines of the Social Sciences and the Humanities [Fanon’s “human 

sciences” in Epigraph 6) has had to, and lawlikely so, continue to function as the contemporary 

expression of that first invented and millennially conserved order of cognition; that is as one first 

invented, by those classified by our present system “human sciences” order of knowledge, one 

that we have inherited from them, as “primitive”. 125 

That is, as a form of cognition which responded and responds to the fact that once 

according to the laws of human auto­institution, the cosmogonically inscribed/chartered, 

sociogenic code of symbolic life/death, autopoetically instituting of our genre specific fictive 

125 
Paul Feyerabend has identified this first form of traditional cognition in his book, Farewell to Reason (London, 
New York, Verso, 1987), and which is the same form of knowledge production, identified by A.M. Hocart as that of 
a macrocosmic/microcosmic system of thought common to all societies (in his 1936/1970 book, Kings and 
Councilors, etc.) and by Gregory Bateson in his 1979 book, Mind and Nature, etc., as an abductive order of thought 
also common to all human societies, but which is to be seen in its most pristine form, in the totemic religious thought 
of the indigenous (i.e., pre­settler, pre­immigrant) peoples of Australia. While this same form of thought was 
identified by P.F. Moraes­Farias (in a 1980 essay as one that is based on a “knowledge of [order­instituting] 
categories,” rather than on “knowledge of the world as it is). As Feyerabend writes with respect to this: 
To say that a procedure or a point of view is objective(ly true) is to claim that it is valid 
irrespective of human expectations, ideas, attitudes, wishes. This is one of the fundamental claims 
which today’s scientists and intellectuals make about their work. The idea of objectivity, however, 
is older than science and independent of it. It arose whenever a nation or tribe or a civilization 
identified its way of life with the laws of the (physical and moral) universe” (Emphasis added).

­ 71 ­ 
mode of kind, has been institutionalized, thereby determining the mode of institution also of the 

social reality of the specific autopoetic languaging living system, which is reciprocally, that is, 

circularly and recursively, that genre­specific code’s condition of existence, as the former is of 

its, then the overall system, because now self­organizing itself about the It of that specific 

sociogenic code of  symbolic life/death, must lawlikely enact itself, as in Franciso Varela’s 

terms, a higher level system. 126  Therefore, one to which, given the systemic closure, both 

cognitive, aesthetic, and organizational, that is the condition of each such self­organizing living 

systems’ autonomous functioning, its subjects, whether at the purely biological level of bees with 

respect to their beehive, or in that of ourselves with respect to the hybridly Word/Nature 

[logos/bios] human level that is own—can normally have no directly cognizing access.  Access 

that is, from a metasystemic perspective, and therefore, outside the terms in which the system 

must be normally known from the inside, by its subjects, in the good/bad “perceptual 

categorization” terms that are adaptively advantageous to the securing of the well being of its 

sociogenic code or prototype of being human, together with that of its correlated mode of fictive 

kind or referent we; terms therefore that are indispensable to both the code’s and the overall 

system's symbolically encoded intentionality of stable replication. 

Therefore, with our inability to have cognitive access to the higher level system of which 

we are subjects—as an inability, that in our secular case was to arise from the West’s 

reprojection of our human agency onto agencies that were no less extra­human if now 

desupernaturalized, and therefore as such, an inability linked to the fact that we too, as secular 

Western or westernized academics and intellectuals, must nevertheless also continue to make the 

empirical reality of our collective human agency as “opaque to ourselves,” doing so as lawlikely 

126 
Francisco Varela. Principles of Biological Autonomy. (1979)

­ 72 ­ 
as the Baruya’s religious­intellectuals or “grammarians,” 127  continue to make opaque the reality 

of their own agency to themselves. Yet, as an inability that in our case, as in that of the Baruya, 

leads to the real life consequences, ones directly due to our present mode of knowledge 

production, whose overriding telos is that of (as is that the Baruya’s) the rigorous elaboration, 

(indeed, the work of providing 128 ) the genre­specific order of knowledge indispensable to the 

stable replication and enactment of our present genre of being human, its fictive modes of kind, 

and overall, the global social reality of its autopoetic living macro­world system. With this telos 

thereby entailing, that, as in the case of the Baruya’s dynamic of gendered inequality, the 

increasing inequality reported by Hawkens, together with that of Barnley’s overall global 

problematique, including that of the also increasing processes of global warming and climate 

change, continue, on a daily basis, to sacrifice the interest of the referent “we” of our species 

being—as that of the Derrida’s “we of the horizon of humanity”—to the existential imperative of 

securing, and stably replicating the genre­specific interests of ethno­class Man, its prototype of 

being human, of its referent we. 

In this context, if it is precisely the making possible of such a metasystemic, indeed 

metacosmogonic perspective, as an outside perspective  that the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, as 

the proposed praxis of Césaire's new and hybrid science of the Word­as­the­Fanonian­ 

sociogenic­code, will set out to effect, indeed with such a perspective coming to be defining of 

what is to now be its new Studia, it can only do so in the framework of the Ceremony Found’s 

new post­humanist Account of Origin. That is, as one whose projected class of classes Origin­ 

Model of Auto­institution, because able to contain the magma of all “local” Origin 

stories/Accounts and their genre­specific respective autopoetic “representations of origin” as 

127 
See for this concept Asmarom Legesse, Gada: Three approaches to the Study of African Society. 1973. 
128 
See in this respect, the pathbreaking essay by Demetrius Eudell, “Modernity and the Work of History,” in A. 
Bogues, ed. After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter.

­ 73 ­ 
member classes of its own, will thereby enable its new Studia’s, relativizing of our present 

globally hegemonic “part science, part myth” Origin­Model/Account or biocosmogony of 

Darwinian Evolution (as defined in terms of [the trope of] “the unerring powers of Natural 

Selection”)—by revealing it to be but one (if the first purely secular) member­class, of the 

Ceremony Found’s own classes of classes. 129  As a relativization, that will then further enable the 

new Studia’s systemic separation of the being of being human­as­a­species, from that of our now 

globally homogenized, conceptually and empirically institutionalized hegemonic genre and/or 

prototype of being human, as that of the West’s Man it its now second reinvented Liberal­ 

humanist homo oeconomicus, conception. Specifically, in its  bourgeois or ethno­class self­ 

conception as optimally “virtuous Breadwinner­cum­taxpayer­cum­“high­worth Investor,” and, 

more recently, in fundamentalist Neo­Liberal terms, as optimally as the  financial bourgeois, i.e., 

as capital accumulator and affluent over­class savvy consumer, yet even in this predatory form, 

still over­represented as if its genre­specific interests and conception of the common good (that 

of, in the still iconic ruling ideas terms of Adam Smith, “the wealth of nations”), could in 

anyway be isomorphic with what the interests and “common good” of the class of classes of our 

species being whose referent we is that of the we of the “horizon of humanity” would necessarily 

have to be, as the Studia’s further deconstruction of this rhetorical strategy of over­representation 

will make apparent. 

129 
See for this the formulation made by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell with respect to be difference that exists 
between a class of classes (i.e., “machinery”) and a mere member of the class (i.e., tractors, cranes, etc). In this 
context, the rhetorical strategy, that cited earlier, and as defined by Paolo Valesio as that of the topos of iconicity, by 
means of which the West’s humanist invention of the concept of Man, at the same time over­represented that 
concept as if its member class answers (i.e., civic humanist and Liberal humanist) were isomorphic with the class of 
classes of all the answers given by a multiplicity of human groups to the same question, has enabled the West to 
institute its world­systemic domination on the basis of its conceptual and empirical globally institutionalized 
absolutization of its own genre­specific member class as if it were isomorphic with the class of classes definition(s) 
of our species being.

­ 74 ­ 
 Consequently, given that the goal of the Ceremony’s Found’s proposed new Studia is a 

goal or telos now being sought to be implemented, in response to a historically new, extreme and 

hitherto unprecedented form of the same millennial existential imperative, yet one which because 

defined now by the almost unthinkable yet looming possibility of our eventual extinction as a 

species, now calls, even more imperatively for our Autopoetic Turn towards the non­opacity of 

our consciousness, to the empirical reality of our collective human agency, and, thereby, for our 

now our fully realized cognitive autonomy as a species. The recognition therefore, that which we 

have made, we can unmake, then, consciously now, remake. 

With this emancipatory recognition, itself being makable on the basis of the recognition 

of this new principle of  autopoetic sociogenic causality, as itself a recognition which by 

enabling inter alia, both the relativization and the deconstruction of Man’s bio­cosmogonically 

chartered naturally selected/dysselected code of symbolic life/death; and correlated space­of­ 

Otherness complex, as abductively projected onto the order­stabilizing Divides of the 

Color/White/Black/Rich/Poor, developed/underdeveloped planet of the suburbs/planet of the 

slums Lines, will initiate the processes of the de­extra­humanization of all the entities and/or 

concepts onto which we have hitherto projected our own empirical agencies, and, thereby, the 

unblocking of the systemic mechanisms by means of which our present order’s now purely 

secular form of the traditional existential imperative, has functioned to keep our own collective 

agency opaque, to what is our now normative symbolically encoded ethno­class order of 

consciousness, and, therefore, opaque to ourselves. 

It is in this reference frame, that the Ceremony Found’s new answer and its Origin 

Modle’s projected laws of human auto­institution, that are as specific to our third and hybrid 

level of reality, as Newton’s laws of gravitation are specific to the physical, and Darwin’s (now

­ 75 ­ 
re­thought and revised) laws of Evolution are specific to the (purely) biological level, because 

also revealing such laws to function for our contemporary Western world systemic societal order, 

as they have done for all human societies, if so functioning, hitherto, outside our conscious 

awareness, serve to “find the ceremony” able to breach the divide between White and Black, and, 

more comprehensively, between the White/non­White Color Line, by revealing it to be, like all 

the other variants, of the complex of our present projected “space of Otherness complex”, an 

unbreachable divide, whose unbreachability is itself only a function of the systemic enacting of 

the code of symbolic life/death (as that of the naturally selected­eugenic, humans as naturally 

dysselected/dysgenic) humans. That is, the code, in whose terms, we have hitherto autopoetically 

instituted preconceptually experienced and performatively enacted ourselves, as good men and 

women of our genre­specific (Western and westernized) ethno­class kind—doing so in all good 

conscience/consciousness. 

Consequently if the now meta­systemic and meta­cosmogonic perspectives, of the 

Ceremony Found’s proposed New Studia, will set out to provide the new cognizing basis of, at 

long last, the autonomy of our consciousness and therefore its non­opacity with respect to the 

reality of our human agency, that they will, as such perspective, make possible, in doing so, an 

unprecedented rupture in the dynamic of our millennially extended human history. 

That is, the discontinuity that will be now that of our Second Emergence—this time not 

from the Primate­type mode of the total subordination/restriction of our inter­altruistic eusocial 

behaviors to a level of cooperation whose narrow limits have been preset by our species­specific 

replicator DNA code, but instead, from our hitherto subordination, normally, to our own 

autopoetically, and thereby  humanly invented cosmogonically chartered replicator sociogenic 

codes of symbolic life/death; these as codes which even when, at special axial periods in history,

­ 76 ­ 
they have indeed been transformatively reinvented, (as in the case both of the post­medieval, 

Renaissance humanist West, as well as in that effected by Liberal humanist Great Britain), have 

nevertheless been effected according to laws which functioned outside our conscious awareness, 

therefore as such, ones that had called for the continued opacity to ourselves of our own agency. 

It is therefore this unprecedented Second Emergence rupture, one reenacting of the First 

in new but complementarily emancipatory terms, that is therefore intended, to be effected by 

means of Césaire’s proposed new and hybrid science of the Word­as­the­code, and whose 

proposed praxis is that of the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn. This latter as a praxis that will take as 

the objects of its inquiry, our always humanly invented, sociogenic codes of symbolic life/death, 

together with their enacted second set of instructions, as mandated and inscribed by our (always, 

also humanly invented then retroactively projected) cosmogonies, “foundational myths” or 

representations of origin stories, which have hitherto served to also project our own autopoetic 

agency onto (also humanly invented) extra­human Agencies; its object of inquiry, therefore, as 

that of the processes, and invented socio­technologies, by means of which we have, from the 

Third Event of our origin as a uniquely hybrid species of living being, autopoetically instituted 

our genres of being human and fictive modes of kind, doing so however, according to laws which 

have hitherto functioned outside our conscious awareness; thereby, outside any possibility, 

hitherto, of our fully realized autonomy of agency. 

“And truly what is to be done is to set man free.” 130 

This as the telos of the New Studia therefore, whose hybrid (i.e., the study of the code, of 

its cosmogonically chartered ordo verborum) and thereby of its second set of instruction, as non­ 

linearly and intricately calibrated with the “study of nature”/the ordo naturae), as that of the 

functioning of Goldstein’s natural opioid behavior regulatory system itself activated, in the 

130 
Fanon. Epigraph 6. 71.

­ 77 ­ 
terms of the specific positive/negative system of meanings of the code, which it then implements 

as a living entity, that of the code­made­flesh, will call for its praxis of the Autopoetic 

Turn/Overturn to function in a hitherto unsuspected, transdisciplinary, trans­episteme, trans­ 

cosmogonic modality one of which, as Césaire insisted, “only poetry”—and its modality of 

functioning, as in Bishop’s: 

The ceremony must be found 
Traditional, with all its symbols 
ancient as the metaphors in dreams; 
strange with the never before heard music, continuous 
until the torches deaden at the bed­room door…. 131 

—“can give an approximate notion of.” 

Sylvia Wynter 
August 25, 2007 

131 
John Peale Bishop, “Speaking of Poetry” in his collection of poems, Now with His Love, 1933; Césaire’s “Poetry 
and Knowledge” in Esileman and Smith Eds., Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946­1982 by J.A. Arnold 
(Charlottesville, Carat Books).

­ 78 ­ 
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Wynter, Sylvia, Beyond the World of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of
the Antilles , World Literature Today, 63:4 (1989:Autumn) p.637
 "NO HUMANS INVOLVED": "Certainly," Hacker writes, in Two Nations: Black and White,
AN OPEN LETTER TO MY COLLEAGUES Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) "all persons deemed to be other
than white, can detail how they have suffered discrimination at the
hands of white America. Any allusions to racist attitudes and
Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century. vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1994.
actions will find Cherokees and Chinese and Cubans agreeing with
great vigor ... yet ...members of all these intermediate groups have
Dear Colleagues: been allowed to put a visible distance between themselves and
Black Americans."
You may have heard a radio news report which aired briefly "The Vietnamese," Richard Pryor quipped, "learned how to
during the days after the jury's acquittal of the policemen in the become good Americans by learning how to say nigger."
Rodney King beating case. The report stated that public officials
of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym
N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young WHERE DID THIS CLASSIFICATION COME FROM?
Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city THE POINT OF MY LETTER TO YOU
ghettoes. N. H. I. means "no humans involved."
Stephen Jay Gould argues that "systems of classification
direct our thinking and order our behaviors." [Gould, 1983] By Yet where did this system of classification come from? One
classifying this category as N.H.I. these public officials would have that was held both by the officers involved in this specific case of
given the police of Los Angeles the green light to deal with its the routine "nigger breaking" of Black males, as well as by the
members in any way they pleased. You may remember too that in mainly white, middle class suburban Simi Valley jurors? Most of
the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young Black males all, and this is the point of my letter to you, why should the
caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers classifying acronym N.H.I., with its reflex anti-Black male
to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates behaviour-prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed
explained away these judicial murders by arguing that Black males by the judicial officers of Los Angeles, and therefore by "the
had something abnormal with their windpipes. That they had to be brightest and the best" graduates of both the professional and non-
classified and thereby treated differently from all other North professional schools of the university system of the United States?
Americans, except to a secondary degree, the darker-skinned By those whom we ourselves would have educated?
Latinos. For in this classificatory schema too all "minorities" are How did they come to conceive of what it means to be both
equal except one category - that of the peoples of African and of human and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. to be White,
Afro-mixed descent who, as Andrew Hacker points out in his of Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class, college-
recent book, are the least equal of all. educated and suburban) within whose logic, the jobless and usually
school drop-out/push-out category of young Black males can be

1
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the Lack of the or a sacred source of authority" [Helen Fein, 1979]. In both cases,
human, the Conceptual Other to being North American? The same although the genocides were inflicted in the secular name of a now
way, as Zygmunt Bauman has been pointed out, that all Germans sacred "national" identity, based, in the case of the Turks on the
of Jewish descent were made into and behaved towards as the discourse of a historical Pan-Turianism and, in the case of the
Conceptual Other to German identity in its then Pan-Aryan and German-Aryans, on that of the sanctity of a "pure" racial stock,
Nazi form [Bauman, 1989]. both groups had been defined "within recent memory similarly to
If, as Ralph Ellison alerted us to in his The Invisible Man, we pariahs outside the sanctified social order." It was this discursive
see each other only through the "inner eyes" with which we look classification that had enabled them to be misrecognized as aliens,
with our physical eyes upon reality, the question we must confront as strangers who were, as if it were, of a different species;
in the wake of the Rodney King Event becomes: What is our strangers, "not because they were aliens but because the dominant
responsibility for the making of those "inner eyes?" Ones in which group was alienated from them by a traditional antipathy." [Fein,
humanness and North Americanness are always already defined, 1979].
not only in optimally White terms, but also in optimally middle- This is the same case, of course, with the N.H.I. acronym. For
class (i.e. both Simi Valley, and secondarily Cosby-Huxtable TV. the social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the
family), variants of these terms? What have we had to do, and still "sanctified universe of obligation," of the category of young Black
have to do, with the putting in place of the classifying logic of that males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are
shared mode of "subjective understanding" [Jaime Carbonell, clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and
1987] in whose "inner eyes," young Black males, can be perceived elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and
as being justly, shut out from what Helen Fein calls the "universe everyday means.
of moral obligation" that bonds the interests of the Simi Valley Statistics with respect to this empirical fact have been cited
jurors as Whites and non-Blacks (one Asian, one Hispanic), to the over and over again. Andrew Hacker's recent book documents the
interests of the White policemen and the Los Angeles judicial systemic White/Black differential with respect to life-opportunity
office-holders who are our graduates? on which our present North American order is based.
In her book on the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Nevertheless, this differential is replicated, and transracially so,
Turkish pan-nationalists, and on the Jews by the Pan-Aryan between, on the one hand, the classes (upper middle, middle, lower
racialists in the 1930's-1940's, Helen Fein points out that in both middle and working, whether capital owners or jobholders), who
cases there was a common causal factor. This factor was that over are therefore classified within the "universe of obligation"
the millennium which preceded their group annihilation, "both integrating of our present world system and its nation-state sub-
Jews and Armenians had been decreed by the dominant group that units, and on the other hand, the category of the non-owning
was to perpetrate in the crime to be outside the sanctified universe jobless young of the inner cities; primarily Black with Latino, and
of obligation - that circle of people with reciprocal obligations to increasingly also, White, assimilated to its underclass category.
protect each other whose bonds arose from their relation to a deity

2
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

In the wake of the Civil Rights movements, and of the could they continue to be induced to so perceive themselves within
Affirmative Action programs which incorporated a now new Black these same terms, as they now do, fratricidally turning upon
middle class into the "American Dream," the jobless category has themselves, killing each other off in gang wars or by other violent
been made to bear the weight of the Deviant status that, before the methods.
Sixties had been imposed on all Americans of African and Afro- Where does this "inner eye" which leads the society to
mixed descent, by the nation-state order of the U.S., as an choose the former option in dealing with the North American
imperative condition of its own systemic functioning. Indeed, it variant of the jobless category of the post-Industrial New Poor
may be said that it is this category of the jobless young Black males [Bauman, 1987], the category to which at the global level, Frantz
who have been made to pay the "sacrificial costs" (in the terms of Fanon has given the name les damnés, the condemned, [Fanon,
René Girard's The Scapegoat, 1986) for the relatively improved 1963] come from? Why is this "eye" so intricately bound up with
conditions since the 1960's that have impelled many Black that code, so determinant of our collective behaviours, to which we
Americans out of the ghettoes and into the suburbs; that made have given the name, race?
possible therefore the universal acclamation for the Cosby- "It seems" a sociology professor, Christopher Jenks, points
Huxtable TV family who proved that some Black Americans could out in the wake of the L.A. "that we're always trying to reduce race
aspire to, and even be, drawn inside, the "sanctified category" of to something else. Yet out there on the streets race does not reduce
Americans just like us - if still secondarily so, behind "women" and to something else." [Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13,
the other "minorities." 1992] I have come to believe, after struggling with this issue from
The price paid by the jobless Black male category for this the "lay" perspective of Black Studies (which was itself able to
social transformation is inescapably clear. With respect to the enter academia only in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the
judicial apparatus itself, statistics show that whilst Black men Watts urban riots, and the protests which erupted after the
constitute 6% of the U.S. population, they have come to make up assassination of Martin Luther King), not only that "race" cannot
47% of the prison population. Whilst, in the entire prison be reduced as an issue, to anything else, but that it is we in
population, in the wake of the mandatory sentences for drug academia who alone hold the key to "race," and therefore to the
offenses imposed by (largely White and middle class) Drug War classificatory logic of the acronym, N.H.I.
officials, both Afro-Black young males and Latino-Brown ones, are My major proposal is that both the issue of "race" and its
to be found out of all proportion to their numbers in the society. classificatory logic (as, in David Duke's belief that "the Negro is an
The May 7, 1992 New York Times editorial which gives these evolutionarily lower level than the Caucasian") lies in the founding
statistics, also point out that it costs $25,000 a year "to keep a kid premise, on which our present order of knowledge or episteme
in prison; which is more than the Job Corps or college." However, [Foucault, 1973] and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary
for society at large to choose the latter option in place of the former paradigms, are based.
would mean that the "kids" in question could no longer be
"perceived" in N.H.I. terms as they are now perceived by all; nor

3
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

TAKING THE MAP FOR THE TERRITORY: THE derives from the failure of anthropology [and the other
FALLACY OF SUPRACULTURALISM disciplines as well] to distinguish the purposive aspects of
human behavior …and the unconscious structure in human
culture (as reflected in language and the cognitive bases of
life) from the nonconscious empirical processes that link man
What is this premise? Michel Foucault traces the processes directly to animal societies and the ecosystem [to in effect
by which our present major disciplines came to be put in place at economic processes] [Legesse, 1973]
the end of the eighteenth century by European thinkers, to a central
representation by means of which the human would come to It is this fallacy which underlies the premise of the
perceive and know itself as if it were a purely natural organism in discipline of economics, (as the present master discipline in the
complete continuity with organic life. For if, in the terms specific place of theology), that our human behaviours are motivated
to the "local" culture [Geertz, 1983] of Western Europe, and primarily by the imperative common to all organic species of
therefore to its founding Judaeo-Christian Narrative of human securing the material basis of their existence; rather than by
emancipation [Griaule, 1948, Lyotard, 1989] the human had been imperative of securing the overall conditions of existence,
represented as a divinely created being in the terms of the Biblical (cultural, religious, representational and through their mediation,
Genesis account of origins, the new conception of the human, that material), of each local culture's represented conception of the Self
would be based during the nineteenth century on the new Narrative (Wittgenstein's "form of life). In this context, history falls into the
of Evolution, would be that of an evolutionarily selected being. In trap of taking its narration of what happened in the past, a narration
this conception the human was held to pre-exist the "local clearly oriented by our present culture specific conception of the
cultures," including ours, by means of which alone human "forms human, as if indeed it were what actually happened, when seen
of life" can come to exist [D.T. Campbell, 1982; Lieberman, from a transcultural perspective. The recent controversy over the
1991], as the hybridly biological (bios) and narrative-discursive California school textbook, America Will Be, which imagines the
(logos) level of existence that they are [Wynter, 1991]. That is, as United States as a "nation of immigrants" provides an instructive
they are outside the mode of subjective understanding or "inner example of the historical paradigm's conflation of narrative history
eyes" constituted by the "prescriptive categories" of the "native with "history as what happened" [Waswo, 1988].
cultural model" [Legesse, 1973] which is itself rigorously The classificatory logic of the acronym N.H.I., (as well as
elaborated by the present disciplinary paradigms of the Humanities the belief system of a David Duke for whom whilst the
and the Social Sciences. "Caucasian" incarnates the ostensibly most highly evolved and
The Eritrean anthropologist Asmarom Legesse points out selected mode of "normal" human being, the "lower non-White
that our present organization of knowledge is premised on what he races" and most ultimately the "Negro," incarnate the most
terms the technocultural fallacy. This fallacy, he asserts, atavistic non-evolved Lack of the human), derives therefore from a
second fallacy related to the above; one which underlies our
present disciplinary paradigms, and their hegemonic mode of

4
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

economic rationality. This second fallacy, that of birth and descent) organizing principle of its order as being
supraculturalism, mistakes our present "local culture's divinely ordained (theocentric paradigm). Equally it is only on the
representation-of-the-human-as-a-natural organism as if it were the basis of our present conception of a genetic status organizing
human-in-itself, mistakes the representation for the reality, the map principle, based on evolutionarily pre-selected degrees of
for the territory. biological value, as iconized in the White/Black invariant
For whilst the human species is bio-evolutionarily differential, that our present world system and its nation-state sub-
programmed to be human on the basis of the unique nature of its units, can be hierarchically allocated on the basis of each category's
capacity for speech [Lieberman, 1991] it realizes itself as human ostensible pre-selection for higher and lower degrees of genetic
only by coming to regulate its behaviours, no longer primarily, by worth (biocentric paradigm). One ostensibly "verified" by the
the genetic programs specific to its genome, but by means of its individual or category's place on the social ladder.
narratively instituted conceptions of itself; and therefore by the "The problem of the twentieth century" W. E. B. Du Bois
culture-specific discursive programs, to which these conceptions predicted in 1903, would be the problem of the Color Line. This
give rise. As in the case of our present scholarly elaboration of the line is made fixed and invariant by the institutionally determined
natural organism idea of the human, and of its representation as a differential between Whites (as the bearers of the ostensibly highest
"form of life" regulated in its behaviours by the same imperatives degrees of eugenic descent), and Blacks (as the bearers of the
of material food production and of procreation that also regulate ostensibly lowest degrees of the lack of this descent); by its highest
the lives of purely organic species. Rather than, I propose here by degree of its nigger dysgenicity as the extreme form of the "native"
the narratively instituted goal-trees [Carbonell, 1987] or purposes within the logic of the "Man"/non-White Native code deciphered
specific to each "local culture" including our own. by Fanon and Sartre [Fanon and Sartre, 1963].
It is only within the terms of our present local culture, in Consequently the White/Black invariant Absolute serves to
which the earlier feudal-Christian religious ethic and its goal of provide the status organizing principle that the Caribbean historian
Spiritual Redemption and Eternal Salvation has been inverted and Elsa Goveia identified as being based on the superiority/inferiority
replaced by the goal of Material Redemption, and, therefore, by the ranking rule according to which all other non-White groups as
transcendental imperative of securing the economic well being, of "intermediate categories," place themselves, and are assessed on
the now biologized body of the Nation (and of national security!), their relative "worth" according to their nearness to the one and
that the human can at all be conceived of as if it were a mode of distance from the other. At the same time, as it also enables the
being which exists in a relation of pure continuity with the that of middle classes to institutionally legitimate their own ostensible
organic life. Whilst it is only within these terms, that the N.H.I. analogically selected genetic superiority, as a group category over
acronym and its classificatory logic is to be understood as part of the non-middle classes; most of all over the underclass of South
the genetic status-organizing principle of which the phenomenon Central Los Angeles and its global extensions.
that we have come to know as "race", is the expression. The
feudal-Christian order of Europe had conceived of the caste (noble

5
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

FROM "NOBLE" TO "EUGENIC" DESCENT, "CASTE" basis of a central cultural belief in which all share. This belief,
TO "RACE," WHITE/BLACK TO OWNERS, that of the genetic-racial inferiority of Black people to all others,
JOBHOLDERS/NON-OWNING JOBHOLDERS functions to enable our social hierarchies, including those of rich
DIFFERENTIAL and poor determined directly by the economic system, to be
perceived as having been as pre-determined by "that great crap
Before the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, the game called life," as have also ostensibly been the invariant
institutionally secured White/Black segregation served to hierarchy between White and Black. Consequently in the
absolutize, as the icon of an ostensibly pre-selected genetic value Caribbean and Latin America, within the terms of this socio-
differential between human hereditary variations, the symbolic calculus, to be "rich" was also to be "White," to be poor
representation of eugenic descent on whose basis the global middle was also to be "Black."
classes legitimate their ontological hegemonic social status. In the Where the segregation system of the United States' variant
same way as in the earlier feudal order of Europe the had made the White/Black invariant into the absolute and primary
Noble/Peasant invariant status differential had recursively served to invariant, with the Civil Rights struggle and the rise of the Post-
verify the "truth" of the divinely ordered hegemony of the Industrial consumer-driven economy, the primary focus has shifted
aristocracy based on its Noble line of descent; one which to a variant of the old differential. This differential is one between
legitimated their caste dominance. This earlier truth had only been the suburban category of the owners and job-holders on the one
brought to an end by the intellectual revolution of humanism of hand (of all races including the Cosby-Huxtable and A Different
fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe, when the lay humanists World Black Americans), and the Black non-owners and non-
had challenged and displaced the absolutism of the theological jobholders on the other. Consequently, since the Sixties, this new
categories of the then mainstream Scholastic order of knowledge, variant of the eugenic/dysgenic status organizing principle has been
presided over by the Clergy - categories, whose primary function expressed primarily by the growing life style differential between
was to "verify" the ostensibly divinely ordained status principles of the suburban middle classes (who are metonymically White), and
the order, and its code of "Caste." Equally the code of "Race" can the inner city category of the Post-Industrial Jobless (who are
only be brought to an end with the bringing to an end of the "our metonymically young Black males). Where the category of the
present mode of truth" together with the Absolutism of its owners/jobholders are, of whatever race, assimilated to the
economic categories. category of "Whites," the opposed category of the non-owners, and
Both W. E. B. Du Bois and Elsa Goveia have emphasized the non-jobholders are assimilated to the category of the "young
the way in which the code of "Race" or the Color Line, functions to Black males."
systemically pre-determine the sharply unequal re-distribution of The analogy I want make here is this. That if the ostensibly
the collectively produced global resources; and, therefore, the divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-
correlation of the racial ranking rule with the Rich/Poor rule. Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its
Goveia pointed out that all American societies are integrated on the Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus

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Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic That our global and nation-state socio-systemic hierarchies are
astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic therefore the expression, not of the prescriptive categories of our
organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in now globalized cultural epistemological model, but of the, in the
the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind last instance, evolutionarily pre-selected degrees of eugenic
of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep "worth" between human groups at the level of race, culture,
these systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by religion, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and sex.
our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Given that once the physical and the biological sciences had, after
long struggles, freed human knowledge of the physical and THE NEW QUESTION, FROM WOODSON TO WIESEL
biological levels of reality, from having to verify, as they still did in TO ORR: WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR EDUCATION?
the feudal-European and all other pre-Sixteenth century human
cultures, the "truth" or mode of subjective understanding/inner
eyes on whose basis the role allocation system of each order can The central institutional mechanisms which integrate and
alone be perceived as having been extra-humanly determined, and regulate our present world system, I propose here, are the
therefore as just, only the "truths" with respect to our knowledge of prescriptive categories of our present order of knowledge, as
the social reality of which we are subjects (and therefore always disseminated in our present global university system and its
already subjected and socialized agents/observers), could now be correlated textbook industry. How and why is this so? Paul
deployed to verify the ostensible extra-human, because bio- Ricœur has based himself on the thesis of Clifford Geertz that
evolutionary determined nature of our present status-organizing "ideology is a function of human cultural systems," to propose that
principle based on the code of "Race." As the Liberal analogue the systems of knowledge by which human orders know
therefore of the feudal code of "Caste." themselves, must serve to provide a "generalized horizon of
My proposal here therefore is that it is only on the basis of understanding" able to induce the collective behaviours of each
the classificatory logic of our present Humanities and Social order's subjects. Since these are the behaviours by means of which
Sciences, and its related mode of subjective understanding or each order is integrated and made stably replicable as such an
"inner eyes" generated from the representation of the human as an order, without such horizons of understanding or "inner eyes," no
evolutionarily selected organism, (and who can therefore be more human order could exist [Ricœur, 1979].
or less human, even totally lacking in humanness as in the case of Legesse further suggests that all mainstream scholars
the N.H.I.), that we can be induced to see all those outside our necessarily function as the grammarians of our order; that is, as
present "sanctified universe of obligation," whether as racial or as "men and women" who are well-versed in the "techniques of
Jobless Other, as having been placed in their inferiorized status, ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is
not by our culture-specific institutional mechanisms but rather by completely consistent with the system of values, the
the extra-human ordering of bio-evolutionary Natural Selection. weltanschauung and, above all, the cognitive model" of the society

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Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

to which they belong [Ricœur, 1979: Legesse, 1973]. It is only by Bradley had first pointed to the systemic nature of the
the "trained skills" which we bring to the ordering of such facts, curriculum exclusion imposed on all Black Americans as the
that intellectuals as a category, are able to ensure the existence of function of the United States continuing to conceive of itself as a
each order's conceptual framework, which we rework and elaborate White and Euroamerican "Nation of Immigrants." He had then
in order to provide the "inner eyes" by whose mode of subjective argued that in the wake of the Sixties and Seventies social
understanding, each order's subjects regulate their behaviours, for movements, Black American intellectuals had been trapped by
both enormous good and evil. their refusal to confront a central question. This question was that
So what are we to do as the grammarians by means of of the systemic nature of the rules which governed their exclusion
whose rigorous elaboration of the "prescriptive categories" of our from the mainstream conception of the United States, and which
present epistemological order, and therefore of our "local culture" erased their
[Geertz, 1983] "inner eyes," the collective behaviours which bring centrality to the existential reality of North America. Bradley
the present nation-state order of the United States into being as wrote:
such a specific order of reality are oriented, now that we are
confronted with the price paid for the putting in place of this order As a result of rallies we got courses in 'black literature' and
of reality, as in the case of the Rodney King Beating/jury 'black history' and a special black adviser for black students
and a black cultural center...rotting white washed house on
acquittal/South Central Los Angeles uprising Event? What are we, neither edge of campus...reachable...by way of a scramble up a
specifically as Black intellectuals, to do? muddy bank...And all those new courses did was exempt the
For we as Black intellectuals owe our group presence in the departments from the unsettling necessity of altering existing
university system (rather than as pre-Sixties, where our ones, so they could go right advertising a course in 'American
Fiction' that explicitly includes Hawthorne, Clemens, James,
exceptionality as the token Black scholar verified the rule which
Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and implicitly excludes
excluded our ostensibly I.Q.- lacking population group), to the call Chesnutt, Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
for a new intellectual order of knowledge that was originally made
in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. This call that had been The issue here was that of deconstructing the curriculum
reinforced and made powerful, then too by the burning cities of mechanisms which expelled the Black Conceptual Other outside
Watts, of other ghettoes, as well as the uprisings after Martin the "universe of obligation;" that therefore of redefining White
Luther King Jr.'s assassination of the "captive population," who, as America, as simply America. The issue therefore of a curriculum
James Baldwin wrote, normally have no means of enforcing their freed from the coding of race, on which it is at present instituted,
will upon the city or State. Given this situation, are we then to and one that would have necessarily led to the asking of a central
recycle the same old pieties? Shall we continue to settle for the question - that of the validity of our present order of knowledge
Bantustans in which, as David Bradley wrote in 1982, we have itself.
been trapped? This question had been raised by the Black American
educator Carter G. Woodson as early as 1933 in his book The

8
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

Miseducation of the Negro and has been re-asked in somewhat misrepresentation of the Afro-American past and as well as its
different but still related terms by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the present.
Nazi Holocaust, as well as by David Orr, an environmentalist Woodson's "epistemological break" at this juncture was to
educator. Woodson had asked then, what was wrong with our see that the function of these White/Black misrepresentations was
present system of education? One whose scholarly curriculum not that of differentially motivating the respective categories of White
only served to strongly demotivate Black students, and to lead to and Black, in order to ensure the stable replication of the invariant
their dropping out, but which also socialized White students to be relation of dominance/subordination between the two social
the lynchers (and policemen-beaters) of Black Americans when categories as the empirical embodiment of the socio-symbolic
they became adults. Woodson then used his analysis of the 1933 analogy from which the genetic status-organizing principle, about
school curriculum, to argue that the demotivated and inferior which our present global national order institutes itself as an
intellectual performance of Black students, as a category, should be autopoetic or self-organizing living system [Maturana and Varela,
sought in the same source from which the deep-seated anti-Black 1980], can alone be generated. It was therefore the role of these
phobia shared in by White students (as well as by the students of systemic cognitive distortions to provide the mode of "truth" able
all other intermediate non-White groups) was also generated. to induce the White students (as the potential enforcers of their
These effects, he proposed, should be sought for, neither in the I.Q. totemic group differential status vis-à-vis the Black category,
deficiency of Blacks as an ostensibly evolutionarily retarded whether as adult lyncher, policeman-beater or Simi Valley juror),
population group [C.D. Darlington, 1979], nor in the "innately to perceive it as their "just" and legitimate duty to keep the order's
racist" psyche, of the White lynchers. Instead both were to be seen Conceptual Other in its systemic place. "Why not," Woodson
as psycho-social responses that were regularly induced by the asked, "exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is
systemic nature of the cognitive distortions with respect to the taught to regard as inferior?" "There would be," he further pointed
North American, as well as to the human past and present, that out, "no lynching if it did not start in the classroom." Why not
were everywhere present in the 1933 curriculum/textbooks. judicially "lynch" those who had been made perceivable as "no
These distortions, he went on, served an extra-cognitive humans involved?" This all the more so in the case of the Rodney
function. This function was that of inducing the White students to Kings, who since the Sixties have come to occupy a doubled
believe that their ancestors had done everything worth doing in pariah status, no longer that of only being Black, but of also
both the past, and at the same time, to induce the Black students to belonging to the rapidly accelerating Post-Industrial category of the
believe that their ancestors had done nothing worth doing, whether poor and jobless? As the category which, defined by the
in the human or in the American past. One of the clues to this sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as that of the New Poor, embodies a
extra-cognitive function was that all non-Whites were not equally plight, which like that of the ongoing degradation of the planetary
stigmatized. Whilst the past of all other groups was stigmatized, environment, is not even posable, not to say resolvable, within the
they were nevertheless left with certain shreds of human dignity. conceptual framework of our present order of knowledge.
This was not so with respect to the 1933 curriculum's

9
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

Which is of course, where we come in, and the new form of global socio-human level, of the vast majority of peoples who
the question - what is wrong with our education? Environmental inhabit the "favela/shanty town" of the globe and their jobless
educator, David Orr pointed out in a 1990 commencement address, archipelagoes, as well, at the national level, of Baldwin's "captive
that the blame for the environmental destruction of a planet on population" in the urban inner cities, (and on the Indian
which we are losing "116 square miles of rain forest or an acre a Reservations of the United States), have not been hitherto easily
second," and on which at the same time we send up "2, 700 tons of perceivable within the classificatory logic of our "inner eyes." In
chlorofluorocarbon into the atmosphere" as well as other other words, the two phenomena, that of the physical and that of
behaviours destructive of our ecosystemic life support system, the global socio-human environments, have been hidden costs
should be placed where it belongs. All of these effects, he argues, which necessarily remained invisible to the "inner eyes" of the
are the results of decisions taken not by ignorant and unlearned mode of subjective understanding," generated from our present
people. Rather, they were and are decisions taken by the "best and disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities. And therefore,
brightest" products of our present system of education; of its within the mode of "truth" or epistemological order based upon the
highest levels of learning, of universities like ours here at Stanford. representation of the human as if it were a natural organism.
Orr then cited in this context a point made by Elie Wiesel to a My proposal here is that both of these "hidden costs"
Global Forum held in Moscow in the Winter of 1989. cannot be normally seen as costs within the terms of the hegemonic
"The designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust," Wiesel economic categories, and therefore of the absolutism of its related
pointed out, "were the heirs of Kant and Goethe." Although, "in economic ethic (as the analogues of the theological
most respects the Germans were the best educated people on earth, categories/Absolutism of the Scholastic order of knowledge of
their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. feudal-Christian Europe). That furthermore it is by this ethic, and
What was wrong with their education?" its supraordinate goal of higher and higher "standards of living"
(i.e. the goal of Material Redemption, whereas in the feudal order
the behaviour-orienting goal was that of Spiritual Redemption),
which now sets the limits of our culture-specific "inner eyes" - the
THE ISSUE THAT CONFRONTS US: TO MARRY OUR limits therefore of how we can see, know and behave upon our
THOUGHT TO THE PLIGHT OF THE NEW POOR AND present global and national order; the limits therefore of our
THE ENVIRONMENT "Truth." That it sets these limits (as the now purely secularized
form of the original Judaeo-Christian theological ethic in its feudal
I come now to the final point of my letter to you. Jesse form), as rule-governedly as that ethic had set "limits," before the
Jackson made the point that the uprising of South Central L.A. revolution of lay humanism, with respect to how the subjects of its
"was a spontaneous combustion - this time not of discarded
then order could see, know and behave upon the world. In the
material but of discarded people." As is the case with the also
same way also, as before the intellectual revolution which took
hitherto discardable environment, its ongoing pollution, and ozone
place from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the political
layer depletion, the reality of the throwaway lives, both at the

10
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

ethic (with which the humanists had replaced the theological), had restrictive laws, but also, by the behaviour-prescriptive categories
itself set the limits of how the then sociocultural reality of Pre- of the earlier episteme in whose logic the "hidden costs" of
Industrial Europe could be seen, known and behaved upon; within protectionist policies for agricultural produce (including products
the terms therefore of what Foucault defined as the Classical grown by forced slave labor), could not be seen as costs.
episteme. This is the central point that Bauman makes with respect to
Keith Tribe points out in his book Land, Labour and the now global category of the New Poor. Consequently, the
Economic Discourse (1978) that it was only with Adam Smith's central issue that confronts us here, is whether we too will be able
partial, and with David Ricardo's completed putting in place of to move beyond the epistemic limits of our present "inner eyes" in
new "economic categories," at the beginning of the nineteenth order, in Bauman's words, to "marry our thought" to the emergent
century, that the earlier order of knowledge based on the hegemony post-Industrial plights of both the planetary as well as the global
of political categories was finally displaced; and that the emergent socio-human environment. Specifically with the "captive
centrality of the processes of Industrial production, over against the population" and, jobless category of South Central Los Angeles,
earlier hegemony of agricultural production, was given who can have no peaceful way of imposing their will upon a city
epistemological, and therefore, optimally behaviour-prescriptive and State, whose ordered hierarchies, and everyday behaviours are
status. legitimated in the last instance by the world view encoded by our
Black Americans are the only population group of the post- present order of knowledge.
1492 Americas who had been legitimately owned, i.e. enslaved, Zygmunt Bauman points out that the emergence of the
over several centuries. Their owned and enslaved status had been category of the New Poor is due to a systemic factor. Capital, with
systemically perceived within the "inner eyes" and the the rise of the global processes of technological automation, has
classificatory logic of the earlier episteme, its hegemonic political increasingly freed itself from its dependence on labor. The
categories and behaviour-orienting political ethic, to be legitimate organized working class, in consequence, which had been seen as
and just. The frequent slave revolts as well as the Abolition the potential agent of social transformation during the phase of
Movement, together with the Haitian Revolution and the Civil War capital accumulation, one that had been primarily based on
in the United States, fundamentally broke the military power which production, no longer has enough clout, to put a stop to the process
had sustained that perception. Nevertheless, the displacement of of expanding job erosion, now that consumption has displaced
that earlier "Truth" had been only verified at the level of the production as the primary medium of capital accumulation. During
cognitive models of the society, when "heretical" thinkers like the production phase, the category of the jobless Poor, both in the
Smith and Ricardo had been able to "marry their thought" to the First as well as in the reserve "native" Third worlds, had a function.
cause of the emergent forces of the Industrial world - i.e. to the This function had been that of providing an excess of labor supply
cause of "free trade" (against "protection" for agricultural over demand, in order to put a brake on wage costs. In this new
producers) and of the activity of the Industrial bourgeoisie - forces consumption phase of capital accumulation, it has no function.
that were then blocked in their emergence, not only by the

11
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

Illiterate, unskilled and without job experiences, as the thought to the well-being of the human, rather than only to that of
more and more low-skilled jobs dwindle with the acceleration of "Man," i.e. our present middle class mode of the subject (or of
automated work processes, the jobless New Poor are without the sociogeny) [Fanon, 1963].
wherewithal to serve as a reserve army of consumption. Where The poor and the oppressed, Bauman notes, have therefore
they receive welfare checks, (as in Britain and the United States), come to lose all attractions for the intellectuals. This category,
as part of an internal "pacification program," the neighborhood unlike the working class jobholders cannot be seen, within the
shops, (as we have seen in the case of South Central Los Angeles, economic logic of our present organization of knowledge, as
where these shops are owned by new immigrant groups such as contributors to the process of production who have been unjustly
Iranian, Taiwanese, Korean, Mexican, most of whom maintain a deprived of the "full value of their labor power." Moreover, the
protected labor market by employing their own "ethnic" kin, see fact that this New Poor, seduced too, like all of us, by the clamor of
Time, May 18, 1992) serve as the mechanism to siphon what little advertisements which urge them to consume, so that frustrated in
wealth there is, out of the ghettos; to thereby lock the New Poor their consumption goals, they turn on one another, mutilate and kill
into their discardable throwaway status at the same time as the each other, or "damage themselves with alcohol and drugs"
shop owners (including the Black owners) realize the American convinced of their own worthlessness, or in brief episodes of
Dream, represented as social mobility out of the ghettos. As eruption, "fire the ghettoes, riot, looting whatever they can lay their
successful "breadwinners," their Conceptual Others are those who hands on," means that today's intellectuals, whilst they feel and
make possible their accelerated enrichment; that is, the members express their pity, refrain from proposing to marry their thought
of the captive population" of the ghettoes (and of the global jobless with this particular variety of human suffering.
archipelagoes) who are like the environment, the negative systemic
costs, that are not perceivable within the logic of our present "inner "They theorize," Bauman writes, “the reason for their
eyes" and behaviour-regulating ethic, and its mode of hegemonic reluctance. Habermas would say that the New Poor are not
economic (rather than ecosystemic or human) reason. exploited. Offe would add that they are politically ineffective,
as having no labor to withdraw, they are deprived of
It is within the "Truth" of our present epistemological bargaining power... [The] New Poor need help on humane
order, and therefore within the terms of its related "grand narrative grounds: they are unfit for grooming as the future remakers of
of human emancipation" [Lyotard, 1989], whose supraordinate the world." [Bauman, 1987]
goal or purpose, rather than being as it had been in the case of the
earlier Classical episteme that of the expansion of the state, is now How then did they change the course of North American
that of securing the material well being of the biologized Body of history in two days? How did they, the proscribed category of the
the Nation, and therefore of its optimal middle class mode of the N.H.I., Baldwin's "captive population," Fanon's les damnés, come
subject, Foucault's Man, that, as Bauman points out, we cannot as to not only impose their will upon the city and the state, but to also
intellectuals, whether Liberal Positivist or Marxist-Leninist, marry directly challenge the mode of "Truth" in whose logic their plight,
our thought to the plight of the New Poor; cannot marry our like that of the environment's, is neither posable nor resolvable?

12
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

If, as Legesse suggests, because of our role as the generated. Whether that of the "fallen" lay humanists of medieval
grammarians of our order, we must ourselves, normally, and as the Europe, who were negatively represented as being "enslaved to
condition of our order's integration and stable replication, remain Original Sin" unlike the celibate Clergy who were as such, the
imprisoned in the "structural models" that we ourselves put in guardians of the mainstream system of Scholastic knowledge, or,
place, then how are we to be enabled to break out of one cultural in the case of the peoples of African and Afro-mixed descent as the
specific native model of reality (one variant of our "inner eyes") category of the Human Other, represented as enslaved to its
and make the transition from one Foucauldian episteme, from one dysselected evolutionary origins and whose physiognomic distance
founding and behaviour-regulating narrative, to another? In other from "normal" being, provides the genetic principle of difference
words, how can we marry our thought so that we can now pose the and similarity which bonds all Whites, and increasingly non-
questions whose answers can resolve the plight of the Jobless Blacks, non-Whites at the level of race, and of all middle class
archipelagoes, the N.H.I. categories, and the environment? subjects at the level of class. Most crucially of course, since the
The answer to both will necessarily call for us to move Sixties the liminal category of les damnés, i.e. the N.H.I. category
beyond the Absolutism of our present economic categories, as in of South Central Los Angeles whose doubled pariah status as
the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries the lay humanists of Europe Poor/Jobless and Black, has come to serve a central systemic
moved beyond that of the theological categories of Scholasticism; function for the now Post-Industrial nation-state order of the
and the nineteenth century Classical economists moved beyond United States.
that of the political categories of the earlier epistemological order. Because the negative proscription of the liminal category, is
For Legesse defines his explanatory key in the new terms of the very condition of each human order's functioning as an
culture-systemic categories which move outside the logic of our organizationally and cognitively closed self-regulating or
present mode of subjective understanding, based on the concept of autopoetic system [Maturana and Varela, 1980], the premise of this
the human as a purely natural organism which can pre-exist the category’s proscription is central to the "ground" from which the
culturally instituted and "sanctified universe of obligation" by "regimes of truth" of each epistemological order and its
means of which we are alone "socialized" as inter-altruistically disciplinary paradigms are rule-governedly generated. The liminal
bonded mode of symbolic "kin;" and therefore as specific modes of category's empirical exclusion, like that of the exclusion of the
the sociogenic subject [Fanon, 1964] and of systemic sociality inner city ghetto of South Central Los Angeles, is therefore a
[Campbell, 1982]. condition of each order's "truth."
Legesse suggests that the cognitive escape hatch is always It is only when such a category moves out of its negated
to be found in the category of the liminal. This is the category place, therefore, that the grammarians of an order (as in the case
whose rule-governed negation, institutes a principle of difference where the lay humanists intelligentsia refused their liminal role in
from which both the optimal criterion of being and the "fake" mode the Scholastic system of knowledge), can be freed from their
of similarity or of unanimity [Girard, 1986], on which each order system-maintaining "structural models" and prescriptive categories.
can alone institute itself as a living system, are dynamically

13
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

For it is precisely, Legesse argues, out of the field of then cited Sir Stafford Beer's argument (who wrote the introduction
dynamic interaction between "the generalized horizon of to their book) to this effect. Beer, as I wrote then had argued that
understanding" or "inner eyes" put in place by the prescriptive "contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present organization of
categories of all culture-specific orders of knowledge, and the knowledge" in which, anyone "who can lay claim to knowledge
empirical on-the-ground process to which the collective behaviours about some categorized bit of the world, however tiny, which is
of each order's subjects, as oriented by these prescriptive greater than anyone else's knowledge of that bit, is safe for life."
categories, give rise, that there emerges the liminal category which, As a result, "while papers increase exponentially, and knowledge
in its thrust towards emancipation from its systemic role can serve grows by infinitesimals, our understanding of the world actually
to "remind us that we need not forever remain prisoners of our recedes." Consequently, "because our world is an interacting
prescriptions." Since by its very movement out of its proscribed system in dynamic change, our system of scholarship rooted in its
place, as in the uprising that followed on the Simi Valley jurors' own sanctified categories, is in a large part, unavailing to the needs
acquittal of the policemen "Nigger-breakers" - such a category of mankind." If, Beer concluded, "we are to understand a newer
generates conscious change in all subjects, by exposing all the and still evolving world; if we are to educate people to live in that
injustices inherent in structure; and again, like the N.H.I. category world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong
of South Central Los Angeles, in two days of rage, "by creating a to a vanished world as it is well nigh desperate that we should...
real contradiction between structure and anti-structure, social order then knowledge must be rewritten."
and man-made anarchy," epistemological orders and new modes of My proposal did not get very far then. After Los Angeles,
knowing. however, both the times and the situation have changed. Hence my
open letter to you. St. Clair Drake, one of the founders of the Afro-
American Studies Program at Stanford, always pointed out to
THE SPEECH OF THE STREET? OR THE SPEECH OF A students that there were "street tasks" and intellectual tasks. To
SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM?: extrapolate from Drake, there is street speech and intellectual
TOWARDS THE REWRITING OF KNOWLEDGE speech. It is not unfair to say that the recent Los Angeles example
of the street tasks and street speech of a "captive population"
In a 1984 essay, I had proposed that the task of Black imposing its will upon the city and the State by the only means it
Studies, together with those of all the other New Studies that had had available, took place in the absence of that new Post-Industrial
also entered academia in the wake of the Sixties uprisings, should and post nation-state speech or order of knowledge which it was
be that of rewriting knowledge. I had proposed then that we should the collective task of all the New "lay" Studies to have effected in
attempt to do so in the terms of the Chilean biologists Maturana the wake of the Sixties; in the wake of those first urban uprisings
and Varela's new insights into the rules which govern the ways in therefore which challenged the "Truth" of our present episteme.
which humans can and do know the social reality of which they are The eruption of the N.H.I./liminal category in South Central
always already socialized subjects [Frantz Fanon, 1963]. I had Los Angeles has again opened a horizon from which to spearhead

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Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward

a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic. Such a The point of this letter is to propose that the coming of that
new horizon, I propose, will also find itself convergent with other distant day, and the end, therefore, of the need for the violent
horizons being opened up, at all levels of learning - as for example speech of the inner city streets, is up to us.
in the case of the new sciences of complexity related to the rise of The starving fellah, (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the
the computer as Heinz Pagels points out in his 1988 book The global New Poor or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have
Dreams of Reason. It is this convergence that will make it possible to inquire into the truth. He is, they are, the Truth. It is we who
for us to understand the rules governing our human modes of institute this "Truth." We must now undo their narratively
perception and the behaviours to which they lead - as in the case of condemned status.
the misrecognition of human kinship expressed in the N.H.I.
acronym, in the beating, and the verdict, as well as in the systemic
condemnation of all the Rodney Kings, and of the global Poor and
Jobless, to the futility and misery of the lives they live, as the price
paid for our well-being. It is only by this mutation of knowledge
that we shall be able to secure, as a species, the full dimensions of I am
our human autonomy with respect to the systemic and always Sincerely yours,
narratively instituted purposes that have hitherto governed us -
hitherto outside of our conscious awareness and consensual
intentionality. Sylvia Wynter
Professor, Afro-American Studies
"I believe," Pagels wrote at the end of his book, "that the most
dramatic impact of the new sciences will be to narrow the gap May 1992
between the natural and the human world. For as we come to
grasp the management of complexity, the rich structures of
symbols, and perhaps consciousness itself, it is clear that the
traditional barriers - barriers erected on both sides - between
natural science and the humanities cannot forever be
maintained. The narrative order of culturally constructed
worlds, the order of human feeling and beliefs, will become
subject to scientific description in a new way. Just as it did
during the Italian Renaissance, a new image of humanity will
emerge in the future as science and art interact in the
complementary spheres... I continue to believe that the distant
day will come when the order of human affairs is not entirely
established by domination" [Pagels, 1988].

15
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

BIBLIOGRAPHY .The Wretched of the Earth. Introduction by Jean-Paul

Sartre. Trans. Les Damnés de la terre. New York: Grove
Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Press, 1963.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York:
Cornell UniversityPress, 1989. Free Press, 1979.

.Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post- Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Modernity and Intellectuals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Humans Sciences. Trans. Les Mots et les choses. New
University Press, 1987. York: Vintage Books, 1970.

Campbell, D. T. "On the Genetics of Altruism and the Counter- Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Hedonic Components in Human Culture," Journal of Social Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Issues, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1972).
Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Trans. Bouc Emissaire. Baltimore:
Carbonell, Jaime cited by M. Mitchell Wardrop in Man-Made John Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Minds: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence. New York:
Walker and Co. 1987. Gould, Stephen Jay. Hen's Tooth and Horse's Toes. New York:
Norton, 1983.
Darlington, C. D. "Epilogue: The Evolution and Variation of
Human Intelligence" in Osborne et al, Human Variation. Goveia, Elsa. "The Social Framework," Savacou: Journal of the
New York: Academic Press, 1978. University of the West Indies. Mona, Jamaica. 1972.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: New Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction
American Library, 1969. to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1965.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate,
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Peau noire, Hostile, Unequal. New York: Scribner's, 1992.
masques blancs. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

16
Sylvia Wynter “No Humans Involved”

Legesse, Asmarom. GADA: Three Approaches to the Study of Woodson, Carter G. The Miseducation of the Negro. 1933. New
African Society. New York: Free Press, 1973. York: A. M. S., 1977.

Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Wynter, Sylvia. "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After
Thought and Selfless Behaviors. Cambridge, MA: Humanism" in Boundary 2: A Journal of Post Modern
Harvard University Press, 1991. Literature and Culture Vol. XII, No. 3/Vol. XIII, No. 1
(Spring/Fall 1984): 19-69.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Post Modern Condition.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. . "Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos," in
Discovering Columbus, issue of the Annals of Scholarship
Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 1991): 251-286.
Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht,
Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

Orr, David. "A Commencement Address," reprinted in In Context,

issue The Learning Evolution: Education, Innovations for
Global Citizens, No. 27 (Winter 1991).

Pagels, Heinz R. The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the

Rise of the Sciences of Complexity. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1988.

Ricœur, Paul. "Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination," in

Being Human in a Technological Age, Borchert and
Stewart, eds. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979.

Tribe, Keith. Land, Labour and Economic Reason. London:

Routledge and K. Paul, 1978.

Waswo, Richard. "The History That Literature Makes," in New

Literary History Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring 1988): 541-564.

17
 Unsettling the Coloniality
of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Towards the Human, After Man,
Its Overrepresentation—An Argument

SY LVI A W Y N T E R
Stanford University

INTRODUCTION
Guide-Quotes 1

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most con-
stant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively
short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European
culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent
invention within it. . . . In fact, among all the mutations that have affected
the knowledge of things and their order, the . . . only one, that which began
a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it
possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance . . . was the
effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. . . . If
those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared . . . one can certainly
wager that man would be erased.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of The Human Sciences

● 257
258 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

The reality in highly indebted countries is grim. Half of Africa’s population—

about 300 million people—live without access to basic healthcare or a safe
water source. In Tanzania, where 40 percent of the population dies before
age 35, the government spends nine times more on foreign debt payments
than on healthcare. In 1997, before Hurricane Mitch, Nicaragua spent more
than half its revenue on debt payments. Until recently, it has taken countries
in structural adjustment programs six or more years to get debt relief. For
lenders this seems like common sense—making sure the country has its eco-
nomic house in order before canceling debts—but the human cost is tremen-
dous. Six years is a child’s entire elementary school education. If
governments are forced to cut subsidies for public education and charge fees
that make schooling too expensive for the poor, it cheats a whole generation
of children.
—Robert W. Edgar, “Jubilee 2000: Paying Our Debts”

Step up to the White House, “Let me in!”

What’s my reason for being? I’m your next of kin,
And we built this motherfucker, you wanna kill me ‘cause o’ my hunger?
. . . I’m just a black man, why y’all made it so hard?
Damn, nigga gotta go create his own job,
Mr. Mayor, imagine this was yo backyard,
Mr. Governor, imagine it’s yo kids that starve,
Imagine yo kids gotta slang crack to survive,
Swing a Mac to be alive, . . .
Extinction of Earth? Human cutdown? . . .
Tax-payers pay for more jails for black and latin faces”
—Nas, “CIA”

Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one
trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions:
they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the
same rare species they attempt to define. . . . The specifically intellectual
form of the operation—self-definition—masks its universal content which is
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 259

the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and—

with it—a given (or claimed) status for the group.
—Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters:
On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals

What is known as the Gregorian reform was actually an effort of modern-

ization initiated and carried out by the Church from about 1050 until 1215
(the year of the Fourth Lateran Council). The reform first of all established
the independence of the Church from secular society. And what better bar-
rier could have been erected between clergy and laity than that of sexuality?
Marriage became the property of lay men and women; virginity, celibacy,
and/or continence became the property of priests, monks, and nuns. A wall
separated the pure from the impure. Impure liquids were banished from the
realm of the pure: the clergy was not allowed to spill sperm or blood and not
permitted to perpetuate original sin through procreation. But in the realm
of the impure the flow was not stanched, only regulated. The Church became
a society of bachelors, which imprisoned lay society in marriage.
—Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination

The intellectual’s schizoid character stems from the duality of his social exis-
tence; his history is a record of crises of conscience of various kinds, with a
variety of origins. In their ideologies the intellectuals cultivate certain par-
ticular interests until they have universalized them, then turn about and
expose the partiality of those ideologies. . . . They articulate the rules of the
social order and the theories which give them sanction, but at the same time
it is intellectuals who criticize the existing scheme of things and demand its
supersession.
—George Konrad, Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power

Now the highest Father, God the master-builder, . . . took up man . . . and
placing him at the midpoint of the world . . . spoke to him as follows: “We
have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift
peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, pos-
260 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

sess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire.
A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down
by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed
thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for
thyself. . . . Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have
We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable art the
molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape
thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which
are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the
higher natures which are divine.”
—Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man

the argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will
be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our
present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man,
which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of secur-
ing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy
of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation,
which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/
Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will
call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now
purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/
Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought
into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999,
2000),2 and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial
difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself (Mignolo
1999, 2000).3
The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with
respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the
environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal
distribution of the earth resources (20 percent of the world’s peoples own 80
percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible
for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 261

earth’s peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the
edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on
the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopu-
lation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the
South4)—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs.
Human struggle. Central to this struggle also is the usually excluded and
invisibilized situation of the category identified by Zygmunt Bauman as the
“New Poor” (Bauman 1987). That is, as a category defined at the global level
by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich coun-
tries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon’s category of les damnés (Fanon
1963)—with this category in the United States coming to comprise the crim-
inalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made
to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their
female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the
ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the
semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population. So that if
we see this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within)
the prison system of the United States as the analog form of a global archi-
pelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called
“underdeveloped” areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of
the continent of Africa (now stricken with AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil
wars, and whose bottommost place as the most impoverished of all the
earth’s continents is directly paralleled by the situation of its Black Diaspora
peoples, with Haiti being produced and reproduced as the most impover-
ished nation of the Americas)—a systemic pattern emerges. This pattern is
linked to the fact that while in the post-sixties United States, as Herbert
Gans noted recently, the Black population group, of all the multiple groups
comprising the post-sixties social hierarchy, has once again come to be
placed at the bottommost place of that hierarchy (Gans, 1999), with all
incoming new nonwhite/non-Black groups, as Gans’s fellow sociologist
Andrew Hacker (1992) earlier pointed out, coming to claim “normal” North
American identity by the putting of visible distance between themselves and
the Black population group (in effect, claiming “normal” human status by
distancing themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir,
262 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

“nigger” rung of being human within the terms of our present ethnoclass
Man’s overrepresentation of its “descriptive statement” [Bateson 1969] as if
it were that of the human itself), then the struggle of our times, one that has
hitherto had no name, is the struggle against this overrepresentation. As a
struggle whose first phase, the Argument proposes, was first put in place (if
only for a brief hiatus before being coopted, reterritorialized [Godzich 1986])
by the multiple anticolonial social-protest movements and intellectual chal-
lenges of the period to which we give the name, “The Sixties.”
The further proposal here is that, although the brief hiatus during which
the sixties’ large-scale challenge based on multiple issues, multiple local ter-
rains of struggles (local struggles against, to use Mignolo’s felicitous phrase,
a “global design” [Mignolo 2000]) erupted was soon to be erased, several of
the issues raised then would continue to be articulated, some in sanitized
forms (those pertaining to the category defined by Bauman as “the seduced”),
others in more harshly intensified forms (those pertaining to Bauman’s cate-
gory of the “repressed” [Bauman 1987]). Both forms of “sanitization” would,
however, function in the same manner as the lawlike effects of the post-six-
ties’ vigorous discursive and institutional re-elaboration of the central over-
representation, which enables the interests, reality, and well-being of the
empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those
of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man.” This, in the same
way as in an earlier epoch and before what Howard Winant identifies as the
“immense historical rupture” of the “Big Bang” processes that were to lead to
a contemporary modernity defined by the “rise of the West” and the “subju-
gation of the rest of us” (Winant 1994)—before, therefore, the secularizing
intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentral-
izing religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the mod-
ern state—the then world of laymen and laywomen, including the institution
of the political state, as well as those of commerce and of economic produc-
tion, had remained subordinated to that of the post-Gregorian Reform
Church of Latin-Christian Europe (Le Goff 1983), and therefore to the “rules
of the social order” and the theories “which gave them sanction” (See Konrad
and Szelenyi guide-quote), as these rules were articulated by its theologians
and implemented by its celibate clergy (See Le Goff guide-quote).
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 263

The Janus face of the emergence of Mignolo’s proposed “modernity/colo-

niality” complementarity is sited here. As also is the answer to the why of the
fact that, as Aníbal Quijano insists in his Qué tal Raza! (2000), the “idea of
race” would come to be “the most efficient instrument of social domination
invented in the last 500 years.” In order for the world of the laity, including
that of the then ascendant modern European state, to escape their subordi-
nation to the world of the Church, it had been enabled to do so only on the
basis of what Michel Foucault identifies as the “invention of Man”: that is, by
the Renaissance humanists’ epochal redescription of the human outside the
terms of the then theocentric, “sinful by nature” conception/ “descriptive
statement” of the human, on whose basis the hegemony of the Church/clergy
over the lay world of Latin-Christian Europe had been supernaturally legiti-
mated (Chorover 1979). While, if this redescription was effected by the lay
world’s invention of Man as the political subject of the state, in the tran-
sumed and reoccupied place of its earlier matrix identity Christian, the per-
formative enactment of this new “descriptive statement” and its master code
of symbolic life and death, as the first secular or “degodded” (if, at the time,
still only partly so) mode of being human in the history of the species, was to
be effected only on the basis of what Quijano identifies as the “coloniality of
power,” Mignolo as the “colonial difference,” and Winant as a huge project
demarcating human differences thinkable as a “racial longue durée.” One of
the major empirical effects of which would be “the rise of Europe” and its
construction of the “world civilization” on the one hand, and, on the other,
African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.

PA RT I
The Janus Face of the Invention of “Man”: Laws of Nature
and the Thinkability of Natural, rather than Supernatural Causality
versus the Dynamics of the Colonizer/Colonized Answer
to the Question of Who/What We Are.

This “enormous act of expression/narration” was paradoxical. It was to be

implemented by the West and by its intellectuals as indeed a “Big Bang” process
by which it/they were to initiate the first gradual de-supernaturalizing
264 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

of our modes of being human, by means of its/their re-invention of the theo-

centric “descriptive statement” Christian as that of Man in two forms. The
first was from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century; the second from
then on until today, thereby making possible both the conceptualizability of
natural causality, and of nature as an autonomously functioning force in its
own right governed by its own laws (i.e., cursus solitus naturae) (Hubner
1983; Blumenberg 1983; Hallyn 1990), with this, in turn, making possible the
cognitively emancipatory rise and gradual development of the physical sci-
ences (in the wake of the invention of Man1), and then of the biological sci-
ences (in the wake of the nineteenth century invention of Man2). These were
to be processes made possible only on the basis of the dynamics of a colo-
nizer/colonized relation that the West was to discursively constitute and
empirically institutionalize on the islands of the Caribbean and, later, on the
mainlands of the Americas.
This seeing that if, as Quijano rightly insists, race—unlike gender (which
has a biogenetically determined anatomical differential correlate onto which
each culture’s system of gendered oppositions can be anchored)—is a purely
invented construct that has no such correlate (Quijano 2000), it was this
construct that would enable the now globally expanding West to replace the
earlier mortal/immortal, natural/supernatural, human/the ancestors, the
gods/God distinction as the one on whose basis all human groups had mil-
lennially “grounded” their descriptive statement/prescriptive statements of
what it is to be human, and to reground its secularizing own on a newly pro-
jected human/subhuman distinction instead. That is, on Quijano’s “Racism/
Ethnicism” complex, Winant’s “race concept,” Mignolo’s “colonial difference,”
redefined in the terms of the Spanish state’s theoretical construct of a “by-
nature difference” between Spaniards and the indigenous peoples of the
Americas (Padgen 1982): a difference defined in Ginés de Sepúlveda’s six-
teenth-century terms as almost a difference between “monkeys and men,”
homunculi and true humans. “Race” was therefore to be, in effect, the non-
supernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the
traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing
West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the
what we are.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 265

In his 1999 Coloniality Working Group conference presentation, Walter

Mignolo perceptively identified one of the consequences of the “Big Bang”
initiation of the “colonial difference” as that of the fact that, “in the imagi-
nary of the modern/colonial world system sustainable knowledge . . . disre-
garded Amerindian ways of knowing and knowledge production that were
reduced to curious practices of strange people and, in another domain were
demonized.” However, the anthropologist Jacob Pandian (1985) enables us to
see that this epistemological “disregard” was itself part of an even more cen-
tral imperative—that of the sustainability of the new mode of being human,
of its epochal redescription as, primarily, that of the political subject of the
state Man in the transumed and reoccupied place of Latin-Christian
Europe’s founding matrix description, Christian, which had defined the
human as primarily the religious subject of the Church. While, if this new
descriptive statement (one that was to gradually privatize as well as harness
the matrix Christian identity to the realizing of the modern state’s own sec-
ular goals of imperial territorial expansion) was also to be effected on the
basis of a parallel series of discursive and institutional inventions, there was
one that was to be as novel as it was to be central. This, as Pandian docu-
ments, was to be that of the West’s transformation of the indigenous peo-
ples of the Americas/the Caribbean (culturally classified as Indians,
indios/indias), together with the population group of the enslaved peoples
of Africa, transported across the Atlantic (classified as Negroes,
negros/negras) into the physical referents of its reinvention of medieval
Europe’s Untrue Christian Other to its normative True Christian Self, as that
of the Human Other to its new “descriptive statement” of the ostensibly only
normal human, Man.
In his seminal book, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Towards
an Authentic Anthropology (1985), Jacob Pandian enables us to see that
within the terms of the Judeo-Christian religious creed (within the terms,
therefore, of its variant of the “formulation of a general order of existence,”
correlated “postulate of a significant ill,” and therefore proposed behavior-
motivating “cure” or “plan of salvation” that is defining of all religions
[Girardot 1988]), the physical referents of the conception of the Untrue Other
to the True Christian Self had been the categories of peoples defined in reli-
266 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

gious terminology as heretics, or as Enemies-of-Christ infidels and pagan-

idolaters (with Jews serving as the boundary-transgressive “name of what is
evil” figures, stigmatized as Christ-killing deicides). In the wake of the West’s
reinvention of its True Christian Self in the transumed terms of the Rational
Self of Man1, however, it was to be the peoples of the militarily expropriated
New World territories (i.e., Indians), as well as the enslaved peoples of Black
Africa (i.e., Negroes), that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of
Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irra-
tional/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly reli-
gio-secular) “descriptive statement” of the human in history, as the
descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity.
So that rather than “sustainable knowledge” merely disregarding the
“other ways of knowing” of the Amerindian peoples, as Mignolo contends,
Pandian proposes instead that it was to be the discourses of this knowledge,
including centrally those of anthropology, that would function to construct
all the non-Europeans that encountered (including those whose lands its
settlers expropriated and those whom they enslaved or enserfed) as the
physical referent of, in the first phase, its irrational or subrational Human
Other to its new “descriptive statement” of Man as a political subject. While
the “Indians” were portrayed as the very acme of the savage, irrational Other,
the “Negroes” were assimilated to the former’s category, represented as its
most extreme form and as the ostensible missing link between rational
humans and irrational animals. However, in the wake of the West’s second
wave of imperial expansion, pari passu with its reinvention of in Man now
purely biologized terms, it was to be the peoples of Black African descent
who would be constructed as the ultimate referent of the “racially inferior”
Human Other, with the range of other colonized dark-skinned peoples, all
classified as “natives,” now being assimilated to its category—all of these as
the ostensible embodiment of the non-evolved backward Others—if to vary-
ing degrees and, as such, the negation of the generic “normal humanness,”
ostensibly expressed by and embodied in the peoples of the West.
Nevertheless, if the range of Native Others were now to be classified, as
Pandian further explains, in the terms of the multiple mythologies, of the
savage Other, the fossil Other, the abnormal Other, the timeless ethnographic
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 267

Other, the most salient of all these was to be that of the mythology of the
Black Other of sub-Saharan Africans (and their Diaspora descendants). It is
this population group who would come to be made, several centuries on,
into an indispensable function of the enacting of our present Darwinian
“dysselected by Evolution until proven otherwise” descriptive statement of
the human on the biocentric model of a natural organism. With this popu-
lation group’s systemic stigmatization, social inferiorization, and dynami-
cally produced material deprivation thereby serving both to “verify” the
overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human, and to legitimate the
subordination of the world and well-being of the latter to those of the for-
mer. All of this was done in a lawlike manner through the systemic stigma-
tization of the Earth in terms of its being made of a “vile and base matter,”
a matter ontologically different from that which attested to the perfection of
the heavens, and thereby (as such) divinely condemned to be fixed and
unmoving at the center of the universe as its dregs because the abode of a
post-Adamic “fallen” mankind had been an indispensable function of the
“verifying” of medieval Latin-Christian Europe’s then theocentric descrip-
tive statement of human as “sinful by nature.” In this way, the descriptive
statement on which the hegemony of the world of the Church over the lay
world was legitimated (Chorover 1979).
Gregory Bateson and Frantz Fanon, thinking and writing during the
upheaval of the anticolonial/social-protest movements of the sixties, were
both to put forward new conceptions of the human outside the terms of our
present ethnoclass conception that define it on the model of a natural organ-
ism, as these terms are elaborated by the disciplinary paradigms and overall
organization of knowledge of our present episteme (Foucault 1973). In an
essay entitled “Conscious Purpose vs. Nature,” published in 1969, Bateson
proposed that in the same way as the “physiology” and “neurology” of the
human individual function in order to conserve the body and all the body’s
physical characteristics—thereby serving as an overall system that con-
serves descriptive statements about the human as far as his/her body is con-
cerned—so a correlated process can be seen to be at work at the level of the
psyche or the soul. To put it another way, not only is the descriptive state-
ment of the psyche/soul determinant of the kind of higher-level learning
268 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

that must take place, seeing that the indispensable function of each such
system of learning must be, imperatively, to conserve that descriptive state-
ment, but it is also determinant of the overall range of acquired know-how
that is produced by the interactions of the wider society in which each indi-
vidual finds itself—and as a society whose overall descriptive statement will
necessarily be of the same general order as that of the individual, at the level
of the psyche/soul. All such learning, whether at the microlevel of the indi-
vidual or at the macrolevel of the society, must therefore function within the
terms of what Foucault has identified as a specific “regime” and/or “politics
of truth” (Foucault 1980, 1981).
Fanon had then gone on to analyze the systemically negative represen-
tation of the Negro and of his African past that defined the curriculum of
the French colonial school system of the Caribbean island of Martinique in
which he had grown up (one in which, as he also notes, no Black counter-
voice had been allowed to exist), in order to reveal why, as a result of the
structures of Bateson’s system of learning designed to preserve the status
quo, the Antillean Negro had indeed been socialized to be normally anti-
Negro. Nor, the Argument proposes, was there anything arbitrary about this
deliberate blocking out or disregard of a “Black” voice, of a positive Black
self-conception. Rather this “blocking out” of a Black counter-voice was, and
is itself defining of the way in which being human, in the terms of our pres-
ent ethnoclass mode of sociogeny, dictates that Self, Other, and World should
be represented and known; a lay counter-voice could no more have normally
existed within the terms of the mode of sociogeny of medieval Latin-
Christian Europe. In consequence, because it is this premise that underlies
the interlinked nature of what I have defined (on the basis of Quijano’s
founding concept of the coloniality of power) as the Coloniality of Being/
Power/Truth/Freedom, with the logical inference that one cannot “unsettle”
the “coloniality of power” without a redescription of the human outside the
terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, Man, and its over-
representation (outside the terms of the “natural organism” answer that we
give to the question of the who and the what we are), the Argument will first
link this premise to a fundamental thesis developed by Nicholas Humphrey
in his book A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness,
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 269

published in 1992. It will then link both to the sixteenth-century dispute

between Bartolomé de Las Casas, the missionary priest, on the one hand,
and the humanist royal historian and apologist for the Spanish settlers of
then Santo Domingo, Ginés de Sepúlveda, on the other—as a dispute that it
will define as one between two descriptive statements of the human: one for
which the expansion of the Spanish state was envisaged as a function of the
Christian evangelizing mission, the Other for which the latter mission was
seen as a function of the imperial expansion of the state; a dispute, then,
between the theocentric conception of the human, Christian, and the new
humanist and ratiocentric conception of the human, Man2 (i.e., as homo
politicus, or the political subject of the state).
Here, the Argument, basing itself on Fanon’s and Bateson’s redefinition
of the human, proposes that the adaptive truth-for terms in which each
purely organic species must know the world is no less true in our human
case. That therefore, our varying ontogeny/sociogeny modes of being
human, as inscribed in the terms of each culture’s descriptive statement, will
necessarily give rise to their varying respective modalities of adaptive truths-
for, or epistemes, up to and including our contemporary own. Further, that
given the biocentric descriptive statement that is instituting of our present
mode of sociogeny, the way we at present normatively know Self, Other, and
social World is no less adaptively true as the condition of the continued pro-
duction and reproduction of such a genre of being human and of its order
as, before the revolution initiated by the Renaissance humanists, and given
the then theocentric descriptive statement that had been instituting of the
mode of sociogeny of medieval Latin-Christian Europe, its subjects had nor-
matively known Self, Other, as well as their social, physical, and organic
worlds, in the adaptively true terms needed for the production and repro-
duction not only of their then supernaturally legitimated genre of being
human, but as well for that of the hierarchical social structures in whose
intersubjective field that genre of the human could have alone realized itself.
And it is with the production and reproduction of the latter (i.e., the
social world) that a crucial difference needs to be identified in our human
case. This was the difference identified by C. P. Snow when he described our
present order of knowledge as one defined by a Two Culture divide between
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the natural sciences, on the one hand (whose domains comprise the physical
cosmos, as well as that of all biological life), and the disciplines of the social
sciences and the humanities on the other (Snow 1993). And although there
has been some attempt recently to rebut the hypothesis of this divide, cen-
trally among these the Gulbenkian Report on the social sciences prepared by
a team of scholars headed by Immanuel Wallerstein and Valentin Mudimbe
(1994), the fact remains that while the natural sciences can explain and pre-
dict, to a large extent, the behaviors of these nonhuman worlds, the disci-
plines of the social sciences and humanities still remain unable to explain
and predict the parameters of the ensemble of collective behaviors that are
instituting of our contemporary world—to explain, therefore, the why not
only of the large-scale inequalities, but also of the overall Janus-faced effects
of large-scale human emancipation yoked to the no less large-scale human
degradation and immiseration to which these behaviors collectively lead.
These behaviors, whether oriented by the residual metaphysics of
fertility/reproduction of the agrarian age in the poorer parts of the world, or
by the metaphysics of productivity and profitability of our techno-industrial
one in the rich enclaves—with the one impelling the dynamics of overpopu-
lation, and the other that of overconsumption—now collectively threaten the
planetary environment of our human-species habitat.
The Argument proposes, in this context, that the still unbreachable
divide between the “Two Cultures”—a divide that had been briefly chal-
lenged by the range of anticolonial as well as the social cum intellectual
movements of the sixties, before these movements were re-coopted—lies in
the fact that our own disciplines (as literary scholars and social scientists
whose domain is our sociohuman world) must still continue to function, as
all human orders of knowledge have done from our origin on the continent
of Africa until today, as a language-capacitated form of life, to ensure that
we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in
the adaptive “truth-for” terms needed to conserve our present descriptive
statement. That is, as one that defines us biocentrically on the model of a
natural organism, with this a priori definition serving to orient and motivate
the individual and collective behaviors by means of which our contemporary
Western world-system or civilization, together with its nation-state sub-
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 271

units, are stably produced and reproduced. This at the same time as it
ensures that we, as Western and westernized intellectuals, continue to artic-
ulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules of the social
order and its sanctioned theories (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979).
Recent and still ongoing scholarship on archaeo-astronomy has shown
that all human orders—from the smallest society of nomadic hunter-gath-
erers, such as the San people of the Kalahari, to the large-scale societies of
Egypt, China, the Greeks, and the Romans—have mapped their “descriptive
statements” or governing master codes on the heavens, on their stable peri-
odicities and regular recurring movements (Krupp 1997). Because, in doing
so, they had thereby mapped their specific criterion of being human, of what
it was “to be a good man and woman of one’s kind” (Davis 1992), onto the
physical cosmos, thereby absolutizing each such criterion; and with this
enabling them to be experienced by each order’s subjects as if they had been
supernaturally (and, as such, extrahumanly) determined criteria, their
respective truths had necessarily come to function as an “objective set of
facts” for the people of that society—seeing that such truths were now the
indispensable condition of their existence as such a society, as such people,
as such a mode of being human. These truths had therefore both com-
manded obedience and necessitated the individual and collective behaviors
by means of which each such order and its mode of being human were
brought into existence, produced, and stably reproduced. This, therefore,
meant that all such knowledges of the physical cosmos, all such astronomies,
all such geographies, whatever the vast range of human needs that they had
successfully met, the range of behaviors they had made possible—indeed,
however sophisticated and complex the calculations that they had enabled
to be made of the movements of the heavens (as in the case of Egypt and
China)—had still remained adaptive truths-for and, as such, ethno-
astronomies, ethno-geographies.
This was no less the case with respect to the long tradition of Greek/
Hellenistic astronomy, which a medieval Judeo-Christian Europe would have
inherited. Since, in spite of the great advances in mathematical astronomy
to which its fundamental Platonic postulate (that of an eternal, “divinized”
cosmos as contrasted with the Earth, which was not only subject to change
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and corruption, but was fixed and unmoving at the center) has led a long
line of astronomers to struggle to “save the phenomena” (i.e., to reconcile
their measurements of the movements of the heavens with this premise),
Greek astronomy was to remain an ethno-astronomy. One, that is, in which
the moral/political laws of the Greek polis had been projected upon the
physical cosmos, enabling them to serve as “objective truth” in Feyerabend’s
(1987) sense of the term, and therefore as, in my own terms, adaptive truth-
for the Greeks. With the consequence that their projected premise of a value
distinction and principle of ontological distinction between heaven and
earth had functioned to analogically replicate and absolutize the central
order-organizing principle and genre-of-the-human distinction at the level
of the sociopolitical order, between the non-dependent masters who were
Greek-born citizens and their totally dependent slaves classified as barbar-
ian Others. With this value distinction (sociogenic principle or master code
of symbolic life/death) then being replicated at the level of the intra-Greek
society, in gendered terms (correlatedly), as between males, who were citi-
zens, and women, who were their dependents.
In a 1987 interview, the theoretical physicist David Bohm explained why
the rise of the physical sciences would have been impossible in ancient
Greece, given the role that the physical cosmos had been made to play in sta-
bilizing and legitimating the structures/hierarchies and role allocations of
its social order. If each society, Bohm pointed out, bases itself on a general
notion of the world that always contains within it “a specific idea of order,”
for the ancient Greeks, this idea of order had been projected as that of an
“increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens.” In consequence, in
order for modern physics (which is based on the “idea of successive posi-
tions of bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these bod-
ies”) to be developed, the “order of perfection investigated by the ancient
Greeks” had to become irrelevant. In other words, for such an astronomy
and physics to be developed, the society that made it possible would have to
be one that no longer had the need to map its ordering principle onto the
physical cosmos, as the Greeks and all other human societies had done. The
same goes for the need to retain the Greek premise of an ontological differ-
ence of substance between the celestial realm of perfection (the realm of
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 273

true knowledge) and the imperfect realm of the terrestrial (the realm of
doxa, of mere opinion).
This was not a mutation that could be easily effected. In his recent book
The Enigma of the Gift (1999), Maurice Godelier reveals an added and even
more powerful dimension as to why the mutation by which humans would
cease to map the “idea of order” onto the lawlike regularities of physical
nature would not be easily come by. This would come to be effected only in
the wake of the Renaissance humanists’ initiation of the processes that
would lead to the degodding/de-supernaturalizing of our modes of being
human on the basis of their invention of Man in the reoccupied place of
their earlier matrix theocentric identity, Christian.
Although, Godelier writes, as human beings who live in society, and who
must also produce society in order to live, we have hitherto always done so
by producing, at the same time, the mechanisms by means of which we have
been able to invert cause and effect, allowing us to repress the recognition
of our collective production of our modes of social reality (and with it,
the Argument proposes, the recognition also of the self-inscripted, auto-
instituted nature of our genres/modes of being human). Central to these
mechanisms was the one by which we projected our own authorship of our
societies onto the ostensible extrahuman agency of supernatural Imaginary
Beings (Godelier 1999). This imperative has been total in the case of all
human orders (even where in the case of our now purely secular order, the
extrahuman agency on which our authorship is now projected is no longer
supernatural, but rather that of Evolution/Natural Selection together with
its imagined entity of “Race”). As if, in our contemporary case, Evolution,
which pre-adapted us by means of the co-evolution of language and the
brain to self-inscript and auto-institute our modes of being human, and to
thereby artificially program our own behaviors—doing so, as the biologist
James Danielli pointed out in a 1980 essay, by means of the discourses of reli-
gion, as well as of the secular ones that have now taken their place—still
continued to program our hybrid ontogeny/sociogeny behaviors by means of
unmediated genetic programs. Rather than, as Danielli further argued, all
such behaviors being lawlikely induced by discursively instituted programs
whose good/evil formulations function to activate the biochemical
274 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

reward/punishment mechanism of the brain—as a mechanism that, while

common to all species, functions in the case of humans in terms specific to
each such narratively inscribed and discursively elaborated descriptive
statement and, thereby, to its mode of the “I” and correlated symboli-
cally/altruistically bonded mode of the eusocial “we” (Danielli 1980).
If, as David Bohm pointed out, the Greeks’ “idea of order” had been
mapped upon degrees of perfection, projected upon the physical cosmos as
degrees of rational perfection extending from the apex of the heavens’
degrees to the nonhomogenous nadir of the earth’s—with the rise, in the
wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, of a now Judeo-Christian Europe,
while the classical Greco-Roman (i.e., Ptolemaic) astronomy that had given
expression to the Greek idea of order was to be carried over—it was to be
Christianized within the terms of Judeo-Christianity’s new “descriptive
statement” of the human, based on its master code of the “Redeemed Spirit”
(as actualized in the celibate clergy) and the “Fallen Flesh” enslaved to the
negative legacy of Adamic Original Sin, as actualized by laymen and women.
Hence the logic by which medieval Latin-Christian Europe’s “notion of the
world” and “idea of order” would become one of degrees of spiritual perfec-
tion, at the same time as it would remain mapped onto the same “space of
Otherness” principle of nonhomogeneity (Godzich 1986). With the result
that on the basis of this projection, the medieval Latin-Christian subject’s
sensory perception of a motionless earth would have “verified” for them not
only the postulate of mankind’s justly condemned enslavement to the nega-
tive Adamic legacy, but, even more centrally, the “sinful by nature” descrip-
tive statement of the human in whose terms they both experienced
themselves as Christians, being thereby behaviorally impelled to seek
redemption from their enslavement through the sacraments of the Church,
as well as by adhering to its prohibitions, and to thereby strive to attain to
its otherworldly goal—that of Divine Election for eternal salvation in the
Augustinian civitas dei (the city of God).
Central to Winant’s “immense historical rupture,” therefore, was the con-
ceptual break made with the Greco-Roman cum Judeo-Christian premise of
a nonhomogeneity of substance, and thereby of an ontological distinction
between the supralunar and the sublunar, heaven and earth, as the break
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 275

that was to make possible the rise of a nonadaptive, and therefore natural-
scientific, mode of cognition with respect to the “objective set of facts” of the
physical level of reality: with respect to what was happening “out there.” The
fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese (to and around Africa, then to
the East), as well as Columbus’s voyages across an until-then held to be (by
Western Europeans) non-navigable Atlantic Ocean (since both of these
areas, Black Africa and the Americas, had been held to be uninhabitable, the
one because too hot, the other because under water, with both being outside
God’s providential Grace) were themselves expressions of the same overall
process of self-transformation. This as the process that, internal to late-
medieval Latin-Christian Europe, was to underpin the rise of the modern
political city and monarchical states of Europe, and that (together with an
ongoing commercial revolution) were to effectively displace the theologi-
cally absolute hegemony of the Church, together with that of its celibate
clergy, over the lay or secular world, replacing it with that of their (i.e. the
monarchical states’) politically absolute own. The new conceptual ground of
this reversal had, however, been made possible only on the basis of the intel-
lectual revolution of Renaissance humanists—a revolution that, while allied
to the Reform movement of Christian humanism, was mounted in large part
from the counter-perspective of the lay intelligentsia. From the viewpoint,
therefore, of the category whose members had until then been compelled to
think and work within the very theocentric paradigms that legitimated the
dominance of the post-Gregorian Reform Church and its celibate clergy (the
name clergy means, in Greek, the chosen) over the lay world—as these par-
adigms had been elaborated in the context of the then hegemonic Scholastic
order of knowledge of medieval Europe.
This theological condemnation of the “natural man” of the laity had
become even more intensified by medieval Scholasticism’s reconception of
the human in Aristotelian Unmoved/Mover terms. Its Omnipotent God had
created the world for the sake of His Own Glory, thereby creating mankind
only contingently and without any consideration for its own sake (propter
nos homines/for our human sake), had left it, in the wake of the Adamic Fall
and its subsequent enslavement to the Fallen Flesh, without any hope of
being able to have any valid knowledge of reality except through the media-
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tion of the very paradigms that excluded any such hope. Given that it was
precisely these theologically absolute paradigms that, by circularly verifying
the “sinful by nature” cognitive incapacity of fallen mankind, served at the
same time to validate both the hegemony of the Church and of the celibate
clergy over the lay world, including the state, as well as the hegemony of the
supratemporal perspective of the Church (based on its represented access to
Divine Eternal Truth) over any knowledge generated from the local, tempo-
ral, and this-worldly perspective of a lay world ostensibly entrapped in the
fallen time of the secular realm, this thereby subjected mankind to the insta-
bility and chaos of the capricious whims of Fortune (Pocock 1989).
The lay intelligentsia of medieval Europe had, therefore, found them-
selves in a situation in whose context, in order to be learned and accom-
plished scholars, they had had to be accomplices in the production of a
“politics of truth” that subordinated their own lay world and its perspective
on reality to that of the Church and of the clergy. Accomplices also in the
continued theoretical elaboration of a theocentric descriptive statement of
the human, in whose terms they were always already the embodied bearers
of its postulate of “significant ill”—that of enslavement to Original Sin—an
“ill” curable or redeemable only through the mediation of the Church and
the clergy, and circularly, through that of the theologically absolute para-
digms that verified the hegemony of the latter.
The manifesto (put forward from the perspective of the laity) that was to
make possible the rupture in whose terms the Copernican Revolution and
the new epoch that would become that of the modern world were to be
made possible was that of the fifteenth-century treatise by the Italian
humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463‒1494) entitled Oration on the Dignity of
Man. In this treatise, Pico rewrote the Judeo-Christian origin narrative of
Genesis. Adam, rather than having been placed in the Garden of Eden, then
having fallen, then having been expelled with Eve from the garden by God,
is shown by Pico to have not fallen at all. Instead, he had come into existence
when God, having completed his Creation and wanting someone to admire
His works, had created Man on a model unique to him, then placed him at
the center/midpoint of the hierarchy of this creation, commanding him to
“make of himself ” what he willed to be—to decide for himself whether to fall
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 277

to the level of the beasts by giving into his passions, or, through the use of
his reason, to rise to the level of the angels (See Pico’s guide-quote). It was
therefore to be on the basis of this new conception, and of its related civic-
humanist reformulation, that Man was to be invented in its first form as the
rational political subject of the state, as one who displayed his reason by pri-
marily adhering to the laws of the state—rather than, as before, in seeking
to redeem himself from enslavement to Original Sin by primarily adhering
to the prohibitions of the Church.
Two strategies were made use of in order to effect this epochal degod-
ding (if, at first, only in hybridly religio-secular terms) of the “descriptive
statement” in whose terms humans inscript and institute themselves/our-
selves as this or that genre of being human. The strategy was that of a return:
the return by the humanists to Greco-Roman thought, to (in the case of
Pico) the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, as well as to the even
earlier Egyptian thought as transmitted through these latter, in order to find
both a space outside the terms of the medieval order’s “descriptive state-
ment” and an alternative model on which to reinvent the matrix optimally
Redeemed-in-the-Spirit Self of the Christian, the “subject of the church,” as
that of the Rational Self of Man as political subject of the state. While it was
the revalorization of natural man that was implicit in this overall return to
the Greco-Roman and other pre-Christian thought, and models by Renais-
sance humanists such as Ficino and Pico, as Fernand Hallyn (1990) has pro-
posed, that was to make possible Copernicus’s intellectual challenge to the
ontological distinction between the supralunar and sublunar realms of the
cosmos: to its foundational premise of a nonhomogeneity of substance
between them.
Why was this the case? Within the terms of the medieval order’s theo-
centric conception of the relation between a totally Omnipotent God and
contingently created humans, the latter could not attempt to gain valid
knowledge of physical reality by basing him/herself on the regularity of its
laws of functioning. Seeing that God, as an absolute and unbound God,
could arbitrarily intervene in the accustomed course of nature (cursus soli-
tus naturae) in order to alter its processes of functioning, by means of mir-
acles, at any time He wished to do so. It was therefore to be, as Hallyn
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proposes, the humanists’ revalorized conception of a more egalitarian rela-

tion between natural man and a Christian God, reconceived as a Caring
Father who had created the universe specifically for man’s sake (propter nos
homines, for our human sake), that provided the counter-ground for the
Copernican rupture with the orthodox Christianized astronomy that had
been inherited from the Greeks. It was the new premise that God had cre-
ated the world/universe for mankind’s sake, as a premise that ensured that
He would have had to make it according to rational, nonarbitrary rules that
could be knowable by the beings that He had made it for, that would lead to
Copernicus’s declaration (against the epistemological resignation of
Ptolemaic astronomy, which said that such knowledge was not available for
mere mortals) that since the universe had been made for our sake by the best
and wisest of master craftsmen, it had to be knowable (see Copernicus
guide-quote).
In his book The Medieval Imagination, Jacques Le Goff analyzes the way
in which the medieval order of Latin-Christian Europe had organized itself
about a value principle or master code that had been actualized in the
empirical relation between the celibate category of the clergy (as the embod-
iment of the Spirit, and the noncelibate category of the 1aity (as the embod-
iment of the Fallen Flesh). This Spirit/Flesh code had then been projected
onto the physical cosmos, precisely onto the represented nonhomogeneity of
substance between the spiritual perfection of the heavens (whose supralu-
nar bodies were imagined to move in harmonious and perfectly circular
motions) as opposed to the sublunar realm of Earth, which, as the abode of
a post-Adamic fallen mankind, had to be at the center of the universe as its
dregs—and, in addition, to be not only nonmoving as it is sensed by us to
be, but to be so because divinely condemned to be nonmoving in the wake
of the Fall. However, it was not only the Earth that had to be known in these
adaptive truth-for terms, within the conceptual framework of the Christian-
Ptolemaic astronomy of the time. The geography of the earth had also had
to be known in parallel Spirit/Flesh terms as being divided up between, on
the one hand, its temperate regions centered on Jerusalem—regions that,
because held up above the element of water by God’s Providential Grace,
were habitable—and, on the other, those realms that, because outside this
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 279

Grace, had to be uninhabitable. Before the fifteenth-century voyages of the

Portuguese and Columbus, which disproved this premise of the nonhomo-
geneity of the earth’s geography, the Torrid Zone beyond the bulge of Cape
Bojador on the upper coast of Africa had therefore had to be known as too
hot for habitation, while the Western hemisphere had had to be known as
being devoid of land, seeing that all land there had to remain, in the frame-
work of Christian Aristotelian physics, submerged in its “natural place”
under water, since ostensibly not held “unnaturally” above the water by
Divine Grace.
This series of symbolically coded Spirit/Flesh representations mapped
upon the “space of Otherness” of the physical cosmos had not only func-
tioned to absolutize the theocentric descriptive statement of the human, its
master code of symbolic life (the Spirit) and death (the Flesh), together with
that statement’s overall explanatory thesis of supernatural causation. It had
also served to absolutize “a general order of existence,” together with its
“postulate of significant ill,” whose mode of affliction then logically calls for
the particular “plan of salvation” or redemptive cure able to cure the specific
“ill” that threatened all the subjects of the order, in order to redeem them
from its threat of nihilation/negation that is common to all religions
(Girardot 1988). Now in specific Judeo-Christian formulation, the postulate
of “significant ill” had, of course, been that of mankind’s enslavement to
Original Sin, with his/her fallen state placing him/her outside God’s Grace,
except when redeemed from this “ill” by the sacrament of baptism as admin-
istered by the clergy. While this behavior-motivating schema had itself also
been anchored on the Spirit/Flesh, inside/outside God’s Grace, ill/cure sys-
tem of symbolic representations attached to the represented supra/sublunar
nonhomogeneity of substance of the physical cosmos, as well as to the hab-
itable/uninhabitable geography of the earth.
Here the Argument identifies Girardot’s schemas as ones that also func-
tion beyond the limits of original religious modalities, seeing them instead
in the terms of Danielli’s hypothesis as forms of the central, behavior-moti-
vating/-demotivating, discursive, good/evil postulates, able to activate the
biochemical reward and punishment mechanism—and, therefore, as the
central “machinery of programming” that is common to all human orders,
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whether religious or secular. In consequence, whether religious or secular, all

such schemas/programs and their formulations of “a general order of exis-
tence” also function to inscribe the specific “descriptive statement” of the
human that is enacting of the ontogeny/sociogeny, nature-culture mode of
being human, for whom the specific ensemble of motivated behaviors will be
adaptively advantageous. In this conceptual framework it can therefore be
recognized that it was in the context of the humanists’ redescribing of the
Christian definition of the human—in new, revalorizing, and (so to speak)
propter nos homines and/or Man-centric terms—that the series of fifteenth-
century voyages on whose basis the West began its global expansion voyages
(one of which proved that the earth was homogeneously habitable by
humans, seeing that the Torrid Zone was indeed inhabited, as was that of
the land of the Western hemisphere that turned out to be above water),
together with Copernicus’s new astronomy (which proposed that the earth
also moved about the Sun, projected as the center, and was therefore of the
same substance as, homogeneous with, the heavenly bodies), were to initi-
ate the rupture that would lead to the rise of the physical sciences. Thereby,
to a new order of cognition in which “the objective set of facts” of the phys-
ical level of reality was now to be gradually freed from having to be known
in the adaptive terms of a truth-for specific to each order, as they had been
millennially—to be known as they were and are “out there.”
What needs to be emphasized here is, firstly, that the two orthodox pre-
suppositions that were now to be swept away—that of the nonhomogeneity
of the geography of the earth and that of the nonhomogeneity of the earth and
the heavens—had been ones indispensable to the conservation of the
medieval order’s theocentric descriptive statement of the human. Secondly, it
had been the reinvention by the lay humanists of the Renaissance of the
matrix identity Christian in terms of the new descriptive statement of Man as
political subject, allied to the historical rise and expansion of the modern
state (for whom, eventually, these earlier orthodox presuppositions, their
truth-fors, were expendable, because no longer of any adaptive advantage to
its own instituting as such a mode of being human), that had made the sweep-
ing away of the earlier unquestioned principles of nonhomogeneity possible.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 281

This sweeping away led a later Isaac Newton to exult that, because it had now
been shown that all parts of the universe were made of the same forces, of the
same matter, one could now be able to extrapolate from the bodies nearest to
us, and on the analogy of nature always consonant with itself, what the bod-
ies furthest from us had necessarily to be (Funkenstein 1986).
To sum up: this means that the epochal rupture that was set in motion
by Western intellectuals, by means of which human knowledge of the phys-
ical cosmos would be freed from having to be known in the adaptive truth-
for terms that had been hitherto indispensable to the instituting of all
human orders and their respective modes/genres of being human—the rup-
ture that was to lead to the gradual development of the physical sciences—
had been made possible only by the no less epochal reinvention of Western
Europe’s matrix Judeo-Christian genre of the human, in its first secularizing
if still hybridly religio-secular terms as Man as the Rational Self and politi-
cal subject of the state, in the reoccupied place of the True Christian Self, or
mode of sociogeny, of Latin-Christian Europe; by the reinvention also of the
secular entity of the West in the reoccupied place of the latter, with this rein-
vention being based on the model of Virgil’s Roman imperial epic.
This takes us back to the negative aspect of the dialectical process of cul-
ture-historical transformation by which the West was to initiate the first
phase of the degodding of its descriptive statement of the human, thereby
also initiating the processes that were to lead to the development of the new
order of nonadaptive cognition that is the natural sciences. Since it was to
be in the specific terms of this reinvention—one in which while, as
Christians, the peoples of the West would see themselves as one religious
genre of the human, even where they were to be convinced that theirs was
the only true religion, and indeed, as Lyotard points out, were unable to con-
ceive of an Other to what they called God—as Man, they would now not only
come to overrepresent their conception of the human (by means of a sus-
tained rhetorical strategy based on the topos of iconicity [Valesio 1980]) as
the human, thereby coming to invent, label, and institutionalize the indige-
nous peoples of the Americas as well as the transported enslaved Black
Africans as the physical referent of the projected irrational/subrational
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Human Other to its civic-humanist, rational self-conception. The West

would therefore remain unable, from then on, to conceive of an Other to
what it calls human—an Other, therefore, to its correlated postulates of
power, truth, freedom. All other modes of being human would instead have
to be seen not as the alternative modes of being human that they are “out
there,” but adaptively, as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self-
description. This at the same time as its genuine difference from all others
(i.e., its secularizing reinvention of its matrix religious identity from the
Renaissance onwards as that of Man in two forms—one ratiocentric and still
hybridly religio-secular, the other purely secular and biocentric) would
remain overseen, even non-theorizable within the acultural premise on
whose basis it had effected the reinvention of its matrix Christian genre or
theological “descriptive statement” of the human.
This central oversight would then enable both Western and westernized
intellectuals to systemically repress what Geertz has identified as the “fugi-
tive truth” of its own “local culturality” (Geertz 1983)—of, in Bruno Latour’s
terms, its specific “constitution with a capital C,” or cultural constitution
that underlies and charters our present order, as the parallel constitutions of
all other human orders that Western anthropologists have brilliantly eluci-
dated underlie and charter all other human orders (Latour 1991)—doing so
according to the same hybrid nature-culture, ontogeny/sociogeny laws or
rules. With this systemic repression ensuring that we oversee (thereby fail-
ing to recognize) the culture and class-specific relativity of our present mode
of being human: Man in the second, transumed, and now purely biocentric
and homo oeconomicus form of that first invention that was to lead to
Winant’s “immense historical rupture,” to Quijano’s “Racism/Ethnicism”
complex, and to Mignolo’s modernity/coloniality complementarity.
What were the specific terms of that first reinvention? Of its overrepre-
sentation? Why were these terms to lie at the basis of the Las Casas/
Sepúlveda dispute, whose empirical outcome—in favor of the latter’s
humanist arguments as opposed to Las Casas’s still theologically grounded
ones—was to provide the legitimated “ground” for what was to become the
colonizer (both the metropolitan imperialists and their settler enforcers) vs.
colonized relation (both Indians and Negroes, on the one hand, and the set-
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 283

tlers as criollos subjugated to the metropolitan peninsulares—whether

those of Spain, England, or France—on the other).

PA RT I I
The Las Casas/Sepúlveda Dispute and the Paradox of the Humanists’
Invention/Overrepresentation of “Man”: On the Coloniality of Secular
Being, the Instituting of Human Others.

The suggestion that the Indians might be slaves by nature—a suggestion

which claimed to answer questions concerning both their political and their
legal status—was first advanced as a solution to a political dilemma: by what
right had the crown of Castile occupied and enslaved the inhabitants of ter-
ritories to which it could make no prior claims based on history? . . . [John
Mair’s text adopted from Aristotle’s Politics] was immediately recognized by
some Spaniards as offering a final solution to their problem. Mair had, in
effect, established that the Christians’ claims to sovereignty over certain
pagans could be said to rest on the nature of the people being conquered,
instead of on the supposed juridical rights of the conquerors. He thus
avoided the inevitable and alarming deduction to be drawn from an appli-
cation of these arguments: namely that the Spaniards had no right whatso-
ever to be in America.
—Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American
Indians and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology

Leopoldo is asked to compare the Spaniards with the Indians, “who in pru-
dence, wisdom (ingenium), every virtue and humanity are as inferior to the
Spaniards as children are to adults, women are to men, the savage and fero-
cious [man] to the gentle, the grossly intemperate to the continent and tem-
perate and finally, I shall say, almost as monkeys are to men.” . . . “Compare
the gifts of magnanimity, temperance, humanity and religion of these men,”
continues Democrates, “with those homunculi [i.e., the Indians] in whom
hardly a vestige of humanity remains.”
—Ginés de Sepúlveda (cited by Pagden)
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The major reason for writing (this book) was that of seeing all and such an
infinite number of the nations of this vast part of the world slandered
(defamed) by those who did not fear God . . . [and who published] it abroad
that the peoples of these parts, were peoples who lacked sufficient reason to
govern themselves properly, were deficient in public policy (and) in well-
ordered states (republics) . . . as if Divine Providence, in its creation of such
an innumerable number of rational souls, had carelessly allowed human
nature to so err . . . in the case of such a vast part of the human lineage (de
linaje humano) as is comprised by these people allowing them to be born
lacking in sociality, and therefore, as monstrous peoples, against the natural
tendency of all the peoples of the earth . . .
—Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologetic History of the Indies

I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear,
inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism5

Leopoldo: If a breach of natural law is a just cause for making war, either I
am wrong, or there will be no nation on earth that cannot be militarily
attacked because of their sins against, or breaches of, the natural law. Tell me
then, how many and which nations do you expect to find who fully observe
the law of nature?
Democrates: Many do, I am sure: [but] there are no nations which call them-
selves civilized and are civilized who do not observe natural law.
—Ginés de Sepúlveda, The Second Democrates, or
On the Just Causes of War Against the Indians

Clearly one cannot prove in a short time or with a few words to infidels that
to sacrifice men to God is contrary to nature. Consequently neither anthro-
pophagy nor human sacrifice constitutes just cause for making war on cer-
tain kingdoms. . . . For the rest, to sacrifice innocents for the salvation of the
Commonwealth is not opposed to natural reason, is not something abom-
inable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its origin in natural
reason itself.
—Las Casas’s reply to Ginés de Sepúlveda6
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 285

And there is no difference with respect to the duties imposed upon these
who do not know him, (the True God as we Christians do) as long as they
hold some God to be the true God, and honor him as such. . . . This is because
the mistaken conscience/consciousness (la conciencia erronea) obliges and
compels exactly the same way as does the true/a correct one (la conciencia
recta).
—Las Casas, Tratados de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Third Treatise)

The priest Casas having at the time no knowledge of the unjust methods
which the Portuguese used to obtain slaves, advised that permission should
be given for the import of slaves into the islands, an advice which, once he
became informed about these methods, he would not have given for the
world. . . . The remedy which he proposed to import Black slaves in order to
liberate the Indians was not a good one, even though he thought the Black
slaves, at the time to have been enslaved with a just title; and it is not at all
certain that his ignorance at the time or even the purity of his motive will
sufficiently absolve him when he finds himself before the Divine Judge.
—Las Casas, History of the Indies (vol. 3)

. . . Doctor Sepúlveda, before dealing with an issue of which he had no direct

knowledge should have sought information from those servants of God, who
have toiled day and night to preach to convert the peoples of the Indies,
rather than have rushed to pay heed to and give credit to those profane and
tyrannical men who, in order to justify the expropriations (latrocinio) rob-
beries and murders that they have committed, as well as the usurped social
rank to which they have climbed doing so at the cost of the vast torrents of
spilled blood, of the suffering and damnation of an infinite number of inno-
cent souls, have persuaded him to write his thesis [i.e., in defence of their
position/interests].
—Las Casas, Tratados

Culture, in my view, is what a human being creates and what creates a human
being at the same time. In culture, the human being is simultaneously cre-
ator and creation. This is what makes culture different from both the natu-
ral and the supernatural; because in the supernatural we have the world of
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the Creator, and in nature we have the world of creations. The coincidence
of these two roles in a human being is what makes him a cultural being. . . .
Transculture means a space in, or among, cultures, which is open to all of
them. Culture frees us from nature; transculture frees us from culture, from
any one culture.
—Mikhail Epstein, “Postcommunist Postmodernism: An Interview”

About the Pope being the Lord of all the universe in the place of God, and
that he had given the lands of the Indies to the King of Castille, the Pope
must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his. . . . The
king who asked for and received this gift must have been some madman for
he asked to have given to him that which belonged to others.
—Cenú Indians’ reply to the Spaniards7

Two different anthropologies and their respective origin models/narratives

had inscribed two different descriptive statements of the human, one
which underpinned the evangelizing mission of the Church, the other the
imperializing mission of the state based on its territorial expansion and
conquest. Nevertheless, rather than merely a Christian/classics opposition,
the second descriptive statement, that of “Man” as political subject of the
state, was to be instead a syncretized synthesis of the anthropology of the
classics drawn into a secularizing Judeo-Christian framework, and there-
fore into the field of what Latour would call the West’s “constitution with
a capital C.”
This syncretism had already been at work in the formulations of Ficino
and Pico della Mirandola. For the latter, classical thought had enabled him,
as part of his revalorizing strategy of natural man, to fuse the original Judeo-
Christian conception of the human as being made in the image of God, with
the view of Platonic philosophy in which man is defined by the fact of the
choice that he can give himself to adopt “the sensual life of an animal or the
philosophical life of the gods.” Ficino had also defined man in terms derived
from both Christian and Platonic, as well as other pre-Christian sources as
a creature standing between “the physical world of nature” and “the spiritual
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 287

world of the angels of God”: as balanced between “natural” and “supernatu-

ral” order. It was in the context of this syncretized reinscription that the new
criterion of Reason would come to take the place of the medieval criterion
of the Redeemed Spirit as its transumed form—that the master code of sym-
bolic life (“the name of what is good”) and death (“the name of what is evil”)
would now become that of reason/sensuality, rationality/irrationality in the
reoccupied place of the matrix code of Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh. The
descriptive statement instituting of the humanists’ Man would therefore use
the Judeo-Christian answer to the what and who we are (i.e., the “human
created in the image of God,” but later become the embodiment of Original
Sin) to revalorize the medieval order’s fallen natural man by proposing that,
because “God is included in man in that an image embodies and includes its
exemplar,” human reason had remained “lord over the senses similar to the
way in which God is lord over his creatures.”
The relation here is one of analogy. While reason is not a god, “it par-
takes of some of God’s functions” in that it is intended to rule over a “lower
order of reality.” The fundamental separation for Pico was one between two
orders of creation, with man placed by God at the midpoint between them.
These were, on the one hand, the “super-celestial” regions with minds (i.e.,
angels, pure intelligences), and on the other, a region “filled with a diverse
throng of animals, the cast off and residual parts of the lower world.” Placed
between these two realms, man was the only creature “confined by no
bounds,” free to “fix limits of nature” for himself, free to be “molder and
maker of himself ” (see Pico’s guide-quote). Rather than the medieval
Christian’s choice of remaining enslaved to the Fallen Flesh and to Original
Sin, or seeking to be Redeemed-in-the-Spirit through the sacraments of the
Church, this newly invented Man’s choice is that of either growing down-
wards into the lower natures of brutes, or responding to the Creator’s call to
grow “upward” to “higher” and “divine” natures (Miller 1965).
With this redescription, the medieval world’s idea of order as based upon
degrees of spiritual perfection/imperfection, an idea of order centered on
the Church, was now to be replaced by a new one based upon degrees of
rational perfection/imperfection. And this was to be the new “idea of order”
on whose basis the coloniality of being, enacted by the dynamics of the rela-
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tion between Man—overrepresented as the generic, ostensibly supracultural

human—and its subjugated Human Others (i.e., Indians and Negroes),
together with, as Quijano notes, the continuum of new categories of humans
(i.e., mestizos and mulattos to which their human/subhuman value differ-
ence gave rise), was to be brought into existence as the foundational basis of
modernity. With this revealing that, from the very origin, the issue of race,
as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Nonwhite/Native Question, the
Negro Question, yet as one that has hitherto had no name, was and is fun-
damentally the issue of the genre of the human, Man, in its two variants—
the issue of its still ongoing production/reproduction in the form of the
second variant.
The clash between Las Casas and Sepúlveda was a clash over this issue—
the clash as to whether the primary generic identity should continue to be
that of Las Casas’s theocentric Christian, or that of the newly invented Man
of the humanists, as the rational (or ratiocentric) political subject of the
state (the latter as the “descriptive statement” in whose terms Sepúlveda
spoke). And this clash was to be all the more deep-seated in that the human-
ists, while going back to the classics and to other pre-Christian sources in
order to find a model of being human alternative to the one in whose terms
the lay world was necessarily subordinated, had effected their now new con-
ception and its related “formulation of a general order of existence” only by
transuming that of the Church’s matrix Judeo-Christian conception, thereby
carrying over the latter’s schematic structure, as well as many of its residual
meanings.
In this transumed reformulation, while the “significant ill” of mankind’s
enslavement was no longer projected as being to the negative legacy of
Adamic Original Sin, the concept of enslavement was carried over and
redescribed as being, now, to the irrational aspects of mankind’s human
nature. This redescription had, in turn, enabled the new behavior-motivating
“plan of salvation” to be secularized in the political terms of the this-worldly
goals of the state. Seeing that because the “ill” or “threat” was now that of
finding oneself enslaved to one’s passions, to the particularistic desires of
one’s human nature, salvation/redemption could only be found by the sub-
ject able to subdue his private interests in order to adhere to the laws of the
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 289

politically absolute state, and thereby to the “common good.” This meant
that the primary behavior-motivating goal, rather than that of seeking sal-
vation in the civitas dei, was now that of adhering to the goal of the civitas
saecularis (Pocock 1975): the goal, that is, of seeking to ensure the stability,
order, and territorial expansion of the state in a competitive rivalry with
other European states. This at the same time as the primacy of the earlier
religious ethic, as defended by Las Casas from a universalistic Christian per-
spective, was replaced by the new ethic of “reasons of state,” as the ethic car-
ried by a Sepúlveda whose civic humanist values were still, at the time, only
incipiently emergent. However, it is the latter ethic that, given the existen-
tial sociopolitical and commercial, on-the-ground processes that were to
lead to the rapid rise of the centralizing state,8 to its replacement of the
medieval system-ensemble with its monarchical own (Hubner 1983), and to
the expanding mercantilism with its extra-European territorial conquests,
exponentially accelerated was soon to triumph and become the accepted
doctrine of the times.
Nowhere is this mutation of ethics seen more clearly than in two plays
written in the first decades of the seventeenth century: one the well-known
play by Shakespeare, The Tempest; the other the less well-known play by
Spain’s Lope de Vega, written at roughly the same time and entitled The New
World Discovered by Christopher Columbus. In the plot of The Tempest, the
central opposition is represented as being between Prospero and Caliban;
that is, between Higher Reason as expressed in the former, and irrational,
sensual nature as embodied in the latter. The drunken sailors, Stephano and
Trinculo, had also, like Caliban, been shown as embodying that enslavement
to the irrational aspects of human nature (if to a lesser degree than the lat-
ter) which Prospero must repress in himself if he is to act as a rational ruler;
that is, one for whom the securing of the stability and order of the state (in
effect, reasons-of-state) had now to be the overriding imperative, the major
this-worldly goal. And while Miranda as woman, and as a young girl, is
shown as poised at midpoint between rational and irrational nature, she is
pre-assured of attaining to the former status because of her father’s tutor-
ing. This master code of rational nature/irrational nature, together with the
new “idea of order” as that of degrees of rational perfection in place of the
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earlier degrees of spiritual perfection, is also seen to be at work in Lope’s

play, even where syncretized with the earlier religious ethic within the con-
text of Spain’s Counter Reformation order of discourse. There, the
rational/irrational master code contrasts the rational Christian king and
queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabel, as opposed, on the one hand, to the
“irrational” Moorish prince of Granada—who is shown dallying with the
sensual pleasures of love while Ferdinand and Isabel capture Granada, dis-
placing him (“Orientalism” has an even longer history than Said has
traced!)—and on the other, and most totally so,9 to the “irrational” because
tyrannical Arawak cacique who, because of his forcible abduction of the
bride-to-be of one of his subjects, is shown to be as justly expropriated of his
sovereignty, his lands, and his religion as Caliban is “justly” expropriated of
his in The Tempest. In both plays, therefore, the Human Other figures to the
generic human embodied in Prospero and in the Catholic king and queen
are made to embody the postulate of “significant ill” of enslavement to the
lower, sensory aspects of “human nature.” At the same time, the generic
human bearer-figures of the politically rational are made to actualize the
new, transumed formulation and its conception of freedom as having no
longer mastery over Original Sin (as well as over those Enemies-of-Christ
who as such remain enslaved to it), but rather of mastery over their own sen-
sory, irrational nature—and, as well, of all those Human Other categories
who, like Shakespeare’s Caliban and Lope de Vega’s Dulcanquellín, are stig-
matized as remaining totally enslaved to theirs.
But perhaps what Shakespeare’s Reformation play reveals, more clearly
than does Lope de Vega’s Counter Reformation one, is the profound shift in
the grounds of legitimacy of which Sepúlveda had been the proponent in the
1550s dispute with Las Casas, and that were now being instituted in early
seventeenth-century Western Europe. That is, the shift in the terms by which
the latter’s ongoing expropriation of New World lands and the subsequent
reduction of the indigenous peoples to being a landless, rightless,10 neo-serf
work force—together with the accelerated mass slave trade out of Africa to
the Americas and the Caribbean and the instituting of the large-scale slave
plantation system that that trade made possible—will be made to seem just
and legitimate to its peoples. In addition, the way in which this shift will be
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 291

linked to another shift (one by which Western Europe’s categorization of the

“Indians” and “Negroes” in now secular rather than in the earlier religious
terms of Otherness: the new terms, therefore, of Quijano’s “Racism/
Ethnicism” complex) will be effected.
As Valentin Mudimbe documents in his The Invention of Africa (1988),
beginning in 1444 with the Portuguese landfall on the shores of Senegal West
Africa, all the actions that were to be taken by European-Christians—their
enslavement of non-Christians whom they first classified in theological
terms as Enemies-of-Christ, whether those of Africa or those of the New
World, together with their expropriation of the lands of the peoples on both
continents (limitedly so, at that time, in the case of Africa; almost totally so
in the case of the Americas)—were initially seen as just and legitimate in
Christian theological terms. In these terms, all the concessions of non-
European lands by the pope to the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns were
effected by means of several papal bulls that defined these lands as ones
that, because not belonging to a Christian prince, were terra nullius (“the
lands of no one”), and so legitimately expropriated by Christian kings
(Mudimbe 1988). In other words, they were so seen within the terms of the
adaptive truth-for of their “local culture’s” still hegemonic descriptive state-
ment of the human, and of the order of knowledge to which that statement
gave rise. And, therefore, as the truth of the “single culture” in whose theo-
centric terms they thought and acted (Epstein 1993), whose truth they
believed to be as supernaturally ordained as we now believe ours to be
“objective” because, ostensibly, supraculturally true.
This means that the large-scale accumulation of unpaid land, unpaid
labor, and overall wealth expropriated by Western Europe from non-
European peoples, which was to lay the basis of its global expansion from
the fifteenth century onwards, was carried out within the order of truth and
the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed-specific conception of
what it was to be human—which, because a monotheistic conception, could
not conceive of an Other to what it experienced as being human, and there-
fore an Other to its truth, its notion of freedom. Its subjects could therefore
see the new peoples whom it encountered in Africa and the New World only
as the “pagan-idolators,” as “Enemies-of-Christ” as the Lack of its own nar-
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rative ideal. This was consequential. It set in motion the secularizing rein-
vention of its own matrix Christian identity as Man. The non-Europeans
that the West encountered as it expanded would classify the West as “abnor-
mal” relative to their own experienced Norm of being human, in the
Otherness slot of the gods or the ancestors. This was the case with the
Congolese who, seeing the white skin of the Europeans as a sign of mon-
strous deviance to their Bantu genre/norm of being human, classified them
together with their deceased ancestors (Axelson 1970). For the Europeans,
however, the only available slot of Otherness to their Norm, into which they
could classify these non-European populations, was one that defined the lat-
ter in terms of their ostensible subhuman status (Sahlins 1995).
The creation of this secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the
theocentric slot of Otherness in which non-European peoples had been clas-
sified in religious terms as Enemies-of-Christ, pagan-idolators, thereby
incorporating them into the theological system of legitimacy—which, as set
out in the papal bulls from the 1455 Romanus Pontifex onwards, had pro-
vided the framework in whose terms their ostensibly “lands of no one/terra
nullius” had been seeable as justly expropriable, and they themselves justly
enslavable as such pre-classified populations—was taking place, however, in
the wider context of the overall sociopolitical and cultural transformation
that had been set in motion in Western Europe from the Renaissance
onwards, one correlated with the challenge of the then ascendant modern
European monarchical state to the centralizing post-Gregorian hegemony of
the Church.
In this context, Anthony Pagden has excellently documented the shift
that would eventually take place in the grounds of legitimacy in whose terms
Europeans were to see themselves as justly expropriating the lands and liv-
ing space of the indigenous peoples of the New World. This shift, as he
shows, would occur as a direct result of the fact that while, at first, the
Spanish state had depended on the pope’s having divided up the New World
between Spain and Portugal, doing this in exchange for the promise that
their respective states would help to further the evangelizing mission of
Christianity, the Spanish sovereigns had soon become impatient with the
papacy’s claim to temporal as well as to spiritual sovereignty. In conse-
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 293

quence, King Ferdinand of Spain, wanting to claim temporal sovereignty for

himself as he set out to institute the first Western European world empire,
had summoned several councils comprised of jurists and theologians. He
had then given them the mandate that they should come up with new
grounds for Spain’s sovereignty, which moved outside the limits of the sov-
ereignty over the temporal world claimed by the papacy.
The fact that the theological grounds of the legitimacy both of Spain’s
sovereignty over the New World and of its settlers’ rights to the indigenous
people’s lands (as well as of the latter’s right, in the early period, to carry out
slave-trading raids on the American mainland) had come upon a central
obstacle made this matter all the more urgent. The obstacle was this: all the
basic concepts of the theological system of legitimation—i.e., that the lands
of non-Christian princes were terra nullius and as such justly expropriable
by Christian princes; that the indigenous peoples could be enserfed or even
enslaved where necessary—had come to founder upon a stubborn fact. This
was that the indigenous peoples of the New World could not be classified as
Enemies-of-Christ, since Christ’s apostles had never reached the New World,
never preached the Word of the Gospel to them. Which meant that because
they could not have ever refused to hear the Word, they could not (within
the terms of the orthodox theology of the Church) be classified as Christ-
Refusers, their lands justly taken, and they themselves enslaved and/or
enserfed with a “just title.”
The life-long struggle of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Spanish mission-
ary priest, in the wake of his 1514 conversion experience, to save the
Caribbean Arawaks from the ongoing demographic catastrophe that fol-
lowed both their infection by new diseases to which they had no immunity
and their subjection to the harsh, forced-labor regime of the Spaniards was
a struggle waged precisely on the basis of the fact that such subjection could
not be carried out with a “just title.” This was, therefore, to lead him to make
a fateful proposal, one that was to provide the charter of what was to become
the Black-diasporic presence in the Americas. This proposal was that
African slaves, whom he then believed to have been acquired with a just title,
should be brought in limited numbers as a labor force to replace the Indians.
This proposal, which kick-started what was to be the almost four-centuries-
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long slave trade out of Africa, had therefore been the result of his struggle
not to replace “Indians with Africans,” as Liberal historians who think in
biocentric, classificatory terms would have it—but rather, within the theo-
logical terms in which Las Casas thought and fought, to replace those whom
he knew from first hand to have been enslaved and enserfed outside the “just
title” terms of orthodox Christian theology with others whom, as he thought
at the time, had been acquired within the terms of those “just titles.” The
cited passage (see Las Casas guide-quote) reveals that Las Casas, when he
later found out that the African slaves had been no less ruthlessly acquired
outside the terms of the same just titles than had been the Indians, was to
bitterly repent of his proposal. But by then, the mass slave trade from Africa
across the Atlantic that would give rise to today’s transnational Black
Diaspora had taken on a life and unstoppable dynamic of its own.
Las Casas had thought and acted in the terms of his Christian evangel-
izing imperative. The Spanish state’s primary imperative, however, was that
of its territorial expansion, of realizing its imperial goals of sovereignty over
the new lands. Its jurists had, in this context, at first attempted to get around
the Enemies-of-Christ obstacle by means of a judicial document called “The
Requisition” (“Requerimento”). A hybridly theologico-juridical document,
written in Latin, the Requisition was supposed to be read out to groups of
assembled indigenes by a notary who was to accompany any slave-raiding,
land-expropriating expedition that sailed from the first settled Caribbean
islands to the mainland. This document was intended to ensure that the
indigenes in question literally heard the Word of the Christian Gospel, so
that they could then be later classified as having refused it, and therefore as
Enemies-of-Christ. The document proclaimed to the indigenes that Christ,
who was king over the world, had granted this sovereignty to the pope, who
had in turn granted the lands of their “barbarous nations” to the king of
Spain, who had sent the expedition members as his emissaries. The expedi-
tionaries had been sent to give the indigenes the choice of accepting the
king of Spain’s sovereignty over their lands, together with their acceptance
of Christ’s Word and, with it, of conversion to Christianity. If they accepted
the king’s sovereignty together with conversion, they would be unharmed.
Should they refuse (thereby making themselves Christ-Refusers and
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 295

Enemies-of-Christ), they would be attacked, captured, justly enslaved—their

lands justly expropriated. If Las Casas was to write that on reading this doc-
ument he did not know whether to laugh or cry, the reported reply by the
Cenú peoples on the mainland to one such expedition opens a transcultural
cognitive frontier onto the way in which, to use Marshall Sahlins’ phrase (if
somewhat inverting its meaning) “natives think” (Sahlins 1990), and law-
likely so within the terms of their/our order-specific modes of adaptive cog-
nition-for, truth-for.
Seen from hindsight, what the Cenú are saying (see Cenú/Greenblatt
guide-quote) is that, outside the “local cultural” field of what was then
Western Europe, and therefore outside the adaptive truth-for terms of its
monarchical-Christian genre of being human, the speech of the Requisition
was “mad and drunken”: speech that was meaningless. Since it was only in
the terms of what could seem just and legitimate to a specific genre of being
human that the lands of non-Christian and non-European peoples could
have been seen as the pope’s to give, or the king of Castile’s to take. What is
of specific interest here is not only that it was this initial, large-scale, one-
sided accumulation of lands, wealth, power, and unpaid labor by the West
that was to provide the basis for today’s 20/80 wealth and power ratio
between the world’s peoples, but also that this primary accumulation had
been effected on the basis of a truth-for, or system of ethno-knowledge, that
was no less non-veridical outside the viewpoint of its subjects than the
premise the Portuguese and Columbus’s voyages had only recently dis-
proved—i.e., the premise that the Earth was nonhomogeneously divided
into habitable within God’s Grace and uninhabitable outside it. Seeing that
what we also come upon is the nature of our human cognitive dilemma, one
that is the very condition of their/our existence as hybridly nature-culture
beings, the dilemma is how, in Epstein’s terms, we can be enabled to free
ourselves from our subordination to the one culture, the one descriptive
statement that is the condition of us being in the mode of being that we are
(Epstein 1993).
That vast dilemma, which is that of our still-unresolved issue of con-
sciousness (McGinn 1999) was one that Las Casas brilliantly touched upon
when, referring to the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice, he stated that a
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mistaken (i.e., adaptive) consciousness/conscience impels and obliges no

less than does a true one. However, not only the Cenú Indians, but the
Spaniards themselves had also come to realize the invalid nature of their
attempt to get around the theological concept of Enemies-of-Christ. In con-
sequence, as Pagden tells us, the Spanish Crown had, from early on, initiated
the adoption of new grounds of legitimacy that were to eventually make the
Requisition document unnecessary. The councils of jurists/theologians that
King Ferdinand set up for this purpose had come up with a formula that,
adopted from The Politics of Aristotle, would not only enable the master
trope of Nature (seen as God’s agent on Earth) to take the latter’s authorita-
tive place, but would also effect a shift from the Enemies-of-Christ/Christ-
Refusers system of classification to a new and even more powerfully
legitimating one. It was here that the modern phenomenon of race, as a new,
extrahumanly determined classificatory principle and mechanism of domi-
nation (Quijano 2000), was first invented, if still in its first religio-secular
form. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, together with the mass-
enslaved peoples of Africa, were now to be reclassified as “irrational”
because “savage” Indians, and as “subrational” Negroes, in the terms of a for-
mula based on an a-Christian premise of a by-nature difference between
Spaniards and Indians, and, by extrapolation, between Christian Europeans
and Negroes. This neo-Aristotelian formula had been proposed by the
Scottish theologian John Mair.
A new notion of the world and “idea of order” was being mapped now,
no longer upon the physical cosmos—which beginning with the fifteenth-
century voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, as well as with the new
astronomy of Copernicus, was eventually to be freed from having to serve as
a projected “space of Otherness,” and as such having to be known in the
adaptive terms needed by human orders to represent their social structures
as extrahumanly determined ones. Instead, the projected “space of
Otherness” was now to be mapped on phenotypical and religio-cultural dif-
ferences between human variations and/or population groups, while the
new idea of order was now to be defined in terms of degrees of rational per-
fection/imperfection, as degrees ostensibly ordained by the Greco-Christian
cultural construct deployed by Sepúlveda as that of the “law of nature,” “nat-
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 297

ural law”: as a “law” that allegedly functioned to order human societies in

the same way as the newly discovered laws of nature served to regulate the
processes of functioning of physical and organic levels of reality.
It is, therefore, the very humanist strategy of returning to the pagan
thought of Greece and Rome for arguments to legitimate the state’s rise to
hegemony, outside the limits of the temporal sovereignty claimed by the
papacy, that now provides a model for the invention of a by-nature differ-
ence between “natural masters” and “natural slaves,” one able to replace the
Christian/Enemies-of-Christ legitimating difference. For while Mair does
not specifically use the term rational, the thesis of a by-nature difference in
rationality (one transumed today into a by-Evolution “difference” in a sub-
stance called I.Q.) was to be central to the new legitimation of Spain’s right
to sovereignty, as well as of its settlers’ rights both to the land and to the
labor of the Indians. With, in consequence, the institution of the
encomienda system, which attached groups of Indians to settlers as a neo-
serf form of labor, together with the institution of the slave plantation sys-
tem manned by “Negroes” coming to centrally function so as to produce and
reproduce the socioeconomic and ontological hierarchies of the order as if
indeed they had been mandated by the ostensibly extrahuman agency of
“natural law.”
For the settlers—as well as for their humanist royal historian and chap-
lain, Ginés de Sepúlveda, who defended their claims (against the opposition
of the Dominican missionaries and, centrally so, of Las Casas, who sought to
put an end to the encomienda labor system)—the vast difference that
existed in religion and culture between the Europeans and the indigenous
peoples was clear evidence of the latter’s lack of an ostensibly supracultural
natural reason. The quite Other form of life and mode of being human of the
indigenous peoples were therefore simply seen by the Spaniards as the irra-
tional Lack of their own. So that even when confronted, as in the case of the
Aztecs, with the latter’s complex and well-organized imperial civilization—
one, however, based on the central institution of large-scale human sacri-
fice—Sepúlveda was able to argue that this practice by itself was clear
evidence of the Aztecs’ lack of “natural reason”: of their having therefore
been determined by “natural law” to be the “natural slaves” of the Spaniards.
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In opposition to this thesis, and from the perspective of his own univer-
salist Christianity and evangelizing imperative, Las Casas was to put for-
ward, in his formal dispute with Sepúlveda in 1556, one of the earliest
attempts at a transcultural mode of thinking—one that was almost hereti-
cal to his own Christian religious beliefs. He had counter-argued that the
Aztec practice of human sacrifice was a religious practice that, rather than
giving proof of the Aztecs’ lack of rational reason, proved itself to be an error
of reason itself. This, given that to the Aztecs human sacrifice, “the sacrifice
of innocents for the good of the commonwealth,” was a practice that was not
only seen by them to be a legitimate, just, and rational act, but was also one
that had seemed to them to be a pious and virtuous one. In effect, an act that
had been seen as being as righteous and virtuous by the Aztecs in their
adaptive truth-for terms (based on their having mistaken, from Las Casas’s
Christian perspective, their false gods for the true One) as the Spanish set-
tlers’ expropriation of the indigenous peoples’ lands and the enserfment of
their lives/labor would come to seem just and legitimate to them within the
adaptive truth-for and incipiently secular terms of the new “reasons-of-
state” legitimation now being put forward by Sepúlveda.
The universally applicable Christianity in the terms of whose schema of
Divine Election and Damnation Las Casas waged his struggle (terms that,
once he had been informed by his fellow Portuguese missionaries of the
unjust and rapacious methods used by the Portuguese to acquire African
slaves, would lead him to confess that his proposal put his own soul in mor-
tal danger), and the identity that he had experienced as primary—that of
being a Christian (an identity that had impelled him to do “all that one ought
to as a Christian,” which for him had centrally included making use of the
state as a means of evangelizing the Indians) were increasingly being made
secondary. This at the same time as the new identity of the “political sub-
ject” (one defined by a “reasons-of-state ethic,” which instead used the
Church for its own this-worldly purpose) came to take center stage—the
new identity of which intellectuals like Sepúlveda were now the bearers.
In consequence, the humanist counter-discourse of the latter, which
functioned in the terms of this new descriptive statement and of its “rea-
sons-of-state ethic,” now became the new “common sense” (as we see it
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 299

enacted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest) of the pre-Enlightenment, pre-

Darwinian era. It was therefore within the terms of this new “common
sense”—and in the context of his defense of the settlers’ rights to the lands
and enserfed labor of the indigenous peoples, as well as of the Crown’s right
to wage just war against the latter if they resisted its sovereignty—that
Sepúlveda further elaborated Mair’s proposed legitimating of neo-
Aristotelian by-nature difference, defining it as one based not only on dif-
ferential degrees of rationality, but also as being human, of humanity.
Here we see the fatal error attendant on the West’s degodding of its reli-
gious Judeo-Christian descriptive statement of the human at its clearest.
While, as Christians, Westerners could see other peoples as also having gods
(even if, for them, necessarily “false” ones as contrasted with their “true” and
single One), as subjects defined by the identity Man, this could no longer be
the case. Seeing that once its “descriptive statement” had been instituted as
the only, universally applicable mode of being human, they would remain
unable, from then on until today, of (to paraphrase Lyotard) conceiving an
Other to what they call human (Lyotard 1990). And where the matrix
Christian conception of the human, which not only knew itself to be creed-
specific, but which had also been one carried by a Church that had been
engaged for hundreds of years in Europe itself in the Christianizing conver-
sion of pagan peoples, had compelled its missionaries to engage in tran-
screedal, transcultural modes of cognition, even where transforming the
pagan gods into the satanic figure of their Christian Devil—for the human-
ists’ “Man,” overrepresented as the supracultural, super-creedal human itself,
this was not possible. Hence the logic by which, for the humanist Sepúlveda,
the religious practices of the Aztecs were, so to speak, “crimes against
humanity,” breaches of the ostensible universally applicable “natural law,”—
a law that imposed a by-nature divide between “civilized” peoples (as true
generic humans who adhered to its Greco-European cultural construct) and
those, like the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean, who
did not. As such, the New World peoples had to be seen and constructed,
increasingly by all Europeans, in neo-Sepúlvedan terms as forms of Human
Otherness, if to varying degrees, to a now secularizing West’s own. And while
a Las Casas, in the context of his struggle against both Mair’s and Sepúlveda’s
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theses, would see, from his own universalist-Christian perspective, that their
systemic classifying of the indigenous peoples as “by nature” different from,
and inferior to, the Spaniards, and as almost subhuman—that further, their
(in his terms) deliberate “slandering” of an entire population, of a “large part
of God’s Creation” had the directly instrumental purpose of subordinating
the peoples whom they slandered in order to expropriate their lands and to
reduce them as a population to enserfed encomienda labor (to render them,
in Peter Carlo’s term, landless and rightless)—this “slandering” was never-
theless not arbitrary.
Instead, it was a constitutive part of the new order of adaptive truth-for
that had begun to be put in place with the rise to hegemony of the modern
state, based on the new descriptive statement of the human, Man, as pri-
marily a political subject—of, therefore, the West’s own self-conception. As
a result, seen from a transcultural perspective in the context of the “local
cultural field” of a Judeo-Christian/Latin-Christian Europe that was in the
process of reinstituting itself as the secular imperial entity, the West, this
“slandering” both of Indians and of Negroes can be seen in its precise role
and function. That is, as a lawlike part of the systemic representational shift
being made out of the order of discourse that had been elaborated on the
basis of the Judeo-Christian Spirit/Flesh organizing principle (one in whose
logic the premise of nonhomogeneity, articulating its master code of sym-
bolic life and death, had been mapped onto the physical cosmos) to the new
rational/irrational organizing principle and master code. And as one whose
foundational premise of nonhomogeneity, which was now to be mapped
onto a projected, ostensibly divinely created difference of substance between
rational humans and irrational animals, would also come to be mapped at
another “space of Otherness” level. This level was that of a projected Chain
of Being comprised of differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality (and
thereby, as shown in the quote from Sepúlveda, of humanity) between dif-
ferent populations, their religions, cultures, forms of life; in other words,
their modes of being human. And while the West placed itself at the apex,
incorporating the rest (the majority of whom it would come to dominate in
terms of their differential degrees of distance from, or nearness to, its now
hegemonic, secularizing, and single own), and was to legitimate its relation
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 301

of dominance over them all in the terms of its single culture’s adaptive truth-
for, it was to be the figure of the Negro (i.e., the category comprised by all
peoples of Black African hereditary descent) that it was to place at the nadir
of its Chain of Being; that is, on a rung of the ladder lower than that of all
humans, lower even than that of Sepúlveda’s New World homunculi.
While “indios” and “negros,” Indians and Negroes, were to be both made
into the Caliban-type referents of Human Otherness to the new rational self-
conception of the West, there was also, therefore (as Poliakov notes), a
marked differential in the degrees of subrationality, and of not-quite-human-
ness, to which each group was to be relegated within the classificatory logic
of the West’s ethnocultural field. From the beginning, it would be the
“Negroes” who would be consigned to the pre-Darwinian last link in the
Chain of Being—to the “missing link” position, therefore, between rational
humans and irrational animals. And while the fact that the “Indians” were,
by the late 1530s, declared to be de jure, if not altogether de facto, free (and
as such vassals of the Crown like the Spaniards, if still secondary “native”
ones) at the same time as the “Negroes” would continue to constitute the
only outrightly enslaved labor force, and this fact was a partial cause of this
differential, there was an additional major and powerful factor. This factor
was that of the role that the black skin and somatotype of peoples of African
hereditary descent had been made to play, for centuries, in the elaboration
of monotheistic Christianity, as well as in all three monotheisms, all of which
had been religions instituted by population groups who were white-skinned,
or at least, not black-skinned. With the result that the intellectuals of these
groups, in developing the symbolic systems of their monotheistic creeds,
had come to define these symbols in the terms of their own somatotype
norm, in the same way as the Bantu-Congolese had done in developing their
polytheistic own. An account of the early seventeenth-century kingdom of
the Congo, written by a Spanish Capuchin missionary priest (Father Antonio
de Teruel), reveals the above parallel, thereby providing us with a transgenre-
of-the-human, transcultural perspective.
The indigenous peoples of the Congo,” Teruel wrote, “are all black in
color, some more so, some less so. Many are to be seen who are the color of
chestnut and some tend to be more olive-colored. But the one who is of the
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deepest black in color is held by them to be the most beautiful. Some are
born somewhat light-skinned, but as they grow older they become darker
and darker. This occurs because their mothers make use of the artifice of an
ointment . . . with which they anoint their infants, exposing them once they
have been anointed, to the rays of the sun, then leaving them there for long
periods, and repeating this action over and over . . .” (Teruel 1663‒64; empha-
sis added)

Given the fact that a black skin is so highly regarded among them, we
Europeans appear ugly in their eyes. As a result, children in those areas,
where a white has never been seen before, would become terrified, fleeing in
horror from us, no less than our children here are terrified by the sight of a
black also fleeing in horror from them. But they do not want us to call them
negroes (negros) but Blacks (Prietos); amongst them only slaves are called
negroes and thus amongst them it is the same things to say negro as to say
slave” (Teruel (1663‒1664) Ms. 3533:3574).

Unlike the Bantu-Congolese ethno-specific conception, however, the

monotheists had projected their respective creeds as universally applicable
ones, defining their God(s) and symbol systems as the only “true” ones. This
was to be even more the case with respect to Christianity from the time of
the Crusades onwards. With the result that, as the historian Fernández-
Armesto noted in his description of the “mental horizons” of Christian
Europeans at the time of their fourteenth-century expansion into the
Mediterranean, followed by their expansions into the Atlantic, in the terms
of those “horizons,” Black Africans had been already classified (and for cen-
turies before the Portuguese landing on the shores of Senegal in 1444) in a
category “not far removed from the apes, as man made degenerate by sin.”
And while the roots of this projection had come from a biblical tradition
common to all three monotheisms—that is, “that the sons of Ham were
cursed with blackness, as well as being condemned to slavery”—in Europe,
it had come to be elaborated in terms that were specific to Christianity. In
this elaboration, the “diabolical color,” black, had become the preferred color
for the depiction of “demons” and the signification of “sin“—the signifying
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 303

actualization, therefore, of Judeo-Christianity’s behavior-programming pos-

tulate of “significant ill” to its limit degree. So that as a result, in addition to
their being co-classified with apes, who “iconographically . . . signified sin,”
Black Africans were generally thought in “medieval ape lore,” a precursor to
the theory of Evolution, to be “degenerate” descendants of “true man”
(Fernández-Armesto 1987). Because all of these traditions reinforced each
other, the “descendants of Ham” classificatory category that was to be
deployed by the Europeans at the popular level, once the Enemies-of-Christ
justificatory category had been discarded as legitimation of the mass
enslavements of Africans (at the official level of Church doctrine, one of the
justifications was also that the latter’s physical enslavement was a means of
saving their souls), would be inextricably linked to Judeo-Christianity’s “for-
mulations of a general order of existence,” to its descriptive statement of
what it was to be a Christian—to be, therefore, in their own conception, the
only possible and universally applicable mode of being human, yet as a mode
which nonconsciously carried over, as the referent of “normalcy,” their own
somatotype norm in the same way as their now purely secular and biocen-
tric transformation of Christian, Man, overrepresented as if its referent were
the human, now continues to do, even more totally so.

PA R T I I I
From the Iconography of Sin and the Christian Construction
of Being to the Iconography of Irrationality and the Colonial
Construction of Being: On the Paradox of the Mutation from
Supernatural to Natural Causation.

Sepúlveda’s classification of the peoples of the Americas as homunculi,

who—when contrasted to the Spaniards in terms of prudence and reason
(ingenium)—are almost “like monkeys to men,” can be seen as transuming,
or carrying over, the residual iconography of sin into the formulation of the
new postulate of “significant ill” as that of being enslaved to the irrational
aspects of one’s nature. So that, while the iconic figure of the “ape” is main-
tained because the earlier matrix ontological distinction between the con-
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demned category of peoples enslaved to Original Sin, and the Elect category
of those redeemed from this sin has now been recast in the terms of the “by-
nature difference” of rationality, the “ape” figure will be deployed in the new
terms of a secularizing iconography as the marker of a naturally determined
zero degree of irrationality. So that, as the earlier ontological distinction
between the Elect-Redeemed and the Condemned (a distinction that had
been actualized by the relation between the category of the celibate clergy
and that of the non-celibate laity) came to be replaced by the new distinc-
tion made between those determined by nature to be the possessors of rea-
son, and those predestined by it to remain enslaved to a lack of such reason,
this distinction will be actualized in a new relation. This was the relation, in
the Americas and the Caribbean, between the European settlers classified as
by nature a people of reason (gente de razón) and the non-European popu-
lation groups “Indians” and “Negroes,” classified as “brute peoples without
“reason” who were no less naturally determined to be so. It is here, therefore,
that the figure of the Negro was now to be transferred, like that of the ape,
from the earlier iconography of sin and its postulate of “significant ill” to the
new iconography of irrationality, to its new postulate of “significant ill.” As a
result, where before the “Negro” had been projected, within the terms of the
Judeo-Christian imaginary, as the “figure” of the human made degenerate by
sin, and therefore supernaturally determined (through the mediation of
Noah’s curse laid upon the descendants of Ham) to be the nearest of all peo-
ples to the ape, now he/she will be projected as the by-nature determined
(i.e., caused) missing link between true (because rational) humans and the
irrational figure of the ape. This at the same time as inside Europe, the
increasingly interned figure of the Mad would itself come to function, within
the terms of the same iconography, as the signifier of the “significant ill” of
a threatened enslavement to irrationality in the reoccupied place of the
medieval Leper, whose figure, in a parallel way to that of the “Negro,” had
served as the intra–Christian-European signifier of the then “significant ill”
of enslavement to Original Sin.
This alerts us to the dialectic at work in the epochal shift effected by the
West from the explanatory model of supernatural causation to that of natu-
ral causation. That is, to the fact that it was the same explanatory model that
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 305

legitimated the large-scale expropriation and mass enslavement of two peo-

ples on the grounds of a naturally determined difference of rational sub-
stance between them and their expropriators and slave masters that had, at
the same time, made possible the rise and development of the physical sci-
ences as a new order of human cognition. This meant that the same model
that was to initiate the centuries-long degradation of two human groups for
the benefit of another such group was to also set in motion the process that
would emancipate the “objective set of facts” of the physical level of reality
from having to be known in the adaptive truth-for terms in which it had been
hitherto known by all human population groups. This had been so known, in
exactly the same way as “Indians” and “Negroes” were now going to be
“known” by Europeans, as an indispensable function of the mechanisms by
means of which, as Godelier points out, all human groups have been enabled
to make the fact that it is they/we who are the authors and agents of our own
orders opaque to themselves/ourselves. Since they are mechanisms that func-
tion to project their/our authorship onto Imaginary supernatural Beings, as
well as to represent the latter as being as much the creators of the physical
cosmos onto which each order mapped its structuring principles, descriptive
statement of the human, and correlated moral laws as they are of the sub-
jects, who ostensibly merely mirror these laws in the organization of their/our
own social hierarchies, divisions of labor, and role allocations.
Hence the logic by which, if the Copernican Revolution was to be only
made possible by the West’s invention of Man outside the terms of the ortho-
dox, “sinful by nature” descriptive statement and theocentric conception of
the human, Christian, this was to be only fully effected by the parallel inven-
tion/instituting of the new categories that were to serve as the physical ref-
erents of Man’s Human Other. With the result that the same explanatory
model that legitimated the expropriation and internment of the Indians, the
mass enslavement of the Negroes, and the internment of the Mad—all osten-
sibly as living proof of their naturally determined enslavement to irrational-
ity—will also underlie the cognitively emancipatory shift from the
explanatory model of supernatural causation to that of natural causation,
which made the natural sciences possible. The shift, therefore, from the
explanatory principle of Divine Providence and/or retribution, as well as
306 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

from that of witchcraft and sorcery, to that of the new principle of laws of
nature, of events happening cursus solitus naturae (in the accustomed or
ordinary course of nature) as the explanatory model that underlay the sci-
entific revolution, both with respect to the physical sciences and, if more
slowly so, to the rise of modern medicine.
However, at the same time as the West initiated the process by means of
which the projection of extrahuman causation could no longer be mapped,
in good faith, on the physical levels of reality, it would also begin, in the wake
of its reinventing of its descriptive statement as that of Man in its first form,
to identify as its Imaginary extrahuman Being the figure of “Nature,” now
represented as the authoritative agent on earth of a God who, having created
it, has now begun to recede into the distance. So that as the earlier
Spirit/Flesh master code was being relegated to a secondary and increas-
ingly privatized space, the new rational/irrational master code, which was
to be the structuring of the rearranged hierarchies of the now centralized
political order of the modern state, was being projected upon another “space
of Otherness.” This was that of the projected hierarchy of a graduated table,
or Chain of all forms of sentient life, from those classified as the lowest to
those as the highest. It is, therefore, as the new rational/irrational line
(drawn between the fundamental ontological distinction of a represented
nonhomogeneity between divinely created-to-be-rational humans, on the
one hand, and divinely created-to-be irrational animals, on the other) comes
to be actualized in the institutionalized differences between European set-
tlers and Indians/Negroes, that the figure of the Negro as the projected miss-
ing link between the two sides of the rational/irrational divide will inevitably
come to be represented in the first “scientific” taxonomy of human popula-
tions, that of Linnaeus, as the population that, in contrast to the European
(which is governed by laws), is governed by caprice (Linnaeus 1735). So irra-
tional that it will have to be governed by others.
In consequence, and as Poliakov argues in The Aryan Myth (1974), it is
the population group classified as “Negro” by the West who would be made
to pay the most total psycho-existential price for the West’s epochal degod-
ding of both its matrix Judeo-Christian identity and the latter’s projection of
Otherness. Since, if that process called for the carrying over or transuming
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 307

(Bloom 1983) of the monotheistic macro-stereotype of all Black peoples as

descendants of Noah’s son Ham (whom he had cursed, condemning his
descendants to be the servants to the descendants of those of his two other
sons, Japhet and Shem), and its reattachment to the new concept of the sub-
rational Negro, condemned this time by the malediction of Nature rather
than by Noah, this was because, in both cases, that stereotype had become
indispensable to the mechanisms by which the Judeo-Christian West
enacted its descriptive statement of the human—firstly as Christian, then as
its first hybridly religio-secular variant, Man.
This in the same way in which it would remain indispensable to the
enacting of the descriptive statement of the now purely secular because bio-
centric Darwinian variant of Man: one in which the Human Other maledic-
tion or curse, one shared with all the now colonized nonwhite peoples
classified as “natives” (but as their extreme nigger form) would be no longer
that of Noah or Nature, but of Evolution and Natural Selection. So that what-
ever the terms of derogatory clichés of which both the native and the “Negro”
are the butt, what is clear is that its obsessive “name of what is evil” stereo-
typing functions as an indispensable part of the Godelier-type mechanism
by which the subjects of the West (including those subjects like ourselves
whom it has “westernized” and “modernized”) are enabled to make opaque
to themselves/ourselves (according to the same nature-culture laws by
which the subjects of all other human orders have done and do the same)
the empirical fact of our ongoing production and reproduction of our order,
of its genre of being human, its mode of consciousness or mind, and there-
fore of the latter’s adaptive truth-for. We are, as intellectuals, the agents of
its formal elaboration.
The first form of the secularizing, “name of what is evil,” stereotyped role
of the “Negro” was, however, different from the form it now takes. Poliakov
links that first form, and the conceptual imaginative terms it would take, to
a shift in the role played by that other major Other figure to the Judeo-
Christian identity, the Jew. This shift began with the rise of the modern state
in Spain, together with the centralizing of its order, from 1492 onwards. In
that year, all Jews who adhered to their religion of Judaism were expelled,
while shortly after, the conquered Islamic Moors of southern Spain began to
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be forcibly converted to Christianity—both as effects of the goal of “religious

unification” that was to be the basis of the monarchical order of Spain. In
consequence, Poliakov points out—because a great number of Jews had
accepted conversion to Christianity, rather than being expelled—the impo-
sition of a single orthodox faith, that of Christianity, under the aegis of the
Inquisition as an agent of the new state had given rise to the problem of the
conversos or converts, either Moriscos (Muslim converts) or Marranos
(Jewish converts). It was, therefore, in the context of the shift from being a
primarily religious subject, for whom the “name of what is evil” was/is that
of a common enslavement by all mankind to Original Sin, to that of being a
political subject of a state (yet unified on the basis of its Christian creed)
that the Other to the norm of this subject was to be the category of the con-
versos, both Marranos and Moriscos. A specific reprobation was therefore
now placed on these two categories: that of their impurity or uncleanness of
blood, and also of their faith, because descended from ancestors who had
practiced the Jewish and the Islamic creeds.
If, as Harold Bloom notes, cultural fields are kept in being by transump-
tive chains (Bloom 1982), it was to be the trope of “purity of blood,” together
with that of its threatening “stain” (itself a “re-troped” form of the matrix
negative construct of the “taint” of Original Sin) that, once re-troped as
“racial purity,” would come to be attached to peoples of Black African hered-
itary descent. With the result that if the latter would (together with a range
of other nonwhite “natives”) come to reoccupy the now purely secular place
that had been earlier occupied by the Marrano and Morisco, the deep-seated
belief in the pollution carried by their “negro blood” would lead to the theme
of miscegenation coming to reoccupy the earlier foundational place that the
incest had taken in all other human orders (Fox 1983). This at the same time
as all members of this population were now to be constructed, discursively
and institutionally, as the bottom marker—not now merely on a local scale,
such as that of the “clean” Spanish-Christian scale of being, but instead of
what was to become, from Sepúlveda onwards, that of a projected univer-
sally human scale of being. With this being so, whether in the terms of the
Enlightenment’s “Nature,” or even more totally so in terms of the Darwinian
paradigm of Evolution.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 309

What Poliakov reveals here, therefore, is the nonarbitrary and systemic

nature of the way in which the range of negatively marked tropes attached to
the “figure” of the “Negro” were/are only the contemporary culmination of a
process by means of which, beginning early on in the sixteenth century, a pro-
jected taxonomy of human population groups had begun to be put in place—
one in which the “Negro” had to be, imperatively, at the bottom. Beginning
with Peter Martyr’s 1516 definition of Indians as “white,” as contrasted with
“black” Ethiopians, this placing was carried over in the first attempt at “racial
classification” by François Bernier in 1684, which also assimilated the Indians
to the white race now projected as the normal race. While the parallel sys-
temic construction of the Black as the “abnormal” race can be seen in the
generalization of the positive/negative value meanings (common to all
European languages) as between mestizo (white/Indian) and mulatto
(white/Black). What Poliakov further demonstrates is that, in the same way
as the systemic construction of Moriscos and Marranos was an indispensa-
ble function of the inscripting and instituting of the norm subject of the
Spanish religio-political monarchical state as a “clean” and therefore rational
subject (rather than, as before, a subject seeking to be spiritually redeemed),
so it is to be with respect to the role of the Black Other in the construction
of Europeans as racially “pure,” secular subjects. In that, beginning with the
West’s expansion in the fifteenth century, it would be the Black population
group whose discursive and institutional degradation as the new ne plus
ultra marker of barely human status (whether in the terms of Man1 or of
Man2) was to be an indispensable function of the enacting of the descriptive
statements by means of which the West was to effect its epochal de-super-
naturalization of its matrix mode of being human. As redescriptions, that is,
by means of which it would open the frontier onto natural-scientific knowl-
edge, both of the physical and (after Darwin) of the biological levels of real-
ity, at the same time as these redescriptions were to lead directly to the
present “Two Cultures” divide of our contemporary order of knowledge.
So that if Darwin’s redescription of the human in now purely secular
terms, and his deconstruction of the rational/irrational master code
mapped on to a projected Chain of Being of all forms of sentient life, was to
make possible the rise and development of the biological sciences, on the
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one hand—it was, on the other, to provide the “new” ground for this “Two
Cultures” organization/order of knowledge. That is, as one whose discipli-
nary fields were to be all based on the new description of the human as a
purely biocentric being, and in whose terms not only the peoples of the
Black Diaspora, but this time the peoples of Black Africa itself (as well as
their continent, Africa), together with all the colonized dark-skinned
“natives” of the world and the darker-skinned and poorer European peoples
themselves,11 were now to find themselves/ourselves as discursively and
institutionally imprisoned as the Indians, the Negroes-as-slaves and the
Mad had been discursively and institutionally imprisoned in the terms of
the descriptive statement of the earlier form of Man1.
This principle, that of bio-evolutionary Natural Selection, was now to
function at the level of the new bourgeois social order as a de facto new
Argument-from-Design—one in which while one’s selected or dysselected
status could not be known in advance, it would come to be verified by one’s
(or one’s group’s) success or failure in life. While it was to be in the terms of
this new Argument, with its postulate of the no less extrahuman (because
bio-evolutionarily determined) ordering of our contemporary social and
economic order, that the extreme situation both of the darker-skinned
“natives” and of the Black in the West’s new conception of the human was,
as it still continues to be, both discursively and institutionally constructed.
With this construction serving as an indispensable function of the contin-
ued production and reproduction of our still hegemonic biocentric and eth-
noclass descriptive statement of the human, Man, as the first represented to
be a universally applicable “descriptive statement” of the human, because
overrepresented as being isomorphic with the being of being human itself—
and dependent, for its enactment, on a new “space of Otherness” principle
of nonhomogeneity in the reoccupied place of the earlier rational/irrational
line. This principle would be embodied in the new line that W. E. B. Dubois
was to identify as the Color Line: that is, as a line drawn between the lighter
and the darker peoples of the earth, and enforced at the level of social real-
ity by the lawlikely instituted relation of socioeconomic dominance/subor-
dination between them. With this line being as centrally a function of the
enacting of our present biocentric, descriptive statement of the human as
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 311

(in the medieval order of Latin-Christian Europe) the institutionally and dis-
cursively enforced line drawn between the categories of the clergy and the
laity had been a central function of the enacting of the then theocentric
genre or descriptive statement of the human.

PA RT I V
From the Degodding of the Descriptive Statement to its
De-biologizing, from Natural to Nature-Culture Causation:
The Sixties, the Multiple Challenges to “Man,” and the
Colonial/Native/Negro/Third-World Questions, as the Genre
or the Assuming-of-”Man”-to-Be-the-Human Issue.

What is by common consent called the human sciences have their own
drama . . . [A]ll these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direc-
tion: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing—and that he
must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that
he is different from the other “animals.” . . . This amounts to nothing more
nor less than man’s surrender. . . . Having reflected on that, I grasp my nar-
cissism with both hands and I turn my back on the degradation of those who
would make man a mere mechanism. . . . And truly what is to be done is to
set man free.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

Here the Argument returns to Margaret Boden’s point about the principal
metaphysical significance of artificial intelligence (Boden 1977), linking it to
Nicholas Humphrey’s distinction between the “objective” set of facts “out
there” and the way each organism—or (as the Argument’s extension of his
thesis puts it, each genre-of-the-human)—must lawlikely know its reality
primarily with reference to its own adaptively advantageous production/
reproduction as such a mode of being. Thus, what the range of anticolonial
movements at the level of the global (as well the multiple) social movements
internal to the United States and other First-World countries that took place
during the fifties and sixties fundamentally revealed was the gap that exists
312 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

between our present “mental construction of reality” as one projected from

the perspective (and to the adaptive advantage) of our present ethnoclass
genre of the human, Man, and its biocentric descriptive statement, and the
way our global social reality veridically is out there; that is, outside the view-
point of ethnoclass Man—of its genre of being, of truth, of freedom—as all
three are articulated in the disciplines of our present epistemological order
and its biocentric disciplinary discourses. The literary scholar Wlad Godzich
first made this point, if in somewhat different terms, when he wrote in 1986
on the great impact of the sociopolitical upheavals of the late fifties and six-
ties, particularly decolonization and liberation movements. And although
most of the new theoretical departures, he would add, were to be quickly
reterritorialized and re-coopted back into the mainstream orthodoxies of
our present disciplines, the fact is that (as noted earlier) some aspects of this
initial impact have remained (Godzich 1980).
That one of the central remaining manifestations of this impact was to
be that of feminist studies was due to a fundamental fact. This was that of
the way in which while before the sixties, the issues with which women were
concerned had been addressed only in the context of the Woman’s Question
of the Marxist paradigm (as, at that time, the only paradigm concerned with
the relation between knowledge and human emancipation), in the wake of
the sixties, women activists had ceased their earlier “echoing” of Marxist
thought and had redefined the Woman’s Question into an issue that was spe-
cific to their own concerns, rather than as merely being, as before, a subset
of what might be called the Labor Issue. Renaming themselves feminists,
they had redescribed their issue as that of gender and sexism, thereby tar-
geting the deconstruction of the social phenomenon of patriarchy as their
goal, rather than the mode-of-economic-production target of the Marxian
Labor issue. This has not been the case, however, with the issues that before
the sixties had been known as the Colonial Question, the “Native” (i.e. non-
white) and the Negro Question—all of which had been, like the Woman’s
Question, subsets of the Marxian Labor issue. This in spite of the fact that
at the empirical level, it was the multiple movements related to these ques-
tions that had most forcibly erupted in concrete political and social strug-
gles all over the globe, as well as internally in the United States.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 313

The Argument proposes, on the basis of the first part of its title, that all
of these Questions, ones that in the wake of the attaining of political inde-
pendence by the former colonies or of the ending of segregation in the
United States would come to be labeled instead as the Third-World and
“Minority” Questions, now need to be redescribed in the terms of an issue
that is specific to them—yet one that has hitherto had no name, seeing that
it cannot exist as an “object of knowledge” within the terms of our present
order of knowledge any more than, as Foucault points out, biological life
could have existed as an object of knowledge in the classical (and in my
terms, the pre-bourgeois) episteme. This issue is that of the genre of the
human, the issue whose target of abolition is the ongoing collective produc-
tion of our present ethnoclass mode of being human, Man: above all, its
overrepresentation of its well-being as that of the human species as a whole,
rather than as it is veridically: that of the Western and westernized (or con-
versely) global middle classes.
The paradox with which we are confronted here is the following: that in
the wake of the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance, as carried out in
large part by the lay humanists of the Renaissance on the basis of their reval-
orized redescription of the human as the rational, political subject, Man—
on the basis, as Jacob Pandian points out, of their parallel invention of Man’s
Human Others—Western intellectuals were to gradually emancipate knowl-
edge of the physical cosmos from having to be known in the adaptive, order-
maintaining terms in which it had hitherto been known by means of the rise
and development of the physical sciences. This meant that increasingly, and
for all human groups, the physical cosmos could no longer come to be validly
used for such projections. Instead, the West’s new master code of
rational/irrational nature was now to be mapped onto a projected Chain of
Being of organic forms of life, organized about a line drawn between, on the
one hand, divinely created-to-be-rational humans, and on the other, no less
divinely created-to-be-irrational animals; that is, on what was still adaptively
known through the classical discipline of “natural history” as a still super-
naturally determined and created “objective set of facts.” This “space of
Otherness” line of nonhomogeneity had then functioned to validate the
socio-ontological line now drawn between rational, political Man (Prospero,
314 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

the settler of European descent) and its irrational Human Others (the cate-
gories of Caliban [i.e., the subordinated Indians and the enslaved Negroes]),
in exactly the same way as, before Copernicus, the “space of Otherness” pro-
jection of a nonhomogeneity of substance between the perfection of the
celestial realm and the degradation of the terrestrial had reciprocally bol-
stered and validated the Spirit/Flesh code as enacted in the ontological
value difference between clergy and laity within the terms of Judeo-
Christianity’s matrix formulation of a “general order of existence.” In the
same way, therefore, as in the order of knowledge of pre-Newtonian Europe,
all knowledge of the astronomy of the universe had had, however technically
sophisticated and whatever its predictive power, to remain couched in
ethno-astronomical terms, so all pre-Darwinian knowledge of organic life
had had to be conceptualized in the terms of a (so to speak) proto- or ethno-
biology.
The biological sciences were therefore to come into existence only in the
wake of the second act of redescription effected during the nineteenth cen-
tury by Liberal humanist intellectuals—as a redescription by means of
which the still hybridly religio-secular political subject conception of the
human, Man (as embodied in Prospero) was redefined as optimally eco-
nomic Man, at the same time as this Man was redefined by Darwin as a
purely biological being whose origin, like that of all other species, was sited
in Evolution, with the human therefore existing in a line of pure continuity
with all other organic forms of life. A mutation had thereby occurred, in that
Darwin, by means of his deconstruction of the Chain of Being that had been
earlier mapped onto the rational human/irrational animals line, had begun
the emancipation of the human knowledge of the purely biological level of
reality from having to be known in genre-specific adaptive terms, thereby
giving rise to the biological sciences and to its contemporary, dazzling tri-
umphs—as, for example, the cracking of the DNA code, the Human Genome
Project, together with the utopian cum dystopian promises and possibilities
of biotechnology.
It can be seen in hindsight that the “space of Otherness” which had been
projected both upon the heavens as well as upon organic life, had been a
central function of the Godelier-type mechanisms by means of which, as
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 315

humans, we keep our own authorship and agency opaque to ourselves, in

that the respective codes that had been mapped upon them (i.e., that of
Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh, then that of rational nature [redeemed from
irrationality] and irrational nature [enslaved to irrationality]) had both
played a central analogical status-ordering and thereby system-maintaining
role for their respective social systems: firstly, that of Latin-Christian Europe,
followed by that of the monarchical (whether absolute or constitutionally
limited) order of the landed-gentry West. Analogical in the sense that it was
their “space of Otherness” projection that had induced the subjects of both
of these orders to both know and experience their societies’ respective role
allocation, social hierarchies, divisions of labor, and ratio-proportional dis-
tribution of their goods and their bads as being supernaturally preor-
dained—as, in their respective ethno-knowledges, both the projected
difference of ontological substance between heaven and earth (Spirit/Flesh)
in the first case, and in the second, that between rational humans and irra-
tional animals, had been divinely created to be. With the status-ordering
principles generated from their respective codes—one based on ostensibly
differential degrees of enslavement to sin/redemption from sin, the other on
ostensibly differential degrees of rational nature/enslavement to irrational
nature—thereby inducing the subjects of these orders to experience their
own placement in the structuring hierarchies of the order as having been
extrahumanly (in these two cases supernaturally) designed and/or deter-
mined, rather than as veridically or systemically produced by our collective
human agency.
The Argument proposes that the new master code of the bourgeoisie
and of its ethnoclass conception of the human—that is, the code of selected
by Evolution/dysselected by Evolution—was now to be mapped and
anchored on the only available “objective set of facts” that remained. This
was the set of environmentally, climatically determined phenotypical dif-
ferences between human hereditary variations as these had developed in
the wake of the human diaspora both across and out of the continent of
Africa; that is, as a set of (so to speak) totemic differences, which were now
harnessed to the task of projecting the Color Line drawn institutionally and
discursively between whites/nonwhites—and at its most extreme between
316 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

the Caucasoid physiognomy (as symbolic life, the name of what is good, the
idea that some humans can be selected by Evolution) and the Negroid phys-
iognomy (as symbolic death, the “name of what is evil,” the idea that some
humans can be dysselected by Evolution)—as the new extrahuman line, or
projection of genetic nonhomogeneity that would now be made to function,
analogically, as the status-ordering principle based upon ostensibly differ-
ential degrees of evolutionary selectedness/eugenicity and/or dysselected-
ness/dysgenicity. Differential degrees, as between the classes (middle and
lower and, by extrapolation, between capital and labor) as well as between
men and women, and between the heterosexual and homosexual erotic
preference—and, even more centrally, as between Breadwinner ( job-
holding middle and working classes) and the jobless and criminalized Poor,
with this rearticulated at the global level as between Sartre’s “Men” and
Natives (see his guide-quote), before the end of politico-military colonial-
ism, then postcolonially as between the “developed” First World, on the one
hand, and the “underdeveloped” Third and Fourth Worlds on the other. The
Color Line was now projected as the new “space of Otherness” principle of
nonhomogeneity, made to reoccupy the earlier places of the motion-filled
heavens/non-moving Earth, rational humans/irrational animal lines, and
to recode in new terms their ostensible extrahumanly determined differ-
ences of ontological substance. While, if the earlier two had been indispen-
sable to the production and reproduction of their respective genres of being
human, of their descriptive statements (i.e., as Christian and as Man1), and
of the overall order in whose field of interrelationships, social hierarchies,
system of role allocations, and divisions of labors each such genre of the
human could alone realize itself—and with each such descriptive state-
ment therefore being rigorously conserved by the “learning system” and
order of knowledge as articulated in the institutional structure of each
order—this was to be no less the case with respect to the projected “space
of Otherness” of the Color Line. With respect, that is, to its indispensability
to the production and reproduction of our present genre of the human
Man2, together with the overall global/national bourgeois order of things
and its specific mode of economic production, alone able to provide the
material conditions of existence for the production and reproduction of the
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 317

ethnoclass or Western-bourgeois answer that we now give to the question

of the who and what we are.
It is in this context that the Negro, the Native, the Colonial Questions,
and postcolonially the “Underdeveloped” or Third/Fourth-Worlds Question
can be clearly seen to be the issue, not of our present mode of economic pro-
duction, but rather of the ongoing production and reproduction of this
answer—that is, our present biocentric ethnoclass genre of the human, of
which our present techno-industrial, capitalist mode of production is an
indispensable and irreplaceable, but only a proximate function. With this
genre of the human being one in the terms of whose dually biogenetic and
economic notions of freedom both the peoples of African hereditary descent
and the peoples who comprise the damned archipelagoes of the Poor, the
jobless the homeless, the “underdeveloped” must lawlikely be sacrificed as a
function of our continuing to project our collective authorship of our con-
temporary order onto the imagined agency of Evolution and Natural
Selection and, by extrapolation, onto the “Invisible Hand” of the “Free
Market” (both being cultural and class-specific constructs).
The challenge to be confronted at this conjuncture is this: While from
the Renaissance onwards, Western intellectuals have, by means of the devel-
opment of the natural sciences, enabled us to obtain nonadaptive knowl-
edge of our nonhuman levels of reality, we have hitherto had no such parallel
knowledge with respect to ourselves and the nature-culture laws that gov-
ern our modes of being, of behaving, of mind, or of minding. The buck for
such knowledge (one able to open up a new frontier of nonadaptive human
self-cognition, and therefore the possibility of our nonheteronomously and
now consciously ordered/motivated behaviors, beyond the ethnoclass limits
of our contemporary ones) stops with us. While the prescriptive guidelines
of how we are to set about this challenge lie in the paradox of the new
Darwinian descriptive statement of the human: Man in its second, purely
secular, biocentric, and overrepresented modality of being human. What
then had been the contradiction at the heart of the Darwinian Revolution,
at the core of its paradigm of Evolution that was to give rise to, on the one
hand, the continuing dazzling successes of the biological sciences and, on
the other, not only to the obsessive ethno-biological beliefs in the genetic
318 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

inferiority of nonwhite natives, in the barely evolved near-primate status of

black-skinned peoples (as matrix beliefs that would logically make possible
the “life unworthy of life” extermination credo of the Nazis), but also at the
same time to C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” division of knowledge? That is, to
the natural-scientific disciplines on the one hand, and to the rigorous yet
adaptive, and therefore ethno-disciplines of the humanities and social sci-
ences on the other?
Although Foucault, in his analysis of the processes by means of which
the classical episteme was replaced by our own, had proposed that these
epistemes be seen as being discontinuous with each other, what he oversaw
was that such a discontinuity, like the earlier discontinuity that had been
effected by the classical episteme itself, was taking place in the terms of a
continuous cultural field, one instituted by the matrix Judeo-Christian for-
mulation of a general order of existence. That, therefore, these shifts in epis-
temes were not only shifts with respect to each episteme’s specific order of
knowledge/truth, but were also shifts in what can now be identified as the
“politics of being”; that is, as a politics that is everywhere fought over what
is to be the descriptive statement, the governing sociogenic principle, insti-
tuting of each genre of the human. With the result that as Christian becomes
Man1 (as political subject), then as Man1 becomes Man2 (as a bio-economic
subject), from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, each of these new
descriptive statements will nevertheless remain inscribed within the frame-
work of a specific secularizing reformulation of that matrix Judeo-Christian
Grand Narrative. With this coming to mean that, in both cases, their epis-
temes will be, like their respective genres of being human, both discontinu-
ous and continuous.
This was the fact that Jacob Pandian brought to our attention when he
noted that the Untrue Christian Self as the Other to the True Christian Self
of the Judeo-Christian conception was to be re-inscripted, from the six-
teenth century onwards, as the new Untrue Human Others to the “true”
human that is Man, in its two forms. Firstly as subrational Indian, Negro
Others to Man1, then, secondly, as native and nigger Others to Man2. It is
with this proposal that he also provides the answer to the why of the imper-
ative signifying role that will continue to be placed by the secular West upon
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 319

what seems to its subjects, from the perspective of their somatic norm, to be
the alien features of the Negroid physiognomy. The answer also as to the why
the negative connotations that will continue to be placed on it should, while
now effected in purely biologized terms, still carry over, if in new post-six-
ties terms, the “undeserving” “name of what is evil” ordering principle that
still reenacts the matrix stigma that had been placed by medieval
Christianity on the Negroid physiognomy (Gans 1999). With the conse-
quence that because now made to embody and actualize the example of the
human, not now as fallen to the status of the ape, but rather as barely evolved
from it (and, as such, an undeserving race because dysselected-by-Evolution
within the logic of the Darwinian paradigm), it was now not only the peo-
ples of the Black ex-slave Diaspora, but all the peoples of Black Africa who
would be also compelled to confront the inescapable fact (one attested to by
the infamous 41-bullet shooting death of Amadou Diallo) that, as put suc-
cinctly by Frantz Fanon, “wherever he[/she] goes in the world, the Negro
remains a Negro” (Fanon 1967)—and, as such, made to reoccupy the signi-
fying place of medieval/Latin-Christian Europe’s fallen, degraded, and
thereby nonmoving Earth.
The Argument here redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a “pol-
itics of being”: that is, one waged over what is to be the descriptive state-
ment of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death
each human order organizes itself. It then proposes that it was precisely
because of the above political dynamic—which underpinned the Darwinian
Revolution, making it possible—that it was also compelled to function as a
half-scientific, half-mythic theory of origins, at least as it had to do with the
human. Since it was to be in the context of the political struggle for hege-
mony that was being waged by a then increasingly wealthy but non-landed
bourgeoisie against the established ruling elite of the landed gentry elite that
Darwin would be impelled to put forward a new theory with respect to the
origin of all species, including the human species (one able to move outside
the terms of the “Argument from Divine Design”), that had functioned to
legitimate both the ruling status of the landed gentry and the order of knowl-
edge of the classical episteme, and that had provided the mode of adaptive
truth-for indispensable to the legitimation of the ruling gentry’s hegemony.
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It was in order to deconstruct the “Argument from Divine Design” that

Darwin was to put forward his brilliantly innovative new paradigm that
would lead to the rise and development of the biological sciences, at the
same time as it would also elaborate a new origin narrative in place of
Genesis (Isaacs 1983).
Blumenberg reveals the central role that will be played in this reformu-
lation by the clergyman-economist Thomas Malthus (Blumenberg 1983).
This is the new form of the “absence of order” that Malthus will elaborate in
his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. For Malthus, it is the
“autonomous lawfulness of population growth,” projected as a “universal law
of life,” which predetermines a new modality of the “absence of order”: this
time, the ostensibly fundamental contradiction posed by the fact that men’s
increase in numbers is a geometric progression, whereas the increase in the
quantity of food can only be an arithmetical progression. With the result
that given the widening gap between the two progressions, the law of self-
regulation that follows logically calls for the state’s noninterference with the
ostensibly extrahuman regulatory effect of the supposed “law of nature”—a
law that also calls for the category of the Poor to be left by themselves,
unaided by any measures taken by the state, in order that its members can
be weeded out by the “iron laws” of nature. What Malthus puts in place,
therefore, is the second transumed reformulation of the matrix Judeo-
Christian formulation. Enslavement here is no longer to Original Sin, or to
one’s irrational nature—with, in the case of the latter, the threat or “signifi-
cant ill” of the political state falling into the chaos and nonpredictability of
a state-of-nature. Rather, enslavement is now to the threat of Malthusian
overpopulation, to its concomitant “ill” of Natural Scarcity whose imperative
“plan of salvation” would now be postulated in economic terms as that of
keeping this at bay—of material, in the place of the matrix spiritual,
Redemption.
The above reformulations were all part of the then intellectuals’ struggle
to redescribe both the human, and its human activity, outside the terms of
the description of the human on whose basis the owners of landed wealth
had based their hegemony. What is usually overlooked, however, is that their
redescription will be one that carried in its turn a new descriptive statement
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 321

able to legitimate the rise to hegemony of the non-landed, capital-owning

bourgeoisie as the new ruling elite. While it will be in the lineaments of the
new criteria defining of Man2, in the terms of this new descriptive statement,
that the lineaments of its negative Human Others are also already outlined.
Seeing that if at one level Man2 is now defined as a jobholding Breadwinner,
and even more optimally, as a successful “masterer of Natural Scarcity”
(Investor, or capital accumulator), what might be called the archipelago of
its modes of Human Otherness can no longer be defined in the terms of the
interned Mad, the interned “Indian,” the enslaved “Negro” in which it had
been earlier defined. Instead, the new descriptive statement of the human
will call for its archipelago of Human Otherness to be peopled by a new cat-
egory, one now comprised of the jobless, the homeless, the Poor, the sys-
temically made jobless and criminalized—of the “underdeveloped”—all as
the category of the economically damnés (Fanon 1963), rather than, as
before, of the politically condemned. With the result that if inside Europe, it
will be the Poor who will be made to reoccupy the earlier proscribed interned
places of the Leper and the Mad, in the Euro-Americas, it is the freed Negro,
together with the Indians interned in reservations, or as peons on hacien-
das, who will now be interned in the new institution of Poverty/Joblessness.
That is, in an institution now made to actualize the idea of the human
overcome by Natural Scarcity, and therefore in the process of being swept
away by Malthus’s “iron laws of nature,” because unable, as the regular job-
holding Breadwinners and Investors are so clearly able to do, to master the
“ill” of this scarcity. This at the same time, as Fanon shows in The Wretched
of the Earth, as the “native” rural agro-proletariat interned in colonial insti-
tutions would be made to actualize the category most totally condemned to
poverty and joblessness, ostensibly because of the represented bio-evolu-
tionarily determined incapacity of its members to do otherwise. Since, like
the medieval Leper, whose proscribed role had called for him/her to actual-
ize the realization of the effects of mankind’s enslavement to Original Sin, so
this new archipelago of Otherness will be made to signify the realization of
the new reformulation’s posited “absence of order,” or postulate of “signifi-
cant ill,” defined now in economic terms. And “curable,” therefore, only in
economic terms.
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What can be seen as at work here is the positive aspect of the political
project that, however nonconsciously so, drove Darwin’s intellectual enter-
prise. In that it is going to be in the wider context of the intellectual revolu-
tion of Liberal or economic (rather than civic) political humanism that is
being brought in from the end of the eighteenth century onwards by the
intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, together with their redefinition of Man1 in
the purely secular and now biocentric terms of Man2 that these new sciences
are going to be made possible. Since the new genre of being human, in its
now purely degodded conception, is one that no longer needs to know the
world of organic life in the ostensibly supernaturally ordered, adaptive truth-
for terms in which it had to be known by the subject-bearers of Man1—as it
had been known, therefore, in the terms of Foucault’s classical episteme,
with these terms serving to validate the hegemony of the owners of landed
rather than of moveable wealth, or capital. Yet it is also in the terms of this
specific political project that the fundamental paradox of the Darwinian
Revolution emerges, one that links the imperatively secured bottom role of
the Black Diaspora peoples—as well as the systemic expendability of the
global Poor, of the jobless, the homeless, the underdeveloped—to the issue
raised earlier with respect to the imperative “Two Culture” organization of
our present order of knowledge.
To sum up: it is in this context that a new principle of nonhomogeneity,
that of Dubois’s Color Line in its white/nonwhite, Men/Natives form (i.e., as
drawn between the lighter and the darker races), will now be discursively
and institutionally deployed as a “space of Otherness” on which to project an
imagined and extrahumanly (because ostensibly bio-evolutionarily) deter-
mined nonhomogeneity of genetic substance between the category of those
selected-by-Evolution and the category of those dysselected-by-Evolution.
The Color (cum Colonial) Line would, therefore, be made to reoccupy the
places earlier occupied by the Heaven/Earth, supralunar/sublunar, and by
the rational humans/irrational animals premises of nonhomogeneity in
order to enable the selected/dysselected, and thus deserving/undeserving
status organizing principle that it encoded to function for the nation-state
as well as the imperial orders of the Western bourgeoisie, in the same way as
Jacques Le Goff documents the enslaved to the flesh/Redeemed-in-the-
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 323

Spirit, deserving/undeserving status-organizing principle had functioned

for the ecclesiastical-cum-medieval aristocratic order of Latin-Christian
Europe (Le Goff 1988). So that where the ranking rule of superiority/inferi-
ority accepted and internalized by all the subjects of the medieval order of
Europe had been that of differential degrees of redemption from enslave-
ment to the Fallen Flesh, degrees therefore of religious merit (with the
“learned” scholars of the order, as Le Goff points out, obsessively priding
themselves on their ability to keep themselves chaste and sexually continent
on feast days, at the same time as they stigmatized the peasants as people
who, unlike them, gave in to their lustful and carnal desires, thereby falling
to the level of beasts [Le Goff 1988]), in the case of the bourgeoisie, the rank-
ing rule would be a transumed form of the first. As such, therefore, it would
come to be based on degrees of selected genetic merit (or eugenics) versus
differential degrees of the dysselected lack of this merit: differential degrees
of, to use the term made famous by The Bell Curve, “dysgenicity.”
It is this new master code, one that would now come to function at all
levels of the social order—including that of class, gender, sexual orientation,
superior/inferior ethnicities, and that of the Investor/Breadwinners versus
the criminalized jobless Poor (Nas’s “black and latino faces”) and Welfare
Moms antithesis, and most totally between the represented-to-be superior
and inferior races and cultures—that would come to function as the dually
status-organizing and integrating principle of U.S. society. So that if, before
the sixties, the enforced segregation of the Black population in the South as
the liminally deviant category of Otherness through whose systemic nega-
tion the former Civil War enemies of North and South, together with the vast
wave of incoming immigrants from Europe, would be enabled to experience
themselves as a We (that is, by means of the shared similarity of their now-
canonized “whiteness”), in addition, their segregated status had served
another central function. This had been that of enabling a U.S. bourgeoisie,
rapidly growing more affluent, to dampen class conflict by inducing their
own working class to see themselves, even where not selected by Evolution
in class terms, as being compensatorily, altruistically bonded with their
dominant middle classes by the fact of their having all been selected by
Evolution in terms of race.
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For this vicarious compensation had been (and still is) urgently neces-
sary, given the degree of psychic devastation wrought on the non-middle-
class groups by the terms of the new degodded redescription of the human
in the context of the Darwinian/Malthusian reformulation of the original
Judeo-Christian formulation. This was so in that in the terms of their new
behavior programming schema, in whose “dysselected by Evolution until
proven otherwise” criterion (i.e., guilty until proven innocent) the individual
could not know if s/he had indeed been so selected except by attaining to
the optimal status of being a middle class Breadwinner and/or successful
Entrepreneur/Investor, to not be middle class was/is to have to accept one’s
ostensible dysselection. This premise had induced in the white, blue-collar
(non-middle) working classes’ status a deeply destructive form of self-
hatred, whose corrosive force could only be assuaged by institutionalized
mechanisms, whether those of the school curricula as noted by Carter G.
Woodson in 1933, or that of outright segregation of (as well as of multiple
other forms of discrimination against) the Black U. S. population group.
Seeing that it was and is only such mechanisms that can enable the white,
blue-collar working classes, as well as the white poor, to experience them-
selves as having been selected, although not in class terms, at least as mem-
bers, together with their bourgeoisie, of the highly selected and thus highly
“deserving” white race. With this being so proved, ostensibly, by the fact of
the empirical dominance and supremacy of whites as a group over all other
nonwhite races and, most totally, over their “racial” anti-type Other, the
Black American—as the group whose Negroid physiognomy and origin con-
tinent/Africa prove them, within the terms of the Darwinian Imaginary, to
belong to the category of humans most totally of all peoples dysselected-by-
Evolution. The bottommost role of Black Americans in the United States is
systemically produced, since it is the ostensible proof of their alleged dysse-
lected “undeservingness” that then functions as the central psychic com-
pensatory mechanism for the white working class, at the same time as this
mechanism induces them to continue to see/experience themselves as also
being, in terms of class, “dysselected by Evolution”—a perception that
induces them to accept their own class-subordinated status, as well as the
hegemony of their middle classes.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 325

The Negroid physiognomy and its continent of origin, Black Africa,

together with the dark-skinned poorer peoples assimilated to its category
have been made to function within the terms of our present biocentric con-
ception of the human, as well as of its related “formulation of a general order
of existence” (whose postulate of “significant ill” is that of a dual mode of
Natural Scarcity—that is, a scarcity of fully genetically selected human
beings, on the one hand, and of material resources on the other), as the actu-
alized embodiment, no longer of the human made degenerate by sin and
therefore fallen to the status of the apes, but of the human totally dysse-
lected, barely evolved, and as such intermediate between “true” humans and
the primates. As such, the marker of that most totally dysselected-by-
Evolution mode of non-being that each individual and group must strive to
avoid, struggle to prove that they themselves are not, if they are to be.
A parallel and interlinked role is also played by the category of the Poor,
the jobless, the homeless, the “underdeveloped,” all of whom, interned in
their systemically produced poverty and expendability, are now made to
function in the reoccupied place of the Leper of the medieval order and of
the Mad of the monarchical, so as to actualize at the economic level the
same dysgenic or dysselected-by-Evolution conception. With the post-
Sixties’ reordering of society, “Negroid” physiognomy and skin color will be
made to coalesce with the inner city status of poverty and joblessness, crime,
and drugs. They will do so together with those brown Latino faces assimi-
lated to its status as this status, a new Liminal category, enables the incor-
poration of the socially mobile Black middle class into the normative order
of things, if still at a secondary level. The metaphysical dread of this
“Negroid” presence by the “normal” subjects of the order will lead logically
to Nas Escobar’s “taxpayers” being eager to pay for more jails for Black and
Latin faces; eager to see poor women taken off welfare and kept “out of plain
sight.” Since here, again, it is not as men, women, and children that they are
being condemned. It is as “the name of what is evil.”
Here, the dimensions of the fundamental paradox that lies at the core of
the Darwinian answer to the question of who we are (when seen from the
perspective of the goal of unsettling our present coloniality of power, of
being) emerges. The paradox is this: that for the “descriptive statement” that
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defines the human as purely biological being on the model of a natural

organism (thereby projecting it as preexisting the narratively inscribed
“descriptive statement” in whose terms it inscripts itself and is reciprocally
inscripted, as if it were a purely biological being, ontogeny that preexists cul-
ture, sociogeny), it must ensure the functioning of strategic mechanisms
that can repress all knowledge of the fact that its biocentric descriptive
statement is a descriptive statement. Yet that such strategic, Godelier-type
mechanisms of occultation, repressing recognition that our present descrip-
tive statement of the human is a descriptive statement, are able to function
at all (if outside our conscious awareness) is itself directly due to the fact
that, as Terrence W. Deacon points out in his 1997 book The Symbolic Species:
The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, humans have been pre-adapted,
primarily through the co-evolution of language and the brain, to be a sym-
bolic and, therefore, a self-representing species.
In consequence, if it was the functioning of these symbolic, representa-
tional, behavior-motivating/demotivating processes as it has to do with the
stigmatizing portrayal of women as intellectually inferior, made by “angry
male professors,” that Virginia Woolf had brilliantly zeroed in on (in her
essay A Room of One’s Own), it was also this same “representational process,”
as expressed in the curriculum and order of knowledge of the United States,
that the Black American educator Carter G. Woodson was to identify in his
1933 Miseducation of the Negro as functioning in a parallel manner as a
behavior-motivating/demotivating mechanism. This, seeing that, as he
pointed out, the curriculum’s systemic canonization/positive marking of all
things European and Euro-American, and no less systemic stigmatization/
negative marking of all things African/Afro-American clearly had an
extracognitive function. This function was one that, by motivating whites
(by representing their ancestors as having done everything worthwhile
doing), and as lawlikely demotivating Blacks (by representing theirs as hav-
ing done nothing), ensured the stable reproduction of the U.S. order that
called for the white population group as a whole to be at the apex of the
social order, and for the Black population group to be at the bottom
(Woodson 1933). With this thereby “verifying,” by its systemic production of
the constant of the 15 percent school achievement gap between white and
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 327

Black students, the selected-by-Evolution status of the one, the dysselected-

by-Evolution nature of the other, and thereby the principle of nonhomo-
geneity that is mapped upon the “space of Otherness” of the Color Line in its
most total white/Black forms. As the line from which the status-ordering
principle, based upon differential degrees of selectedness/dysselectedness
and functioning at all levels of the order, is transformatively generated,
thereby enabling the subjects of our orders to continue to experience it as
the realization of a true, because ostensibly extrahumanly determined, order.
If we see both Woolf ’s and Woodson’s insights as insights into the work-
ings of the symbolic representation processes instituting of our present
genre of the human, Man, and therefore as insights into the necessarily
adaptive truth-for nature of the overall system of knowledge that is enacting
of these processes, then the following linkages can be made. Linkages not
only to Aimé Césaire’s recognition of the same “demotivating” processes at
work in ensuring the subordination of the decolonized in his Discourse on
Colonialism (1960), but also to the multiple challenges mounted during the
sixties—both at the global level by anticolonial activists and by activists in
Europe, and then in the United States by Blacks and a range of other non-
white groups, together with feminists and Gay Liberationists—with all call-
ing in question the systemic nature of their negative markings as nongeneric
or abnormal Others to a series of positively marked generic norms. If this
same overall representation process was to be followed up post-sixties by
Edward Said’s more in-depth elaboration of Césaire’s thesis with respect to
Orientalism, the same linkage can also be made several centuries backward
to Las Casas’s profound challenges to what he called the “slandering” of the
indigenous peoples as a function of the legitimating not only of the expro-
priation of their lands, but also of their expulsion, as “such a large part of
God’s creation,” from human status. Since what joins all of these challenges,
from that of Las Casas to all those of our contemporary order, is, the
Argument proposes, their profound challenge to the overrepresentation of
Man, in both of its variants: to, thereby, the coloniality of being, power, truth,
freedom to which such an overrepresentation leads.
If Fanon, from the standpoint of a “native colonized” and Black Human
Other (i.e., as the standpoint of groups, prohibited—most totally so the lat-
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ter—from realizing themselves as fully human within the terms of our pres-
ent ethnoclass genre of the human), was to put forward the conception of
modes of sociogeny (of each genre-specific governing sociogenic principle,
descriptive statement, or code of symbolic life/death) as a new object of
knowledge, which itself functions in a “space of transculture,” as a space
from which to define the human outside the terms of any one member of the
class of such principles, statements and codes, he had thereby laid the basis
for a fundamental recognition on our part. A recognition in which we can
come to see ourselves as a contemporary, increasingly westernized (in the
terms of Man) population, who, as in the case of all other genre-specific
human populations, inscript and auto-institute ourselves as human through
symbolic, representational processes that have, hitherto, included those
mechanisms of occultation by means of which we have been able to make
opaque to ourselves the fact that we so do. While it was a parallel recogni-
tion that some half a century ago led Aimé Césaire (because coming from
the same standpoint of liminal deviance to our present ethnoclass norm of
being human as did Fanon) to put forward his cognitively emancipatory pro-
posal for a new science able to complete the natural sciences.
The natural sciences (Césaire had argued in a talk given in Haiti, entitled
“Poetry and Knowledge”) are, in spite of all their dazzling triumphs with
respect to knowledge of the natural world, half-starved. They are half-
starved because they remain incapable of giving us any knowledge of our
uniquely human domain, and have had nothing to say to the urgent prob-
lems that beleaguer humankind. Only the elaboration of a new science,
beyond the limits of the natural sciences (he had then proposed), will offer
us our last chance to avoid the large-scale dilemmas that we must now con-
front as a species. This would be a science in which the “study of the Word”—
of our narratively inscribed, governing sociogenic principles, descriptive
statement, or code of symbolic life/death, together with the overall symbolic,
representational processes to which they give rise—will condition the “study
of nature” (Césaire 1946, 1990). The latter as study, therefore (the Argument
proposes), of the neurophysiological circuits/mechanisms of the brain that,
when activated by the semantic system of each such principle/statement,
lead to the specific orders of consciousness or modes of mind in whose
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 329

terms we then come to experience ourselves as this or that genre/mode of

being human. Yet, with this process taking place hitherto outside our con-
scious awareness, and thereby leading us to be governed by the “imagined
ends” or postulates of being, truth, freedom that we lawlikely put and keep
in place, without realizing that it is we ourselves, and not extrahuman enti-
ties, who prescribe them.
In his introduction to Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of
the Earth), J. P. Sartre zeroed in on the parallel dilemma of “colonized” native
intellectuals who find themselves/ourselves in a situation in which the
Man/Native dichotomy can be seen as an exact parallel of the clergy/laity
dichotomy as it existed towards the end of the Middle Ages. Like the clergy
intellectuals then, now it is the intellectuals of Man who “own the Word,”
while, like the pre-Renaissance lay intellectuals, it is the “native” intellectu-
als (and postcolonially speaking, the intellectuals of the subordinated and
economically impoverished world) who now have only the use of Man’s
Word, who therefore can only “echo.” That is, who must think, write, and pre-
scribe policies, however oppositionally so, in the terms of the very biocen-
tric paradigms that prescribe the subordination and impoverishment of the
vast majority of the worlds to which they/we belong; since paradigms elab-
orated in the very terms of the descriptive statement of the human, in whose
logic the non-Western, nonwhite peoples can only, at best, be assimilated as
honorary humans (as in the case of the “developed” Japanese and other
lighter-skinned Asians) and, at the worst, must (as in the case of Nas’s “black
and 1atino faces”) forcibly be proscribed from human status by means of the
rapidly expanding U.S. prison-industrial system; as itself, a central mecha-
nism of the overall archipelagoes of the poverty-producing institutions of
the Third and Fourth Worlds, archipelagoes that are the major costs paid for
the ongoing production, realization, and reproduction of our present ethn-
oclass genre of the human, of its overrepresentation as if it were isomorphic
with the human, its well being, and notion of freedom, with those that would
have to be brought into existence, were the well-being of the human to be
made into the referent imperative.
If, as Sartre saw so clearly in the case of Fanon, “native” intellectuals had
ceased echoing and had begun opening their mouths for themselves in
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response to a parallel “phase of objectification,” a hardening insulation from

what is human that is increasingly made evident by the ossification of our
present order of knowledge and its biocentric paradigms, so Fanon’s “self-
assertion,” his concentration on finding the lost motives, related no longer
to Man’s but to our human self-interest, was to be effected by means of a
redescription parallel to that by means of which the lay humanists had
invented Man and its Human Others in the reoccupied place of the Christian
genre of the human and its pagan/idolator/Enemies-of-Christ/Christ-
killer/infidel Others. Nevertheless, while these lay humanist intellectuals
had indeed effected a redescriptive statement by means of which they secu-
larized human existence, detaching it from the supernatural agency of the
divine realm, they had done so only by opening the pathway that would
eventually lead, with Darwin, to a new descriptive statement, itself re-
anchored in the no less extrahuman agency of Evolution, thereby reducing
the human within the terms of a biocentric “human sciences” paradigm to
being a “mere mechanism” driven in its behavior by its genetic programs—
and, as such, subject to the processes of natural causation, rather than to the
ontogeny/sociogeny or nature-culture modality of causation, which alone
could enable (as Fanon brilliantly glimpsed) the reflexively self-aversive
behavior of many westernized Black peoples, made into the Other to our
present ethnoclass norm of being human, to repress the genetic instinctual
narcissism defining of all modes of purely organic life. And what Fanon’s new
answer to the question of who/what we are (its revalorizing “descriptive
statement” detached now from any form of extrahuman agency or author-
ship, theocentric or biocentric) enables us to come to grips with is precisely
such a new mode of causation, thereby, with the still-to-be-explained puzzle
of (human) consciousness(es), doing so outside the terms of our present
“Two Culture” order of knowledge and its adaptive “regime of truth” based
on the biocentric disciplinary paradigms in whose terms we at present know
our social reality; this, as the indispensable condition of our continuing to
assume that the mode of being in which we now are (have socialized/
inscripted ourselves to be) is isomorphic with the being of being human
itself, in its multiple self-inscripting, auto-instituting modalities.
 Sy lv i a Wy n t e r ● 331

If Césaire called in 1946 for a new science of the Word, a science there-
fore of our dual descriptive statements and thereby of our modes/genres of
being human, doing so from the perspective of a poet—in 1988, the physicist
Hans Pagel would make a parallel call in his 1988 book The Dream of Reason:
The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity. His call, too, was
for a new frontier to be opened onto a nonadaptive mode of human self-cog-
nition: onto the possibility, therefore, of our fully realized autonomy of feel-
ings, thoughts, behaviors.
The true leap, Fanon wrote at the end of his Black Skins, White Masks,
consists in introducing invention into existence. The buck stops with us.

NOTES

1. The epigraphs placed at the beginning of select sections are intended to serve as guide-
quotes, or as Heideggerian guideposts (Heidegger 1998), to orient the reader as the
Argument struggles to think/articulate itself outside the terms of the disciplinary dis-
courses of our present epistemological order; seeing that it is these discourses, this
order, that are necessarily—as the condition of our being in the genre/mode of being
human that we now hegemonically are—instituting/inscripting both of the Man of the
Argument’s title, and of its overrepresentation as if it were the human.
2. The series of papers presented/made available by Aníbal Quijano at the 1999 and 2000
conferences held by the Coloniality Working Group at SUNY-Binghamton are central to
the formulations of this Argument (see References).
3. The same holds for the two papers presented by Walter Mignolo at both of these con-
ferences (see References), as well as for his book Local Histories/Global Designs:
Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000).
4. The divide is not only economic, but also behavioral. Where the subjects of the techno-
industrial North are hegemonically oriented in their behaviors by the contemporary
secular metaphysics of productivity and profitability, the subjects of the South, while
drawn into the margins as satellite spheres of the techno-industrial North, are still
partly oriented in their behaviors by the largely religious, traditional metaphysics of
reproductivity/fertility that had been instituting of the agrarian revolution. The prob-
lem of the environment, of global warming, etc., is directly due to the convergence of
these two metaphysics and the way in which both continue to impel our collective
behaviors outside of our conscious awareness.
332 ● Un s e t t l i n g t h e C o l o n i a l i t y o f B e i n g / Po w e r / Tr u t h / Fre e d o m

5. Cited by Frantz Fanon as epigraph to his Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skins,
White Masks) 1967.
6. Las Casas’s reply to Ginés de Sepúlveda on the occasion of the 1660–61 debate at
Valladolid, Spain, as to whether or not the New World Indians were equally “men” (Las
Casas) or “slaves-by-nature” (Sepúlveda).
7. The Cenú Indians’ reply to the Spaniards’ “local culture” conception of the legitimacy
of the Papal Bull of 1492 as one that “gave” the New World to Spain, as cited by
Greenblatt (1974).
8. In his presentation to the 2000 Conference of the Coloniality Working Group, now
included in this volume, Kelvin Santiago-Valles documented these socio-existential,
political, and commercial-economic processes, even where he represents the latter as
the determinant forces driving the transformation (see References), as distinct from
Kurt Hubner’s concept of an interacting overall system-ensemble transformation
(Hubner 1983), the key to which, the Argument proposes, is the redescription of the
descriptive statement of the public operational identity of Christian as that of Man
overrepresented as the generic human; the redescription also, therefore, of the
Christian Others—i.e., pagan-idolators, infidels, Enemies-of-Christ, as Human Others
(i.e., Indians, Negroes).
9. As Quijano perceptively sees, the contemporary focus on Orientalism that deals with
the stigmatization of Islam, as an alternative imperial monotheistic order to that of the
West, has completely and strategically displaced the far more totally exclusionary sys-
tem of stigmatization placed upon Indians and Negroes (see his Qué tal Raza!).
10. Peter Carlo raises this issue—that of the role of discursive formations in the ongoing
processes of accumulation by which the “proletariats” are produced as rightless and
landless—in his presentation at the 1999 Conference of the Coloniality Working Group
(see References).
11. Ibid.

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100 SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES,VOLUME6 (1979)

BOOKS IN REVIEW

A Utopia from the Semi-Periphery:Spain, Modernization,and the Enlighten-

ment
Stelio Cro, ed. Description de la Sinapia, Peninsula en la TierraAustral: A
Classical Utopia of Spain, [Hamilton, Ont.:] McMasterUniversity, 1975. LVII
+ 146 [+ 72] pp. $7.50. This edition of a hitherto unpublishedSpanishmanu-
script makes an original contribution to utopian scholarship.The manuscript,
together with another - a treatise on education almost certainly by the same
anonymous author - was found by Professor Cro in the archive of an eight-
eenth century lawyer and political bureaucrat, the Count of Campomanes
(1723-1802); ProfessorCro has published the second ms. as an appendixto the
edition. Both manuscripts are undated. There is no doubt however, as Prof-
essor Cro argues in his lucid and well researchedintroduction, that Sinapia is
an eighteenth-centuryutopia of the SpanishEnlightenment.1It had long been
believedthat Spainproducedno systematicliteraryutopia.lb We shareProfessor
Cro'sexcitement at his find.
There is an additional factor: Sinapia may well constitute, up to this
point, the only literary utopia written from the perspectiveof what has been
describedas the semi-peripheralareas of the modern world system. It therefore
raises some useful questions as to the relationshipbetween utopias and what a
contemporaryscholarhas called "the tidal wave of modernization."2
ProfessorCro relates the writingof More'sUtopia to the widespreadtrans-
formation of European life, concepts, and attitudes subsequentto the Spanish
discovery and conquest of the New World, to the change and disruptionthat
initiated the modern era. Central to this transformationwas the development
of the first global economic system. This world system, as described by Em-
manuel Wallerstein,3 incorporated three areas, each defined by a different
dominant mode of labor control - the core by free wage labor, the semiperi-
phery by serf labor, the plantation system of the periphery by forced slave
labor. The world market which linked these areas produced through the mech-
anism of trade - equal exchange between unequally valued labor - the rela-
tively unequal levels of development of the three areas.The mechanismof trade
servedas a conduit for the accumulationby the core areasof a disproportionate
share of the social wealth that was now produced globally. This access of social
wealth was one of the factors that enabled a "spontaneous" dynamism of
growth which transformedthe core areas into today's developed First World.
The other areas had instead to find ways and means of grapplingwith the
correlativecycle of underdevelopment.
This may explain the perceptive observationby Professor Cro that, al-
though Sinapia is heavily influenced by other previousutopias, the manuscript
reveals ". . . a line of political thought original to its creator . . . the perfect
state is a Christianstate based on science and technology" (p. XIII). If as Prof-
essor Cro conjectures, the author of Sinapia was a feijoista, this would further
suggest that a contributing cause of the political originalityof the manuscript
is to be found in the nature of Spain's semi-peripheralrelation to European
countriessuch as France,Holland,England.
Feij6o (1676-1764) was both a priest and an academic,one of the elite
minority group, who like Campomanes- in whose archive both manuscripts
were found - representedthe Enlightenmentin Spain. Professor Cro quotes
 BOOKSIN REVIEW 101

the excellent Spanish historian, Vicens Vives, who arguesthat with the inaug-
uration of the Bourbon monarchyin 1700, a Europeanconception of life came
to modify and substitute the Spanish mentality moulded by the Counter Re-
formation. But as with all semi-peripheralareas - Russia with its Slavophile
and Narodnik movements is a case in point - there is always a strong ambiva-
lence towardsthe wave of modemizationemanatingfrom the core.
Both Feijoo and the author of Sinapia express an ambivalentattitude to
the European conception. On the one hand, both, like all the elites of under-
developed areas, share the dream of "catching up with the core"; and both
aspired - as did the other ilustrados(i.e., membersof the "enlightened"elite)
of the time - to a "utopian city from which the remnant of medieval bar-
barismwould disappear,fused in the crucible of a superiorculturemoulded by
progressand tolerance."4
At the same time, however, Feijoo belonged to the Church-cum-academic
bureaucracy,partakingof the scholastic tradition which had fused intellectual
and religious orthodoxy with national orthodoxy. Most probably this is also
true for the author of Sinapia,who, as ProfessorCro speculates,might well have
been a priest. Like Feijoo, he was clearly receptive to the new intellectual sti-
muli that came from abroad,but he also sharedin this group'sidentificationof
the national with the Christian-Catholicthat had markedSpain's brief, if daz-
zling, imperialhegemony.
In the sixteenth century Spain had been the first core country of the
emerging world system. Her domination of Europe under CharlesV, her con-
quest and expropriationof the New World, seemed to provide empirical evi-
dence for the national belief that she was a country destined by God for provi-
dential mission, i.e., to realize a Christianutopia on Earth. ProfessorCro refers
to the "remarkableutopian flavour"that marksthe sixteenth century chronicles
and reports of travellersto the Indies.More"fiction than history," the narrative
impulse of these chronicles was "the search for happy land, the quest for a per-
fect society in America"(p. XI).
For with the discovery of the New Worlda transpositionwas made by the
Europeanimagination.The former ideal world remote in time, relatedto a "lost
Christianparadise"and/or "the Golden age of the ancients,"was transposedto a
"world remote in space."5 The New World reality was incorporatedinto the
topos of an adynaton - which serves both as the censureof the times and the
denunciation of the times - the world upside down."6 In Peter Martyr'sDe-
cades, e.g., the factual lineaments of the New Worldare drawninto the stock
literary representationsof the pastorallocus amoenus, and of the innocent neo-
Horation aldea (village, countryside) as contrasted to the corrupt court/city/
civilization. Through these devices the New World is portrayed as a fusion of
the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age, a figurationthat was central to the
religious enthusiasm, to the reason-as-natureparadigmof Christianhumanism.
The mechanismof world reduction7 common to utopias worksthrougha series
of exclusions or eliminations.Thus Martyr'sChristian-humanist portraitof the
New World utopia - the "goulden worlde of which oulde wryters speake so
much" - ritually excludes "pestiferous money" and the legal state apparatus:
"where men lyved simply and innocently with inforcement of lawes, contente
only to satisfy nature "8
The paradox was to be that, although there was an early attempt to model
two cities in New Spain on the model of More'sUtopia (pp. V-VI), the actual
SpanishNew Worldsocieties were in fact organizedby the Churchand State bur-
eaucratic apparatuswhose minutely regulatedlaws - the famous laws of the
Indies - negated the humanistdreamof a statelessparadise.And in Spainitself,
this same apparatus, by representing the Christian humanism of Erasmian
102 STUDIES,VOLUME6 (1979)
SCIENCE-FICTION

thought as religious heresy, censored out this revitalizingcurrent of thought.

The movement of Christianrationalization- a secularizationof theology and a
theologization of the secular - that had been central to the ongoing cultural
transformationin the core countries of Europe was therby postponed. Indeed,
through its imposition of religious orthodoxy as national orthodoxy - heresy
came to constitute Un-SpanishActivities - the Church/Stateapparatusstifled
the rise of the incipient Spanish commercial and industrialbourgeoisie.Since
Spanishcapitalismwas thus thwarted the wealth transferredfrom the Indies to
Spain was siphoned off, through the mechanismof unequal exchange, in trade
to the new core countries: Holland, France, England. During the seventeenth
century Spain was displaced to the semi-periphery.In the eighteenth century
she would have to cope with the fall from grandeur,the retreatfrom "manifest
destiny" - with the new phenomenonof underdevelopment.
The underdevelopedsemi-peripheryis alwaysout-of-date.If the eighteenth-
century European Enlightenmentwas marked by a wave of dechristianization
which followed on the earlierstage of Christianrationalization,Sinapiamay be
called the utopian manifesto of the eighteenth-centurySpanish attempt at a
form of Christianrationalization.This mode of rationalizationmight be called -
and the paradoxis instructive- the SpanishChristianEnlightenment.
The utopian imaginationin the semi-peripherymust confront the emp-
irical existence of superiormodels of social transformationin the core countries,
models which constrainits projections,preventingit from postulatingan auton-
omous and wholly other system. Because of this the referentialsub-text of the
utopian discourse of Sinapia - i.e., the social reality from which it takes its
departureand which it constitutes through negation/inversion9- relates at the
same time to eighteenth-centurySpain,to the core countries,and to the relation
between them. The utopian "development" plan of Sinapia projects a model
which can set the terms of a new relation, and which - as with the Russian's
Narodniki and the Spanishilustrados- can incorporateselected aspects of the
core model by and through traditionalinstitutions. Feijoo and the author of
Sinapia, members of the Churchbureaucracyand of the intellectual scholastic
tradition, would seek to use institutions of the Churchin order to create a nat-
ional form of the European"universal"Enlightenment.
The theoretical problemswhich Feijoo deals with in his essays, as well as
the possible solutions, are both posed and resolved by the narrativemachinery
of Sinapia. The ideological contradiction facing the Spanish ilustrados deter-
mines both the structure of the text and the structureof the proposed social
order.
Feijoo had posed the central problem in the context of addressingwhat is
today a widespreadThird World dilemma - the problem of the literary and
other "backwardnessof our nation." In pushing for educational reform, he
argued that Spain should not be held back by fear of religious heresy from
taking advantage of the scientific knowledge offered them in foreign books.
Feijoo's argumentwas that theology and philosophyeach had their own sphere,
that the former as revealedknowledge was superiorto the latter which was the
result of mere human knowledge. Spain was well supplied with trainedtheolo-
gians who could discern what was opposed to ChristianFaith and what was not.
The Holy Tribunalof the Inquisition was always on guardto defend religious
doctrine by removing, in Feijoo's words, any "poison" that might accompany
the "liquor" of the new learning.'0 The new climate of thought was to be
filtered through the selective frameworkof bureaucratizedChristianorthodoxy.
Sinapia, in givingnarrativerepresentabilityto this solution, both resembles
and differs from the utopian structures of the French Enlightenment. This
relationship of parallelismand divergence can most usefully be envisagedin
 BOOKSIN REVIEW 103

terms of Mannheim'sand Deleuze/Guattari'sanalyses of utopia. Mannheim's

distinction between ideology as the legitimationof the ruling group and utopia
as the manifesto of a social groupaspiringto hegemonyis reinforcedby Deleuze
and Guattari'sanalysis of the role played by utopias in the legitimationand de-
legitimation of desire. They argue that utopias function not "as ideal models
but as group fantasies, as agents of the real productivity of desire, makingit
possible to disinvest the current social field, to de-institutionalizeit . . . l1
Like its contemporaryFrench utopias, Sinapia disinveststhe social field
of the aristocracy, delegitimates its accompanying climate of thought. Prof-
essor Cro points to the difference between Plato's Republic and Sinapia (pp.
XVII-XVIII).The former legitimates the rule of a militaryaristocracy,the latter
de-legitimatesthe representationalcategories of the still powerful landed aris-
tocracy. By limitingwar and preferringpeace, even if gainedthroughbriberyand
stratagem,Sinapia displaces the military code with the work-ethic.It replaces
the aristocratic code of honor with the bourgeois utilitarian ethic; the pro-
digality and conspicuousluxury cunsumptionof the aristocracywith the sober
moderationof the middle class. The speculativeimaginationhere acts as "a gen-
eral solvent"12 of the system of representationof the aristocracy.
In this, Sinapia is at one with the European Enlightenment,sharingin
its "social equalitarianismand rationalism"(p. XXVIII). This is borne out by
the internalevidence of the utopian stock figuresin the text. The figuresof the
Persianprince Sinap and the prelate Codabend,and in particularthat of Siang,
the Chinese philosopher,are all borrowedfrom the FrenchEnlightenment.And
it is the wave of dechristianizationin Europe, Baudet suggests, that may have
been responsible for the enthusiasm"for China and other lands that swept ac-
ross Europe in the eighteenthcentury."The real historicalfigureof Confucius-
the philosopherwho was not a religiousfounder - was centralto the European
representationof the Chinese "who honour everything, their parents and the
ancestors." This mixture of reverencefor tradition allied to a secularmorality
coming out of a higher culture provides the ideological legitimation for the
figures of one of the founders of Sinapia, the Chinese Siang. The other two
founders, the Persianprinceand prelatealso come out of the eighteenth-century
literary stock in which - together with the Noble Savages- "Turks,Persians
and other Non-Westernerswere installedalongsidethe Chinese."1 3
However, if Sinapia borrows figures from the EuropeanEnlightenment,
it uses them in a specific manner.The narrationin which the Chinese philoso-
pher Siang is converted by the Persian Christianssignifies a reconciliationbe-
tween Christianorthodoxy (the Persians)and the natural sciences (Siang). In
addition, by re-transposingthe imaginedideal world back in time - the Persian
Christiansrepresentan earliermode of Christianity,that of the third and fourth
centuries - and combining this with the European Enlightenment'suse of
cultures of a higher order, Sinapia turns its back on both the prelepsarianGold-
en-Age-type utopia of the ChristianHumanistsand on the Rousseauistperfect
state of naturewith its emphasison the individual.
In the Europeanconception, the theme of economic freedom "definedas
social equality based on the division of labour and private property"'14was
linked to the representationof man's individualorigin in a state of nature.The
concept of the originallyfree and unbound individualwith his naturalright to
private property was to be the mythological charter of the commercial and
industrialbourgeoisieon their rise to hegemony. The feudal rights of the nobi-
lity to their large landed estates was delegitimatedalong with the concept of
rights based on birth. In the state of Naturethere is a reversalof all ranks.Merit
is what now counts in the competitivefree-for-all.
Sinapia also joins in this delegitimationof the propertyrightsof the nobi-
lity. But it postulates as its ideal imagined world the earlierChurchstructure
104 SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES,VOLUME6 (1979)

with its emphasison the Christiancommunity, where all propertyis held as col-
lective state property. Thus in Sinapia, with its ritual exclusion of privatepro-
perty, money, and markets, capitalism is put off limits. If the "naturalstate"
conception led in France to the idea of remakingthe world anew on the model
of its imaginaryorigins, the remaking of the social order in Sinapia means a
conservativereturn to earlierpolitical structures,which are paradoxicallyable to
incorporatethe naturalsciencesrepresentedas the pagantraditionof thought of
"highercultures." The state of Nature is in it implicitly delegitimated;thus, the
"noble savage" American Indian and Black can play no ideal role in Sinapia.
Rather they are subjected to the "civilizing"influences of the superiorChris-
tian and Chinese cultures. The ideal Incas, the model for Campanella'sCity of
the Sun, become in Sinapia Peruvian Chinchas whose "rusticity" has to be
civilized,just as the Malay's"ferocity" has to be "domesticated"(p. 6).
It is the Black, however, who is most displaced from the natural state
ideal of "noble savage," to the lowest rank in the pecking order of races and
cultures. Blacks are representedas simple and docile, as negrillos called Zam-
bales. They were cleared out of the geographicalspace by the Malays who
drove them into the adjoining country of the Galos. Later, in the context of
Christianuniversality,the Blacks are representedas one of the racesinvolvedin
the mixture which has produced the Sinapian.Here their "race"is designated
by the literary term of Ethiopian. They are assimilatedby the use of this term
to a legendary medieval utopian figure - the priest-kingof Ethiopia, Prester
John.
When Europeanswere themselves semiperipheralto the then hegemonic
Mohammedanpower, PresterJohn had played a powerful role in the European
imaginationas the black image of Christianpower who would one day deliver
them from the Moors.'5 His imaginedkingdom - a magicalutopia with a pool
which rejuvenatedmen, and a magic table which cured drunkenness- was also
the ideal model of a Christianstate in which a Priest King combined religious
and temporalpower. This originalmodel of a priestking becomes,in the utopia
of Sinapia, the model of the ideal state patternedon a church hierarchy.The
magical model of Prester John is transformedinto the rationalized model, in
which the Christian community is converted into a paternal social machine.
GeographicallySinapia is divided into units-familydwellings;severalsuch units
constitute a barrio, severalof which constitute a villa (town), severalof which
constitute a city, severalof which constitute a metropolis,severalof which cons-
titute a province, nine of which constitute Sinapia.Socially and politically, each
unit is ruled by a Father, each Father with prescribeddegreesof power to pun-
ish their family membersand the two slavesallotted to them. Slaves,privateand
public, are made slavesas a punishmentfor their crimes,but the power to decide
on limited or perpetualslaveryis confined to the top Fathersand to the Prince
who functions as chief magistrate.Thus the fathersof the family are punishable
by the fathers of the barrio,who in turn, are punishableby the fathers of the
villa, and so forth. The prince, with the Senate'sapproval,alone has the right to
punish by death, life-slavery,or exile. Sinapiathus exemplifiesthe carceralcom-
plex, designedto identify devianceand the social norm of orthodoxy.16
Exile is retained as the punishmentfor heresy. Hereticsare given a chance
to recant; if they do not, they must be totally excluded from the Kingdom.For
Sitnapia is, above all a social and ideological autarchy, that mode of utopia cen-
tral to all forms of the bourgeois- i.e., both non-aristocraticand non-popular-
imagination.As Roland Barthespoints out, the sites of utopia are alwaysrigidly
enclosed so that they can constitute a social autarchy.The inhabitantsof these
bourgeoismodes of utopia are always shut in so as to "forma total society, en-
dowed with an economy, a morality, a languageand a time articulatedinto sch-
edules, labours, and celebrations. Here as elsewhere the enclosure permits the
 BOOKSIN REVIEW 105

system, i.e., the imagination.... s 17

Sinapiais representedas completely enclosed from the rest of the world;
it is well protected by armed forces against any outside intrusion. Trade is
strictly regulated and only carried out by a few selected bureaucrats;exit and
entrance visas are strictly supervised.And if Sinapia rigidly excludes Christian
religious enthusiasm, a new kind of rational enthusiasmfor totalitariansuper-
vision and control pervades the text. The real stroke of imaginativebrilliance
in the work is to be found in the meticulous arrangementsfor a form of cen-
sorship which will enable the incorporationof the novelties of the naturalsci-
ences without any dangerof deviationistheresy.
Merchantsof Enlightenment - mercaderesde luz, much as in Bacon'sNew
A tlantis - are dispatched to purchase,with no expense spared,the "new tech-
nology": books and models for "the advancementof the sciences and the arts"
(p. 58). When brought back, all materialmust first be decontaminated,distilled
by a highly ingenious form of censorship. A group of censors - gatherers,
miners, distillers, improvers- select out the materialthat can be utilized, and
even improveupon the models and scientific paradigms.Whateveris considered
ideologically dangerousto the Christian-bureaucratic mode of organization,to
its static perfection - for Sinapia is a classical utopia - is filtered out, the
"poison" removed (to repeat Feijoo's metaphor) as the "liquor" is distilled.
Sinapians are therefore locked within a totalitarian representation of re-
ality. Equal material distributionis used as the legitimationfor unequal access
to the means of information and communication.The desire disinvestedfrom
the social field of the landed aristocracyis reinvestednot into the pivate pro-
perty bourgeoisie but into the social field of the technocratic/bureaucratic
bourgeoisie whose representationalcategorieslegitimate an intellectual and im-
aginativeautarchy. In fact, the utopian mode of Sinapia seems to prefigurethe
dystopian realization in our time of the representationalautarchy - with its
managedreality and managedfantasy - imposed by the bureaucratic/corporate
elite of the First, Second, and ThirdWorldthroughthe mass-media.
Indeed, correlative to this Sinup!a can also teach us something about
modern SF. Our century has seen the beginningof the end of the Eurocentric
cultural autarchy with the historical emergence of former utopian fictional
Others - the Chinese, the Persians,the Blacks, the Mohammedans- from exo-
ticism. In the context of this historical movement another transpositionhas
been made from terrestrialto extra-terrestrialtime/space, and fictional Others.
If we see SF as the updated pseudo-utopianmode of the global (and increa-
singly dominant) technocratic bourgeoisie, as the expression of its group fan-
tasy, then one of SF's more troubling aspects - a neo-fascist elitism that re-
minds one of Sinapia's,based as it is on the projection of "highercultures" -
becomes theoretically explicable. From Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey to
Star Wars, SF - like Sinapia - ritually excludes or marginalizesthe "Lesser
breeds without the law," outside of technological rationality-what Ursula
Le Guin has called the social, sexual, and racialaliens.18 Such SF excludes, in
fact, the popular forces who today embody the millenarianheresy of utopian
longing,19 and who are on our world scene the only alternativeto the new,
non-propertiedtechnocraticbureaucracy.
NOTES
1. The ms. dating has led to an ongoing critical dispute between ProfessorCro and
ProfessorMiguel Aviles Fernandez,who has also published an edition of Sinapia: Una
Utopia Espanoladel siglo de las luces (Madrid:Ed. Nacional,1976). Cro in his later work
A Forerunnerof the Enlightenmentin Spain (Hamilton, Ont.: McMasterUniv., 1976)
argueson the basis of a newly discoveredreferencefor a 1682 date, which would imply
106 SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES,VOLUME6 (1979)

that the authoris a forerunnerratherthan contemporaryor followerof the feiotsta current.

Againstthis, Aviles Fernandezarguesfrom internalevidencethat Sinapiais a productof the
Enlightenmentand was most probably written by the Count of Campomanesin the last
third of the 18th century. I agreethat this workbelongsto an 18th-centurydiscourse,even
though I would place it in the earlierpartof that century,so that I am reluctantto attribute
it to Campomanes.For a balanceddiscussionof the opposing viewpoints see F. Lopez
Estrada, "Ma'snoticias sobre la Sinapiao utopia espafiola,"MoreanaNo. 55-56 (1977):
23-33.
lb. Monroe Z. Hafter, in "Towardsa History of SpanishImaginaryVoyages,"Eight-
eenth CenturyStudieg8 (Spring 1975): 265-82 discussesa "full-lengthSpanishimaginary
voyage written in the Enlightenment"which pretendsto be the true account of a philo-
sopherwho voyagesin an unknowncivilization,Selen6polis(Madrid,1804). Hafterargues
that althoughno study of imaginaryvoyageslists so much as a singleoriginalSpanishtext,
neverthelessthis account, while it "standsout for its developedportraitof the ideal lunar
society of Selenopolis. . . forms partof a trajectoryto whichinterestis astronomy,distant
travel,and social satirecontributedover a periodof many years"(p. 266). The parallelsbe-
tween Sinapiaand Selen6polisare clear- the problemof incorporatingthe naturalsciences
and the need to rationalizesociety. But the basic differenceis that Selenopolisis an open
society (encouragingtrade, internaland external)whichmarginalizesreligion,while Sinapia
ia a closed theocraticsociety. The narrativedeviceof the voyageto a landwhichis projected
as existing- Selenopolis- leadsto somewhatdifferentconclusionsthandoes the projection
of a utopia - a no-where- wlhoseexistence is figurativelylocated in the geographyof the
narrativeitself. But Sinapiadoes belong to a wave of speculativethought,typicalof under-
developedcountries, ceaselesslyseeking to correct a "backwardness" whose causesare as
much external - in the system of relations - as they are internal;a history of thought
thereforemarkedby a Sisypheanfutility. Hafterdiscussesthe historyand extensionof this
wave,expressedboth in book form andin journalisticliterature.
2. ErnestGellner,Thoughtand Change(Chicago,1965), p. 166.
3. ImmanuelWallerstein,The Modern World-System:CapitalistAgricultureand the
Origin of the European World-Economyin the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974),
pp. 86-87.
4. Jaime Vicens Vives, Manualde historia econ6mica de Espafla(Barcelona,1969),
p. 431; my translationof the originalSpanishquoted by ProfessorCro(p. XIX).
5. Henri Baudet, Paradiseon Earth: Some ThoughtsOn EuropeanImages of Non-
EuropeanMan (New Haven, 1965), p. 32; and J.H. Elliott, The Old Worldand the New,
1492-1650 (Cambridge,1970), p. 25.
6. Ernst Curtius,EuropeanLiteratureand the Latin MiddleAges (New York, 1952),
p. 96.
7. Fredric Jameson. "WorldReduction in Le Guin: The Emergenceof Utopian Nar-
rative,"SFS 2 (Nov. 1975).
8. Peter Martyr,Decades, trans.R. Eden (1555), in The First ThreeEnglishBooks on
America,ed. E. Arber(Birmingham,1885), p. 71; quoted by J.H. Elliot, p. 26.
9. See FredricJameson,"Of IslandsandTrenches:Neutralizationand the Productionof
UtopianDiscourse,"Diacritics(June 1977): 9.
10. PadreFeij6o, Cartaseruditasy curiosas,etc. 1 742-1760; see the letter, "Causasdel
atrasoque se padece en Espafiaen orden a las ciencasnaturales,"in the anthologySpanish
Literature1 700-1900, B.P.Patt andM. Nozick eds. (New York, 1965), pp. 7-16.
11. KarlMannheim.Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1940), p. 38; andG. Deleuzeand
F. Guattari,Anti-Oedipus:Capitalismand Schizophrenia(New York, 1977), pp. 30-31.
12. Jakob Burckhardt,Reflections on History (London, 1943), p. 110; quoted by
Baudet,p. 72.
13. Baudet,p. 43 andp. 45.
14. Ibid.,p. 59.
15. See Ibid., pp. 15-20; also Robert Silverberg,TheRealmof PresterJohn (New York,
1972).
16. See MichaelFoucault, Disciplineand Punish: The Birth of the Prison(New York,
1977), p. 30.
17. RolandBarthes,Sade/Fourier/Loyola(New York, 1976). p. 17.
18. UrsulaLe Guin, "AmericanSF and the Other,"SFS, 2(Nov. 1975).
19. The emergence,in the peripheryareas of the world system, of political/religious
 BOOKSIN REVIEW 107

cults like JamaicanRastafarianism- the ReggaesingerBob Marleyexpressesin his hit song

Exodus the inversion/negationof the social order throughits delegitimationas Babylon
comparedto the projectedtrue home of Zion - are the contemporaryexpressionsof pop-
ular movementsof insubordination.The parallelswith the Gnostics who delegitimatedthe
classicalkosmos at the end of antiquity, thus usheringin the new figurativespace which
Christianitywas to inhabit,areclear.
-Sylvia Wynter
Locus: The Newspaperof the Science Fiction Field, 2 vols.: Nos. 1-103 (1968-
1971), Nos. 104-207 (1972-1977). Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. Non-paginated
( - must be near 3,000 pp.). $95.00. Sociologists, ideology students, and
microhistoriansof SF 1968-77, as well as specializedresearchlibraries,will wish
to have these two very fat volumes for the wealth of gossipy biographic,pub-
lishing, etc. data on people and events from the SF microculture scattered
among its pages. For all others, the one-dimensionalityof such items as "Ray
Nelson is looking for pen-pals who remember past lives" (No. 12); "[Lem's
Solaris] is turgid and boring, perhaps because of the infinite detail" (Charles
Brown, No. 71); "Throughout ["The New Atlantis"] Le Guin unloads all the
clich6s that she has avoided . . . for 13 years" (Dan Miller,No. 177) makes it
obvious that it would have been enough to have reprinted a rather slim and
careful selection of some statistics and book reviews from Locus - notably
those by David Hartwelland RichardLupoff, but also (despite Locus's frequent
fulminations against academics) by professors Peter Fitting, David Samuelson,
and Susan Wood. Such a selection would hopefully be reset rather than repro-
duced, as here, by photographicreprint with whateverhorribleeyestrain may
tesult.
-DS
An UnnecessaryReprint

Hans Girsberger.Der utopische Sozialismusdes 18. Jahrhundertsin Fnmnkreich.

Wiesbaden:Focus-Verlag,1973. XXVII+271p.26 DM. This photo-offset edition
of the original 1924 book on utopian thought in 18th-CenturyFrance, oc-
casioned by the growing post-1968 interest in the history of utopianism and
SF, confirms Dale Mullen's complaints (in SFS 15:192) about unnecessary
reprinting; indeed it extends them, since he was speaking about post-1945
fiction, and this is an example of pre-1945 secondaryliterature.The first 107
pp. of Girsberger'sbook are an introduction discussingthe philosophical,idea-
ological, and material "bases" of 18th-century utopianism, with a brief re-
view of the utopian tradition from Plato to the Renaissanceand of the "soc-
ialist" extra-literarymodels for that tradition in Antiquity, -theJesuit state in
Paraguay,and the French rural cooperativeas remnantsof the early "agrarian
communism."Self-confessedlya second-handdigest,basedmostly on the French
and German secondary literature of the 50 years precedingGirsberger'sbook,
this first part is today completely supersededby interveningstudies on utopian-
ism (for the generalones of Beer, Berneri,Biesterfeld,Bloch, Cioranescu,Gove,
Negley-Patrick, Schwonke, and Seeber see SFS 10:245-46; also Atkinson,
Baczko, Cherel, Coe, Coste, Courbin, Krauss, Le Flamanc, Manuel, Muhll,
Patrick, Pons, Poster, Trousson, Tuzet, Venturi, Volgin, and Wijngaarden,to
mention only the main studies dealing with 18th-century authors). However,
the investigationof the texts of "utopian socialism"proper which follows on
pp. 108-235 is not much more useful either. First, it is based on what I have
elsewhere (see chapter 3 of my book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, US
1979) called the "antediluvian"approachin utopian studies, i.e. the isolation of
a fully perfect and ideal "essence" of utopia which is by definition identicalin
"poetically intuitive" and "philosophically dialectical" (in other words, fict-