Sylvia Wynter and the Concept of the Homocene

What—or who—is responsible for the state of the planet? The “or who” suggests a distinction between two types of responsibility. One we may term “causal responsibility”: when X causes Y, X bears causal responsibility for Y; Y is what it is by virtue of what X is. A second we may term “existential responsibility,” where a salient feature of such responsibility is who one is.

Consider, for instance, the responsibility parents feel for the deeds of their offspring. Reductively we might say, “If this child had not been born, this deed would not have occurred; therefore, what this elder person is—the parent of the child—is causally responsible for what was done.” But in most such cases, it is not the mere fact of parentage that matters as much as the manner in which one parents. The prototypical parent in such cases rues that they were not a better parent, rather than ruing having been a parent altogether. Being a better parent is, ultimately, a matter of character, speaking to who one is. Existential responsibility thus invokes a notion alien to strictly causal accounts of responsibility: being held to account in the future for what one has done in the past or, simply, accountability.

How is the causal versus existential responsibility distinction relevant to the terms laid out in the title of the present essay, “Sylvia Wynter and the Homocene”?

Let us begin with Wynter. Dating back at least as far as her classic “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism,” originally published in two parts in the Jamaica Journal (1968–1969) and now also reprinted in a recent collection of Wynter’s writing bearing the same title, Wynter has been concerned with the question of how to study human reality without eradicating either what can be termed its etic of emic dimensions.

These latter terms, “etic” and “emic,” are used to indicate whether what is being studied is approached in terms endogenous to the community under study or exogenous. Emic studies explain what is meaningful from the perspective of the community under study. Etic studies explain what is meaningful from a vantage external to that community. While many particular methods depend on prioritizing one of these (often by excluding the other), well-rounded methodologies imply the call for exploring both etic and emic accounts of social phenomena in order to understand them multi-dimensionally. Indeed, rigorous methodology may require, in short, working out specific permutations of the etic and the emic, as opposed to a mere combination of the two.

Wynter’s work can be understood in part as an effort to put a particular permutation of the etic and the emic on the table. This point is developed implicitly in her 1984 essay, “The Ceremony Must Be Found,” whose core argument has been rehearsed in all her writing since. The central issue is that the human sciences and the humanities (the studia humanitatis) presume, in effect, an emic approach to what Wynter terms “Man.” The episteme of the modern age is understood from the vantage of what Wynter, following Clifford Geertz, calls the “local culture” of Man. Man is the figure that emerged through the creation of a global consciousness in the fifteenth century onward, where the globe came to be understood as European dominion. Man is the figure who is entitled to rule the world, to lord over its land and peoples.

For Wynter, the local culture of Man involves the over-representation of Man as if it were the human. What she terms Man’s “human Others,” those who represent the lack of Man-ness, are represented as if they both are and are not human. On the one hand, they are represented as if they are sub-human, since only Man is portrayed as genuinely human and they are Man’s lack. On the other hand, as in the grammar of lordship and domination, Man’s subordination of Man’s human Others is represented as a form of tutelage and care; when Man acts, Man acts in the interest of all of humanity, such that humanity includes the human Others, though ambiguously and with the ubiquitous threat of violent exclusion from the purported benefits of Man’s lordship.

For the humanities and the human sciences, then, there is the basic problem of their unwitting elaboration in the emic terms of Man. These create knowledge that is intelligible from within Man’s “local culture,” even as that local culture has been globalized through colonization and the ever-encroaching conquest of market logics and epistemicidal practices. Hence, inhabitants of the globe face the problem of being everywhere internal to the episteme of Man.

Hope, on this account, rests in those engines of epistemic production whose relationship to the episteme of Man is ambiguous. Global conquest implies there being no sites of pure exteriority to the episteme of Man, outside of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. For those whose communities have already been colonized, enslaved, converted, or manipulated by Man, one has already lived one’s life internal to Man’s episteme. However, the ambiguous exclusion of the human Others from humanity implies the possibility of a double consciousness where one comprehends that, in terms emic to Man’s episteme, one is sub-human. Such is the character of liminal persons, who are liminal in the sense of being both marginalized and incorporated; they are incorporated into the broad definition of humanity but marginalized out of the narrow definition of Man, which represents itself as speaking for the human.

The episteme works to resolve this contradiction of sub-human beings manifesting human consciousness through what I will term homodicean logics, which would present the false appearance of the contradiction being resolved. But where liminal people develop what Paget Henry terms “potentiated second sight” and Jane Anna Gordon calls “potentiated double consciousness,” there is an effort to produce an etic perspective on the culture to which one is nonetheless internal. Liminal people whose double consciousness is potentiated experience the shared elements of their communities as both insiders and outsiders.

Wynter’s call, then, is for a liminal and potentiated perspective on the episteme of Man. One of the implications of this call is for an understanding of Man’s ecological consciousness. The logic of Man is expressed in terms of global dominion: the distinction between lands and peoples is collapsed, since ultimately Man is entitled to both. As in W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic definition of whiteness (“the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”), the colonial logic implies planetary property, rather than mere rule over people. The logic of the terra nullius, for instance, implies that if a people has not already initiated a domineering relationship to the land, then both the land and the people must be colonized by Man. From this follows a pursuit of hyper-accumulation in which damage to the earth is viewed as a problem to be managed by Man rather than as evidence that Man is a problem.

The most popular term for the climatic context produced by this dynamic today is Anthropocene. We now live on a planet where, unlike in previous eras, human activity is the primary force of geological change. A competing conception is that of the Capitalocene, which highlights the role of capitalism as the primary driver of such transformation and destruction. Anthropocene names human beings as the cause of climate change; Capitalocene names a mode of production adopted by human beings as the cause of climate change.

How do these categories of Anthropocene and Capitalocene relate to our initial categories of causal and existential responsibility? In implicating human agency as a causal factor in the destruction of the planet, each seems to evoke existential responsibility. Yet as plain statements of fact, these conceptions begin with the matter of causal responsibility. The Anthropocene is defined by human agency as cause of climatic transformation. The Capitalocene is put forth as an alternative naming of a particular human orientation, toward the functional rule of the owners of wealth that produces wealth, as the predominant cause of such transformation. It is only if one takes these terms as implicating oneself that they entail existential responsibility.

Here we may unpack the relationship between causal and existential responsibility on the one hand and etic and emic descriptions on the other. Wholly etic descriptions would seem to rule out existential responsibility altogether. It is only within the context of a human community that existential responsibility is intelligible. Purely etic descriptions nihilate who one is to the point of pure anonymity; one is defined in terms of characteristics that nonetheless do not touch one’s character.

Emic descriptions, though, not only are capable of invoking existential responsibility but generally do exactly that: the internal logic of the community rests on holding people accountable. Yet in doing so, emic descriptions face the problem of obscuring a variety of causal responsibilities since the emic perspective can only be conscious of that which is meaningful to the community.

For a community in denial of its effects on the world beyond it, purely emic descriptions may implicitly preempt an understanding of causal responsibilities and, in so doing, blunt understanding of existential responsibilities. They face the problem of ideology, in the way that Wynter invokes Paul Ricoeur’s conception of ideology as, in effect, erasing non-ideological frameworks. Emic descriptions are intra-ideological: they occur within the framework of the worldview or episteme adopted as the “local culture” of one’s community. Insofar as one’s community denies its causal responsibility for states of affairs, its emic descriptions reify bad faith about the community’s existential responsibility, as well as the existential responsibilities of members of the community.

In this regard, “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene” are correctives that function at the level of an etic description of causal responsibility, which run up against the bad faith of 20^th– and 21^st-century human communities regarding their causal responsibility for transforming the planet’s climate. If enough people adopt this etic perspective on humanity, then the function would be the transformation of at least some of the emic perspectives and thus an integrated conception of human causal and existential responsibility for climate change. Yet we note that these terms are introduced by human agents themselves. What this implies is the liminality of those who have coined and popularized these terms; they have developed a marginal perspective on their society from within the society.

Yet, let us here return more explicitly to Wynter. Wynter’s challenge to Marxism, for instance, is that Marxists remain internal to the episteme of Man. Marxists could break with the ideology of capital—and one might argue here, perhaps especially so because Marxism’s intellectual history is essentially coterminous with the history of capitalist ideology, as opposed to its precursors—but they failed to see Marxism as nonetheless internal to what Wynter terms the homo oeconomicus description of Man. If Marxism is a form of potentiated double consciousness vis-à-vis capitalism, Wynter’s charge is that it fails to be a liminal perspective on the episteme of Man, which produces capitalism but is not exhausted by capitalism.

What this suggests is, for those sympathetic to Wynter’s account of the episteme of Man, that an alternative conception be put forth. In this regard, I take Nishitani Osamu’s discussion of anthropos and humanitas to be instructive. Nishitani notes that it is commonplace (though with some exceptions) to find a particular configuration of these word stems in Western European languages. Though ostensibly anthropos is simply the Greek term for humanity and humanitas the Latin term for humanity, their contemporary usage implies a general schism. As in notions of “the humanities,” “humanism,” and “human dignity,” we typically find the humanitas stem in the context of affirming the meaningfulness and value of the human. Anthropos, by contrast, as in “anthropocentric” and “anthropogenic,” is often charged with being causally responsible for the ills of human communities.

The contrast between the humanities and anthropology here is telling. In the logic of the humanities, the one who studies is engaged in essentially the same practice as the ones under study; there is a sympathetic and/or empathetic endeavor to understand what is meaningful in human expression so that those meanings can be reused, reconfigured, or taken as inspiration for subsequent acts of expression. The study of novelists and poets is very typically undertaken by novelists and poets. The humanities, at their core, necessitate an emic understanding of what is studied, even if elements of the etic may emerge around the margins.

Anthropology, by contrast, begins with the etic: it is the outsider’s perspective on the species. In its 18^th and 19^th century variants, this is clear as anthropology is roughly indistinct from European raciology—it is an account of purportedly racial differences found throughout the globe. As Anténor Firmin had argued, that variety of anthropology was really a science akin to astronomy or geography, a charting of physical differences rather than an attempt to understand the source of those differences in terms of either their physical environment (with the exception of Kantian “physical geography”) or their cultural environment. Anthropology thus did not take seriously European Man as an object of study; European Man was simply the a priori standard of humanity against which others were judged as deviations.

In the 20^th century, anthropologists began to take culture seriously, inspired in part by Du Bois’s radical challenges to the human sciences as mediated by Franz Boas. Cultural anthropology, with fieldwork as its methodological fixture, came to the fore. But this transformation left the etic as the lingua franca of anthropology: the model was of the European subject traveling the globe to find cultures that could function as objects of study for Man (propter nos—“for us”—to invoke another Wynterism). The anthropologist would have to develop an emic understanding of those cultures, but the purpose of such understanding was to produce an etic anthropological discourse. Gaining the trust of the communities under study called methodologically for reciprocal ethical relations between the anthropologist and the community, but as a science there was no pretense that anthropology was being performed reciprocally such that Europeans served equally as objects of study.

In short, whereas relations between humanitas and humanitas rest on bidirectional relations of shared meaning and reciprocity, relations between humanitas and anthropos are imagined as unidirectional, despite the obvious forms of denial that this entails regarding questions of exploitation, appropriation, etc.

The issue in short, then, is that for the episteme of Man, humanitas and its cognate, homo (as in homo sapiens, “Ecce homo,” etc.) refer to Man in Man’s emic terms. Discussion of the anthropos is rooted in Man’s etic terms. The failure of anthropology to achieve authenticity, as argued by the likes of Cheikh Anta Diop and Jacob Pandian, derives from its inability to develop an etic perspective on Man, which would in turn involve comprehending how Man’s etic apprehension of the anthropos is grounded in Man’s emic conceptualization of himself, homo.

What Wynter has argued, following Lewis R. Gordon, is that this grammar recapitulates the logic of theodicy: the presumption of Man as a limitless source of knowledge, potency, and beneficence is rationalized despite the obvious contradictions that limitlessness in any of these areas would entail for limitlessness in the others. Wynter terms this phenomenon biodicy, because it is Man, a living being (bios), that is rationalized, rather than God (theos). This argument stems, in part, from Wynter’s conception of the contemporary episteme of Man as deriving from a pseudo-Darwinian origin narrative in which Man as homo oeconomicus is naturally selected, but the human Others are naturally dys-selected. The structure of the argument suggests, then, that biodicy ought to be conceived as one manifestation of a greater phenomenon, what I term homodicy. Homodicy is a theodicy that replaces God (theos) with Man (homo). Its biodicean variant rationalizes the supposed omnibenevolence of homo oeconomicus. What I term its logodicean variant does the same for what Wynter identified as the earlier conception of Man, homo politicus, for whom it is the fetishization of rationality that sets the theodicean grammar into motion.

The question at hand, then, is whether the concepts of the Anthropocene or even the Capitalocene are internal to the homodicean logic of Man’s episteme. As a simple point of fact, in Wynter’s terms it is the global figure of Man that is both producing climate change and reaping the vast portion of the rewards of the practices that produce it. If this is so, then the more fitting term would be Homocene: it is Man who makes the contemporary climate be as it is, not the anthropos or “human Others.” By this count, “Capitalocene” certainly fares better but raises additional issues; can there not be, as Wynter’s discussion of transumptive chains suggests, forms of Man that outlast capitalism and thus make techno-managerial views of the planet, as in the turn to geo-engineering as a response to climate change, normative post-capitalism? Indeed, given the dialectical relationship between capitalist and socialist nations, the familiar historic dynamic is of socialisms that seek to compete with capitalisms to be, in effect, the better Man.

While I am not the first to use the term “Homocene,” my proposal is thus that the term be used not as a replacement for Anthropocene or Capitalocene, but as an alternative whose meaning stands in relation to these. In other words, Wynter’s work helps us understand the interrelation of anthropogenic, capitalogenic, and homogenic phenomena. The paradox that climate change poses for the planet’s “human Others” is of inhabiting a world wherein one’s contributions to anthropogenic climate change are in fact marginal but one nonetheless bears existential responsibility for it, albeit indirectly. In other words, because Man is both causally and existentially responsible for the Homocene, Man’s human Others bear existential responsibility for overthrowing the planetary rule of Man and creating the conditions under which a geologic era after the Homocene can come into being.

Thomas Meagher

Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.