the plot
last updated: 07:05 19 mar, 2026
i've been thinking a bunch about sylvia wynter and her idea of the plot as a place of insurgency and rebellion.
wynter wrote about the plot in her essay novel and history, plot and plantation. in this book she discusses plantation economies, where the provision ground was the small piece of land where enslaved people grew their own food, outside the plantation's logic, outside its ledger, and outside its systems of value. the plantation did not recognize it as productive. that, wynter argues, was never incidental. this provision ground, the plot, was invaluable to the communities it nourished precisely because it was illegible (non-valuable) to the dominant economy, so its real value slipped past the colonial class. it produced food, yes, but also
selfhood, continuity, and a relationship to making/creating that was not compromised or extractive.
what makes wynter's concept so useful is the double meaning the word carries. in black metamorphosis she draws out the "values of the under life," the secretive histories grown alongside and beneath the plantation's official ledger, and uses the yam as the symbol: grown underground, invisible from above, fed from below, and rhizomatic/adventitious. in novel and history, plot and plantation she extends this: to plot is also to counter-narrate, to scheme, to grow a story that the dominant system cannot account for or understand. a poem is a plot in this senses, so is a zine, and so is a shell script.
as a poet and writer who tinkers with tech to build small tools. i have been trying to find the right language for why i do these things, and why i cannot fully separate them, and i think wynter gives me something close. my language grows from and as a plot.
when i write a poem, i am working on a plot, when i print a zine on a mimeograph and fold it and hand it to someone, i am working on a plot, and when i write a shell script that fetches my rss feeds and prints a booklet i can read on paper, i am working on another plot. none of these are really legible to the attention economy, at least, not as things worth measuring. they do not scale well, they don't have a user base, and they do not have a growth curve. instead, they produce something i can hold, read, share, or run, and that relationship between me and the made thing is not mediated by a large platform, a pricing tier, or an algorithm deciding who sees it.
this blog lives on bear blog, which is itself a kind of plot. it is small, hand-tended, and not trying to be anything other than what it is. a blog is a blog is a blog. but don't forget, blog is dead ... back to the weblog!
i have been thinking about with my blogging, poetry, and code as the same kinds of insurgent acts of conviviality. they are ways of making meaning in forms the dominant economy finds useless or at best decorative. better, it is a way of making things with attention to care. the poem does not produce revenue, a zine does not have a profit margin (it costs the creator), and the shell script that runs only on my machine for my particular workflow is not a product. these are provision grounds, and i tend to them the way you tend to anything that feeds you, your family, and your friends. tending is caring.
wynter's essay is specifically about caribbean literature and the novel as a form that either reproduces plantation logic or resists it, and i do not want to flatten that specificity. i am simply borrowing the logic, not the history. but i find the provocation inspiring: what are you making that nobody is measuring? what feeds you that doesn't show up in anyone's analytics? is your garden and its plots under the radar or off the beaten path?
my plots are here: in my writing, poems, tools, zines, everyday attitudes, and this blog, all small but overgrowing and continuing to feed me, my family, and my friends. nourishment these days, is insurgency: mentally as well as physically.