Human as double bind: Sylvia Wynter and the genre of “man”

Abstract

Sylvia Wynter's philosophy of sociogenesis is an implicit response to a double bind instituted by conceiving of humanity in what she calls generic terms. Either one is human and measured by a morphology that privileges an implicit whiteness, masculinity, cis-ness, hetero-ness, symmetry, and ability, or one is a biological organism without necessarily having recourse to the recognition humans share with each other. Wynter addresses this double bind in arguing first that what is political has in fact always had ecological implications. Bodies denied in politics are in fact of great consequence for politics. This implicit morphology of the genre “Man” has always included the presumption that “Man” can and does act unilaterally. And second, Wynter addresses the double bind in her reading of Fanonian sociogenesis. There is no generic body, as Wynter reads Fanon. The way in which a body is regarded, given the “sociogenic principles” of a political context, is an indistinguishably biological-political matter.