Wynter’s Autopoietic Overturn and Nonadaptive Agency

2022

More recently, Wynter’s historical insight correlates with the geological sciences, which trace humanly-produced nuclear residues as stratigraphic indicators of Earth’s exit from the Holocene epoch. Wynter’s model allows us to explain the existential threat of this moment in the following way: the auto-instituting domination of the I/We in the image of Western bourgeois Eurohumanist “Man” (descriptive statement), in order to maintain the adaptive advantage conferred by its coordinates of reference, is rapidly eroding the possibility of the human species continued existence as such. The catastrophic, manifestly-real consequences of this third level of existence (under its current lawlike governing terms) has become a threatening trap, in response to which Wynter proposes nothing short of a historico-epistemic paradigm shift built upon a “counter-cosmogony”.

Patricia Reed, "Wynter’s Autopoietic Overturn and Nonadaptive Agency", in Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, eds.: A. Franke, E. Giuliano, D. Ryner, C. Tancons, Z. Xiang and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, (Leipzig: Spector Books), 2022. Link