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The economic and biological genre of being human that continues to pervade Western social and political contexts begins roughly in the nineteenth-century by way of liberal humanist intellectuals (Ibid., 314). As we will see below, while Man 2 is both continuous and discontinuous with Man 1 and the theocentric conception of being human, the principles that Man 2 presupposes are quite distinct (Ibid., 318). Man 2 is a secular conception of what it means to be human. The distancing of Man 2 from a religio-centered construction is due to its focus on a biocentric and economic mode of being human.

Generally speaking, this conception of the human is dependent upon Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In particular, two premises of Darwin’s theory are particularly important for Wynter’s construction of Man 2: a) that the human exists “in a line of pure continuity with all other organic forms of life” (Ibid., 314); and b) natural selection impacts the fitness of species, resulting in certain traits being passed down to future generations through reproduction. The implications of these two premises are developed below. Alongside the biocentric conception of the human is the economic conception of the human, i.e. homo economicus. Like the theocentric

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and rational conceptions of what it means to be human, the biocentric and economic co-constitution of the genre of being human is defined through its negation.

What then is the negation upon which Man 2 is dependent? The new category of human otherness is “now comprised of the jobless, the homeless, the Poor, the systemically made jobless and criminalized—of the ‘underdeveloped’—all as the category of the economically damnés, rather than, as before, of the politically condemned” (Wynter 2003, 321).²⁷ Man 2 is, on the one hand, constructed on the basis of what it means to be an economically productive member of society. The ills of the society, as a result, concern the population who are perceived as not contributing economically. For example:

Enslavement here is no longer tied to Original Sin, or to one’s irrational nature […] Rather, enslavement is now to the threat of Malthusian overpopulation, to its concomitant “ill” of Natural Scarcity whose imperative “plan of salvation” would now be postulated in economic terms as that of keeping this at bay—of material, in the place of the matrix spiritual, Redemption (Ibid., 320).

At the same time, however, Wynter claims that the economic genre of being human is mapped onto a Darwinian chain of being that is manifest in two manners (Ibid., 309). First, “this principle, that of bio-evolutionary Natural Selection, was now to function at the level of the new bourgeois social order as a de facto new Argument-from-Design—one in which while one’s selected or dysselected status could not be known in advance, it would come to be verified by one’s (or one’s group’s) success or failure in life” (Ibid., 310). An economic hierarchy is mapped onto a biocentric hierarchy. Or, in other words, economic success (and thus economic failure) is mapped onto a conception of who is most fit (or least fit) in society. As a result, the

27 It is important to note that Wynter explicitly references Fanon in this quote, ind irectly citing the 1963 version of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

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economically damned in society, or the dependents of society, can thus justifiably (according to this system) be dysselected from society and thus undeserving of social aid. Second, drawing from a Darwinian conception of the continuity between all living creatures, the economic and biocentric conception of man also operates upon a continuity of those who are most fit and those who are least fit.

An important implication of this new space of otherness is confirmed by Frederick Douglas’s “The Color Line” (1881) echoed in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Wynter describes the Color Line as “a line drawn between the lighter and the darker peoples of the earth, and enforced at the level of social reality by the lawlikely instituted relation of socioeconomic dominance/subordination between them” (Wynter 2003, 310, sic). As a result, the Color Line comes to demarcate what in previous systems were the Heaven/Earth dichotomy and the rational/irrational dichotomy, culminating in the demarcation of those who are deserving of reward (and the most fit) from those who are not (Ibid., 322). More specifically, those who were economically disenfranchised because of their race, through racial segregation and red lining, for instance, are deemed less fit within a given social reality, i.e. economic failure is a failure of their ability to adapt and survive in a social context.

For Du Bois, the Color Line refers to the racial segregation of African-American people in the U.S., segregation that occurred through legal structures as well as discursive means. In addition, his discussion of the Color Line also establishes what he calls “double consciousness.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, he states the following:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,

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an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two

warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (Du Bois 1994, 2).

In other words, a marginalized person recognizes not only their own self-perception but also how they are perceived as a member of a marginalized group by a dominant group. A further implication here is that someone who has the sensation or experience of double-consciousness has a particular kind of epistemic position in the world, whereby they have access to different kinds of knowledge based on their position in relation to the Color Line. As a result, for Du Bois and for Wynter, marginalized people have access to knowledge that is not immediately accessible (if accessible at all) to those who occupy dominant positions within the same social reality.

There are various examples that we can draw from in order to understand the ramifications of this genre of being human. We could look to the recent (and historical) economic migrant sentiment in Europe and North America. For instance, in the U.K. the anti-immigrant sentiment that was central to the 2016 Brexit vote was based on the idea of job scarcity for U.K. citizens, a distinction which is likely based upon the Color Line just described, albeit an extension of the Color Line based upon a racialized other that is “not British.” One might also consider “the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex” (Wynter 2003, 261) or the criminalization of First Nations populations in Canada. In all these cases, racial profiling presupposes the evolutionary natural selection of those who will “make it” and those who will not.

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At this point, it should be apparent that there are some similarities between the conceptions of a worldview and the notion of worlds developed by Wynter and Badiou respectively. For instance, for Badiou, “world” implies a series of relations, a network through which objects appear (Badiou 2009a, 99). Additionally, “a world articulates the cohesion of multiples around a structured operator (the transcendental)” (Ibid., 102). In other words, worlds provide the conditions through which objects appear, but are ordered by what he calls the transcendental index. Furthermore, the ordering of any world is wholly contingent. For Wynter, a worldview refers to a dominant narrative that organizes worlds according to a particular conception of what it means to be human (i.e. the True Christian Self, the Rational Political Man, or the Economic and Biological Man). Similarly for Wynter, the organization of worlds according to some master code is contingent and thus could be organized differently. Generally speaking, both Wynter and Badiou offer a critique of these dominant and oppressive conceptions of worlds and also seek solutions to oppressive world orders. The continuities between Badiou’s and Wynter’s political theories of emancipation provide the conditions for my analysis of why and how Wynter’s political theory offers a substantial alternative to Badiou’s project without radically changing the kinds of goals he has for his project. Alternatively, the continuities between their projects also allow me to demonstrate that there is an alternative solution to Badiou’s project in Wynter’s work. To these ends, it is the distinctions between their projects with which I am concerned. Whereby Badiou focuses on a politics of indifference based upon a theory of political truths Wynter focuses on liminal positions and a theory that emphasizes differences in addition to universal emancipation through her pluri-conceptual framework. These points of comparison are the focus of the next two sections.

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