Toolkit

The social cartography ‘The House That Modernity Built’ was inspired by Audre Lorde’s famous insight that:

“… the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

The first four frames at the top of the cartography present a brief analysis of contemporary social structures and institutions facing social, political, ecological and economic crises. The four frames at the bottom of the cartography offer an analysis of how modernity affects our reasoning, our sense of self and reality, our desires, and our perceived entitlements, impairing our capacity to feel, to hope, to relate, and to be and imagine differently.

This cartography synthesises critiques of modernity that have been mobilised in Indigenous, Black, and Decolonial practices and studies, Post-development and Post-colonial theory, and (different forms of) Psychoanalysis, through the works of communities, as well as scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Fred Moten, Arturo Escobar, Vandana Shiva, Boaventura de Souza Santos, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sylvia Wynter, Glen Coulthard, Michalinos Zembylas, Ilan Kapoor, Sara Ahmed, Leela Gandhi, David Scott, M. Jacqui Alexander, and many others. A description of the ‘house’ was first published in Stein and Andreotti (2017), and subsequently further developed in Stein, Hunt, Susa and Andreotti (2017), and Andreotti, Stein, Sutherland, Pashby, Susa, and Amsler (2018).

The House and the Planet
The first frame presents a house built by modernity that is exceeding the limits of the planet. This house consists of:

• a foundation of separability (separations between humans and the earth, and hierarchies of human value)
• a carrying wall of universal reason based on Enlightenment humanism
• a carrying wall of the modern nation states grounded on principles of liberal rights and justice
• a (current) roof of global capital representing shareholder financial capitalism that has replaced roofs of industrial capitalism and socialism in different contexts

Hidden Costs
The second frame draws attention to the externalised and invisibilised costs of building and maintaining the house through historical and on-going expropriation, land-theft, exploitation, destitution, dispossession and epistemicides, ecocides, and genocides (as these manifest contemporarily in e.g. extraction of blood minerals, arms trade, the denial of Indigenous peoples’ treaty rights, violent policing both at and within the borders of the house, the poisoning of lands and waters through resource extraction, human trafficking, preventable famines and malnutrition, racialized incarceration, the testing of new drugs and treatments on vulnerable populations, interference in foreign elections, etc). One arrow points to the extraction of resources from the planet to the house, another shows the house dumping its sewage system and waste disposal on the planet.

Floors
The third frame complexifies the divisions within the house and problematizes desires related to the promise of social mobility for all. The top level of the house is presented as the “north-of-the north”: those who have accumulated the most wealth and power in the house and who have secured and stabilised their position as legitimate producers of value and heirs of the house. In the second level, the “north-of-the-south” is invested in climbing the stairs of social mobility in an effort to reach the bar established by the “north-of the-north”. The basement is the place of the “south-of-the-north” where people who have been exploited and marginalised within the house and who dis-identify with the aspirations of the second and top floors build their community. Outside of the house is the “south-of-the-south”, those who live without the securities that the house affords, who subsidise the existence of the house, paying the highest price for its maintenance, and who fight to protect alternatives to life inside the house.

Structural Damage
The fourth frame shows the house cracking below a water-damaged roof collapsing under the weight of social, ecological, economic and political crises, including unsustainable growth, overconsumption, a surplus labour force, mental health crises, and cancellation of welfare and rights. The frame invites the questions: should we fix the house? Expand it? Build another house? Or create other types of shelter?

Harnessed Fears
The sixth frame suggests that the ‘House of Modernity’ relates to existential fears created through the foundation of separability and its project of transcendence (of “nature”). Separability sustains the house: once we are no longer perceived as interwoven with the land, each other and the cosmos, and the land becomes “resource” or “property”, all other bodies (including human bodies) need to justify their existence by producing value in predetermined economies of worth. The project of transcending nature can take different forms, but is often characterised by an aversion to death, pain and loss, the overcoming of nature/flaws/material conditions/interdependence and control of a path that can secure the achievement of a specific higher ideal (which may or not relate to a notion of God) (e.g. a better life, “greatness”, sovereignty, civilization, progress, development, evolution, etc., defined in multiple ways). The house modernity built constructs and harnesses certain fears to mobilise our motivation to invest in its reproduction and expansion. These fears become existential insecurities related to our vulnerability and lack of autonomy and self-insufficiency in the face of death, pain, “nature” and the universe at large. Our fears of scarcity, worthlessness, destitution, existential emptiness, loss, pain, death, impermanence, incompetence and insignificance are all mobilised in modern economies of value production where the intrinsic value of human and non-human life is denied.

Compensatory Desires
As we engage in the production of value for the validation and worth of our existence through intellectual, affective, and material economies established by modernity, our desires are allocated accordingly. For example, our harnessed fear of scarcity is turned into a “positive” desire for accumulation, our harnessed fear of impermanence becomes a desire for mastery, certainty, consensus, coherence and control. Our fear of incompetence becomes a desire for authority, and our fear of insignificance becomes a desire for external validation, community (on our terms) and universality/normalisation.

Perceived Entitlements
Enacted within and dependent upon the continuity of the house, our compensatory desires become naturalised entitlements that mark and limit our ability to face and navigate the complexities of the social, economic, political and ecological crises that worsen as the house cracks. For example, the desire for accumulation is enacted as an entitlement to property, the desire for mastery is enacted as an entitlement to autonomy and stability, the desire for authority is enacted as an entitlement to the arbitration of justice, the desire for validation is enacted as an entitlement to admiration, innocence, virtue, exceptionalism, self-authorship (demanding that the world sees you as you see yourself) and leadership. These entitlements calibrate our hopes and fantasies sustaining colonial addictions and trapping human life-force within the collapsing house.

Reasoning and its Implications for Imagination Work

The fifth frame, at the bottom, depicts how the house conditions our possibilities for experiencing the world by reducing being to knowing and life to meaning-making. This framework works like a grammar that defines what is intelligible, legitimate, viable and desirable within the house. 

The house conditions us to relate with the world through our cognitive repertoire of meanings, rather than our senses. Each referent enables a certain way of making meaning while bracketing all others, thereby buffering our sense of reality, and our capacity to imagine otherwise. Logocentrism compels us to believe that reality can be described in language in its totality. Universalism leads us to understand our interpretation of reality (and our imagination of a desirable future) as objective and to project it as the only legitimate and valuable world view. Anthropocentric reasoning makes us see ourselves as separate from nature and having a mandate to manage, exploit and control it. Dialectical thinking traps us in a linear logic that is obsessed with consensus and resolutions and averse to paradoxes, complexities and contradictions. Teleological thinking makes us want to plan for the engineering of a future that we can already imagine and believe that without that point of arrival in the future we can't get there; it is the false idea that we cannot have motivation if we don’t know where we are going. 

We often see that way too much time is spent trying to imagine a future and convince others of the validity and legitimacy of our version of that future. This often serves to bypass the more important (and more difficult) work that needs to be done in the present in terms of relating with more emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment and intergenerational accountability. 

As Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, Hereditary and elected chief of the Huni Kuin peoples of the Amazon, says: 

The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present. We will need to combine engineering and relational sciences and technologies if humanity is to have a future on this planet. Before we can do that, Western disciplines of science and technology will need to lose their ingrained ethnocentrism and universalism, and confront the harms they have caused and/or contributed to. Once that happens, Indigenous sciences and technologies can be integrated with Western sciences and technologies to coordinate efforts towards regeneration and the expansion of social-ecological accountabilities.

Further resources:

Inquiry: A complexity approach to decolonization (and a decolonial approach to complexity)

Article: The gift contract

Article: Preparing for the end of the world as we know it

Course: Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and relational accountability