Locating order(ing) in ontological security

Ontological security refers to the security of the self: the ways in which our ways of being in the world and our conception of being is secure or made insecure. The concept was introduced by Scottish psychoanalyst R. D. Laing in The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness,Footnote ⁹ in which he sought ‘to give an account of a quite specifically personal form of depersonalization and disintegration’.Footnote ¹⁰ Laing resisted ‘imposing our categories of thought on to the patient’, which can result in the possibility of knowing ‘just about everything that can be known about the psychopathology of schizophrenia […] without being able to understand one single schizophrenic’.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, Laing advocated observation of the patient ‘as expressive of his mode of being-in-the-world’, or subjectivity.Footnote ¹²

From here, Laing introduces his conceptualization of ontological security: ‘Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.’Footnote ¹³ Individuals with psychosis or schizophrenia, however, ‘may feel more unreal that real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question’.Footnote ¹⁴ For individuals experiencing such ontological insecurity, ‘such a basis for living has not been reached’ and ‘the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat’.Footnote ¹⁵

It is these aspects of Laing’s work that were taken up by Anthony Giddens to introduce ontological security to the social sciences. Giddens’s sociological interpretation of ontological security maintains that individuals can gain a sense of agency when they can rely upon a certain measure of trust and stability in routines, material environments, and social narratives. As he puts it, ‘Rituals of trust and tact in day-to-day life […] are much more than merely ways of protecting one’s own self-esteem […] they touch on the most basic aspects of ontological security’.Footnote ¹⁶ Without being able to take these things for granted, ‘each encounter would have to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis, placing individuals in a permanent state of anxiety’.Footnote ¹⁷ This anxiety ‘tends to threaten awareness of self-identity’, as relations between the self and the world become obscured.Footnote ¹⁸ For Giddens’s social actor, this routinization and habitualization arises from encounters with others: ‘for him that individual is one that is embedded into an intersubjective whole in the period of late modernity; the individual cannot be understood separately and asocially’.Footnote ¹⁹

Security, in this sense, refers to ‘security-as-being’ rather than ‘security-as-survival’. Giddens’s sociological interpretation has since been taken up by scholars in the CSS tradition, becoming an established area of study. OSS now covers a range of theoretical perspectives and in terms of various issues: feminist,Footnote ²⁰ postcolonial,Footnote ²¹ psychoanalytic,Footnote ²² the vernacular and everyday,Footnote ²³ affect,Footnote ²⁴ the realist security dilemma,Footnote ²⁵ narrative,Footnote ²⁶ dread and anxiety,Footnote ²⁷ populism,Footnote ²⁸ embodiment,Footnote ²⁹ Indigenous cosmologies,Footnote ³⁰ materiality and territorialityFootnote ³¹ – among many others. As interpretations of ontological security in CSS have proliferated, some studies have sought to return to Laing and/or Giddens’s conceptualizations of ontological security in order to clarify terms, introduce new vantage points, and critique OSS’s limitations.Footnote ³²

Despite this empirical diversity, OSS tends to uphold a common understanding of ontological security and ontological insecurity. For Homolar and Scholz, ‘Being ontologically secure allows us to “encounter all the hazards of life […]” with a firm sense of both our own and others’ reality and identity’; ‘we need to be able to trust that we – as well as our environment – will remain constant, stable and predictable’.Footnote ³³ Krickel-Choi describes ontological security as ‘a form of “psychological well-being” or, in the broadest sense, as the “psychological security of the self”’.Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, Innes and Steele see ontological security as ‘the seeking of a consistent self through time and space, and the desire to have that self-recognised and affirmed by others […] it is a form of security-seeking that is pursued regarding the “who” or “what” ontologically it is or desires to be’.Footnote ³⁵

There are a range of approaches to this ontologically securing self (be it a focus on intersubjectivity, autobiographical narratives, the state and other political groupings, or individuals and social groups),Footnote ³⁶ but two central tenets of ontological security within OSS can be identified, namely, the self seeks stability, certitude, and constancy in itself and in its social and material environment, and the self (whether at the state, group, or individual level) participates in behaviour to enhance its sense of ontological security (whether intersubjectively or intra-subjectively). Disciplinarily speaking, this focus on identity and intersubjectivity dovetails two important disciplinary shifts in IR. The early 1990s in IR saw, first, calls for the broadening and deepening of IR’s definition of security. Research groups that came to be known as the Copenhagen and Welsh Schools expanded security studies beyond both a conventional military focus and a conventional state-centrism. Secondly, David Campbell’s Writing Security and Alexander Wendt’s ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’, published in 1991 and 1992 respectively, introduced intersubjectivity and the social/discursive construction of security to IR.Footnote ³⁷

These intellectual developments in IR – a ‘sociological turn’, of sorts – laid the groundwork for Jef Huysmans to interrogate the foundational meaning of security in his pioneering 1998 article.Footnote ³⁸ Moving beyond a definitional or conceptual understanding of security, Huysmans analyses security as a ‘thick signifier’: a performative formation which does not refer to an external, objective reality but instead ‘positions people in their relations to themselves, to nature and to other human beings with a particular discursive, symbolic order’.Footnote ³⁹ In other words, ‘security’ articulates ‘a particular way of organizing forms of life’ and social relations along a specific ordering logic.Footnote ⁴⁰ Huysmans’s rationalization for this understanding of security is predicated on security’s foundational double fear of death. Death is not only ‘a fear-of-the-power-of-others-to-kill-me’, but also a fear of indeterminability and uncertainty: an external condition that we seek to avoid through the acquisition of knowledge and the creation of agencies which mediate the relation between life and death (such as the state).Footnote ⁴¹ Following this logic, security involves both the mediation of death and the activity of ordering, the latter of which attempts to secure the possibility of determinability. For Huysmans, threat construction (or ‘daily security’) mediates relations between the self and its enemies in order to mitigate the ‘fear-of-the-power-of-others-to-kill-me’. The figure of the stranger, a figure both inside and outside a society, differs from enemies in that they disrupt the possibility of ordering: the security-seeking self is confronted with a disordering element that resists categorization.Footnote ⁴² As such, strangeness challenges the political legitimacy of death-mediating agencies such as the state, since its capacity to order is threatened.

For Huysmans, then, ontological security mediates relations between the self and the stranger and is concerned with ‘how to order social relations while simultaneously guaranteeing the very activity of ordering itself’.Footnote ⁴³ Strangeness, in this understanding of ontological security as a thick signifier, must be neutralized in order to secure the ordering capacity of the state (possibly, but not inevitably, through threat construction). In Huysmans’s formulation, ontological insecurity is understood as an inability to order social relations and/or to mediate between life and death, resulting in a ‘fundamental legitimacy crisis for security agencies (state institutions, the state, and international organizations)’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this way, Huysmans operationalizes ontological security in a way different from Giddens’s original formulation and from how it is commonly deployed in CSS: not only is the referent object of security located at the state rather than individual level, but the ability to order is central to experiencing ontological in/security.

Reducing the self to identity: Ontological security’s occlusion of order(ing)

What do we mean when we speak of ordering? For mainstream IR theorists, the foundations of order lie in the territorial sovereignty of states and juridical equality between them. International order, it follows, refers to the balance of power between states in the international system, and war, international institutions, and norms are crucial to traditional accounts of international order and disorder. In these conventional accounts, order is placed in dialectical relation to disorder, with the two also understood as mutually exclusive: where the international order is challenged, disorder prevails.Footnote ⁴⁵

Developed during the Cold War, conventional security studies largely inherited IR’s understanding of order. In the context of a bipolar superpower contest, security studies was ‘concerned primarily with international system structure, power balancing, the elements of national power, deterrence, nuclear strategy, the causes of war, and the management of crises’:Footnote ⁴⁶ in other words, strategies pursued by states to secure the international order. The Copenhagen/Welsh School and constructivist approaches to security studies – as introduced above and broadly accepted as the genesis of CSS as a discrete subfield – retained a focus on security but sought to redefine it in terms of human-centric emancipation and discursive processes of securitization.Footnote ⁴⁷

Order and ordering rarely explicitly features in CSS literature. Although CSS asks, ‘whose security?’,Footnote ⁴⁸ less common are interrogations of which order security upholds and how security orders. Here, Huysmans’s account differs from conventional CSS. For Huysmans, ordering in a security sense refers to a ‘logic of security’, which cannot be reduced to a specific form or content but is rather ‘an ensemble of rules that is immanent to a security practice and that defines the practice in its specificity’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, security ordering ‘positions people in their relations to themselves, to nature and to other human beings within a particular discursive, symbolic order’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this way, ordering – understood as a ‘specific metaphysics of life’Footnote ⁵¹ – is explicitly inherent in an understanding of security as a thick signifier.

The first intervention this article makes is analysing ontological security and OSS via Huysmans’s understanding of security as a process of ordering and of guaranteeing the activity of ordering. Put another way, it asks what and how does ontological security order? As we have seen, OSS generally defines ontological security as the routines and behaviour that a subject pursues to secure a stable sense or narrative of its self/itself. Ontological security as a thick signifier, it follows, therefore orders the self and, in doing so, guarantees the activity of ordering. In other words, ontological security and its deployment in OSS scholarship position the self within a particular symbolic order, both in terms of a specific metaphysics of life and in terms of the scholarly, disciplinary act of ordering.

Chris Rossdale, in an important contribution to OSS entitled ‘Enclosing critique: The limits of ontological security’, put forward ‘a critique of ordering political subjectivity within an ontological security/insecurity framework’.Footnote ⁵² In Rossdale’s theorization of subjectivity in OSS, he sought to demonstrate the limits of ontological security analyses which subscribe to ‘contiguous and stable narrative of selfhood’.Footnote ⁵³ His argument is summarized well in the following passage:

In other words, ontological in/security writes out modes of being in the world which radically disrupt and subvert aspirations to stability and wholeness. Rossdale resists this enclosure of the self by putting forth alternative subjectivities which instead ‘celebrate incompleteness and expendability as the precondition of otherness’ and ‘foster spaces in which subjectivity remains an open (and political) question’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Building on Rossdale’s contribution, OSS has engaged in generative analyses of the self from a range of unconventional theoretical perspectives. For instance, the late 2010s saw a number of postcolonial Lacanian readings of the self-operationalized in tandem with ontological security. Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject, understood as constituted by an inherent ‘lack of essence or foundation’ and a desire for wholeness, has been analysed through Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of the colonial ‘Self/Other’ subjective relation in several works. An understanding postcolonial Lacanian self has been deployed in a number of ways, for example to critique populist politics’ reinforcement of the immigrant/refugee imaginary as the ‘Other’ that denies the ‘Self’ fulfilment of a nostalgic colonial past,Footnote ⁵⁶ to interrogate the role of desire and fantasy in narratives of the self,Footnote ⁵⁷ to pose alternative understandings of the Other,Footnote ⁵⁸ and to trace shifting Brazilian racial self-understandings.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, these analyses continue to engage in an ordering of the self in several ways. First, by deploying a Lacanian understanding of the self that is predicated on an inherent Lack, the underlying drive towards the self’s ‘wholeness’ is still left intact, thereby not addressing Rossdale’s challenge to imagine subjectivities which resist the foreclosure of the subject. For instance, in Vieira’s analysis of Brazilian narratives of racial identity, in which he traces a shift by which political elites have engaged in a contemporary reformulation of Brazil’s Lack based on its ‘non-Western, principally African origins’,Footnote ⁶⁰ the subjectivity of enslaved West Africans is still enclosed within Brazilian self-understanding. Put another way, Brazilians’ striving for wholeness is reformulated rather than fundamentally challenged, and, in doing so, alternative subjectivities (in this case, that of enslaved West Africans) are folded into this impulse rather than understood as constitutive of a fundamental challenge. Secondly, although analysing the self via Spivak’s Self/Other colonial relation is a generative move in OSS, these postcolonial Lacanian analyses continue to guarantee the activity of ordering by collapsing the subject into questions of identity and enemy construction by describing processes by which the Other has been categorized as the Other. By associating the Other with the subject’s Lack, subjects are fixed with racial and mobility identities and implicitly assumed to threaten the Self’s ability to secure wholeness. Although these analyses provide answers to questions of ‘whose (ontological) security?’ and the ability of a colonial Self to establish and securitize identity narratives, the literature does not interrogate the politics of being in a fuller sense, since it continues to engage in ordering along Wholeness/Lack and Self/Order binary logics. In Kinnvall’s study on populist politics, for example, migrants and social ‘out-groups’ are positioned as threats to the Self’s imperial nostalgia and provoke feelings of anger, frustration, and anxiety.Footnote ⁶¹ While this provides answers to the question of ‘whose ontological security?’, it continues to affix identities to particular subjects and thereby engages in an ordering of the self. Lastly, though empire and racialization are central to Spivak’s Self/Other formulation, these ordering dynamics can feature as secondary explanatory, rather than constitutive, forces to the politics of the self. In other words, OSS literature which does engage with race and racism tends to function at the level of identity-making rather than interrogating how racialization and empire are central to the constitution of the self. For instance, Carmina Yu Untalan’s work on how the postcolonial Other can creatively confront ontological insecurities draws on the case of Okinawan ‘Otherness’ vis-à-vis the US and Japanese ‘Selves’.Footnote ⁶² Although Untalan effectively critiques state-centric OSS in the way it limits the Other to an element that either ‘threatens or satisfies the Self’, therefore ‘perpetuating the colonialist logic of survival and power accumulation’,Footnote ⁶³ the article’s empirics conclude that ‘the Okinawans have been sometimes willing to make their sense of identity flexible and accommodating (to work with the Japanese and US selves) […] for survival’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ultimately, understandings of racialized Selves and Others are collapsed into identity management without a more fundamental interrogation of how the racialization of the Self/Other is constitutive to the politics of being.

Sylvia Wynter’s theory of being human as praxis

The principal intervention this article makes is an interrogation of the ontological security’s self and the biographical narrative it seeks to secure – Huysmans’s ‘specific metaphysics of life’ – by introducing Sylvia Wynter’s theory of being human as praxis. By doing so, it proposes a radical challenge to conceptualizations of the self present in existing OSS literature by foregrounding dynamics of racialization and empire as constitutive of the self.

By now, ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’Footnote ⁶⁵ has become something of a truism in IR and CSS, but it takes on a new significance in terms of Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human. I provide here a brief biography of Wynter to stress the centrality of transformation and ‘real-world’ liberation from the colonial project of universalized humanity to her theory of being human as praxis.

Cuban-born Jamaican scholar Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre has rightly been described as a ‘dense, lush intellectual, and creative corpus’ originating in a rich tradition of Caribbean diasporic intellectual labour to ‘unearth the knowledge(s) buried in the histories of the ex-slave archipelago’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Wynter read modern languages (Spanish with an English minor) at King’s College London in the late 1940s, where she also became involved in anti-colonial political activism. Her professional life began in the performing and creative arts, before she travelled in 1961 to GuyanaFootnote ⁶⁷ to work with Cheddi Jagan, a prominent anti-colonial and communist leader, whereupon she observed first-hand the racial and class tensions between Black and Indian folks.Footnote ⁶⁸ Wynter’s experiences in Guyana catalysed a reassessment of her intellectual perspective. Since the mid-1940s, Caribbean Marxism had been the prevailing philosophy among West Indian radical students, intellectuals, and activists. The profound racial division in Guyana led Wynter to question and ultimately move away from Marxism, and, in returning to academia in 1963 to lecture at the University of the West Indies, she began to develop a perspective that ‘recognises that production was not the organizing principle of society, rather race and racial ideology are the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Wynter took up a professorship at University of California–San Diego in the early seventies. In an interview in 2000, she emphasized the importance of her time in the United States and the Black Power and civil rights movements there: ‘I began to experience the entirely different nature of what it is to be something called “black” in this society, as distinct from in Jamaica, in the Caribbean […] For being American in post-Civil War US is being white, being above all, not-black. The totality of this negation was something new to me!’Footnote ⁷⁰ Wynter concludes that ‘Black America needs a liberatory theory developed from the Black experience’, one that confronts ‘how the Black lower classes remain the most wretched social group in the Western social order.’Footnote ⁷¹ Drawing on lived experiences in the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as her training in medieval and Renaissance Spanish culture, Wynter mobilized early Spanish imperial history – in particular theological debates about the humanness of Indigenous peoples – to formulate her theory of racial hierarchization and human ontology.Footnote ⁷² Wynter’s philosophical project can be described as a postulation of a new humanism which entails a redefinition ‘of the human being, its related “rational world view”, and its ordering body of knowledge’, what she terms an ‘un/writing of our present normative defining of the secular mode of the Subject’.Footnote ⁷³ Wynter’s liberatory theory, therefore, is well suited to the task of interrogating the self from a ‘Black “gaze from below”’,Footnote ⁷⁴ and, indeed, the knowledges upon which dominant understandings of the self come to be. Operationalizing her theory, the self can be analysed along Huysmans’s two-pronged understanding of ontological security as that which orders the self and that which secures the activity of ordering itself.

For Wynter, answers to the question of what it means to be human can be traced back to the ‘heretical’ overturning of medieval Christendom by Renaissance humanist scholars.Footnote ⁷⁵ Wynter begins with the intelligentsia’s return to classical Greek texts throughout the fifteenth century, contending that this intellectual Renaissance constituted a gravitational shift in the order of knowledge. The Studia Humanitatis broke with ‘the higher system of divinely sanctioned identity’; a secularization and rationalization of knowledge that Wynter terms ‘degodding’ insofar as it represented an ‘alternative system of learning whose referential authority was no longer that of Christian theology’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Man thus was ‘released’ from theological ‘margins of knowledge’ which had hitherto dictated that ‘fallen man could not hope to know by which God had ordered his Creation’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This humanist order of knowledge epistemologically empowered man to gather knowledge of previously unknowable physical reality and its cosmological laws of functioning.Footnote ⁷⁸ Natural causality, rather than divine causality, functioned as the explanatory principle of reality and of the structural oppositions (Sameness/Difference, order/chaos) in reality’s order of values. These transformations gave rise to ‘an alternative mode of life and being’ in which man ‘underwent a new Counter-Birth, a Renaissance’, in which one could now be understood not only as Christian but also as Rational Man.Footnote ⁷⁹ Within this cognitive transformation, as well as the rise of the modern stateFootnote ⁸⁰ and decline of feudalism in Europe,Footnote ⁸¹ Man was no longer solely understood as a religious subject of the Church, but also as a rational and political subject of the state.

Order was no longer exclusively conceptualized as degrees of perfection from the terrestrial realm of Fallen Man/Flesh to the celestial realm of the Divine/Spirit;Footnote ⁸² rather, order now could be based upon degrees of perfection from unreason/irrationality to reason/rationality. Secular reason emerged as an alternative epistemological principle by which Man could understand the world and his central place within it, giving rise to the emergence of the physical sciences. Wynter cites the Copernican leap – which displaced Christian notions of the earth as fixed in the centre of the universe – as a heretical shift that produced the figure of Man as governed by reason, science, and the state, rather than the spiritual, theolog, and the Church.Footnote ⁸³ It is at this historical juncture, Wynter contends, that a continuum of being emerges: Man is situated at the midpoint between ‘the “super-celestial” regions […] (i.e., angels, pure intelligences), and on the other, a region “filled with a diverse throng of animals, the cast off and residual parts of the lower world”’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Crucially, these Christian Renaissance socio-political and cultural notions of Man took on a new significance in the global context of Spain and Portugal’s colonial conquests beginning in the fifteenth century. As European knowledge of the world expanded with Iberian slaving and evangelizing missions in Africa, the Atlantic, and South Asia, the continuum of perfectibility from the cosmos to the tropics was mapped onto the geography of the earth.Footnote ⁸⁵ The spatialization of this general order of existence upheld a geographic opposition between temperate and habitable regions centred on Jerusalem on the one hand, and the uninhabitable Torrid Zone beyond the north-westernmost bulge of the African continent.Footnote ⁸⁶ The association between the sub-Saharan African climate and its peoples’ alleged irrationality (which came to form a cornerstone of Catholic theological justifications for the transatlantic slave trade) found antecedents in medieval Islam. Writing in the eleventh century, Sā’id al-Andalusi, a Spanish historian, wrote that:

Climate-rationality theory, along with ancient Christian associations of hell, sin, and demons with the colour black,Footnote ⁸⁸ as well as Islamic racism such as that above,Footnote ⁸⁹ provided religious and cultural frameworks within which Black and Indigenous peoples came to be understood in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century colonial expeditions. These embryonic forms of racial ordering came to ‘be mapped on phenotypical and religio-cultural differences between human variations and/or population groups’, not as divinely ordained, but ordained by the ‘law of nature’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, the idea of a natural difference between white-Christian-rational-political Man emerged as the Iberian colonizers encountered Indigenous modes of being.

It is this development that rests at the centre of Wynter’s thesis. By-nature difference, she argues, came to be defined ‘not only on differential degrees of rationality, but also as being human, of humanity’.Footnote ⁹¹ Ways of being that Iberians encountered in the Americas, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in South, East, and South-East Asia could no longer be seen within the terms of rational, political, secular Man. As the demand for slave labour in settler colonies grew, theological debates sought to establish the humanness of Indigenous peoples – whom the law of nature decreed ‘natural slaves’Footnote ⁹² – to determine whether they may be enslaved. While Indigenous Americans became legally protected from being understood as commodifiable/property in the transatlantic slave trade,Footnote ⁹³ Spanish and Portuguese slavers and settlers could continually justify enslavement of Africans, Caribbeans, and South, East, and South-East Asians in terms of their ‘not-quite-humanness’. For Wynter, Black Africans, categorized by colonizers as ‘the figure of the Negro’ were placed ‘at the nadir of its Chain of Being; that is, on a rung of the ladder lower than that of all humans’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Natural difference, then, acted as justification to deny humanness to colonized and Indigenous peoples. Its inverse (indeed, dialectical) action was to confer humanness only to white-Christian-rational-political Man. In Wynterian terminology, Man became the ‘descriptive statement’ of humanness: this way of being was ‘overrepresented’ as the only universally applicable mode of being human. Other empires have, of course, formulated political subjectivities. What distinguishes Man, however, is its universal imposition. As Wynter puts it, ‘Rome’s empire was Roman. Instead, […] the West, over the last five hundred years, has brought the whole human species into its hegemonic, now purely secular […] model of being human’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Since Man was born of natural law, itself invented as a universal and extra-human ordering principle, it follows that Man is itself universal; the expression of generic humanness.

With Wynter’s account of the emergence of Man in place, let us now turn to her theorization of being human as praxis. Martiniquais psychiatrist and intellectual Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking introduction of the sociogenic explanation in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) is, for Wynter, ‘one of the strongest openings towards such re-writing of knowledge’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Fanon proposed that ontogenic (the development of an organism) and phylogenic (the evolution of an organism) explanations are insufficient for understanding psychoanalysis and the constitution of the subject and that a sociogenic explanation must be incorporated. To be human, in Fanonian and Wynterian terms, is not simply to be a purely biological organism but also a deeply cultural one: there is a constitutive relation between ‘the human as a living system and a vitally material being (ontogeny), and, on the other hand, the human as a symbolic, “languaging” being […] (sociogeny)’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Being human ‘is consequently a complex mediation between natural and social processes and not a unidirectional course emanating from “purely organic life”’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Colonial power, for Fanon and Wynter, is the white sociogenic attachment of lack, degeneracy, and inferiority to Blackness, i.e., ‘I am who I am in relation to the other who sees me as such, and [therefore, in a colonial context] […] becoming black is bound up with being perceived as black by a white person’,Footnote ⁹⁹ and, as such, ‘white subjectivity is naturalized in consciousness and embodiment as the normative bearer of humanity in colonized black subjects’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Man, in this understanding, is a product of European ‘philosophical and scientific projects,’ an ‘oversized figure’ that becomes the yardstick against which all other forms of being and selfhood are measured.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Wynterian terms, we may say that Man is selected, and other forms of being are dysselected, condemned to less-than-humanity in terms that extend far beyond liberal critiques of race.Footnote ¹⁰² Wynter’s radical move is to dislocate the ‘idea of race’ from its liberal notion, namely a ‘mistaken, false scientific apprehension of the human body’; she instead ‘begins with the ontological question – that which ponders human existence and who/what we are – alongside the “idea of race”’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Wynter’s ‘counter-humanism’ demands that we think through ‘the ways in which a racial presence is necessary to the expansion, development, and implementation of imperial order and the production of Man-as-human’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In other words, Wynter insists that we interrogate human life itself, and the racial codes that govern it, in order to trigger another ‘heretical’ overturning of knowledge in which humanness can be fundamentally redefined and freed from racialization.

The liberation of humanness relies on an understanding of being human as praxis; that is, ‘the human as verb, as alterable, as relational’, rather than a noun or a biological given which condemns the dysselected to their status as such.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Wynter cites Judith Butler’s ‘illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun’ as foundational in her redefinition of being human as praxis which unlocks an understanding of how ‘those currently inhabiting the underside of the category of Man-as-human – under our current epistemological regimes, those cast out as impoverished and colonized and undesirable and lacking reason – can, and do, provide a way to think about being human anew’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This ‘Black gaze from below’ is essential to the re/writing of our present order of life; in other words, ways of being human differently.

Wynter’s understanding of being human as praxis places analytical centrality on the action, rather than condition, that is integral to subjectivity. For our interrogation of the self in OSS, being human as praxis therefore dislocates analytical primacy away from the self as a noun – connoting fixity, categorization, order – and instead towards the self as a verb: the creative, uncapturable, discontinuous, generative movement constitutive of the self. Being human as praxis opens up an ‘audaciously imaginative’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ intellectual vista whereby we can embrace an understanding of humans as constituted by particular fields of physical, political, historical, and psychosocial formations of power, in order to, in turn, trouble the orders of knowledge upon which they rest.

The autopoetics of the self and OSS

Holding in mind Wynter’s understanding of the self as praxis, i.e. constituted by specifically colonial and racial orders of knowledge, we can introduce two final elements of Wynter’s philosophical oeuvre in order to trouble OSS’s failure to divest from identity management. One of Wynter’s ‘most original and groundbreaking contributions’ is her appropriation of ‘autopoiesis’ as autopoetics.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Coined by two Chilean biologists to apply cybernetics and systems theory to cognitive biology, ‘autopoiesis’ holds that organic systems are animated by a dynamically symbiotic relation with ‘external’ systems in a self-regenerative process. Put differently, a living system autonomously produces and reproduces itself to maintain its own unity, and, in such a closed system, any interaction with outside elements is predetermined by the internality of the system itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For Wynter, the ways humans represent themselves as human functions as an autopoietic system, becoming ‘self-conscious through self-observation; by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions[,] we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ We see how, therefore, Man-as-human (an autopoietic system) recursively and endlessly self-regenerates, obscuring the ‘mechanisms of occultation by means of which we have been able to make opaque to ourselves’ that humanness is not a predetermined biological given but is praxis.Footnote ¹¹¹

Weaving together Wynter’s theorizations so far, we can therefore speak of the emergence of Man-as-human (or ‘the self’) as an autopoietic praxis which is obscured from itself. A crucial dynamic of this is the universalization of modern Western scientism, i.e. how our orders of knowledge are governed by rationality and scientificity. In contradistinction, and following Aimé Césaire, Wynter contends that ‘we come to imagine/experience ourselves, our modes of being’ through literary and aesthetic orders – what she has referred to as ‘psycho-aesthetic structures’.Footnote ¹¹² The autopoietic praxis of the self can be analysed through a poetic knowledge, as ‘“words”, as “narrative schemas” to be read, interpreted, and deconstructed’.Footnote ¹¹³ The poetic is, for Wynter, intimately connected with Fanon’s sociogeny: the symbolic, cultural, narrativizing codes which govern being human as much as our biological matter does.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Autopoetics, therefore, describes the self-reproduction of symbolic and narrative (sociogenic) orders through which humanness comes to be recursively defined: an ‘autopoetics of the self’. As we have seen, Wynter calls for an analytic from the perspective of the dysselected – that is, those who lie outside of the terms of Man-as-humanness – in order to become conscious of the autopoetics of the self and, eventually, provoke a re/writing of modern orders of knowledge in service of the liberation of the self from Man-as-human. Wynter and her long-standing intellectual companion Katherine McKittrick term this mode of analysing sociogenic codes which govern the self as a ‘demonic approach’, a phrase borrowed from the biological and mathematical sciences which refers to ‘a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable, outcome’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ A ‘demonic’ approach, therefore, is one governed by the impossibility of prediction, mobilized in service of identifying a system ‘that can only unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally demonic, is integral to the methodology’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Essentially, a ‘demonic’ analytic is one which occupies the perspective of the dysselected in order to raise consciousness of the orders of knowledge which self-reproduce Man-as-human. The play on words immanent to a ‘demonic’ understanding of the self is intentional for Wynter and McKittrick: it brings attention both to the denial of humanness to the dysselected (or ‘supernaturally demonic’) and to an autopoetic analysis of the self which refuses ordering, prediction, and fixity.

What is at stake for OSS with this ‘demonic’ understanding of the self? Putting together these elements of Wynter’s magisterial oeuvre, a ‘demonic’ approach to the self in OSS speaks to Rossdale’s challenge within OSS to liberate an understanding of the self from fixity and determination. An understanding of the self as autopoetic interrogates modern orders of knowledge that privilege pseudoscientific/humanist categorizations of subjectivity, instead offering a methodology for a radical rewriting of being human that refuses to be ordered. Central to this rewriting is a liberation from the racial codes which extend beyond notions of race and racialization as identity markers but indeed constitute and structure our current modality of being human.

As we have seen above, analyses of the ontological security-seeking self in OSS can often collapse into descriptions of identity securitization; for instance, the ways in which populist politics naturalize anti-immigrant sentiments.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Even OSS scholarship which aims to ‘avoid collapsing together the concepts of self, identity, and ontological security’, such as Browning and Joenniemi’s ‘Ontological security, self-articulation and the securitization of identity’, falls short of effectively delinking the self and identity management. The authors’ central claim is that the self is a reflexive subject, requiring self-articulation and recognition from others, and that the late modern self must grapple with ‘the contingencies of radical doubt’ and a ‘changing normative environment’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The anxiety produced by such uncertainty can be mitigated by flexibility and adaptability towards the self; therefore, ontological security can be attained through an ‘opening up […] around identity’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For the authors, friendship, which is based on ‘equality, respect, solidarity [… and] positive forms of difference’ should also be a source that the self can draw upon for an articulation of ‘safe identities’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Ultimately, the self is still understood in terms of identity management in this analysis, since its contribution lies in positing an adaptive and accepting approach towards identities in order for the self to soothe ontological anxieties. Additionally, ontological security is still framed as the pursuit of a ‘safe identity’, achieved by the recognition of identities different to oneself’s, and as such, the self and identity management remain analytically entangled.

With Wynter’s theorization, those whom she terms ‘dysselected’ occupy a subjectivity that cannot be collapsed into notions of identity. Since the self is autopoetically defined in relation to the Western European, white, Christian idea of Man, being human ‘is a relational act’. This act positions ‘the contemporary underclass as colonized-nonwhite-black-poor-incarcerated-jobless people’ – Wynter’s dysselected – not simply as occupying social categories, but as ‘identifiably condemned due to their dysselected human status’.Footnote ¹²¹ Dysselection, therefore, transcends liberal notions of race and other identity markers, instead invoking an entire order of knowledge which overrepresents Man as the only referent for being human. Many OSS analyses, by locating ontological in/security at the level of migration status, race, nationality, religion, and so forth, ultimately serve to affix and entrench identity markers. As such, conventional OSS forgoes a deeper interrogation of the symbolic orders upon which ‘identity’ rests and arrests possibilities for subverting them.

A ‘demonic’ approach to OSS

We have found generative connections between Huysmans’s understanding of security as a thick signifier and Wynter’s conceptualization of being human as praxis, since both foreground ‘specific metaphysics of life’ and symbolic orders. Indeed, this article’s intervention thus far can be summarized as a Wynterian extension of Huysmans’s understanding of ontological security as that which ‘positions people in their relations to themselves, to nature and to other human beings within a particular discursive, symbolic order’ and, in doing so, guarantees the activity of ordering itself. So far, I have contended that an autopoetic understanding of the self can shed light on the deeper symbolic and racial orders upon which modern selfhood rests – Huysmans’s first articulation of ontological security’s function. In this final section, I reflect upon the second, i.e. how the intellectual project of OSS guarantees the activity of ordering itself. In doing so, I offer a ‘demonic’ approach to OSS not only in intellectual terms but also in terms of the activity of doing OSS ‘in the world’. Put differently, why does it matter, in material terms, that OSS conceptualizes the self in terms of identity politics?

Above, I introduced Wynter’s philosophical oeuvre with a brief biography in order to situate her thought in the material socio-political world. Anti-colonial revolutionary movements both in 1930s Jamaica and the 1960s United States constitute more than a historical background or political context for a purely intellectual project; instead, in Wynter’s words, these ‘multiple forms of spontaneously erupting uprisings of “otherness” […] determine[d] what was to be the imperative trajectory of my life and work’.Footnote ¹²² It was from the ‘epistemological tumult’ initiated by anti-colonial and civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s that Wynter first forged an articulation of humanness, since revolutionary struggles on the ground ‘opened up new claims to the category of human’.Footnote ¹²³ Beyond empirical fodder for an intellectual project, the ‘Fifties/Sixties’ were crucial in that it was also the terrain for ‘Black Americans’ struggle for the establishment of Black Studies within the university system of the USA’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The incorporation of this field of knowledge ‘made possible’ Wynter’s exploration of humanness in two senses: by honing her theoretical understanding of race as ‘the issue whose historically-instituted singularity could not be made into a subset of any other issue’, and also in the sense that, without Black Studies emerging as a physical site for knowledge generation, such a ‘Black “gaze from below”’ could not exist.Footnote ¹²⁵

In the ‘lingering afterglow’ of these institutional and revolutionary struggles, Wynter authored her theory of human of being praxis in an endeavour to ‘reenact Renaissance humanism’s original heresy’ and embark upon a re/writing of humanness.Footnote ¹²⁶ Since then, Wynter writes that her ‘own heresy remained incomplete’ and that her ‘essay can be seen in this respect to have, in the end, failed’.Footnote ¹²⁷ In subsequent publications, Wynter muses on this and on the ‘incomplete and unfinished challenge to the conception of Man itself’ of the ‘Fifties/Sixties’.Footnote ¹²⁸ In terms of social revolution, Wynter found that movements too quickly ‘accepted the fiction of equivalence’ or legal equality, the conceptualization of which itself is reliant on a dialectical ‘inequality’, thus maintaining the relation between Man-as-human and less-than-human. Without a fundamental transformation of the social order, a ‘sliding hierarchy’ of oppression was institutedFootnote ¹²⁹ – what we can term ‘identity politics’ in contemporary terms. This incomplete revolutionary struggle was codified within the social relations and imaginaries of academia: the ‘hopeful intellectual project’ of Black Studies has, in her eyes, since become ‘ethniciz[ed] in middle-class assimilationist terms as African American Studies’Footnote ¹³⁰ and has abandoned a re/writing of being human ‘in favour of valorizing a project through which Man-as-human is axiomatically preconceptualized as the marker of emancipation’.Footnote ¹³¹ In such ‘“identity” studies’ projects, the study of ‘race’ is ‘one working toward or meeting the standards of Man’, rather than a fundamental challenge to ‘the making and meaning of Man-as-human’.Footnote ¹³²

Wynter’s reflections on the co-optation of revolutionary struggles in academia reveal several important insights for a demonic approach to OSS. In the first place, we see how a more radical reflexivity – which takes the activity of ‘doing research’ as an object of critique in and of itself – understands the researcher as engaged in ‘the performance of social relations and imaginaries’ of the Western academy.Footnote ¹³³ A demonic approach calls our attention not only to the ways in which OSS epistemically orders the social world on the pages of monographs and journal articles but also to the conditions of possibility for the knowledge of OSS to exist within a ‘specific metaphysics of life’ in which the academy is constituted by both ‘overrepresented’ racial orders of knowledge and anti-colonial struggles outside of academia.

In terms of OSS, this subfield of study gained traction in the 2000s and 2010s, a period in which liberal identity politics became entrenched as the terrain for social struggle. We can define liberal identity politics along two axes: the rendering of social identities as essential and affixed and a reliance on the liberal state to achieve limited – usually legal – reforms in order to ‘achieve’ equality.Footnote ¹³⁴ This approach encourages a focus on the individual, a ‘personalization and individualization of oppression’, and an analysis of one’s experience is ‘at the expense of simultaneously analysing how structures condition experiences’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Since the millennium, we have seen how social identities are understood as reified, deterministic, and totalizing, resulting in the so-called ‘culture wars’ and identity politics du jour, and an attendant dislocation of struggle away from radical collective liberation. In this way, identity politics’ ascendency creates the conditions of possibility for OSS’s focus on identity management and an understanding of the self as defined by social identities. This analytic authorizes the epistemic ordering of the self within the confines of identity in an autopoetic sense: a recursive feedback loop in which thought (in this case, the self as identity) becomes embodied (so that being human is enacted along identity lines). Returning once more to Huysmans, we can therefore understand the activity of doing OSS as an intellectual project which ‘guarantees the activity of ordering itself’; it is ‘a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity – death as the undetermined – by fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order’ so as to ‘make life intelligible’.Footnote ¹³⁶

Wynter’s demonic approach and attendant reflections on Black Studies as an incomplete revolutionary intellectual project also warns us against the co-optation of radical struggle within intellectual thought. The ‘ethnicization’ of Black Studies as African American Studies, Wynter contends, depoliticized struggles for an overturning of Man-as-human and instead reformulated the project as one of enunciating strategies for the dysselected to pursue Man-as-humanness. In a similar vein, contemporary academia’s embrace of intersectionality – an analysis of the co-constitutive axes of oppression rooted in a critique of coloniality – can be seen as an extension of Black Studies’ incomplete revolutionary intellectual project. Instead of a fundamental critique of material structures of oppression, intersectionality’s focus on identity results in a ‘valorization of difference without consequences, recognition without redistribution’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Chandra Mohanty and Silma Bilge, in their respective articles, both chart the ways in which intersectionality has become diluted and co-opted by neoliberal academia.Footnote ¹³⁸ The flattening and commodification of difference in the academy has the effect of ‘conflat[ing] political struggles and identities with market niches’ in which ‘identity-based radical politics are often turned into corporatized diversity tools leveraged by dominant groups to attain various ideological and institutional goals’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Intersectionality and theories of identity, therefore, become neutralized and tamed, stripped of their radical collective focus on social justice.

From the perspective of the dysselected (i.e. a demonic approach), this intellectual neutralization has critically important material implications. In Wynterian terms, co-optation of radical challenges to being human ensures that ‘colonized-nonwhite-black-poor-incarcerated-jobless people’ are condemned to a dysselected less-than-human status. This denial of humanness manifests itself in various forms of ‘organized violence and abandonment’, including racial capitalism, mass incarceration, police brutality, and strict migration control.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Put simply, affixing social identities such as migration status or race – rooted, as Wynter demonstrates, in the colonial encounter – to forms of being human underwrites the various forms of epistemic and material violence that, in turn, uphold racial ordering that makes ‘identity’ possible. This process of subjectification and identity re/production operates autopoetically, further re/producing violence in an enclosed and recursive feedback loop.

A demonic approach to OSS occupies a radically alternative perspective to the self and to identity, and, in doing so, ‘holds in it the possibility of undoing and unsettling – not replacing or occupying – Western conceptions of what it means to be human’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ For Rinaldo Walcott, a demonic approach can be spatialized in the Caribbean basin; the ‘failed nation-states of the archipelago of misery […] forged out of modernity’s brutality’, insofar as this region symbolizes a ‘constant negotiation of human difference […] all the while articulating a humanness yet “to come”’.Footnote ¹⁴² Interrogating the autopoetics of the self from the ‘space’ of the Caribbean urges us to confront ‘the ways in which our colonial present and imperialism continue to make identity a locus of control, containment, and regulation’.Footnote ¹⁴³ It is through this demonic confrontation that we may begin to attend to Wynter’s call for ‘a revolution in thought, a complete “rewriting of knowledge”’ which can liberate our understanding of the self from racial orders of knowledge and violence. In doing so, we can decisively exceed a redefinition of being human from a purely intellectual project and engage in struggles for radical collective liberation as part of a global recreation of human life.