Sylvia Wynter: Science Studies and Posthumanism as Praxes of Being Human

Preamble

Katherine McKittrick’s volume, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis, first captures the breadth and depth of Wynter’s work through an interview and then is followed by seven essays by various scholars reflecting on the themes and implications of Wynter’s complex historical and social theorizing. Wynter is a Caribbean (born in Cuba, but from a Jamaican family who returned there 2 years after Sylvia was born) novelist and post-colonial philosopher, and is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University. Her work uses history, in ways reminiscent of Foucault, who is frequently cited, to make philosophical sense of the ways that the European colonial powers (the dominant “ethnoclass;” Wynter, 2003) theorized and practiced definitions of human which excluded all others from the category. In so theorizing, she builds on the work of critical post-colonial scholars Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. In situating the human as a political praxis of the powerful, Wynter can be read as being, to borrow Paul Gilroy’s phrasing, “in but not of” the posthuman turn. She speaks to the issues of technoscience and posthumanism but from the standpoint of the colonized for whom the academic project of posthumanism can be seen as risking/depriving/sharing with the oppressed the humanity that those scholars presume.

McKittrick’s dialogue with Wynter is sectioned, with lengthy titles that capture Wynter’s critical vision and the essay’s thematics. The first section of dialogue is entitled “Toward the Counterauthority of a New Science in the Global Context of Our Contemporary Crisis-Ridden Times.” This, in fact, lays out her vision of the necessity of a new logic of knowledge that counters the racial/colonial/sexist order that her work has traced. Wynter’s historical take is a long one, from the medieval European period through the contemporary moment tracking the way that some people are seen as human and others not, as colonial powers expand and transform the world from their European center. McKittrick and Wynter’s exploration considers Copernicus, Galileo, the Catholic Church, and ultimately Aimé Césaire, who she notes saw that “as brilliant as the feats of the natural sciences are, they themselves are half starved—because they cannot deal with our human predicament” (p. 17). As such McKittrick’s volume is to argue for the necessity of a better science,

we must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it. This is a rewriting in which, inter alia, I want the West to recognize the dimensions of what it has brought into the world—this with respect to, inter alia, our now purely naturalized modes or genres of humanness. (p. 18)

Rinaldo Walcott succinctly summarizes the Wynter project in his chapter in the McKittrick volume on multiculturalism, cosmo-politics, and the Caribbean Basin,

Wynter is interested in demonstrating how Europe’s conception of Man “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” Her project then, comprehensively attends to the ways in which we have come to and produced our contemporary conditions of being human—wherein Man is the measuring stick of normalcy and Man’s human Others are excluded from the category of being—and how we might unsettle and undo this conception of humanness. (p. 190)

We insert Wynter into this volume on the emerging science studies as a caution. In particular, we feel that Wynter’s work is important for challenging certain aspects of science studies, particularly as it is linked to science studies’ posthumanist dimensions. Here, we are thinking of those building on Donna Haraway (1991b), especially her critical piece, “The Cyborg Manifesto” which in so many ways founds and inspires posthumanist science studies. For Haraway (1997), the figure of the human/animal becomes problematic as biology creatively crosses and injects different animal DNA to mess with species boundaries—notably in Oncomouse™ the patented mouse with human breast cancer genetics; Oncomouse™ mocks and makes obsolete categories such as race and linear decent. Haraway is keenly aware of the tendency to erase racial histories; to claim a post racial moment as a way of erasing the ongoing violence and historic trauma of racial Western history—as her critique of Simeve, the computer generated woman who is an aestheticized if not eroticized vaguely image of “our” racial telos, featured on the cover of Time Magazine, shows. But her figure of Oncomouse™ in a more transgressive way does the same erasure, and this is our caution. The figure of Oncomouse™ crosses species lines and challenges blood and descent, while leaving intact the differential practices that constitute racial structuring of Western lives. Thus, transgenic mice, as much as Simeve, are part of a praxis of making humans, the focus of Wynter’s work. Praxis takes on two meanings. This praxis means making humans as an effect of law, ideology, theology, mythology, science, as well as practice in a Bourdieuian sense (action in a specific social field). She is explicitly trying to remind readers that the human is not a finished project, that many remain unable to claim full status of humans in the present moment, especially women, the colonized, the otherwise abled, and the racialized. In our thinking through of a science studies refracted through Wynter, we are following Zakiyya Iman Jackson (2013) who asserts that discussions of posthumanism are based on Western constraints of human,

Wynter anticipated and broadened the interrogation and critique of “man” by placing humanism in the broader field of gendered, sexual, racial and colonial relations . . . [C]hallenging the epistemological authority of “man” and “man’s” attempts to colonize the field of knowledge was, and continues to be, inextricably linked to the history of Western imperialism. (p. 670)

Jackson also challenges, drawing on Wynter,

Might there be a (post) humanism that does not privilege European Man and its idiom? Posthumanism’s past and arguably, ongoing investment in Europe as standard-bearer of “Reason” and “culture” circumscribes its critique of humanism and anthropocentricism because it continues to equate humanism with Enlightenment rationality and its peculiar representation of humanity, “as if it were human itself.” (p. 673)

Certainly, science studies has been part of the critique of “humanity” and anthropocentrism. But, it is also a bringing into humanities the study of science and thus reinforces the traditions to which those humanities lay claim.

The basis of our argument is that we have to unpack the coloniality embedded in the discussions that seek to transcend the human and also how such notions shape curriculum and teaching, especially in science education. As we will describe, Wynter lays the problematic construction of human out first in her descriptions of Man1 and Man2; in two forms (White European) Man is taken as the pinnacle of being human and the standard to with all other humans are “measured.” Man1 refers to the cultural logic in which the non-Christian/pagan person was less human than the Christian man and comes into full being after the Renaissance as the Western Christian man becomes a politicized subject. This is ultimately displaced in the 1800s through secularization by Man2, in which the other is defined by biological inferiority and read onto the bodies of those dysselected (racially, economically, sexually, etc.) from the social/economic hierarchy. “Dysselection” is a Wynter keyword. It evokes Darwin’s evolutionary model but inverted, focusing on the way that such a model legitimates/naturalizes those not selected. For Wynter, at stake is a meta-epistemic “descriptive statement” (another Wynter keyword, taken from Gregory Bateson), basically a doxa (to use Bourdieu’s, 1978, sociology, whose doxa is the taken-for-granted, pre-conscious organization of the world) like legitimating schema that organizes the world for its rulers/colonizers. In the Man2 era, this descriptive statement is a less than curious pairing of Darwin’s evolutionary model and neoclassical (and now its resuscitation in neoliberal economics; the distinctions between them not mattering for Wynter’s analysis)—both share a justification and exploitation—or abandonment—of the dysselected.

It should be clear that science in Wynter’s oeuvre is not the center; she is not in science studies per se. Science is not examined closely in its practices in the modern era, rather she is concerned with science as ideology. Science is of interest to her because it reflects/supports Man2 in a variety of ways; through evolutionary theory as an ideological form, through a selection of problems that do not put human interests first—in this she subscribes to J. D. Bernal’s prescription for a science at the beck and call of human need (Rouse, 1993)—crypto-eugenics and eugenics, and so on. Because of this she has close resonances and shared hopes with those strains of science studies that are utopian. Wynter imbricates the project of postcolonial science studies, and Sandra Harding’s (1991) work seems to mirror Wynter the most. Harding develops Dorothy Smith’s notion of feminist standpoints in relation to science and critiques current scientific practices as characterized by “weak objectivity” and that a stronger objectivity can only be achieved by thinking through the standpoint knowledges of the oppressed. This will result in what she calls a “successor science.” Wynter posits something very similar in her idea of a “new science”—we will follow Mignolo in calling Wynter’s new science scientia, Latin for knowledge. Scientia is not worked out in fine detail; Wynter insists that such an emergent set of knowledges foreground human need and human connection (her sociogenic principle), but necessarily it remains a vague concept. When Winter (building on Césaire) characterizes her “new science” as giving equal weight to “phylogeny” (living things), “ontogeny” (material things), and “sociogeny” (human social interests), she is making a very similar demand to Harding’s, that knowledge be generated from the collective struggles of the oppressed. Harding, however, is not alone in this tradition. Post/anti-colonial science studies has also been developed by Kim Fortun (as she discusses in her critique of Bruno Latour, 2014), Laura Nader (1996), and others (for a discussion of colonialism and science studies, see Seth, 2009).

Wynter’s notions of scientia (a knowledge not founded on the project of European colonialism) and epistemic disobedience provide a starting point from which to rethink our relations and move toward a more-than-human ontology that (re)envisions humans as a part of an ecological system with other animals, plants, and geological features and not in a hierarchy or separate from, thus shifting what it means to be human.

We also draw on other writers and thinkers to build on Wynter’s notion of being human as praxis and to reconcile our connections to posthumanist science studies, because while Wynter challenges a Eurocentrism built into discussions of science, the human, and power, these very same posthumanist studies point to limits and lacunae in Wynter’s theorization. For our engagement, we use the genre of a dialogue or metalogue, a way it preserves the voices of the individual authors (Roth & Tobin, 2004) while collectively (re)theorizing about what it means to be human in the posthuman/materialist turn within analysis of science. Through this metalogue, our voices reflect, refract, diffuse, and diffract themes of the new materialism in the shadow of ongoing colonial power.

Finally, as we dialogue we are both thinking of Wynter in relation to our field of science education as much as science studies, but as one of us has argued elsewhere, science education (in its broadest terms) should be read squarely in the field of science studies including and maybe especially in the study of modern schools as technologies for subject production (Weinstein, 2008).

Technoscience and the Praxis of Being Human

Katherine McKittrick describes Sylvia Wynter’s (2015) ongoing concerns about the notion of human and how it is “tied to epistemological histories that presently value a genre of the human that reifies Western bourgeois tenets” and this Western/European human “excises the most marginalized” (p. 9). However, it is these epistemological histories on which our education is constructed and our ontologies developed. In her essay, No Humans Involved, Wynter (1992b) proposes that “this issue of ‘race’ and its classificatory logic lies in the founding premise, on which our present order of knowledge or episteme [Foucault, 1973] and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary paradigms, are based” (p. 47). So, how do we come to know ourselves outside of the ontologies that have dictated who we are or the dominant knowledge system that has operationalized what it means to be human? Our thinking of humanity and posthumanism is therefore grounded in colonial logics that erased the humanity for Black and Native peoples and continues to work in the service of White patriarchy against immigrants, non-gender binary, differently-abled, and so on, as we see evident in current events and politics.

We presently live in a moment where the human is understood as a purely biological mechanism that is subordinated to a teleological economic script that governs our global well- being/ ill- being— a script, therefore, whose macro- origin story calcifies the hero figure of homo oeconomicus who practices, indeed normalizes, accumulation in the name of (economic) freedom. (p. 10)

Here again, it is science (and economics) as a legitimating ideology which is of concern, rather than science in its material multiplicities. She does not explore the ways in which economics builds on certain problematic versions/visions of science (on this see Mirowski, 1994). For her it is enough that both are naturalizing models of dysselection that allow the dominant ethnoclass to justify the objectification, disposal, exploitation, of others. Science and economics are mythic resources that order inequality as a performance of a particular ethnoclass’s narrative of nature. In other words, praxis (the application of law, theory, and social organization in society) of being human when humanity is described by a descriptive statement that legitimates as natural systems of inequality. As McKittrick summarizes at the very start of her interview with Sylvia Wynter,

These figures, both Man1 and Man2, are inflected by powerful knowledge systems and origin stories that explain who/what we are. These systems and stories produce the lived and racialized categories of the rational and irrational, the selected and the dysselected, the haves and the have-nots as asymmetrical naturalized racial-sexual groupings that are specific to time, place and personhood yet signal the processes through which the empirical and experiential lives of all humans are increasingly subordinated to a figure that thrives on accumulation. (p. 10)

Humans are dysselected by institutions and practices that have an often tacit theory of naturalized failure. This is at heart what Mignolo calls “colonial praxis” (p. 115).

It is worth noting how the logic of dysselection and the Darwinian/Neoclassical Economic descriptive statement is reproduced in certain aspects of science studies. Latour’s paradigm setting, actor, and network-based narrative of science, Science In Action, is a story of winners and losers: of selection and dysselection through an economy of rhetoric. Although his narrative of facts emerging as conquering persuasion/coercion presents itself as mere description, it disguises its own partial nature. For instance, it depends on cybernetics (e.g., actor and network) as a metalanguage as though cybernetics itself was not a cultural practice (Noble, 1991). Latour does not represent science studies in some organic entirety here, though his theories I find “overrepresented,” to use Wynter’s language, in the field. My point here is merely to indicate how the logics of Man2 as traced by Wynter inhabit science studies (or maybe Latour is just unconsciously capturing the way that the sciences too as a practice reflect logics of the Man2 descriptive statement—though he never presents this as critique), while I also want to acknowledge there is also a narrative of care, responsibility, and material dependence that is part of science studies, especially in the work of ecological, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship in the field, for example, E. F. Keller’s (1983) work on Barbara McClintock’s practices involved with “feeling for the organism” points to a relationality other than enrollment and rhetorical battle, Kim Fortun’s (2001) work on women’s activism in the wake of the Bhopal Disaster, and more recently Kelly Moore’s (2008) work on the activism of scientists.

This can be thought of in the same way that physicists’ conceptions of anthropic principle: that there must be dimensions, physical dimensions and so on, that make life possible. The analogy of this model there enables the following hypothesis: in order to understand the functioning of our present world-systemic societal order as it is—rather than as it must law-likely represent itself to be within the “truth of solidarity” terms of our present knowledge orders—one must go to the sociogenic principle. Now when we speak in Western terms about cultures, we are also talking about that principle! Since it is about that principle’s always already cosmogonically chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life/death that each culture auto-institutes itself as a genre-specific autopoietic field. (pp. 29-30, original emphasis)

With the sociogenic principle building on Fanon’s statement, “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny” for Wynter this principle countered the purely biological definition of what it means to be human—it should be noted that Wynter never engages Fanon’s psychoanalytic discourse, but accepts his conclusions about the dichotomous nature of colonized subjectivity. The principle hypostatizes social connection, be that in the form of society, community, culture, or other arrangement. Without the principle we are left with a neoliberal field of hyper-individualization (Margaret Thatcher’s denial of society). Because of this principle, this scientia is one “that unsettles our familiar (Darwinian, objective, racist, sexist) governing codes of scientific thought” (McKittrick, 2015a, p. 148) and seeks to locate scientific knowledge making as connected to the human lived experience and the “recording of science through representational and biological feelings” (p. 154). Although scientia centers human experience, it locates human experiences in a relational rather than cerebral or conceptual space. In this instance, I am using the term “relational” to describe human learning and development as occurring in the active engagement in the world (Stetsenko, 2008) versus solely as an intellectual or cognitive project (however, Stetsenko proposes a transformative activist stance, as an alternative to the relational ontology, to human development which posits that “collaborative purposeful transformation of the world is the core of human nature and the principled grounding for learning and development, which might be a more appropo stance to Wynter’s project of scientia”). This brings attention to the ecospaces we occupy and our subjectivities within such spaces and attenuates the hierarchy of “Man.” Scientia is part of a new praxis of being human which has a Freirian liberatory resonance. As McKittrick notes, “‘the realization of the living’ must be imagined as inviting being human as praxis into our purview, which envisions the human as verb, as alterable, as relational, and necessarily dislodges the naturalization of dysselection” (p. 7). Wynter builds on this notion, citing Judith Butler’s seminal Gender Trouble (1990), arguing that if gender is performative then all aspects of Self are,

Why not, then the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations, as, in our contemporary Western/Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender, race, class/underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns. So you here have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. (p. 33)

For Wynter, imagining a world without dysselection is about imagining a world in which identity has temporal fluidity.

While the natural sciences are certainly informed by monumental racial histories—and this is not to be dismissed—noticing conversations and connections between black creative texts and scientific knowledge will reveal important scholarly challenges: to breach analytical barriers and open up meaningful ways of imagining and honoring “a new contestatory image of the human” and therefore disclose otherwise unacknowledged political and intellectual narratives that differently imagine the scientific workings of emancipatory knowledge. (pp. 149-150)

She then turns to Black artists, specifically Jimi Hendrix to bring new light and liberating understanding to form knowledge that can achieve racial justice. Her quote shows that extant science is not to be dismissed outright in the articulation of a new way of knowing, but that science (and any other field of knowledge) has to be put into dialogue with black and other writings/visions emerging out of marginality and oppression. In other words, it’s not just the content but it is also the process and the whose voices are narrating nature and need that matters in the emergence of a scientia.

Scientia is part of the knowledge structure and ideology (mythos) that can produce a better human praxis of being. This new science grounded in sociogeny, I think means seeing humanity as relational and identity as constructed/contingent and within power relations. It means turning to those analyses Nandita Sharma (a contributor to the McKittrick/Wynter volume) embraces, “postcolonial critiques of national liberation strategies, social constructivist critiques of the naturalness of races or nations, and arguments against absolutism, such as those made by Stuart Hall . . . ” (p. 175). Social relationship is the very subject of sociogeny! As Wynter notes,

We therefore now need to initiate the exploration of the new reconceptualized for of knowledge that would be called for by Fanon’s redefinition of being human as that of skins (phylogeny/ontogeny) and masks (sociogeny). Therefore bios and mythoi. And notice! One major implication here: humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis. (p. 23)

In short being human is a becoming.

This is even more critical as Man2 continues to dominate, for example, while we are questioning the notion of human and using Wynter’s framework. As a part of Man2, the actual populace of the dominant ethnoclass are pushing toward a transhuman exceptionality to; a relocation of themselves physically and politically outside of the sphere of human responsibility toward our Earth—through quasi island nation states, that is, offshore banking, and the humanization of corporate entities. They seem to plan on buying themselves out of the impending environmental traumas for which they are largely responsible for causing, while laying the blame on Others, as Haritaworn (2015) notes, “those whose subjugating and overconsumptive stance to ‘nature’ causes the greatest pollution are not the ones who pay its price. Those who are paying it, meanwhile, are labeled anti-environmental” (p. 211). Relatedly, Wynter makes the distinction against describing global warming as a human activity noting that

the human has now been redefined, since the nineteenth century, on the natural scientific model of a natural organism. This is a model that supposedly preexists—rather than coexists with—all the models of other human societies and their religions/cultures. (p. 21)

She goes on to describe the homogenization of the genre of human into this overrepresentation of “Man-as-homo oeconomicus” as a global/universal notion of being human. Therefore, as Wynter notes, the causes of global warming are not human activities, but rather caused by those who have been subsumed under the “Western and mimetically Westernized middle classes—after we fell into the trap of modeling ourselves on the mimetic model of the Western Bourgeoisie’s liberal monohumanist Man2” (p. 22).

Within this is a parallel critique of the idea of the anthropocene. “Anthropos,” that is, man, is in this revisioning of the human record, rather too simply an example of the praxis of rendering some humans non-human, and confusing a specific ethnoclass for the whole. It is not all humans who have left their poison in the geologic record. It is not all humans who are responsible for radioactive contamination, toxic residue, and mass extinction. Those are the excretions and side effects very specifically of, first, the colonial expansion of 1492 and, second, capitalist economies.

This not only has implications for those who fall outside of this model of human, those who are often at the frontlines of the devastating effects of climate change (one only needs to look to the unprecedented 2017 hurricane season and the attendant destruction of Puerto Rico, Barbuda and Dominica and the politics of rebuilding; Adams, Fortwangler, & Gibney-Sewer, 2017) but also implications for the “solutions” as these come from the Western, ethnoclass-human perspective, those whose ideologies and values have largely produced this problem. Therefore, this “human” problem is really a Man2 problem. However, we will have to go well-beyond the scope of Man2 to effectively address it,

So for us to deal with global warming, this will call for a far-reaching transformation of knowledge—this pari passu with a new mutation of the answer (its “descriptive statement”) that we give to the questions as to who as humans we are. (p. 24).

But the ideas of “we” and “human” seem to be irreconcilable as long as we have this powerful ethnoclass that perceives themselves as beyond the human, especially in the face of increasing understanding of coloniality and active resistance to their hegemony.

To understand how science in its bones is implicated in the practice of dysselection, I often come back to the idea of objectivity and objectification in science and commerce as the moment in which ethics and a politics of justice are severed from knowledge and exchange. Megill (1994) in the overview of his edited volume Rethinking Objectivity suggests four senses (and co-commitment practices) of the term objectivity: absolute, disciplinary, procedural, and dialectical. In three (all but dialectical) objectivity, inevitably is reductionist, fixed, and thus invites (though does not necessarily enacts) forms of material and symbolic violence. I would argue that it is also true, however, even in the fourth, advocated by anthropologist Johannes Fabian most explicitly in the Megil’s volume, but this dialecticism is also visible in Haraway’s (1991c) insight that

A corollary of the insistence that ethics and politics covertly or overtly provide the bases for objectivity in the sciences as a heterogeneous whole, and not just in the social sciences, is granting the status of agent/actor to the “objects” of the world. Actors come in many and wonderful forms. Accounts of a “real” world do not, then depend on a logic of “discovery,” but on a power-charged social relation of “conversation.” The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favour of a master decoder. (loc 4070)

But the word “conversation,” does a lot of displacement here of the very power relations she acknowledges. Certainly some scientific (e.g., anthropological and biomedical) investigations can be conversations per se, but given that usually the questions, the theories, the initiation, and the resultant capital all reside with the scientist and not the object of science, conversation seems like too egalitarian a word. Rather the “conversation” constituting science spans relations that may seem not only like conversation but also like torture, like espionage/infiltration, like violent destruction (consider the research on subatomic structures), or like confidence games. To be the object of science is to always be at risk of forms of violence even if that violence does not materialize.

Wynter extends this critique of objectivity and objectification. Wynter builds on C. L. R. James who points to the Pieza as a framework for the emergence of exploitation prior to, within, and beyond Capitalism. The Pieza was the objectifying standard of the slave body in the Portuguese slave trade. Mignolo (2015) writes,

The “pieza,” then, can be seen as the anchor, the reference point for a sensibility that emerged in the sixteenth century alongside the conquest of the Caribbean islands, Anáhuac and Tawantisuyu; it is a measure, therefore that did not exist before the conquest and that set in motion what today we call “capitalism.” (p. 114)

And as Wynter (1992a) explains

The pieza was the name given by the Portuguese, during the slave trade, to the African who functioned as the standard measure. He was a man of twenty-five years, approximately, in good health, calculated to give a certain amount of physical labor. He served as the general equivalent of physical labor value against which all the others could be measured-with, for example, three teenagers equaling one pieza, and older men and women thrown in a job lot as refuse. (p. 81)

In Wynter’s analysis, the “Pieza Framework” as she calls it in James, moves him from a purely economistic Marxism to someone apprehending intersectional dimensions of power.

One result of this extended critical analysis has been a methodology that employs a pluri-conceptual framework. In this framework the dynamics of multiple modes of domination arising from such factors as gender, color, race, class, and education are nondogmatically integrated. (p. 63)

In this analysis, the pieza precedes capitalism, while seeding it. For Wynter the slave trade and slave labor anticipates capitalism proper.

Wallerstein has called the world system was constituted by James as above all a single network of accumulation. This network can be divided into three phases: (I) circulation for accumulation; (2) production for accumulation [capitalism]; and (3) consumption for accumulation. In each of these phases, the pieza-the source of extractive value-is different. In the first, it was the African slave; in the second, the working class; and in the third and current phase, it has been the consumer. Just as the pieza role reduced the African from the specificity of his/her multiple identities to quantifiable Negro labor, so too has this role in different ways reduced the working class and consumers to productive value through unending cycles of consumption. (pp. 81-82)

But the pieza, as it produces modernity and its structures of power, must be concurrently generative of (or can be read as a framework for viewing) modern science. This is a necessary conclusion if we take seriously Haraway’s (1991c) quote above that locates scientific knowledge within relations of power. Power here cannot be external to the descriptive statements of Man1 and Man2 that emerge as part of the pieza framework. Power is generalized in Wynter’s reading of James and shifts to an explicitly Foucauldian understanding of social struggles taking polymorphous forms and logics. The objectivity of science, in whichever of Megill’s logics (absolute, disciplinary, procedural, and dialectic), is part of the pieza framework which measures and objectifies the object of study/commerce.

The transformation of human research ethics after the Belmont Report which provided the framework for the establishment of Human Subject Review Boards can be read as one response to the awareness that science did operate in a pieza framework, as exemplified by the abuse of Black subjects in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Weinstein, 2001). But as Haraway and recent critical scholarship on bounds of life, animacity, and humanness have argued (e.g., “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness” discussion in GLQ; Muñoz, 2015) that the very boundary work of the human/non(in)-human is political/ethical/troubling. The Belmont Report and the institutionalization of Human Subjects Boards do not end the problem of objectification. Non-humans and sub-humans (e.g., children who cannot consent by law) are still subject to varied forms of scientific violence.

Shifting to our work in science education, as a reflection of the continuing problematic nature of science and the “pieza,” the ethics of human objectification had at least some mention in the old U.S. National Science Education Standards (NSES) but is now erased. There are no traces of an idea that students, as part of their science education, should reflect on how objectifying the world (including people) is problematic. This important critique that was present in the last set of U.S. National Science Education Standards are gone in the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards—The successor to the NSES).

You may remember too that in the earlier case of numerous deaths of young Black males caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates explained away these judicial murders (emphasis hers) by arguing that Black males had something abnormal with their windpipes. That they had to be classified and thereby treated differently from all other North Americans, except to a secondary degree, the darker-skinned Latinos. For in this classificatory schema too all “minorities” are equal except one category—that of the people of African and Afro-mixed descent who . . . are the least equal of all. (p. 42)

This extends to other social institutions where Black people and in many cases brown people are objectified through substandard school and health care who then become research subjects about improving education and health care but who rarely benefit from said research.

Reading Wynter and considering the implications of her work to science education compelled me to revisit works of others who are critically engaged with the project of (re)establishing humanity outside of the Western Imperialist project. For example, Tuhiwai Smith (2012) writes from the perspective of an indigenous person in the settler-colonial state of New Zealand describes how the idea of the “modern” human person was advanced during the Enlightenment, “in [the] wider Enlightenment context, imperialism becomes and integral part of the development of the modern state, of science, of ideas and of the ‘modern’ human person” (p. 23). Europeanness/humanness and Otherness (less-than-humanness) were constructed during this time and science—Western Modern Science—was also collaterally developed and used as a mechanism to validate these notions of humanness. This commenced the dichotomizations that structured society—rational knowledge (science) versus irrational/superstitious/illogical, civilized versus. primitive/savage, knower versus known, all centering power and ownership of knowledge production within the ethnoclass.

Wynter wrote that all societies mapped their [self]

“descriptive statements” or governing codes on the heavens, on their stable periodicities and regular occurring movements . . . 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, onto the physical cosmos’ (Davis, 1992). These respective truths were treated like supernaturally ordained criteria and came to function as an “objective set of facts” for people of that society. (p. 271)

This includes the ancient Greeks, which, as Wynter notes, medieval Judeo-Christian Europe inherited. It was during the Renaissance were the “degodding/de-supernaturalizing or our modes of being human” (p. 272) occurred and hence the emergence of Man2.

There still seems to be a positivist quest for a universal and fixed “truth” of being human. For us to be truly disruptive vis-a-vis hegemonic notions of humanness, we need to think outside of the “regime of the human,” Muñoz (2015) implores,

to think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. (p. 209)

The protocols—the master’s tools—would simply reproduce the Western bourgeois human, that Wynter calls “Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (Wynter, 2003, p. 260). Wynter was clear about disrupting this overrepresentation to unsettle the “coloniality of power” of said master.

Mobilities of Humanism

our present order of knowledge, whose domain of inquiry is precisely that of the social reality of our present Western world-system and its nation state sub-units, have themselves to be law likely and rigorously elaborated in terms governed by the imperative of enabling the stable replication of our contemporary autopoetic and sociogenically encoded Western bourgeois world system as the first planetarily extended such system in humanity. (p. 202)

We need to look to how other knowledge systems have described concepts of being human before we can lay claim to this notion of posthumanism, especially as academics embedded in this colonial system of knowledge and therefore logics. There are lots of discussions about reclaiming indigenous knowledge and indigenizing curricula, and it is very critical here as we, in North America, are on indigenous lands.

Can we therefore, while taking as our point of departure both the ecosystemic and global sociosystemic “interrelatedness” of our contemporary situation, put forward a new world view of 1492 from the perspective of the species, and with reference to the interests of its well-being, rather than from the partial perspectives and with reference to the necessarily partial interests, of both celebrants [of the Columbian conquest] and dissidents? (p. 8)

This new world view is one that looks at mobility as central rather than exceptional in imagining human connection.

Walker’s work is also about sugar and the history of its production and trade. It is a story of slavery and a triangular trade route that ensured sufficient quantity of slaves, of industrial power, our contemporary culture of overconsumption, and much more . . . A Subtlety, refers to sugar sculptures that adorned aristocratic banquets in England and France the Middle Ages when sugar was strictly a luxury commodity. These subtleties, which frequently represented people and events that sent political messages, were admired and then eaten by the guests. (Thompson, n.d.)

The Atlantic Slave Trade and the industrialization of this plant and made sugar more affordable for the masses thus allowing more people to partake in the violence and consumption of African bodies while a few accumulated wealth. Another not-so-subtlety appeared at the 2018 royal wedding, the bride’s veil had the flora of 53 of the Commonwealth nations delicately embroidered, symbolizing the continued dominance of this ethnoclass over land and peoples.

Animalities

I have been working on identifying and delineating a phenomenon I am calling “going cosmic”—a mode of speculation whose very grounds include an erasure of dehumanization that merges so well (as animacy hierarchies might foretell) with, say, animalness. Cosmicness is the enactment of a large-scale fantasy (sometimes imagined as tiny) that not only templatically erases the integrality of intrahuman difference but also misses its projective role—through less explicit investments in white supremacy or in empire—in the very growth of cosmic discourses. This is not an antiscience position; it is neutral to discipline. (p. 321)

The “neutral position” seems untenable here. Science is deeply implicated in ordering our worlds through gender, race, and other constructions of embodiedness. Wynter helps us understand the ways that science underwrites the social order of Man2 through biological–secular narratives of selection and dysselection. Science’s relationship to empire is well documented (MacCleod, 2000). But, if Wynter helps shed light on the ways that Chen’s refusal to take up the problematic of science leaves the contemporary descriptive statement intact, Chen helps shine a light on Wynter’s limits as well. Chen’s work helps index how Wynter fails to explore a new ethic regarding the relations to categories and particulars of animal and matter are necessary in a better descriptive statement. This sort of posthumanism can thus expand the Wynter project beyond Man and Human.

From the Nature of Scientia to Epistemic Disobedience

But, tragically, clearly we are not at risk of imminently entering a new descriptive statement, a post-Man2. Globally, the colonial consciousness seems to be doubling down, reasserting hegemony, though one could hope it is a last gasp. I’m thinking here of the rise and reconstruction of ethnostates from the United States to Israel, from Turkey to Poland, and Russia and China. Given this redoubled hegemony of Man2 what actions might we take even as the current descriptive statement is fortified?

The decolonial option does not simply protest the contents of imperial coloniality; it demands a delinking of oneself from the knowledge systems we take for granted (and can profit from) and practicing epistemic disobedience Wynter’s decolonial project calls into question the concept of the Human and its epistemological underpinnings. (p. 106)

This is critical now that the reality of the anthropocene is forcing us, as humans, to rethink our relations with (and responsibilities for) fellow humans, non-humans, and the material world. As we have been discussing in this metalogue, rethinking what it means to be human requires a decolonizing/anti-colonial stance where we constantly question how we speak and write about being human, especially in the academy.

Man2 persists in many ways, including the ways that we teach and are taught, along with the content of the teaching and taught. We have to resist and disrupt status quo of Man2 (especially to those who are not engaged in these discussions and do not care that they are happening) and reclaiming our collective agency to change our relations for the better. Although this, on some level, seems to center the human, we must also recognize that it is our lens, as humans, that we view and understand our world (just as a spider uses her senses to view and understand her’s) and more than any other organism, we have developed the capacity to manipulate and change our planet in ways that have been harmful to many. Thinking beyond the human does not absolve our collective responsibility for the damage on our planet. Rather, it should increase our sense of responsibility for planetary wellness, even if this means a constant epistemological and related economic revolution that will usurp the power Man2 has held over all of us for more than 500 years. In the words of the prophet Bob Marley (1980), “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds” with the “ourselves” referring to the collective endeavor to transform knowledge production and reclaim humanity/humaneness for all of our relations.

From Science Studies to Scientia