“Taking responsibility for my frequencies” Biosemiotics, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Attending to the correspondences and differences between Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of the ‘self-troping rhetorical human’ and the biosemiotic proposition that sign-making is a necessary and sufficient definition of ‘life’, this chapter reflects on their implications for thinking technologies of self-making. Acknowledging that these differences seem to mark a division between counter- and posthumanism in Western critical theory, it considers Wynter’s notion of ‘ceremony’ as complicating this apparent division. Turning to the exploration of this metaleptic idea of ceremony in the work of poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, this chapter concludes by thinking through the correlation of ideas of ceremony with ideas of (transspecies) responsibility as a form of echolocation, and of echolocation itself as a heuristic, or ceremonial figure, that opens out onto the possibilities of self-(un)making through diffractive reading/listening.