The Modern horror project (RECut)
“Undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue that surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you're sunbathing or taking grass.”
In the opening of Lyotard’s “evil book,” the body theatrically unfolds, offering itself legibly, yet finds itself (un)easily seized by representation. In this schema, as in Modernity, the system plays with symbols, texts, and interpretations until their materiality is submerged, erased by the relentless urgency to advance. The body is dissected, defined, categorized, measured. Desire is transformed into an infinitely deep well of verifiable, retrievable information. We reassemble meaning to make sense of it, but in the end, it becomes an object to be manipulated, written over. Everything is swallowed by the machine, that unceasing, totalizing apparatus, which moves ever forward, perpetuating a vision of “human progress,” legitimizing the conquest of distant worlds and the founding of new ones.
We need not theorize or imagine this radical unfolding today. It occurs vividly through the practices and productions set in motion by Modernity, which carries its own built-in justification. Any method it employs, no matter the carnage, is to be viewed as reasonable. For when agony is produced, let it be for a “legitimate” claim. With suffering comes the promise of longevity, redemption, property, and knowability. No longer will we be threatened by invading frontiers, shrouded in darkness, corrupting the Western conception of freedom and well-being. Worlds will be brought to our fingertips, and finally, death itself will be transformed into colonized terrain.
According to Sylvia Wynter, this colonizing desire began with the re-description of “the human” during the Renaissance, gradually dispelling most of its metaphysical language and being anointed by modern science. In Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, she traces what she calls Man’s overrepresentation across space and time, moving from a theological Christian description to a secular political subject, and then to our current bio-economic conception of the human. With each iteration, she argues—borrowing from Fanon—some sociogenic thread remains intact, reinforcing the hierarchical human/Other binary that amplifies the totalizing system of the West.
Wynter calls this recent re-invention of the human an “enormous act of expression/narration,” akin to the Big Bang. Like Copernicus’s revolutionary astronomy, the invention of "Man" marks a “de-supernaturalizing event” that dramatically displaces the order of the cosmos, crucially, because of the evangelizing and imperializing mission across seas, which initiated “a process of self-transformation” for the West.
In earlier arrangements, as Wynter describes, it was the Abrahamic God who established the distinction between Spirit and Fallen Flesh. The modern system reinvents this old system, where infidels, heretics, and pagan idolaters are replaced with “inferior” humanity—those incapable of reason, slaves to irrational impulses, allied with base matter in a subhuman category. A new origin story replaces Genesis, where “enslavement here is no longer to Original Sin, or to one’s irrational nature,” as Wynter notes, but to the dominant bio/tech/capitalist ethnoclass hierarchy that determines who will be saved and who, like the Biblical Ham and his descendants, are damned.
In Darwin’s time, the un-evolved came to occupy the space once reserved for the Fallen. Our era will push many aspects of this biocentric framework forward, fusing them with race, economic, and class distinctions. With each advancement in modern science, from its earliest formulations to the present, the organization of knowledge and description of the human is recalibrated. Crucially, Wynter reminds us that we must insist, time and again, that no humans are involved in this operation. For the “master codes” to hold, there must be an external, non-human entity maintaining the structure.
Both Wynter and Franz Fanon draw on Shakespeare’s The Tempest to illustrate how this logic plays out. In the play, Prospero must master his base, sensual impulses embodied in Caliban to maintain the “stability and order of the state.” Like Prospero, man becomes Man only by producing himself in relief to, and by suppressing, what is Other. Finally, Otherness finds a stable basis through the production of irrational subjects—embodied in Indians, Negroes, and the mad.
Illness, disease, and degradation are now articulated in strictly bioeconomic terms. If you are black and poor in the United States, you are simply “dysselected by Evolution,” branded with the label of the “radicalized, criminalized, jobless poor,” making you an expendable unit of the Modern system-in-motion.
The paradigm we inhabit today no longer requires the overt authority or anthems of the past to legitimate its force. The machinery has surpassed us (or soon will), colonizing every space. Its desires have become baked in the very structure, in the set decoration and libretto, as it were, embedded in the material substance from which the stage is constructed. The foundation is set, our bodies already inscribed, and we will be on our knees before we even realize we’ve been asked whether we truly believe. Modernity no longer even requires Western Man to drive its forward motion. It operates by its own agential force, tirelessly pursuing the formula that proves, as Fanon feared, that we are ultimately nothing.
All possible iterations of reality will come prepackaged, auto-inscribed, and overrepresented. In this process, a corrupted and pre-inscribed field of vision continually determines the scope of consciousness and freedom. This “inner eye,” as Wynter describes it, shapes what is possible to see. It displays the cosmic order. It produces our reality. Modernity insists that the world must be broken up, grammaticized, reassembled, and forced to speak the language of its captors. So alongside the visual, there is the forceful incentive to represent, even if it means destroying the territory for the sake of the map.
“You want to transmit a message, but you have no other ways. You have to burn yourself in order to get your message across.”
These words were spoken by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2004, at Deer Park Monastery in Southern California, reflecting on a letter he had written to Martin Luther King in 1966. In the letter, he described the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in Saigon three years prior—not as a suicide, but as an act of love.
As before, the theatricality of this disfigured body finds itself uneasily seized by representation, but only within registers that will quickly be swept aside and classified as unreasonable, terroristic, monstrous, sacrificial, and thus denied a reality. There is a category for everything.
In her letter No Humans Involved, invoking the protests in Southern California following Rodney King’s brutal beating by the LAPD, Wynter gestures toward the liminal space, invoking Fanon’s les damnés—a condition intrinsic to each order’s “truth.” Wynter sees tactical potential in this exclusionary space, suggesting that the liminal can “expose” fault lines, “generate consciousness,” and create “new modes of knowing” from the outside.
Wynter suggests that some aspects of reason might actually help guide us toward a new “descriptive statement.” Leaving this task to her academic peers, she proposes that a “new science,” a reconfiguration of the “human,” will need to be invented. She warns that if academics fail to perform a “mutation of knowledge” in their discourses, then the “violent speech” of the streets will do the work for them.
Where Wynter sees tactical use for existing hierarchies, Lyotard aims to dismantle frameworks, concepts, and categories altogether, unsettling the very distinction between interior and exterior. In his evil book, he champions the Möbius strip—continuous, endless, with no proper inside or outside. He calls for a revolution without adequate representation, a revolution without end. Lyotard writes:
“And in this sense, it is not a revolution we need, it is one revolution, and one, and one more… a permanent revolution, if you like, but on the condition that this word ceases to denote continuity and instead means: we will never be sufficiently refined, the (libidinal) world will always be too beautiful, there will always be too great an excess of mute, vibrant trembling in the most ordinary nonsense or depression, we will never stop becoming disciples of its affects, the routes of the affects endlessly crossing and recrossing the signs of representation, tracing the most unheard-of, audacious, and disconcerting itineraries upon them.”
The position here is to resist the aggregate mode of representation, which freezes resistance into manageable forms. Remove the blockages and let the libido flow freely. Any container is an oppression to its freedom. Lyotard then turns to a pagan orientation, one that aligns closely with sensation, ultimately undermining the primacy of the visual that defines Modernity, with all its convoluted programs to engineer the human subject.
The problem, if we are to follow this ethic, is how to be outside when we seem so hopelessly inside—so deeply embedded in the overmapped, over-articulated fold of Modernity. Where do we begin to reinvent the human race? Which logics remain in place and can be deployed tactically? Where do we find the agential force necessary to dethrone Modernity’s stranglehold on reality?
If we reinvest our desire for a human that does not yet exist, would it mean abandoning all our health and wellness projects—yoga, salves, operas, candles, herbal teas, therapies, weekends with friends—which are merely Modernity’s half-apologetic consolation for a world transformed into a living hell? What needs curing, according to Lyotard, is “the disease that wants to cure.”
Depression follows: whether it’s a material condition of gray matter, or a consciousness that drains vitality from things, reifies the present unbearable order, and turns all matter gray, it remains elusive. Just as a series of prophecies is experienced in rapid succession, and it’s all bad news, which amounts to no news at all—just a smaller and smaller space to fill with our own longing screams.
It feels like nothing short of a violent withdrawal from this overrepresented world will suffice. And perhaps this is the message of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation: we must not seek a cure to ease every suffering, but instead, discover modes of suffering that cannot be contained within the stable categories that Modernity insists upon. Allow the space of unknowability to fuel a mistrust for any arrangement, term, or framework that attempts to extinguish the fire and rebuild property lines. Let us not dismiss the thirst for self-annihilation and the destruction of property, for within that unrepresentable haze is the desire for a world—a humanity—that’s not here, but should be.
