[The title “The Ceremony Must Be Found”] here refers to the fact that once these structural oppositions have been put into place, they must then function according to the laws applicable to all human systems. … They are thus the very condition of the collective behaviors through which each human system realizes itself as such a system. … The ceremonies therefore cannot be found for the doctors of philosophy to wed the earth to the moon, for Othello to remain wedded to Desdemona.
—Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” (1984; my italics)Cognition is arguably one of the most consequential discourses of exceptionalism. The ascendency of a cerebral subject representing the consubstantiality of brain with self in Western cultures, and particularly in their modern industrialized and medicalized relation to capital, has been described by Fernando Vidal as a form of “brainhood” aligned with racialized hierarchies. “Brainhood” correlates to ongoing failures to imagine, recognize, and relate to humanhood outside of a “‘punctual’, ‘detached’ and autonomous self, having self-awareness as its only constitutive property, and characterized by radical reflexivity, self-distancing, a sense of inwardness, a first-person standpoint, and disengagement from body and world” (Vidal 7). This cognitive posture, famously distilled in the Cartesian motif of the existential cogito, has served as a guarantor, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it in The End of Cognitive Empire, for “the exceptionalism of the Western world vis-à-vis the rest of the world, … drawing the abyssal line that separated, and still separates, metropolitan from colonial societies and sociabilities” (5). The South suffered, he contends, an epistemicide aside from which it is not possible to comprehend genocide. It is not surprising then that for more than a century, cognition—along with cognate paradigms including consciousness—has been a preoccupation of Caribbean and Latin American thinkers, from Anténor Firmin to Frantz Fanon, and Francisco Varela to Sylvia Wynter.
Cognition in the Caribbean Lakou
The Haitian Canadian American writer Myriam Chancy is one of the most recent to target the legacies of cognitive exceptionalism in her championing of a “lakou consciousness” (18), or a communal neighborhood courtyard consciousness. Rather than a solipsistic and self-consciously mentalized form of consciousness, “yard consciousness” is a site of transnational, transhistorical, intra-African/diasporic affiliative and interpretive practices, including collective ritual, countering the cognitive dissonance born of the experience of racism. Chancy merges the notions of autonomy and the autochthone to yield the neologism autochthonomies (3–6), marking a refusal to acquiesce to colonial disruptions and dislocations that contextualize the African diaspora as peoples out of historyFootnote 1 and without kin.Footnote 2 Lakou consciousness for Chancy comes into being in sociable, verbal, cooperative, and ritual action forms on kin-identified land. Citing Indigenous Knowledge movements, Chancy affirms, quoting Santos, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses, that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice” (7; see Santos et al.).
Lakou consciousness is not a utopian or euphoric framework—on the contrary, autochthonomies involve a framework of “amputation” in the sense that Fanon employed that metaphor, to “initiate a psychic shift or instantiation that requires loss for its activation, and, in that loss, opens up a space for the recovery of untold futures” (Chancy 47). Such a psychic activation was described by the Haitian thinker Anténor Firmin in his 1884 fellowship year at the Parisian Anthropological Society, long led by the early brain scientist Paul Broca. Firmin found himself in the paradoxical position of belonging to a society obsessed with the examination of skulls to resolve the question of whether there was one human species, or a murkier polygenic taxonomical situation summarized by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau as “l'humanité partagée en deux fractions très dissemblables, très inégales, ou, pour mieux dire, en une série de catégories subordonnées les unes aux autres, et où le degré d'intelligence marque le degré d’élévation” (“humanity divided in two very dissimilar, very unequal, camps [of intelligence], or rather, in a series of subordinate categories, with the degree of intelligence correlating to the degree of elevation”; 164).Footnote 3 Firmin ironized, “Est-il naturel de voir siéger dans une même société et au même titre des hommes que la science même qu'on est censé représenter semble déclarer inégaux?” (“Does it make sense to have seated as equals within the same society men whom the science which one is supposed to represent seems to declare unequal?”; lx). As he developed his theory of the equality of the human races, interlaced with a lucid evaluation of the epistemic promise and critical shortcomings of early brain research, Firmin questioned the health of his own mind, given the “depressive, and highly harmful” moral context in which he found himself (x).
Firmin's description of moral injury as mental hazard (the dulling of his mind, or esprit) resonates with Fanon's description of the black experience of racism as a form of dismemberment, an undoing of intactness. Yet Chancy asserts, channeling Octavia Butler's Kindred, that a disability studies reading can frame such amputation, and the phantom limb, as “productive” rather than purely pathogenic: the dulled mind carries within it the phantom of the unfettered mind. Chancy associates a disability studies approach to the cultural representation of raced bodies and experience with a salutary process of epistemological diversification: “If racism is disabling, then the disabilities created through the violence of racism are not in themselves disabling even if they are designed to be so” (33). Suggesting another “cognitive practice” marked by a refusal to subjugate “African, mobile, gendered subjectivities” to Western ones, Chancy indirectly evokes the possibility of a neurodiverse field of autochthonomies, a historical diasporic queering of cognition in the interest of “global cognitive justice” (7).
The potential for neuroqueer autochthonomies parallels critiques of a “colonial” relation enacted in the diagnosis and treatment of spectrum disorders and mental health. For Ralph J. Savarese, autistic embodiment, on a spectrum of cognitive experience potentially including “atypical proprioception and sensory processing, over- and under-inclusion of certain elements in the apprehension of the environment, a drive to associate, a persistent sense of animism, and radical synesthesia,” makes of the autist a cross-sensorial migrant in the terrain of a (neo)colonial neurology (“Toward a Postcolonial Neurology” 276). Savarese takes as an example The Wounded Storyteller, in which Arthur Frank “likens medical and scientific subjects to colonized peoples: the former's bodies have been conquered and their indigenous, which is to say personal, experience of illness or disability has been disregarded” (See 89). Without medicalizing racial subjugation despite its potential health impacts, or making race a metaphor for misconceptions and bias related to autism spectrum disorders, the work of Chancy and Savarese points to intersectional identifications with the embodied consequences of a colonizing paradigm of neuronormativity and racism, consequences of the cognitive exceptionalism that created such cognitive dissonance for Firmin in Paris in 1884.
If autochthonomies resist both truncations of history and attempts to fill them in, what might constitute the past and future rituals of a lakou consciousness? For this I turn to the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter's imperative to respond to the “crisis of the Caribbean situation” through “a ceremony able epistemologically to emancipate humankind's knowledge of the physical and purely biological levels of reality from our order-stabilizing / legitimating symbolic codes” (“Ceremony Found” 204). This ceremony of epistemological emancipation of physical and biological reality from legitimating codes performs the potential for new science to yield new world knowledges, symbolized by the nonconsummated marriage of Othello and Desdemona.
Wynter sees being itself (human and nonhuman being as a single field) as an archive of complex autopoietic unfolding. This vision is founded in the theorization by the Chilean biologist Francisco J. Varela of the organism-wide systems dynamic that “allows cells to configure their own relevant world.” Now a central concept in an array of disciplines including biology, autopoiesis is the space of the self-realization of the living, contrasting with an allopoietic system using external materials to produce something other than itself. Genetic transcription and editing, autoimmune “autobiography”Footnote 4 of the encounter with organic nonself, and motor intercorporeity resulting from embodied simulation of the active experience of others through the mirror neuron system, all exemplify autopoietic dynamism, as in this informal explanation by Varela:
Organisms have to be understood as a mesh of virtual selves. I don't have one identity, I have a bricolage of various identities. I have a cellular identity, I have an immune identity, I have a cognitive identity, I have various identities that manifest in different modes of interaction. … I'm interested in gaining further insight into how to clarify this notion of transition from the local to the global, and how these various selves come together and apart in the evolutionary dance. In this sense, what I've studied, say, in color vision for the nervous system or in immune self-regulation are what Dan Dennett would call “intuition pumps,” to explore the general pattern of the transition from local rules to emergent properties in life.
For Varela's neurophenomenologist colleague Evan Thompson, the cognitive science model of the brain has moved dramatically away from the “stimulus-driven, sequential processing computer” of the cognitivist turn from the 1950s through the 1970s, to a model that resonates with the dynamic, collective, and intercorporal structure of ceremony: “it is now widely recognized that brain activity is largely self-organizing, nonlinear, rhythmic, parallel, and distributed” (xix). Unlike Santos in his translation of “cognition” primarily as epistemology and knowledge, Wynter engages with an “onto-epistemological”Footnote 5 field of philosophical possibility inspired primarily by Gregory Bateson's “systemic perspective,” Varela's notion of the autonomy defining all living systems, and Fanon's concept of sociogeny.Footnote 6 (Wynter also cites many other interdisciplinary theorists of cognition, including Donald T. Campbell, James L. McClelland, O. D. Creutzfeld, and Daniel C. Dennett, to say nothing of literary and linguistic theorists of cognition such as Jacques Derrida.) Cognition is a foundational problematic in Wynter's thought, which can be confusing to readers who associate cognition writ large with the detached, masterful “brainhood” outlined by Vidal. Cognitive identity as brainhood is associated with valences of control that N. Katherine Hayles calls “the historical baggage of human domination and exceptionalism” (65). For Walter Mignolo, Wynter's exploration of cognitive science presents a distinct ethical and linguistic dilemma, and should be referenced, he suggests, as decolonial scientia “to distinguish it from the concept of science that unfolded from Galileo to Newton and from Newton to Einstein; and from Buffon and Linnaeus to Darwin” (148). But Wynter was sensitive to the most philosophically open and challenging dimensions of emerging cognitive theorizations in their own right, as philosophically generative of decolonial science, not just making space for its recognition and practice.
The Death of All Philosophy
This is not to contradict arguments by Joyce E. King and others that Wynter makes use of cognitive science to achieve “cognitive autonomy (from our debilitating and dangerous metanarrative)” (47). One can hardly underestimate the threatening quality of the cognitive metanarrative to those situated on the outside of the exceptional cultivation of rationality in Western culture, and the dys-selection of human demographics from the story circle of homo narrans:Footnote 7
For all these “wrongs” collectively function as the underside costs of the aporia of the secular West, as an aporia generated by our performative-enactment and behavioral-praxis of the planetarily extended, secular Western, now neo-Liberal-monohumanist genre of being hybridly human Man, itself over-represented in homo oeconomicus cum neo-Darwinian terms as homo sapiens sapiens as if this self-definition were isomorphic with the being of being human as Homo Narrans itself. (Wynter, “Ceremony Found” 222)
Cognition gains core parts of its identity through the Western philosophical construction of philosophy itself as something that could not have existed as a tradition in precolonial or colonial Africa, or in the external sites of Africa's diasporas. For G. W. F. Hegel in his preface to the 1812 Science of Logic, philosophy is a self-construing method that “enables philosophy to be an objective, demonstrated science” (“Preface”). Yet he characterizes black life, in Philosophy of History, by “the fact that consciousness has not yet attained any substantial objective existence” (111). Souleymane Bachir Diagne, in The Ink of Scholars, concludes that “the activity of philosophy has for centuries represented its ‘zero point’ with the features of the African” (2), and this zero point converges with marginalization from the rational identity of the real itself, as in Hegel's theorization of a chiasmic relationship between the Western-identified quality of the rational and the real itself: “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational” (“Hegel's Philosophy”). Immanuel Kant tied all philosophy to cognition, and specifically to cognition of reason and knowledge “of the universal in the abstract” (175). Non-Western nations, “for instance, the Chinese and a few Indians,” employed reason, Kant asserted, yet not with regard to “conceptions and to rules in the abstract” (33), leaving brainhood as the unique domain of Western thought. Mystical faculties, including “presension” and “the conception of the incogitable,” he equates unequivocally with “the death of all philosophy” (175). In a brief stretch of Western modern time and territory, an epistemic isomorphism emerged between “the contemporary Western industrialized order” and a both local and supracultural conception of the human species, contrasting, as Wynter sees it, with the “culturality of all other human orders” (“Pope” 17). In the metanarrative of cognitive exceptionalism, there is no philosophy in the lakou, and no lakou in philosophy.
There is some overlap between the Foucauldian concept of the episteme and Wynter's idea of ceremony as “each such societal order's genre-specific mode of material provisioning, whose function is to provide for and secure the overall realization of a specific genre of being hybridly human, its lawlikely teleologically determinant mode of autopoietic institution and/or pseudo-speciation” (“Ceremony Found” 203). The “Other” of “Man” as a “specific, local-cultural conception of the human” is not woman for Wynter, but “those categories [including women] of humans who are projected, in the terms of the same Origin narrative or ‘official creation story’ of Evolution, as having been bio-evolutionarily dysselected—i.e., all native peoples, and most extremely, to the ultimately zero degree, all peoples of African descent” (“Africa” 25).
And yet, gaining distance from a dangerous metanarrative is only a small part of Wynter's work on cognition. Anthony Bogues notes Wynter's alleged comment to Geri Augusto in 2002 that she was trying to “develop a theory of social cognition” (After Man 338n65), and although Wynter does not seem in her published work to have followed the late-twentieth-century and millennial explosion of the field of social neuroscience, or synergistic developments such as the discovery of mirror neurons, key concepts were already introduced as potentialities in the work of Varela. These included the concept of embodied cognition and theorization of the roots of what is now called “4E cognition,” evoked by Eleanor Rosch in her introduction to the revised edition of Varela's The Embodied Mind: “embodied cognition, enaction, embedded cognition, extended mind, grounded cognition, situated cognition, nonrepresentational cognition, emergent cognition, and anti-Cartesian cognition” (xlvii; my italics).
The centrality of Bateson's work to Wynter's problematization of cognition rests on the importance of a systems theory framework. For Bateson, contrary to the image of “occidental man” as “an autocrat with complete power over a universe which was made of physics and chemistry,” for whom “biological phenomena were in the end to be controlled like processes in a test tube,” cognitive science was sounding the death knell of positivist empiricism: “that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole” (47). Wynter seems to have been fascinated by “the curious twist in the systemic nature of the individual man whereby consciousness is, almost of necessity, blinded to the systemic nature of the man himself” (Bateson 47). Much of the human's sampling of the world and its internal dependencies is conscious according to Bateson, “but only after it has been processed by the totally unconscious process of perception” (41). Far from demonstrating the existence of a transcendent subject, this meant for Wynter that there would always be a dynamic, mobile connection between the “‘sinful by nature’” subject that represented the “cognitive incapacity of fallen mankind” and compensating hegemonic claims by the church (“Unsettling” 276). The systems model of a combination of what Bateson called “competition and mutual dependency” (39) would unsettle political positionality not toward deconstructive différance per se (difference and [its] deferrals) but toward Jean Baudrillard's theory of a “Mirror of Production” (19), because the subject is continually being produced as variation. In this boundless emergence, homo narrans can accommodate “the techne, perhaps, of a rhetor-neuroscience … at once inside/outside the figural domain of our order. As such a new cognitive mechanism it must … take as its proper sphere what Gowlett calls the ‘long perspective’ of the hominid-into-human self-making/modelling/figuring” (“Ceremony Must be Found” 55).
It is in this sense that Mignolo, despite the need to recast cognitive science as decolonial scientia, recognizes that it is “across both neurobiological cognition and decolonial practices that Sylvia Wynter's work and her intellectual disobedience emerge” (107). Disobedience, because the discourse of neurobiology helps us to read the biocentric basis of human origin stories, and “to notice that evolution, dysselection, and biocentricity are origin stories with an ontological effect” (107). Going further in this direction, Nandita Sharma frames Wynter's interpretations of cognitive discourses as attempts to persuade us to “become cognitive revolutionaries” (179). Like Katherine McKittrick, Sharma sees this space of revolution as a matter of corelationality. For McKittrick, a “co-relational human being is the flesh-and-blood cognitive figure who is at once physiologically organic, cognitively responsive, and creatively inventive and, in this simultaneity, provides the origin stories through which we make sense of our flesh-and-blood and neurological and cultural claims to humanness” (“Axis” 144).
McKittrick sees in the figure of the cognitive revolutionary a field for engagement with what she calls “Wynter's wager” (144). The notion of the wager is intertextual with “Pascal's wager,” an argument for betting one's life on the existence of God, informed by Pascal's figure of the human as the “thinking reed” that may be crushed by a drop of water but is “more noble than that which killed him” because he knows “the advantage the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this” (Pascal 80). Western modernity is singularly distinguished by the belief that human cognition is superior to the structural intelligence or autopoietic dynamism of the universe that generated the human. Wynter's wager is to “relativize the West's hitherto secular liberal monohumanist conception of our being human, its overrepresentation as the being of being human itself” (Wynter and McKittrick 31).
The ceremony unquestionably fell victim to the early modern identification of the philosophically committed individual as the res cogitans, or thinking thing, and later to an ethos of empirical scientific neutrality and disembodied authority. Yet according to Wynter's own understanding of cognitive debates, the ceremony might precisely be the model of a nonsolipsistic, distributed, rhythmic, nonlinear, embodied autopoietic cognition; as irrepressible as life. The ceremony for Wynter aligns with initiation or symbolic birth, “as one of the matrix social inventions founding to all human ‘forms of life,’ to, therefore, their poesis of being, and correlated modes of symbolically-coded, rather than genetically-programmed, eusociality” (“Africa” 39).
Wagering on Ceremony
Relatively little analysis has been focused on the term ceremony itself in Wynter's work, although it presents an enigmatic, poetic center of gravity in both the 1984 “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” and its 2015 rewriting as “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoietic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and the Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” In those two texts, Wynter's ceremony is inspired by John Peale Bishop's poem “Speaking of Poetry,” a title that evokes the centrality of poetic (and poietic) rhetorico-symbolic emergence of even the most biological of gestalts for Wynter.
In “The Ceremony Must Be Found,” Wynter uses ten lines of Bishop's poem as an epigraph, punctuated by ellipses, which turn out, on close examination, to signal that she has condensed a forty-verse poem into a single short stanza. This transformation, which includes several minute deviations from the original, is so unusual in poetic citation, and so radical in its condensation, that Wynter has in effect rewritten Bishop's poem as a new montage. The ceremony in the synthesized epigraph is the sexual consummation of Desdemona and Othello's marriage, which must occur yet remains always a cognitive projection (or desire) in time:
In the 2015 “The Ceremony Found,” the epigraph is shortened further:
The identification of the ceremony with one of the most canonical of Western literary masterpieces, William Shakespeare's Othello, and with the “making kin” magic that does not occur behind the bedroom door, even as the reader “sees” beyond the bedroom door in the tragic mesh of events and interpretations, presents a motif of “never before heard music” along with oneiric metaphors and visual symbols like torches going out. The ceremony that must be found is, in the context of Wynter's condensation of Peale's poem, a ceremony of consummation between the “Moor” and the Venetian senator's daughter, in which never-heard music and torches being extinguished signal a suspension of cognitive access to intimate human potentialities. The action quality of the ceremony—even the action of what does not occur—is crucial to the finding of the ceremony, particularly in terms of the role of music, rather than the alphabetic print metonymic of the West's modern cognitive exceptionalism. For McKittrick, music is important to the “redefining of the human as praxis, perhaps looking to and reexamining those cosmic sounds, the neural substrates that underlie musical performance …” (160). Intermedial studies of word and sound in literature help to outline a model of a transcultural, nondenotative, sensorimotor cognitive functioning not in the reductionist cognitivist sense of discrete representative correlations to objective universals, but as the site and enactment of ceremony. Ceremony ushers environment into philosophy, consistently with Thompson's comment that “[a] cognitive being's world is not a pre-specified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but is rather a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being in and through its mode of coupling with the environment” (xxvii).. Ceremony involves the strange music of what does not happen, cannot happen—until cognitive consummation of possibility emerges on a model of autopoiesis.
Millennial neuroscience arguably allows literary scholars to ask questions—gingerly—that open previously foreclosed pathways of exploration of Afro-diasporic autochthonomous creativity. David Herman describes narratively organized cognition, which in the context of music could be extended to sensorily organized embodied cognition, as “distributed mind,” meaning “supra- or transindividual activity distributed across groups functioning in specific contexts, rather than as a wholly internal process unfolding within the minds of solitary, autonomous, and de-situated cognizers” (304). Wynter's insertion of the notion of ritual, kinetic, highly charged, initiatory ceremony into the framework of the neurobiological is indispensable for processing epistemic change in millennial-era neuroscience away from cognitive exceptionalism, and toward cognitive justice. Against cognitive exceptionalism, in the sciences and the humanities, it is time to take up “Wynter's Wager.”
