Abstract Using the concept of immunity as a generative case study, this article explores the methodological implications of Sylvia Wynter's liberatory counterhumanism for science and technology studies (STS), asking, What would STS look like if Wynter were considered one of its foundational figures? The author contends that centering Wynter in STS would offer new methodological starting points, innovative narrative modes, and an important public-facing role for the field. To develop this Wynterian STS, the author uses the concepts of immunity, the immune system, and inflammation to explicate Wynter's understanding of technics, or the cultural stories that humans tell about who and what we are. Wynter argues that cultural stories like Darwinian evolution have both defined the human on exclusionary terms and justified social inequality as “natural.” Immunity and related concepts are historically specific cultural stories that not only enrich Wynter's critique of modernity but also provide a genealogy of the technics that have upheld the overrepresentation of Man. A Wynterian STS would denaturalize these technics and help identify less exclusionary stories about who and what we are. However, as this article's critical review of STS literatures demonstrates, any new concepts of the human must center the perspectives of marginalized communities. By situating these experiences as the starting point for analysis, STS could help identify scientific concepts like inflammation that can be mobilized to anticolonial ends, showing that the unjust social order is not natural but, indeed, humanly authored.
Abstract Where are the directors haunted by the sickness of the blues? This article responds to this question and positions the poetics of the lumpen, an underclass of people who bear the status of disabled, migrant, homeless, substance user, sex worker, and so on, as the ontological breech that could rupture our colonial ways of knowing/being/feeling. This rupture moves us beyond the neoliberal framework advocating that our ability to work is our defining principle for determining our rights and humanity. Taking Sylvia Wynter's passing phrase lumpen poetics of the blues, this article defines, builds, and deploys it as a theoretical framework to analyze Judah Attille's 1988 experimental short film Dreaming Rivers. The film, a product of Attille's work with the Black British queer and feminist collective Sankofa, depicts the dreams of Miss T, a Black migrant woman from Saint Lucia, upon her deathbed in England. The experimental form of Dreaming Rivers allows Attille to use cinema as an affective technology that transmits Miss T's blues to audiences rather than representing them as a distinct linear narrative. This experimentation is not dissimilar to the formal innovations found in the blues’ sonic or literary histories. And while much criticism has been devoted to those legacies, less has been said about what a blues poetics might look like cinematically beyond its narrative focus. The lumpen poetics of the blues is that attempt, and also navigates the difficulty this experimental film encounters by being doubly othered as not just culturally Black but produced by (or about) a class of people that are “degenerate” in society (the lumpen). By gazing from below, Dreaming Rivers is able to cinematically convey the pregnant ambitions of a dying migrant woman against a world that has denied her the right to a life.
Abstract By examining the relevance of Sylvia Wynter's work in the context of AI, beginning with her 1992 analysis “ ‘No Humans Involved’ ” on the Rodney King beating, this article argues that her oeuvre highlights the peculiar risks of privileging and naturalization of certain public rhetorics, disciplinary frames of reference, methodologies, and epistemologies over others, especially as political interests and economic valuation drive tech design, development, and deployment. Wynter's writings also directly challenge commonplaces about AI innovations as inexorable, especially in relation to sanguine arguments about human-centered AI, the future of work, and civilization's progress. Her work in particular has important implications for civil rights and international human rights policies that risk becoming lost in current debates over humans in the loop and algorithmic taxonomies of human types.
Abstract This article mounts a critical interpretation of Sylvia Wynter's work and champions her effort to salvage a reenchanted humanism. It traces her use of a frog's perspective—a phrase with extensive critical antecedent starting with Friedrich Nietzsche—to show how this has always been conducted in relation to other kinds of being, not at their expense. It argues that the frog's perspective is her distinctive critical method, one that reconciles totalization and rupture, abstraction and earthliness, and that this method sustains a nonanthropocentric yet human-centered form of reenchantment. It critiques certain grandiose aspects of her project, weighing its breadth, weirdness, and humanity.
