Forms of Life
When we are giving an account of the world, or of religion, we often take one of two approaches. Either we give an account of individual humans and their actions or we give an account of the rules or concepts that organize the world, to which individual humans are subject. Put crudely: we focus on agency or structure.
Everyone knows the world is more complicated than this. Surely there is some complex, mutually constitutive relationship between what individual humans do and the social order they inhabit. The work of scholarship, whether it is historical, anthropological, philosophical, or religious, would seem to be offering an account of this messy middle, as it were.
However, some scholars reject this way of framing their work. For them, it is the messy middle that is primary, that is the only thing we can embrace with confidence. That messy middle is a particular swirl of collectives, concepts, institutions, stories, authorities, and perhaps material realities like bodies and the environment – all in motion, all realized in practice. All interconnected, responding to itself but irreducible to any part of itself (in Caribbean intellectual Sylvia Wynter’s term: “autopoietic”). Call it a “form of life” or, with Wynter, a “genre of being human.”
In this view, the swirl of activity that is our collective life (in this place, at this time) is irreducible to the actions of individual humans and impossible to describe in the language of rule-following. To look at a form of life from the outside always gets it wrong. To use language to characterize a form of life always distorts it, for it freezes something that is dynamic, reducing something that is irreducible. You cannot choose certain concepts from the swirl, the form of life, and use them to describe that form of life as a whole because concepts lose their meaning as soon as they are plucked from their natural habitat.
Taking scholarship as the project of explicating a form of life turns conventional assumptions inside-out. Claims about social order and human agency become derivative and provisional; everything is accountable to the swirl that is a form of life.
Drawing on ideas from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Talal Asad introduced the form-of-life framework into the study of religion – though a closely related concept, tradition, already had a life in theology, and theorizations of tradition by figures such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout resonate strongly with Asad’s work. Asad writes autobiographically about his orientation shifting from the concept-based political theology he found in his father to the quiet piety of his mother, a piety that Asad thought could only be rightly characterized as a form of life. In his later work, Asad has grappled with how political theology could be re-routed through the framework of a form of life, a project continued in intriguing ways by a new generation of scholars.
In Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion, the contributors demonstrate that Wynter is an important contributor to conversations about approaching political theology through forms of life. For those drawn to the form-of-life framework, what results can seem disappointingly quietist (mere explication) or critical (correcting misrepresentations of a form of life). The contributors to Words Made Flesh think with Wynter to showcase the constructive possibilities of this framework.
Reorienting our thinking around forms of life is no easy task, and the subtlety and eclecticism of Wynter’s thought reflects this difficulty. She grasps for and experiments with various tools appropriate to the task, from literature to history, from sociology to physics. By definition, a form of life is essentially untranslatable. It is a swirl of activity we are caught up in here, now, and any description of it from a distance will go wrong. Yet Wynter’s ambition is to consider multiple forms of life across time and space. Wynter has normative ambitions, too: she aspires to speak about how forms of life lead to indignity and violence.
In recent years, philosophers have addressed the challenge of comparing and evaluating forms of life by developing ways of describing something like the shape of a form of life, independent of its specific content. If a form of life is constantly responding to the dynamism within itself, we might ask: How effective is a form of life at responding to unexpected events, be they environmental crises or technological changes or encounters with the radically new? Rahel Jaeggi suggests that we commend forms of life that are more responsive, and that we challenge those that have a tendency to get stuck. From a different direction, William Paris proposes examining the characteristic speed at which a form of life moves – and to challenge those forms of life that impose their characteristic speed on other forms of life, with capitalism and slavery in mind.
Wynter approaches this problem from a different direction. For her, an essential aspect of a form of life (at least after a certain point in human history) is to tell a story about itself. Such storytelling is part of a form of life but also about that form of life, and as David Kline points out in his chapter of Words Made Flesh, Wynter almost always associates such storytelling with religion, sometimes “Sacred Logos.” In the way it participates in and defines a form of life, religion has a particular normative role, prescribing and proscribing. The problem is that representations of a form of life necessarily misrepresent that form of life – so religion involves telling stories that distort, that make rigid those distortions, and that impose those distortions on a social world.
If, in generic terms, religion misrepresents a form of life, Wynter investigates what this looks like in the particular case of European Christianity. She famously tracks the way religion, in that context, elevates certain images of Man; she also tracks the demonic, telling the story of Otherness. Those images shift over time; as Tapji Garba points out in his chapter of Words Made Flesh, the structure remains the same and we find a “reoccupation” of them with new content. (Garba associates Wynter’s method with that of Hans Blumenberg on this point.) In other words, Wynter is not claiming that certain concepts such as patriarchy or white supremacy exist outside of history but rather that they are generated through a mechanism characteristic of all forms of life, and they have a stickiness that resists myriad pressures.
In Wynter’s view, the mismatch between the way forms of life are represented, in European Christianity and its secularized avatars, and forms of life themselves is highly generative. Here is where Wynter’s own normative voice comes through: she commends projects that play with the swirl of practices, bodies, materiality, and institutions that characterize a form of life and that generate new stories accountable to that swirl, stories that challenge the dominant “Sacred Logos.” As authors in Words Made Flesh show, Wynter finds such projects in Rastafarianism, in Black popular music, and in her own literary practice. Moreover, she does not shy away from projects that integrate advances in science and technology as these, too, are aspects of the swirl of practice that composes our form of life.
Ambivalences
What role would religion have when Wynter’s vision of manifold new genres of the human is realized? Does she want to dismiss religion altogether or merely contest, as Justine Bakker puts it in her contribution to Words Made Flesh, “the power that invented extrahuman agents of determination, whether gods or Evolution, have over (the possibility for) human life, behavior, and experience”? Kline and Bakker answer this question from different vantage points. For Kline, Wynter wants us to escape our “autoreligious” tendency in search of “the new scientific objectivity and poetics of the trans-genre common outside.” For Bakker, Wynter’s works open up a “humbler” project that might be called “parareligion,” that is, a fundamental disruption to the ground and the grammar of religion.
Beyond ambiguity around the scope of the transformations that Wynter commends, Oludamini Ogunnaike points out that there is an open question in Wynter’s work around the viability of her constructive project. Can achieving the “open and self-correcting terms” that Wynter desires be achieved in the shadow of the hegemonic Words of Man? It may, indeed, be the case that, as Bakker puts it, “minority discourse must call in question the ‘grounding premise’ of all human systems” in search of “a truly new episteme, a ‘meta-discourse’.” Yet the sources of such a “new mode of revolt” remain ambiguous, leading Ogunnaike to warn that she may fall into a “supercessionist teleology” and Joseph Winters to consider the dangers of Hegelian “wholeness.”
Perhaps these worries point to deeper trouble for the usefulness of form of life as an analytical tool.
In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe eloquently argues that the European liberal “success” stories of modernity, ones that are accompanied by jargons of emancipation, free labor, or free trade, tend to elide their condition of possibilities, namely, the “intimacies” between all continents involved. By “intimacies,” she refers to the asymmetrical and uneven “scenes of close connection in relation to a global geography,” scenes that were “forgotten, cast as failed or irrelevant because they do not produce ‘value’ legible within modern classifications.” Against that elision, she argues that “social relations in the colonized Americas, Asia, and Africa were the condition of possibility for Western liberalism to think the universality of human freedom, however much freedoms for slaves, colonized, and indigenous peoples were precisely exempted by that philosophy.”
The stories that Lowe reads from European archives are precisely what Wynter categorizes as the stories of Man. But Wynter does not always foreground these enabling conditions, making it seem as if Man is an autonomous creation of the European form of life rather than a peculiarly, perhaps dangerously hybrid creation. Could the form of life framework be useful in such conditions of hybridity?
Wynter partially responds to this worry in “1492: A New World View” (1995) and to some extent in “Beyond Miranda’s Meaning” (1990). There, European conquest appears less as the result of extraordinary power than of the unsettled nature of Europe itself. She offers what she calls a “Janus-faced” explanation of the events that preceded the European conquest of the Americas. On the one hand, Columbus’s journey was funded by the regulatory schema of medieval Christianity; on the other, that schema’s domination had already begun to rupture.
Reading “1492,” Bakker suggests that Columbus, like Darwin later in the 19th century and Fanon in 1952, was a figure who existed “outside but central to the hegemonic story” that structured a particular European-Christian society. Columbus, a liminal subject, was “in the position to conjure alternative imaginaries, new ways of being human, unconventional epistemologies.” It was ironic, then, that Columbus and those Europeans who followed him made possible new “law-like” yet “degodded” forms of life. If, as Bakker frames it, Columbus constitutes the “ontological Other to the clergy,” perhaps we should equally turn our attention to those who constitute the ontological Other to Columbus’s transformational moment itself, whose stories are often skipped.
Here is the pivotal point in “1492”: For Wynter, what counts as “the necessary and indispensable prelude” to Columbus was the presence of the peoples of the Americas who challenged Columbus’ hierarchizing and homogenizing “accumulation of differences,” as well as the events preceding his voyage, such as the Portuguese landing on the shores of today’s Senegal. The story does not start with Columbus’s heretical self-reflection, but first and foremost, with the occasions that enabled him to encounter what was radically, physically “outside.”
Joseph Winters’s essay probes Wynter’s ambivalence, writing that she “aims to underscore a tension-filled interaction between a deconstructive, disordering moment that throws a certain imaginary into disarray and the reordering of the world according to a different, yet analogous, master core of nonhomogeneity.” But we might still wonder whether this maneuver is sufficient to account for the “different, yet analogous” bodies who gave Columbus the ability to then perform such a counter-poetic move.
This is just to say that any envisaging of new humanism or “new science of the word” today depends on the material, relational conditions that create space for minority perspectives to witness the “position of the unthought” or “the demonic ground” that is already there. These voices are present, haunting, regardless of our “inside-out” efforts.
Wynter meditates on the “deselected Other” in her novel The Hills of Hebron. As Rafael Vizcaíno discusses, the protagonist, Obadiah, has managed to actualize his autopoetic potential when he consciously carves a doll while, at the same time, thinking of his son, an Other. At this moment, Obadiah “stumbles upon God.” In some ways, Wynter’s depiction of Obadiah mimics her depiction of Columbus. What enables Obadiah’s self-reflection is neither simply old religion nor his own agency exercised as he carves a “fetish” in his pocket, but rather the haunting presence of the Other, outside of the village, that does not fit the schema. For Shamara Alhassan, what leads to Obadiah’s self-realization is a kind of “mental asylum.” It is “a site of political awakening because it functions as the ultimate institutional space of unreason in the prevailing order.”
The planetary activities that spill out beyond the shape of any single form of life, full of uninvited faces, are the “necessary and indispensable preludes” to the emergence of our new self-awareness, to the development of new forms of life. With this in mind, we can now respond to Wynter’s call to pursue an “ecumenical” vision of human beings. To experiment with new, more responsive forms of life is insufficient, for the very singularity of a form of life must always be open to question, explosion, and reconstitution.
