Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis

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Scholarly. Focused on the work of radical Jamaican intellectual Sylvia Wynter. Includes a lengthy dialogue between the editor and Wynter that explores key elements of her work and thought, and then a series of essays which do a mix of laying out the basics, applying her work in specific areas, and extending it in various ways. I read this to get an introduction to Wynter's ideas, which I had encountered in passing in a number of things I've read in the last few years but wanted to understand better because I may want to take up aspects of what she says in the chapter I'm writing at the moment. Hantel, M. (2018). What is it like to be a human?: Sylvia Wynter on autopoiesis. Philosophia, 8(1), 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0003

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Planetary Media: Out of the Planetarium

The split into a particular category of human also involves, as Marisol de la Cadena suggests, a partitioning into universal nature and universal humans that depends on keeping these categories separate. Partitioning is not just a way of designating the planetary and the human. It is also a way of operating on the relations and segregations of each, such that ways of turning “nature” into “resource” and humans into accumulators might also occur. De la Cadena tells these stories through people’s struggles to resist development, to struggle against the conversion of their relations with more-than-human entities into “resources.” And yet, as she writes, “The interruption of the universal partition is a political and conceptual worlding event; what emerges through it is not a ‘mix’ of nature and human. Being composed as humans with nature—if we maintain these categories of being—makes each more. Entities emerge as materially specific to (and with!) the relation that inherently connects them.” 25 De la Cadena reminds that the categorization of the human is not just one of making sub-humans; it is also one of carving off other more-than-human entities into categories such as resources. Writing across Wynter, Spivak and de la Cadena, one could say that separating humans by race, and designating the planetary as a globe or more-than-humans as resources, also involves separating humans from worlds that spark them into (other) ways of being. Being planetary as praxis, in this way, involves working from within the forests; thinking through and working toward modes of being neither from a ground or grounding, nor from above in a position of mastery or partitioning, but from within the middle of asymmetrical yet non-subjugating planetary relations. With four friends he set up Barod as a workers cooperative and started a 16 hours a week job. Alan had a job coach for a while, but that didn't work out well. So, one of the other workers provided support and Alan learnt how to make dictation software work for him and got his head round Photosymbols, photos, that can be used to support written words to make the meanings clearer. Liddiard, K., et al. 2019. Working the edges of Posthuman disability studies: Theorising with disabled young people with life-limiting impairments. Sociology of Health & Illness 41 (8): 1473–1487. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12962. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.