{"id":1090,"date":"2025-12-10T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T16:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2025-12-18T08:59:24","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T08:59:24","slug":"a-young-cowboy-first-saw-the-lights-part-1-philip-coyne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1090","title":{"rendered":"A Young Cowboy First Saw the Lights: Part 1\u00a0\u2013 Philip Coyne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guide Quotes<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Together with Death\u2019s Duel<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Most of those who have written about the affects, and men\u2019s way of living . . . seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics<\/em>2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In his once quiet Nile River village, [Doro] killed and killed and killed . . .There was a gap of what he later calculated to be about fifty years before he came to himself again and . . . discovered that he now possessed the body of some middle-aged stranger, discovered that he was both more and less than a man, discovered that he could have and do absolutely anything.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest<\/em>3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI could see what the leopard was like. I could mold myself into what I saw. I was not a true leopard, though, until I killed one and ate a little of it. At first, I was a woman pretending to be a leopard\u2014clay molded into leopard shape. Now when I change, I am a leopard.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Anyanwu speaking in Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest<\/em>4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And I love light. Perhaps you\u2019ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me of a reoccurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it is with me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one\u2019s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.
That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In keeping with philosopher, novelist and playwright Sylvia Wynter\u2019s pragmatic style, I shall state my intentions upfront. This is the first of a three part text that will parse out a number of implications of Wynter\u2019s systemic notion of Man. More specifically, I will be focusing on the particular implications she offers which provide possible roles for art-making to play in the overthrowing of Man\u2014around the production, proliferation, and navigation of different descriptive statements.6<\/a><\/sup> In this first part I have attempted to ground the whole project by trying to think Man from the bottom up, starting from the lived experience of being situated within Man. To do this I have joined Wynter\u2019s notion of Man up with the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch Philosopher Benedict de Spinoza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wynter\u2019s work offers a remarkably deep and complex understanding of how one\u2019s thoughts, beliefs, and potentially feelings can be factored into a materialist analysis of any historic moment, but these contributions mostly remain at the level of the systemic. To break the death grip that Man has upon our world, as she compels us to do, we must understand Man at the level of our lived reality to envisage how we move between descriptive statements.7<\/a><\/sup> Within this text, I will propose Spinoza\u2019s work as something that can lock into the underbelly of Wynter\u2019s systemic critique, providing a rubric for understanding the minutia of our varying descriptive statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In aid of this, we will be accompanied by three men, each with varying degrees of Manishness: the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poet John Donne; Doro, a character from speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler\u2019s Seed to Harvest<\/em> (aka Patternist<\/em> ) sci-fi series (1976\u20131980); and author Ralph Ellison\u2019s \u201cNarrator\u201d from his book Invisible Man<\/em> (1952). We\u2019ll also be joined by another figure, Anyanwu, also from Butler\u2019s Patternist<\/em> books, who, while born a woman, is capable of changing her physical shape at any given moment. Using these figures, I will attempt to think about the friction that Man creates as it rubs up against the world, what the resulting sparks might illuminate of Man\u2019s internal mechanics, and what is released if the sparks burn down the whole facade. In the process, and with help from Anyanwu and the Invisible Man<\/em>, I hope to situate the profound possibilities of Homo Narrans8<\/a><\/sup>, and of a post-Man world, within our material embeddedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To attempt to explicate Wynter\u2019s notion of Man and the descriptive statements in full here would be an impossible task given the remarkable scale and rigour of her project, but I will attempt a short working outline for us to move forwards with. In profoundly broad strokes, Man is the dominant notion of what it means to be human of the modern world. It is the dominant contemporary \u201cdescriptive statement\u201d of the human. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within Wynter\u2019s work, a descriptive statement is any particular overarching framework for understanding what a human is; it is a fleshed-out, composite description of the human that is both historically contingent and historically constituted. While this is a far too simplistic account of Wynter\u2019s notion, for expediency, descriptive statements can be loosely thought of as something akin to a subjectivity\u2014as coherent perspectival frameworks through which each of us understands and navigates the world. Each of these statements imply and continually reproduce their own epistemic frameworks, that, in turn, produce particular moral orientations and compel particular forms of behaviour. Furthermore, they are collectively produced and reproduced. One is socialised into them during childhood, and while they might break free from aspects of them, this is not a simple process. How we might consciously move between them is a central question for Wynter and, indeed, this text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Man is the central descriptive statement of the modern world. It is the one that the majority of the global population are socialised into, more or less comprehensively. It initially developed in Europe out of the then-dominant descriptive statement \u201cChristian,\u201d as it was undermined by the epistemic shocks caused by early colonial exploration, the Renaissance, and the first moments of scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Man then continued to shift and change through the succession of crises that Europe faced over the succeeding centuries, only to be violently exported around the world through colonialism and finally enshrined as anti-colonial resistance movements were \u201creincorporate[d] . . . neocolonially\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> by the west as they turned into post-colonial nation states. Man continues to mutate to this day, lurching from one epistemic crisis to the next, marching the world closer and closer to ruin.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides Man finding its origins and means of dissemination in colonialism, notions of race play a fundamental role by structuring the necessary negative image of the human in Man\u2019s eye. The racialised Other standing in as an embodiment of the \u201csignificant ill\u201d that proves Man\u2019s own humanity. In turn, this racialised negative image was projected outwards, legitimating colonial violence, the enslavement of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and West Africa, and ultimately logics of race and racial superiority into the structures of the contemporary world.10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Wynter, the central struggle of our time is the one against Man, precisely because of the way that it suffuses all other struggles by posing the \u201cethnoclass\u201d of Man \u201cas if it were the human itself.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> While not providing recipes for the cook-shops of the future, Wynter does offer one model for a post-Man descriptive statement, that of homo narrans, the storytelling human: a figure of self-conscious self-inscription, who, equipped with knowledge of the processes of our descriptive statements and our role in perpetuating them, can produce their own. This figure would constitute a proliferation of descriptive statements all based on the observation that humans need narrativised frameworks\u2014descriptive statements\u2014to understand and navigate the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n


I would like to pay special attention to the materialism of the descriptive statement. In a sense, Wynter\u2019s work provides a means to account for thought (and with a little help, affect or eros) within a historical materialist analysis. To start, Wynter understands the processes of change that descriptive statements go through as a material one. They shift because of exogenous shocks, whether social, political, or environmental, and because of the epistemic crises that these shocks produce. Furthermore, descriptive statements provide their own material constraints; the thinkable, and therefore our actions, are reliant on and constrained by existing epistemic thought.12<\/a><\/sup> Our descriptive statements then are their own arena for the forces of historical materialism to play out in, an uncovered site of contestation that history plays out through, and in which we can enact agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the notion that thinking is a material process is not uncommon in today\u2019s world, Wynter\u2019s contribution here is to understand the contents of our thoughts as equally materially constituted and materially constrained. Thinking, then, is not some abstract disembodied process but something that we produce through a negotiation with existing thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following this brief account of Wynter\u2019s system, we come to the first of our three men: John Donne. A man who\u2014situated in a historical moment of Man\u2019s development, the Northern Renaissance\u2014experienced a violent repudiation of the descriptive statement (Man) that he had actively contributed to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Internal Time\/Space of John Donne<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would like to start here with the provocation that Man produces a particular experiential relationship to time and space: one that understands the time and space that we are situated in as fundamentally simple, empty, and easy to move through, where our capacity to act in it is born out of that simple emptiness. Part of Man\u2019s production was a process of partial secularisation that started with the humanist thought of the Renaissance.13<\/a><\/sup> This process reimagines the world, no longer as an unknowable plastic entity that is constantly at risk of gods interference, but instead as a harmonious domain of natural laws that humans were created to bear witness to. Instead of directly deferring to god or the supernatural, Man began to make claims on the rationality of gods creation, on empiricism, human nature, and, eventually, the market and biology. And yet these more earthly forces produced a paradoxically immaterial understanding of the world. These new legitimating partially secular forces brought the cosmos down to the scale of Man, making it simple, and thus more easily graspable, ownable, exploitable. This conception of the world and its attending notions of time and space continued to develop, through the reformation, into the various phases of capitalism and, in turn, have indelibly marked contemporary Man. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The time\/space produced via this new simplified world of Man was, and still is, an entrepreneurial one, where things could be produced out of thin air, where actions could conceivably have no ramifications, where it wasn\u2019t unimaginable that resources or labour could be endlessly exploitable. It allowed and continues to allow Man to find emptiness and absences wherever it goes: on the islands of the Caribbean; in the minds, lives, and labour of the Indigenous people found there or the slaves brought from Africa; in \u201cunproductive\u201d landscapes and the commons; in inner-city neighbourhoods; in moments of leisure; in historic Palestine; and again now in the rubble of Gaza as the leading edge of capital imagines special economic zones or a Dubai on the Mediterranean. In turn, when the fullnesses that actually do exist where Man identifies absence erupt or break free, Man only sees these fullnesses as grotesque aberrations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Donne\u2019s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions<\/em> (1624) is a remarkable book for a number of reasons. Importantly, for us, one is the way in which the author tracks the experience of this hermetically sealed Manhood as it is wrenched open by the world\u2019s externalities. In the process, he engages Man in a remarkable probing form of study from the inside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donne\u2019s Devotions<\/em> were written against the backdrop of two fevers, each at different levels of abstraction. Firstly the personal. He wrote the book in a period of convalescence immediately after an illness\u2014 now thought to be Tuberculosis\u2014almost killed him. The second fever was one that we are still suffering the implications of.14<\/a><\/sup> Devotions<\/em> was composed some 190 years after the Portuguese rounding of the cape of Bojador, slap bang in the middle of the remarkable tumult that that journey helped unleash. The very same fervour that propelled Man and the modern world into existence, and continued to shape and reshape Man as it roiled on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We find the crux of these two fevers joined in Donne\u2019s opening gambit. \u201cVariable, and therefore miserable condition of man!\u201d Man is miserable because<\/em> he is variable, because the certainty of his time\/space, of his self-possession through rational thought, cannot help him escape the grubby reality of the material world. He is clogged by an \u201cearthly body\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> whose \u201ceye [must ask his] own urine how we do.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> Despite his \u201c[deliberations] upon [his] meats, and drink, and air, and excercises,\u201d17<\/a><\/sup> despite his best attempts to plan for every eventuality, he cannot escape the complexities of the world, and thus he cannot escape its contingencies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his conception of his own Manhood rocked by an unmistakable experience of his instability, Donne is forced to consider a precedent. In the darkest moments of the illness, he turns out from his Manhood to the exterior world for salvation. He turns to his reliance on other people, to his internal mutability, and to his external sociality, asking whether within his dissolution, terrifying as it is, there is a possibility for a more transcendental relationship to god. Donne identifies, somewhat begrudgingly, that within his variability, within the materiality to which Man pays little heed, something potentially more wonderful exists. Man might well be miserable because he is variable, but perhaps each ecumenically human other of homo narrans might not be miserable precisely because they are variable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Soft Underbelly of Man<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a rigorous accounting of how our material variability might constitute a power against Man, we need only look across the North Sea to another man born into the same tumult only a year after Donne\u2019s death. Spinoza did see himself as part of the European project that birthed Man, and yet his work undermines that project in a number of ways. What Spinoza offers is a materialism of mind that starts from the bottom up; one which accounts for the smallest, strangest and most rarefied of human desires; that does not enclose the individual within the bounds of their body; and one that, as a possible mechanics for Wynter\u2019s system, offers a profound tool for contending with the problem of Man. Giving us a framework for understanding the descriptive statement at the level of its lived enactment, something which is no doubt invaluable in any attempt to help produce or propagate any alternatives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within Spinoza\u2019s metaphysics,18<\/a><\/sup> there is only one form of matter in existence,19<\/a><\/sup> which he names substance (or \u201cGod\u201d).20<\/a><\/sup> In the making of this assertion he goes to great lengths to explain what it means for the individual, constructing a model that explains how thought might be made out of the same stuff that the body is. As writer Aurelia Armstrong puts it very succinctly within her text Autonomy and the Relational Individual <\/em>(2009), Spinoza argues for a \u201cpyscho-physical parallelism\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> of the mind and body: \u201cexplicated as a union, which is expressed in Spinoza\u2019s claim that mind is the idea or awareness of an actually existing individual body. Mind, then, is perspectival awareness of body.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> This infers that all manifestations of the mind have direct material manifestation in the body, and one does not follow on from the other. The state of one\u2019s body and their existential experience are two manifestations of the same thing; the matter temporarily coheres as a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How then is this parallelism constructed? What are our thoughts made up of, and how do we think in and through the world? At the heart of these very complex questions is affect<\/em>. Within Spinoza\u2019s work, the two common sense uses of the term are collapsed into one another. Affect, as in a feeling or vibe, is simply another manifestation of physical affect: of a physical change within one\u2019s body whether is it caused internally or by an external force. What Spinoza calls the human affects, which we can think of as feelings, are movements from one bodily state to another. So each time we are affected emotionally, we are affected physically, and each time we affected physically, for example being hit by a ball, we have a series of emotional affects that are not only reactions\u2014they might be fear or embarrassment or a new vendetta\u2014but they are also pain or numbness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affect is also understood as bidirectional, affect is both the capacity to affect the world and the capacity to be affected by the world. Furthermore, Spinoza causally links each of these possibilities; to be able to affect the world means that one can be affected by the world, and to have a greater capacity to affect the world means that you have a greater capacity to be affected by the world. To build on this, each of the human affects implies a movement from one capacity for affect to another. Joy, the positive basic affect, implies that that movement is from one bodily state to another with a greater capacity for affect, a greater capacity to act in the world and be acted on by the world. Sadness, as the negative basic affect, is the diminution of one\u2019s body\u2019s capacity to act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So while Mind is the \u201cperspectival awareness\u201d of body, it is an awareness of and within a field of affect. To return to Armstrong, \u201cthe states of the body the mind monitors are determined by two factors: by what the body is in itself \u2014that is, by the maintenance of a certain ratio of motion and rest between its constituent parts \u2014 and by the influence of other bodies.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup> So this field of affect is not one that remains neatly packaged within the body, it contains the forms of affect from other entities around it. Here we can see how a smile from a loved one across the room can have numerous physical and emotional effects on us, or how the right record on the radio can suddenly become a site of profound emotional or physical resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lastly, the difference between thought and feeling is one of quantity. Philosopher Brian Massumi\u2019s famous definition of affect as a \u201cprepersonal intensity\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> is useful here. Affect is pre-personal: it is the thing that comes before thought, feeling, or desire; it is the building block, the quanta, out of which we cobble concrete meaning together, and eventually our senses of self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this framework produces is a notion of self as a huge conglomeration of thought-affect at different scales, different rates of change, and at different ratios of motion and rest. In human terms, the self is a vast affective assemblage of all the assumptions, desires, ideas, and cultural forms we hold dear, all of our fears and pet peeves, all of which together help us make sense of the things we come into contact with. It is an assemblage that contains elements that change moment to moment, as our physical and emotional bodies are affected, others that change much more gradually, ideas about how the world around us works for example, and some that might never change. This is what I am proposing as a model for understanding the descriptive statement at the level of the individual. And so, the process of changing our descriptive statements is one enacted through affect, through affectionate matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Man on the Loose<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we think of Man in this way, as a vast affective assemblage that is at the same time thought and matter, then does the inevitable physicality of someone ascribing to it provide a fundamental bulwark against its worst excesses? Without Donne\u2019s illnesses, his desires, his need for other people, where might his Manhood have taken him? Butler, in her Seed to Harvest<\/em> series, actually offers a remarkable illustration of Man without the restraints of the physical world in the character Doro. When Doro is faced with a similar prospect to Donne, he is able to plug the gap in his deflating descriptive statement by cutting ties with his own body all together, and, in doing so, setting himself on track to becoming an avatar of pure colonial and fascist violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We first find Doro in a unique ontological conundrum. As a young child with strange powers he falls ill.25<\/a><\/sup> As the illness starts to get the better of him, with his mother and father attending to him, his body begins to shut down. In pure desperation his soul\u2014or consciousness, or subjectivity, however we might formulate it\u2014untethers itself from his physical form and he leaps into his mother\u2019s body, essentially killing her. Panicking, he jumps into the body of his father, killing him too. Over the next few days he bounces between everyone in the village, killing them all and finally leaving the village in the body of the last person he jumps into. He finds that each new body, it not being his own, only lasts a handful of days before he must take another. Every time he jumps, it steels him for the next victim, each time he becomes more distant from the horror he inflicts. The book begins after a point where he has been walking the earth for hundreds and thousands of years, becoming more and more alienated from humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we first meet him, he presents himself as a civil, knowledgeable, and even noble figure, who is forced to bare the cross of his predicament\u2014a self image reminiscent of early Man\u2019s. In the intervening years, he has discovered that certain humans have nascent supernatural abilities, and, so as to \u201cprotect them,\u201d he collects them into communities around the globe, cultivating their gifts in the process. Anyanwu is the central protagonist of the first book of the series and the first individual that Doro meets who is also effectively immortal. As Anyanwu gets to know Doro, his veneer starts to slip. It becomes clear that the communities he had founded are in fact human plantations, and that he has been building these communities because he finds inhabiting the bodies of these individuals with supernatural powers somehow more pleasurable. As the mask that he projects slips further, we see that his relationship to his settlements is really one of owner and chattel, with him engaging in selective breeding, sexual violence, eugenics, and murder on a regular basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doro, removed from his own physicality, without any skin in the game, is compelled, like Man, towards certain ends. And just like Man, these ends quickly take on logics of racial supremacy and violence. The question that remains is whether his invariability would have been enough, without his having to murder, to propel him along these tracks? If Doro is miserable it is not the same misery that struck Donne. Doro is truly shielded from variability and perhaps this is its own more fundamental misery.26<\/a><\/sup> In Anyanwu there was, momentarily, a possibility of happiness for Doro, but after that possibility is foreclosed by the revelation of his brutality, he comes close to killing her. Only after she agrees to re-join one of his communities does he agree to let her live, siding with his own eugenic self-interest. For the rest of the books, he is cast as a pathetic figure who can only muster a remarkable coldness for the other characters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being Dolphin as Praxis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Wild Seed <\/em>(1980), the book in the series that centres around Anyanwu and Doro, is propelled forwards by the fundamental difference in their forms of immortality. Anyanwu is a shape-shifter of such control and precision that she can essentially heal herself in perpetuity: identifying and expelling poisons or cancers, nullify ageing, she is even capable of copying the physiology of other animals perfectly and momentarily expanding her own musculature enough to create superhuman strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doro\u2019s immortality radically separates him from the physical world, from his entanglements with others, and from the ramifications of his actions, and it drives him to abject brutality. Anyanwu, on the other hand, is made immortal precisely through her variability, through her openness to change, and through her materially embedded mediation of, and in, the world around her. Even the way that she comes to understand the animal physiology that she copies is profoundly material. She consumes a portion of them, learning in the process how their bodies function. She has a capacity to tap directly into the material undercurrent of the world, all of the potentialities and ethical orientations that are always already possible. She is an embodiment of Spinoza\u2019s collective joy, a body with an endless capacity to relate to other bodies around her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet she cannot relate to all of it at once. An important aspect of the complex materialism that Wynter uncovers in our processes of self and social inscription is made clear here. To move from one descriptive statement to another in not a simple process of deciding that you are something else; the being otherwise is enacted in practice, or, in Wynter\u2019s terms, \u201cpraxis.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> It involves a comprehensive process of moving through the material world in a new way. In a remarkable chapter of Wild Seed<\/em>, Anyanwu lives for a number of years as a dolphin, so as to escape Doro. To do so she must resocialise herself, learning dolphins\u2019 hunting practices, their social cues, their desires and intimacies. Her dolphin shape is not enough, even after eating one, she must learn to be a dolphin through practice. When returning to land she too has to unlearn her new dolphin ways, she has to shed her dolphin descriptive statement,28<\/a><\/sup> and rediscover the practices of being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The practices that constitute us as any particular descriptive statement are learned without knowledge of the material processes we enact. We are socialised into them by other people who do so unconsciously. Man\u2019s notion of time and space is perfectly adequate for this, yet for homo narrans we need to understand that moving between descriptive statements is a process of instantiating practices of material mediation\u2014like Anyanwu did with her dolphin intimacies.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Figure Outside of Historic Time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings me to our final figure, Ellison\u2019s \u201cNarrator\u201d or Invisible Man<\/em>, who will provide us with a conclusion of sorts. The Narrator is another man forced from Man, yet he is the only one who greets us having successfully switched descriptive statement, not once but twice. The book traces a long succession of betrayals that force him first from his qualified adherence to Man,29<\/a><\/sup> and then from the descriptive statement of what Wynter called the only \u201cecumenically human emancipatory project around,\u201d30<\/a><\/sup> that of Marxism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book speaks to what is likely a common experience of Man out-of-place, an adherent to Man who, within its own racialised hierarchy, is understood to be less successfully human, who constantly stumbles over the invisible road blocks of a fiction that has shaped the world. In his earnest attempts to carve a path that is laid out for him\u2014first by the Jim Crow southern elite, then by white Industrialists in the north, and finally by the (again white) Marxist group, the Brotherhood\u2014the Narrator constantly runs aground on unspoken rules. He is thrust into a world of unknown plasticity, populated by people who do not have his interests at heart, and he is forced to run a gauntlet that he cannot see: a fictional gauntlet with real pitfalls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final betrayal by the Brotherhood, when he realises that they are only using him and his capacity to mobilise the Black people of Harlem as a tool for their own ends, he is jettisoned from all dominant descriptive statements and forced to navigate the world differently. Through this final alienation he becomes the Invisible Man<\/em>, a person outside of \u201chistorical time\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> as Ellison evocatively puts it,32<\/a><\/sup> so far from the \u201ccenter of historic decision\u201d33<\/a><\/sup> that he becomes entirely illegible to the dominant, visible world of Man\u2014so much so that he is about to move \u201crent-free\u201d34<\/a><\/sup> into the utility closet of a building \u201crented strictly to whites\u201d unquestioned.35<\/a><\/sup> He is ignored even as he covers every inch of his closet with lights powered by electricity he steals from the grid, lights which he uses to maintain his form. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly than his capacity to avoid, no doubt only momentarily, the social, political, and economic forms of regulation of the world of Man, is the change in his subjective internal life caused by his new descriptive statement. The prologue and epilogue, in which the Invisible Man talks directly to the reader, both contain a distinct shift in narrative style to the rest of the book that gives us a glimpse of how fundamental the subjective change between one descriptive statement and another is. The remarkable fractious plasticity that Ellison writes in more generallyis put into overdrive in these sections. The Invisible Man seems to exist in a world with different rule, one where meaning making is closer to the ground, more tactile, more material, more elastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Invisible Man<\/em> has successfully escaped from Man, he has harnessed the promised plasticity of homo narrans, tapped into new capacities to act in and through the material world, and yet even he is afraid of the dark. \u201cWithout light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one\u2019s form is to live a death.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup> While the subjective richness of the Invisible Man<\/em> and Anyanwu is cause for optimism about the lived realities of homo narrans, the dangers of giving up on Man all in one go is very real. To be unaware of one\u2019s form is to live <\/em>a death; it won\u2019t kill you, but you will lose your life. To lose your descriptive statement it is to lose your very means of relating to the world you inhabit. This is to say that to move between descriptive statements, we must move purposefully, dislodging Man piece by piece. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To bring Wynter and Spinoza together, we are forced to imagine another time\/space, one that is thick and full, where our capacity to act and think is constituted by our engagement with that thick-fullness, with the ideas and practices that are already around us. To change our descriptive statements then is a process of material mediation; a self-conscious process of mediating the affective assemblages that make up our sense of self. Here then is a role for art in Wynter\u2019s project, first and foremost as a realm of human culture that moves us. Art can help augment or proliferate descriptive statements by providing the affective weight to bolster non-Man living practices, providing new desires, new structures of feeling, and new affective tenors to forms of conviviality. Perhaps because of the fictive nature of descriptive statements, the simple act of restating or redepicting the world, of continually remediating it for other people, is itself a meaningful intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This role for art would likely necessitate a very different set of working practices, ones which would not engage in the centralising and homogenising pull of art under Man, and would necessitate an orientation away from the individual, both in its production and in its assumed viewership. This will be the focus of the subsequent parts of this text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So while the Invisible Man<\/em> battles with \u201cMonopolated Light & Power,\u201d syphoning off their electricity to illuminate his utility closet and maintain his form, maybe another battle can be waged from the basement of Van Beek Art Supplies. Surrounded by materials and media\u2014dipping into the paint, cutting the charcoal, borrowing the brushes, expropriating the pencils, and pilfering the offcuts\u2014perhaps we can engage in a new figurative art: one that, like the Invisible Man<\/em>\u2019s light bulbs, gives us our form by continually rearticulating the affective assemblages of our descriptive statements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n

Philip Coyne<\/strong> is an artist, writer and educator, originally from the UK and now based in the Netherlands. Using sculpture, text, drawing and painting, his work looks to study and instantiate a poetics of social life; this is to say that he thinks about, writes about and attempts to produce work through the speculative forms of production that are endemic to both our social lives and social, or relational, life in general. Conversely, he focuses on the historic and fraught relationship between individuation and modern art, tracing the contours of this relationship in an attempt to envisage what a more genuinely collective form of art might look like.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coyne\u2019s background in independent art spaces, alternative education schools and critical pedagogy has crystallised into an interest in the collective or social aspects of education, shaping his various roles within arts education over previous years. Recently research has focused on outlining a non-liberal time\/space, the different socialities of burial mounds and land art, Black Metal and UK Garage, cryptid gifting practices and an erotics of friendship.  <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

  1. \u00a0John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: together with Death\u2019s Duel<\/em>, (1624, repr.; Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008), 33. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics<\/em>, trans. Edwin Churley (1677, repr.; New York and London: Penguin Random House, 1996), 68. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest<\/em> (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007), 163. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. Ibid., 67. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em> (New York and London: Penguin Random House, 2016), 6. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  6. As explained further below, within Wynter\u2019s work, a descriptive statement is any particular overarching framework for understanding what a human is. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  7. The uses of we\/our in this text are perhaps worth noting for two reasons. There is a strong and well argued critique against the use of we\/our\/us that, amongst other things, claims that their use assumes an in-group that not all readers are, nor would want to be, a part of. That our lived experiences and practices in the world are so varied and numerous that to make generalising claims about all humans is inevitably fraught. In one sense, Wynter shows this to be very much true, different people really do live in different worlds. However she is committed to making very concrete claims about how these different worlds, the different outcomes of our different descriptive statements, are constructed by all humans in roughly the same way. Spinoza too, who claims a very complex determinism for affect, whereby all assemblages of things produce the exact physical and experiential affect that they will produce, but the variables are so numerous that to all intents and purposes they appear as non-determined. There is then an odd universalism at the heart of Wynter\u2019s scathing critique of universalisms, and an odd inner orderliness to Spinoza\u2019s abundantly relational world system. Both want to make concrete claims about how humans function outside of their internal worlds of experience and thought. This is how I will use these pronouns most often in this text, however I do think that a more critical look at this use could be an interesting project for another time.


    Secondly, I often want to make a defence of the first-person plural pronouns because I believe that collectivity is one of the fundamental conditions of life, and that it is through individuation, the production of individuals, that the machinations of power, and incidentally Man, are made possible. This I believe is important to resist. So occasionally I will use we as that which stands against I-ness, as an aspirational pronoun that cleavers through the individual, describing only the parts of any of us that resists individuation. In these instances we will very rarely include me, and never in my totality.     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  8. Also explained further below, homo narrans is one of Wynter\u2019s answers for the problem of Man. It is the storytelling human, a figure who becomes conscious of the role they play in perpetuating their own epistemic frameworks, and can thus mediate or produce novel ways to see and engage the world around them. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  9. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,\u201d in Sylvia Wynter; On Being Human As Praxis<\/em>, ed. Katherine McKitterick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 20\u201321. Within this section Wynter talks about the uptick in global emissions of carbon dioxide in the 1950s as proof of the adoption of Man across the world. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  10. While race is an essential component of Wynter\u2019s system, this text will only touch upon it in passing. Part of the remarkable rigour of the Black Radical Tradition is the overarching materialist position that it produces precisely out of the lived experience of race, i.e., the forms of exclusion and exploitation that racial logics have produced provided the Black Radical Tradition with a vantage point to see through a set of assumptions that are almost ubiquitous in western thought and within the west\u2019s liberatory political traditions. It is this materialism that this text will predominantly focus upon. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  11. Sylvia Wynter, \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation\u2014An Argument,\u201d CR: The New Centennial Review<\/em> 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 260. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  12. For example she argues that those first attempts to cross the Atlantic in the late fifteenth century would not have even been thinkable without the rounding of the Cape of Bojador, precisely because it shattered the Christian descriptive statement epistemic belief in torrid zones. A belief which \u201cproved\u201d to the Christians of the time that there was nothing but sea to the west of Europe. Wynter, \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom,\u201d 278\u2013280. And in turn, she argues that the rounding was an attempt by the Portuguese to eliminate the Islamic monopoly on the Mediterranean gold trade, after having heard rumours about the source of the gold came from beyond the Sahara. Sylvia Wynter, \u201c1492 A New World View\u201d in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View<\/em>, Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1955), 10\u201311. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  13. This initial process of secularisation is spelt out far more succinctly by Wynter in \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom,\u201d between pages 276-278. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  14. \u00a0Which is to say, the series of intersecting epistemic crises, geopolitical and economic shocks that birthed Man; early colonial exploration; the Renaissance; the Scientific Revolution; colonial expansion and exploitation; the Reformation; to state but a few that predated Devotions<\/em>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  15. \u00a0Donne, Devotions up Emergent Occasions<\/em>,33. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  16. \u00a0Ibid. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  17. \u00a0Ibid. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  18. A vexed term in this context, but it seems to me, as an artist and not a philosopher, that a properly costed materialism either is itself a metaphysics of sorts, or simply behaves like one. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  19. As contrasted with a Cartesian mind-body dualism or the notion of the soul, whereby the mind is constituted by something immaterial.\u00a0 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  20. For your sake, I won\u2019t get into the long and contentious debate here about Spinoza\u2019s theology, or lack thereof. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  21. Aurelia Armstrong, \u201cAutonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and Feminism,\u201d in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza<\/em>, ed. Moira Gatens (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2009), 54. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  22. Ibid. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  23. Ibid. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  24. \u00a0Brian Massumi, \u201cNotes of the Translation and Acknowledgements,\u201d in Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus<\/em> (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), xv. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  25. Within the lore of the book, individuals with supernatural powers go through a \u201ctransition\u201d in early adulthood, whereby their powers mature and enhance. To the uninitiated the transition might appear as a fever. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  26. I am reminded of theorist and poet Fred Moten\u2019s musings on the term \u201cto settle\u201d in relation to students at Duke University, settler colonialism, and the protestant ethic as settling for a profound unhappiness. Fred Moten, \u201cA Conversation with Fred Moten 12\/02\/18,\u201d,Woodbine, New York, February 12, 2018, posted December 4, 2018, by Woodbine NYC, YouTube, 1:35:44\u20131:39:35, https:\/\/youtu.be\/I6b5N_u7Ebs?si=Kx8TY8EkQIpZEIXs<\/a>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  27. Wynter and McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species,\u201d 23. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  28. This is certainly a step too far for Wynter. The role that she places on language in producing descriptive statements is clear and she explicitly claims that our self-inscription is a uniquely human process. But given a Spinozan account of affect\u2014as that which comes first before thought, certainly before language\u2014then perhaps it is imaginable that animals, who absolutely do experience affect, have something akin to their own descriptive statements (albeit less organised ones). And this it to say nothing about the ongoing research into the extent of language in non-human animals. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  29. Qualified by his Blackness, something which complicates his capacity to adopt Man but absolutely does not preclude him. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  30. Wynter and McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species,\u201d 40. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  31. Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 424. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  32. Perhaps invoking the Marxist question of the agent of history.\u00a0 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  33. \u00a0Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 423. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  34. \u00a0Ibid., 5. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  35. The Invisible Man<\/em>\u2019s closet reminds me of Wynter\u2019s assertion that \u201ca millennially other<\/em> conception of the human to that of Man\u201d carried over in the plot, that other ways of being have always been maintained in hard to reach places. Sylvia Wynter and David Scott, \u201cThe Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,\u201d Small Axe<\/em>, no. 8 (September, 2000), 165. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  36. \u00a0Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 6. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Guide Quotes Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.  \u2014John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Together with Death\u2019s Duel Most of those who have written about the affects, and men\u2019s way of living . . . seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"\u00a0John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: together with Death\u2019s Duel<\/em>, (1624, repr.; Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008), 33.\",\"id\":\"23f28711-048e-432d-a68b-b7b359065e1c\"},{\"content\":\"Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics<\/em>, trans. Edwin Churley (1677, repr.; New York and London: Penguin Random House, 1996), 68.\",\"id\":\"2041d122-e472-43e8-a36c-99afca186343\"},{\"content\":\"Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest<\/em> (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007), 163.\",\"id\":\"9bbc8027-0ded-4e36-b9e7-c702b79e8aac\"},{\"content\":\"Ibid., 67.\",\"id\":\"94609750-6a27-4655-9a8e-d5dd42565f34\"},{\"content\":\"Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em> (New York and London: Penguin Random House, 2016), 6.\",\"id\":\"ade45a4c-7e2c-42bd-ad1c-fcb99bd5062e\"},{\"content\":\"As explained further below, within Wynter\u2019s work, a descriptive statement is any particular overarching framework for understanding what a human is.\",\"id\":\"0f110d45-676f-4757-8f0f-47fd5b091202\"},{\"content\":\"The uses of we\/our in this text are perhaps worth noting for two reasons. There is a strong and well argued critique against the use of we\/our\/us that, amongst other things, claims that their use assumes an in-group that not all readers are, nor would want to be, a part of. That our lived experiences and practices in the world are so varied and numerous that to make generalising claims about all humans is inevitably fraught. In one sense, Wynter shows this to be very much true, different people really do live in different worlds. However she is committed to making very concrete claims about how these different worlds, the different outcomes of our different descriptive statements, are constructed by all humans in roughly the same way. Spinoza too, who claims a very complex determinism for affect, whereby all assemblages of things produce the exact physical and experiential affect that they will produce, but the variables are so numerous that to all intents and purposes they appear as non-determined. There is then an odd universalism at the heart of Wynter\u2019s scathing critique of universalisms, and an odd inner orderliness to Spinoza\u2019s abundantly relational world system. Both want to make concrete claims about how humans function outside of their internal worlds of experience and thought. This is how I will use these pronouns most often in this text, however I do think that a more critical look at this use could be an interesting project for another time.


    Secondly, I often want to make a defence of the first-person plural pronouns because I believe that collectivity is one of the fundamental conditions of life, and that it is through individuation, the production of individuals, that the machinations of power, and incidentally Man, are made possible. This I believe is important to resist. So occasionally I will use we as that which stands against I-ness, as an aspirational pronoun that cleavers through the individual, describing only the parts of any of us that resists individuation. In these instances we will very rarely include me, and never in my totality.\",\"id\":\"b97df7a2-63c8-400c-b9c1-42dd82f43970\"},{\"content\":\"Also explained further below, homo narrans is one of Wynter\u2019s answers for the problem of Man. It is the storytelling human, a figure who becomes conscious of the role they play in perpetuating their own epistemic frameworks, and can thus mediate or produce novel ways to see and engage the world around them.\",\"id\":\"2a407375-9cf0-4aa5-9abc-6e3de4e7485e\"},{\"content\":\"Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,\u201d in Sylvia Wynter; On Being Human As Praxis<\/em>, ed. Katherine McKitterick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 20\u201321. Within this section Wynter talks about the uptick in global emissions of carbon dioxide in the 1950s as proof of the adoption of Man across the world.\",\"id\":\"6a800ef2-682f-4008-aa7e-9c4e63aac6ee\"},{\"content\":\"While race is an essential component of Wynter\u2019s system, this text will only touch upon it in passing. Part of the remarkable rigour of the Black Radical Tradition is the overarching materialist position that it produces precisely out of the lived experience of race, i.e., the forms of exclusion and exploitation that racial logics have produced provided the Black Radical Tradition with a vantage point to see through a set of assumptions that are almost ubiquitous in western thought and within the west\u2019s liberatory political traditions. It is this materialism that this text will predominantly focus upon.\",\"id\":\"97599b5b-0f12-430d-81f5-7febcc584f05\"},{\"content\":\"Sylvia Wynter, \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation\u2014An Argument,\u201d CR: The New Centennial Review<\/em> 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 260.\",\"id\":\"32e7ff8c-6350-4e82-b6c1-a16cdfcdd8bf\"},{\"content\":\"For example she argues that those first attempts to cross the Atlantic in the late fifteenth century would not have even been thinkable without the rounding of the Cape of Bojador, precisely because it shattered the Christian descriptive statement epistemic belief in torrid zones. A belief which \u201cproved\u201d to the Christians of the time that there was nothing but sea to the west of Europe. Wynter, \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom,\u201d 278\u2013280. And in turn, she argues that the rounding was an attempt by the Portuguese to eliminate the Islamic monopoly on the Mediterranean gold trade, after having heard rumours about the source of the gold came from beyond the Sahara. Sylvia Wynter, \u201c1492 A New World View\u201d in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View<\/em>, Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1955), 10\u201311.\",\"id\":\"5fb2cf81-e531-46c9-bbc4-84471ab277c5\"},{\"content\":\"This initial process of secularisation is spelt out far more succinctly by Wynter in \u201cUnsettling the Coloniality of Being\/Power\/Truth\/Freedom,\u201d between pages 276-278.\",\"id\":\"6252fed3-35af-40e1-a6ce-2f9b7117e4de\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Which is to say, the series of intersecting epistemic crises, geopolitical and economic shocks that birthed Man; early colonial exploration; the Renaissance; the Scientific Revolution; colonial expansion and exploitation; the Reformation; to state but a few that predated Devotions<\/em>.\",\"id\":\"1efc97a4-d16b-48a0-ae91-dc015b60944e\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Donne, Devotions up Emergent Occasions<\/em>,33.\",\"id\":\"e1c0464d-b76b-49dc-91e3-4bb631809441\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Ibid.\",\"id\":\"7abddacb-2446-4fc1-883e-98481b0e5d21\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Ibid.\",\"id\":\"41cc2498-aa64-4118-91a1-16a93a3d10bc\"},{\"content\":\"A vexed term in this context, but it seems to me, as an artist and not a philosopher, that a properly costed materialism either is itself a metaphysics of sorts, or simply behaves like one.\",\"id\":\"93739594-1ef0-49ba-8ee8-d70d6dfbaf8a\"},{\"content\":\"As contrasted with a Cartesian mind-body dualism or the notion of the soul, whereby the mind is constituted by something immaterial.\u00a0\",\"id\":\"b12ef523-27e4-40b7-b8d7-84c70b3f7afd\"},{\"content\":\"For your sake, I won\u2019t get into the long and contentious debate here about Spinoza\u2019s theology, or lack thereof.\",\"id\":\"e2238a06-cd91-4735-b5b4-b2a8980901c5\"},{\"content\":\"Aurelia Armstrong, \u201cAutonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and Feminism,\u201d in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza<\/em>, ed. Moira Gatens (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2009), 54.\",\"id\":\"09823d54-8882-4f87-a802-634b88dfc135\"},{\"content\":\"Ibid.\",\"id\":\"fb156c4c-2a71-4825-9185-c4d2288e44bd\"},{\"content\":\"Ibid.\",\"id\":\"97072837-0941-4839-96ed-a72780aafffe\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Brian Massumi, \u201cNotes of the Translation and Acknowledgements,\u201d in Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus<\/em> (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), xv.\",\"id\":\"5b326283-272e-4fe1-9e67-449667723ea6\"},{\"content\":\"Within the lore of the book, individuals with supernatural powers go through a \u201ctransition\u201d in early adulthood, whereby their powers mature and enhance. To the uninitiated the transition might appear as a fever.\",\"id\":\"f4267c9f-b11b-4c1a-b2a4-7ac71ef615aa\"},{\"content\":\"I am reminded of theorist and poet Fred Moten\u2019s musings on the term \u201cto settle\u201d in relation to students at Duke University, settler colonialism, and the protestant ethic as settling for a profound unhappiness. Fred Moten, \u201cA Conversation with Fred Moten 12\/02\/18,\u201d,Woodbine, New York, February 12, 2018, posted December 4, 2018, by Woodbine NYC, YouTube, 1:35:44\u20131:39:35,     https:\/\/youtu.be\/I6b5N_u7Ebs?si=Kx8TY8EkQIpZEIXs<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"b08907c0-c11c-4b4c-8e90-6ab08242d008\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter and McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species,\u201d 23.\",\"id\":\"36a507aa-631c-4582-a21b-f2844a170914\"},{\"content\":\"This is certainly a step too far for Wynter. The role that she places on language in producing descriptive statements is clear and she explicitly claims that our self-inscription is a uniquely human process. But given a Spinozan account of affect\u2014as that which comes first before thought, certainly before language\u2014then perhaps it is imaginable that animals, who absolutely do experience affect, have something akin to their own descriptive statements (albeit less organised ones). And this it to say nothing about the ongoing research into the extent of language in non-human animals.\",\"id\":\"aafdd87f-7e83-4533-a665-e863cb3c5724\"},{\"content\":\"Qualified by his Blackness, something which complicates his capacity to adopt Man but absolutely does not preclude him.\",\"id\":\"ebff3810-60ad-46fe-8a20-129ae78a18d3\"},{\"content\":\"Wynter and McKittrick, \u201cUnparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species,\u201d 40.\",\"id\":\"a4e7368a-16b6-40d5-a584-62461084df66\"},{\"content\":\"Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 424.\",\"id\":\"6a8460f4-59d6-4a95-8581-5b431a6391cf\"},{\"content\":\"Perhaps invoking the Marxist question of the agent of history.\u00a0\",\"id\":\"e51fd42f-ab46-4ce3-afe8-f03cf64ab854\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 423.\",\"id\":\"9de50254-4de5-4b7f-8a1f-a8999ffb3026\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Ibid., 5.\",\"id\":\"8a03a407-ca11-4700-ad71-d274a30bff27\"},{\"content\":\"The Invisible Man<\/em>\u2019s closet reminds me of Wynter\u2019s assertion that \u201ca millennially other<\/em> conception of the human to that of Man\u201d carried over in the plot, that other ways of being have always been maintained in hard to reach places. Sylvia Wynter and David Scott, \u201cThe Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,\u201d Small Axe<\/em>, no. 8 (September, 2000), 165.\",\"id\":\"75f615fd-b3fa-42eb-91bb-501353e71a72\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 6.\",\"id\":\"485bb41a-3187-4045-a040-1d9ac0e924e2\"}]"},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-groups","category-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1181,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}