The decolonial option does not simply protest the contents of imperial coloniality; it demands a delinking of oneself from the knowledge systems we take for granted (and can profit from) and practicing epistemic disobedience. [Para.] Wynter's decolonial project calls into question the concept of the Human and its epistemological underpinnings. Her work draws on the research of Chilean scientist, philosopher, and intellectual Humberto Maturana (in collaboration in an early stage with Francisco Varela) and black and Caribbean intellectuals and social theorists. Wynter draws on Maturana's insights, in particular his work on autopoiesis, which uncovers the interconnectedness of 'seeing' the world and 'knowing' the world: specifically, he shows that what is seen with the eyes does not represent the world outside the living organism; rather, it is the living organism that fabricates an image of the world through the internal/neurological processing of information. Thus, Maturana made the connection between the ways in which human beings construct their world and their criteria of truth and objectivity and noticed how their/our nervous system processes and responds to information. [Para.] It is across both neurobiological cognition and decolonial practices that Sylvia Wynter's work and her intellectual disobedience emerge. Wynter suggests that if we accept that epistemology gives us the principles and rules of knowing through which the Human and Humanity are understood, we are trapped in a knowledge system that fails to notice that the stories of what it means to be Human—specifically origin stories that explain who/what we are—are, in fact, narratively constructed. Wynter's commentaries on Man1, Man2, and the making of the Human should thus be understood alongside historical and epistemological epochs (medieval, classical) that present humanness through intelligible cosmogonies that, as Denise da Silva argues in this collection, require a juridical-economic colonial presence. To study 'Man' or 'Humanity' is therefore to study a narrativization that has been produced with the very instruments (or categories) that we study with. In short, it is precisely the practice of accepting the principles and rules of knowing that produces narratives that naturalize, for example, evolution and dysselection and thus biocentric Human origin stories. It follows that we fail to notice that evolution, dysselection, and biocentricity are origin stories with an ontological effect. Put simply: we tend to believe our cosmogonies as natural truth(s); this belief system is calcified by our commitment to his belief system; the schema self-replicates, as we continually invest in its systemic belief qualities. In this way, Wynter's writings on the Human and who/what we are are reflective of Maturana's autopoietics. [Para.] Wynter refuses to embrace the entity of the Human independently of the epistemic categories and concepts that created it by suggesting instead that our conceptualizations of the Human are produced within an autopoietic system. The problem of the Human is thus not identity-based per se but in the enunciations of what it means to be Human—enunciations that are concocted and circulated by those who most convincingly (and powerfully) imagine the 'right' or 'noble' or 'moral' characteristics of Human and in this project their own image-experience of the Human into the sphere of Universal Humanness. The Human is therefore the product of a particular epistemology, yet it appears to be (and is accepted as) a naturally independent entity existing in the world.
Walter Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?" In Sylvia Wynter, ed. Katherine McKittrick, Duke, 2015 (emphasis his)
