Gut Brain: Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess

Life is at the center of what constitutes reality.
You don’t live off of what you eat, but off of what you digest.

1. The Still Life and the Biology of Inflammatory Disease

Yoshúa Okón’s video installation Freedom Fries: Still Life (2014) presents a mise-en-scène of the deadly aspects of globalized forms of desire as well as the injurious forms of interdependency that sustain human life on earth. The title alludes to Republican politicians’ renaming of French fries in the US in reaction to France’s opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. To be free, in this context, means being free to have a liberal market that offers McDonald’s fries, free to invade foreign countries, free to fight imperial wars, free to make McDonald’s fries available to Iraqis.

Okón’s installation, shown at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UNAM in Mexico City in 2017–18, comprises a single-channel video, a sculpture, and a photographic triptych. Okón convinced the manager of a McDonald’s to let her use the restaurant as a set for a whole night and a client to act as a model for the photographic part of the piece. In the video, a large white woman lies diagonally on a table at a McDonald’s booth. The pose of the model is reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Hermit and the Sleeping Angelica (1626–28), but unlike Angelica, whose face is upturned, Okón’s model is turned around, covering her face with her arm. The fact that we cannot see her face, her faceless body crudely displayed like meat on a slab, makes the image disturbing, more a still life (as the title states) than a portrait.

After Peter Paul Rubens, Angelica Spied On by the Hermit, between 1626 and 1800. License: Public domain.

McDonald’s functions as a sign of the corporate model that, under the guise of consumer freedom, dehumanizes bodies through offering them ultra-processed foods and uncomfortable modular seating. Although it is as difficult to look at the woman’s body as it is to look away, the focus of the piece is not only her: as we notice the rhythm of her heavy breathing, we also notice the circular motion of a brown man’s arm in the background. He is meticulously cleaning the window that bears the fast-food restaurant’s logo. In his refusal to portray the woman’s face, the artist replicates mainstream society and corporations’ dehumanization of the condition of being obese. The piece is about pressing issues such as what it is like to be a large person in a fat-shaming world, what kinds of social discrimination fat people experience, and how that can be alleviated. Yet it is also about the biopolitical underpinnings of the global obesity epidemic. It posits obese and brown bodies as physical evidence of a racialized neoliberal system whose ideologies promote a model of freedom based on excess consumption and underpaid migrant labor. Moreover, Freedom Fries: Still Life shows how mainstream society has privatized the problem of being fat, framing it as a matter of unhealthiness, immorality, and disease rather than systemic necropower.

Yoshúa Okón, Freedom Fries: Still Life, 2014, film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Necropower is the global apparatus that produces diseased and addicted bodies in order to manage remaindered populations. This is done through the processed products of the for-profit food-pharmaco-industrial complex, which both relies on and contributes to the dismantling of social welfare infrastructures.1 Okón’s installation also accounts for how McDonald’s profits from violence to nonhuman life, rendering it vulnerable to necropower as well. The sculpture that accompanies the video is made up of typical McDonald’s furniture: a modular seating arrangement comprising two chairs facing each other. Instead of a table, an amorphous body made up of three animal carcasses holds the module together, referencing the classical genre of still-life painting. Okón is clearly referencing Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox (1655), an example of the painting genre that emerged in the Northern and Spanish Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Paintings of beef are a category of their own in the genre of still life. They proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but not much has been written about them. Some prominent examples of such paintings include Francisco de Goya’s Still Life: A Butcher’s Counter (1810–12), Gustav Caillebotte’s Calf’s Head and Ox’s Tongue (1882), Chaim Soutine’s Carcass with Beef (1925), and Francis Bacon’s Figure With Meat (1952). Like Bacon’s painting, which should be read in the context of postwar art, twentieth-century filmic portrayals of animal slaughter emphasize the connections between dehumanization and the emotionless treatment of nonhumans. Georges Franju’s Le Sangue des Bêtes is a black-and-white documentary from 1949 showing everyday scenes from the Parisian suburbs juxtaposed with scenes from a slaughterhouse, where men and women methodically butcher horses, sheep, and calves.

The mechanical slaughter of animals for human consumption—along with the conditions under which they are made to live, the massive deforestation required to raise them, and the automation of their treatment—can be connected to the increasingly mechanized abuse of Indigenous populations across the world under the aegis of mid-century modernization. Another slaughterhouse that comes to mind appears in Rubén Gámez’s 1965 experimental film La fórmula secreta (Coca-cola en la sangre) (The secret formula [Coca-Cola in the blood]), an experimental film critical of Western “development” policies in Latin America. The cost of these policies has been massive impoverishment, the degradation of physical and human ecologies through resource extraction, epidemics, and the murder of Indigenous people.2 Gámez explicitly draws analogies between veal slaughter and the disappearance and displacement of Mexico’s Indigenous populations. Both Franju’s and Gámez’s representations of industrial meat production allude to the industrialization of the administration of life and death of all kinds.

Rubén Gámez, La fórmula secreta (Coca-cola en la sangre), 1965, film still, detail. 

With these historical referents in mind, one might read Freedom Fries: Still Life as a comment on the way the corporatization of food production has made autoimmune and inflammatory illnesses, caused in part by microbiome depletion and in part by the ingestion of nonnutritious food, the main causes of death across the world.3 The destruction of the old agricultural order, along with poverty, oppression, and environmental stressors, have induced lifelong changes to hormones and tissues that persist across lifespans as well as generations.4 On the one hand, people dealing with poverty are not able to access nutritious foods due to price barriers and food deserts. In Mexico, for example, one of the effects of NAFTA has been that most Mexicans have been priced out of eating ancestral foods.5 On the other hand, eating has become inextricably tied to food-as-commodity, and eating choices are social-class signifiers. Again in Mexico, having access to ultra-processed foods at Costco, Domino’s, or Burger King has become an aspirational choice. As medical anthropologist Alyshia Galvez argues, NAFTA radically changed Mexicans’ eating habits and preferences, from a milpa-based diet centered around corn, beans, and squash, with occasionally meat or poultry, to a US-American diet based on dairy, meat, grains, and sugar, leading to national epidemics of diabetes and obesity.6

In our era of ultra-processed foods, which is also the era of absolute extractivist capitalism, the violent legacies of colonialism have intensified into forms of necropower through sociopolitical and economic war, but also through the distribution of inflammatory and autoimmune illness across vulnerable communities, especially women, trans people, lesbians, and girls.

2. Excess and the Desire for Self-Destruction

Rather than nourishment or medicine, industrial food has become an excess substance that has transformed eating into a libidinal activity. The consumption of ultra-processed foods clearly and directly indicates the way necropower works and the extent of its reach. This comes across in Jo Ann Callis’s series of staged photographs Cheap Thrills and Forbidden Pleasures (1993), where the artist presents pastries and cakes in sensual tones and textures, like a marketing campaign. The images are anthropomorphic and sexually suggestive: cream oozes erotically from buns, “a golden-crusted apple pie has a gaping hole in the center, baked juices [are] ready to spill, nestled in a sea of yellow chiffon.”7 The series stokes the visual appetite, representing the desire to ingest in excess.

We cannot deflect the blame for people’s health problems onto individual spending choices in a “free” market; nor can we overlook the structural changes in the global food system that have transformed food into a commodity and citizens into consumers. Okón’s video installation shows how unhealthy obesity is a symptom of a toxic world, where pleasurable commodities are manufactured through exploited labor and extractivism, yet fat people are shamed. This applies not only to foods but to all sorts of harmful products, such as perfumes, cleaning solutions, and clothes laden with toxic chemicals.8 The character of Carol White, the protagonist of Todd Haynes’s visionary film Safe (1993), embodies the paradox and paranoia of living in a toxic world. Carol is a suburban housewife who believes that the chemicals in objects and substances around her make her sick, so she secludes herself in the fictional Arizona town of Wrenwood, a community where people “allergic to the twentieth century” come to heal. The community is portrayed as a cult of misunderstood people with a mysterious illness that is medically impossible to diagnose. In retrospect, this mysterious illness could be microbiome depletion due to antibiotics overuse and changes in our diet. Microbiome loss is related to immune-system maladaptation and is linked to chronic inflammatory illness and the growth of mental health disorders.9

3. The Technosphere, Microbiome Depletion, and Inflammatory Illness

Inflammatory disease underlies all the leading global killers in industrialized places.10 This is caused by the proliferation of ultra-processed foods as well as toxic chemicals and substances that have disrupted our bodily functions, as much as by the sociopolitical and environmental structures around us, which have turned the immune system against itself.11 Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, authors of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, argue that inflammation is a natural response to threats that originate in the separation of humans from the web of life (and their domination by what has been called the technosphere.)12 All inhabitants of the planet are now vulnerable to autoimmune illnesses (IBS, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, food allergies) and inflammatory diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, fibromyalgia, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and anxiety. Because microbes in our gut confer protection against inflammatory disease, microbiome dysbiosis, or gut flora imbalance, has even proven to be a source of attention-deficit disorders and autism.13 One of the main reasons for gut dysbiosis is a lack of fiber in our diet; another is soil depletion through agro-industry, which diminishes the variety of bacteria needed to replenish our microbiome.

The origin of the technosphere is Western culture’s treatment of nature as a “resource.” Modern societies were built by treating nature as simple matter for extraction and by putting other living beings to work according to human will and needs. Maria Puig argues that in the late 1950s, anxieties about population growth and imminent famine (particularly in Asia) drove the techno-scientific complex that set in motion the so-called Green Revolution.14 Agro-industry combined artificial fertilizers with chemical pesticides to produce unprecedented yields. The negative consequences are the destruction of soil (erosion, pollution, nutrient depletion) and water, and now the loss of food security worldwide.15

From this perspective, an inflamed body suffering from chronic illness might be compared to a river devoid of biodiversity, a burning forest, or a warming ocean filled with dying coral reefs. Marya and Patel have made such comparisons; so has disability theorist Sunaura Taylor, who writes about the parallels between the state of our environment and the states of disabled bodies.16 The luxurious expenditure of energy that drove industrialization led to a global interdependent economic system that generates waste unassimilable by nature’s cycles, producing intoxication, global warming, and mass extinction. In sum, the inheritance of modernity is a predatory system that considers part of humanity as well as nature expendable. The notion of nature as distinct from humanity, and as malleable, has radically changed the planet, bringing all its living systems to the brink of collapse.

A rare moment caught on camera when corals under heat stress turn vibrant colors usually preceding full coral bleaching and death. Palawan, Philippines, 2010. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

This continues to be driven by consumerism as the primary human relationship to one’s subjecthood. The result is individualist hedonism, the fantasy that death can be negated, and the mandate to pursue individual happiness while considering suffering as a personal failure. Clearly the food system we rely on and the chemical products we consume damage us and the planet. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

4. Mutations in Desire

In his last lectures, given in 2016 and published posthumously as Postcapitalist Desire, British theorist Mark Fisher observed that when he visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2012, the protesters were all carrying iPhones and drinking Starbucks coffee. He concluded that they weren’t hypocrites, but that they didn’t really want what they said they wanted (which was an end to financial capitalism). In Fisher’s view, the protesters said they wanted to live in a different world and find means to create wealth beyond capitalism, but the problem was precisely that at the level of libidinal desire, they were committed to living within the current capitalist world despite their knowledge that it was leading to civilizational collapse.17

Recall Jean-François Lyotard’s controversial statement about peasants and the unemployed (which also applies to colonized subjects): in his view, the process of modernization was made possible through its promises of fulfilling desire. Lyotard wrote: “They enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages.”18

Many people’s incapacity to desire beyond the options provided by extractivist capitalism is due to the fact that we have come to valorize individuality and identify ourselves with what we consume, leaving us disconnected from each other and from reality. Almost a hundred years ago, French theorist Pierre Klossowski argued that under capitalism, even our bodies have been determined by unlimited production: “Bodily presence is in itself already a commodity, independently of (and in excess of) the commodities its presence helps to produce.”19 From this perspective, we can understand individualist hedonism as the internalization of the larger capitalist system that exploits objects in order to isolate and individualize pleasure.

Excess consumption due to hedonistic desires grounded in capitalist infrastructure (the technosphere) is a form of necropower. It has led us to inter-relational toxicity and codependent empathy (both linked to cycles of gender violence),20 inherited trauma, and the trauma of capitalist labor alienation. This stems from what I call, following Félix Guattari, the crisis of relationality,21 which has also been elaborated by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. The crisis of relationality is due to neoliberalism and digital acceleration. According to Bifo, desire is a factor of intensity in our relationships with one another, and it is not reducible to a sexual dimension. In his view, the dematerialization (digitalization) and disembodiment of communicative exchange has moved desire into a hyper-semiotic dimension, mutating desire further away from sexuality and manifesting in a condition of isolation. Desire is reinvented and expressed in a semiotic form, purely phantasmic. It takes the shape of anxiety, self-mutilation, and aggression.22

One of Baruch Spinoza’s most quoted propositions is from his Ethics, published in 1677. It states: “Every object makes an effort, as much as it is within its reach, to preserve its being.”23 In Spinoza’s conception, the essence of humanity is the morally good and rational striving for self-preservation and for the preservation of other humans. Arguably, the above-mentioned crises in desire and relationality are part of what is leading us to self-destruction, or acting against our self-preservation. This behavior is a form of perversion, according to Klossowski’s reading of Sade, Bataille, and Spinoza—the “perversion” that comes with industrialization. Perversion here is not conceived in moral terms, but means rather that industrialization altered human passions by creating a sensible regime of phantasms24 that are channeled into the cycles of capitalist production and consumption, leading to automatism, as Klossowski put it.25 The sensible regime of phantasms is fed by the constant creation of new needs that nourish the chain of the production, acquisition, consumption, and waste of industrial products. In this scenario, use value has been replaced by exchange value. For Klossowski, the perverse elaboration of phantasms and the fabrication of use-objects are divergent processes, in the sense that the elaboration of the phantasm is bound up with the use of pleasure and not with an object’s use value. Fulfilling daily needs as basic as food through industrial methods is not only extractivist but is traversed by perverted libidinal fluxes (market forces). We could think of the perversion and individualization of desire in tandem with modernity and consumerism, which are intrinsically linked to necropower and express themselves in the body and between bodies: from the global epidemic of inflammatory disease to the global epidemic of (gender-based) violence.

5. An Archeology of Inflammation: The Automatization of Female Desire through Seduction as the Motor for Consumption

In Passagenwerk, Walter Benjamin’s study of Parisian shopping halls and thus of the nineteenth century, Benjamin argued along lines similar to Klossowski. He writes that the vital nerve of capitalism is fetishism (the phantasm), which prompts the subject to succumb to the sex appeal of merchandise. While Benjamin elaborates on the figure of the flaneur, the Passagen is the site where the shopper is fabricated.

The figure of this shopper is described at length by Émile Zola in his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight) (1863). Zola recounts the details of an era that saw the invention of mass publicity, great sales, discounts, home delivery, systems of return, and commodity novelty, all primarily geared toward a feminine clientele. He took inspiration from the great Parisian department stores inaugurated around then: Le Bon Marché and Les Magazins du Louvre. The department store is the subject and the stage of a narrative about the primordial scene of capitalism. Zola describes the internal mechanisms of the shop from the perspective of the employees. Many conflicts emerge because of malicious gossip they spread in their struggle to rise through the ranks. In the incipient modern world portrayed by the novel, people had to fight to find their places in society, they were vulnerable to temptations, their vices were awakened by the commodities on offer, and they were anxious to splurge. In the novel, Zola documents the incipient “dessessity” (a term for the combination of desire and need coined by Amaia Pérez Orozco26) of consumers to waste what they buy and shows the slow agony of small commerce and the arrival of professional sellers skilled in attracting (female) buyers.

Remedios Varo, Au Bonheur des Dames, 1956. Courtesy of the artist.

Remedios Varo, the surrealist Spanish painter who took refuge in Mexico, represented the embodiment of feminized conspicuous consumption in a 1956 painting titled after Zola’s novel. The painting is inhabited by feminine figures mounted on monocycles or wheels, analogous to “insects or ants,” as she calls them. Varo describes the work as follows:

Creatures fallen into the worst mechanization, all their body parts have become small wheels, etc., at the shop they sell the pieces they desire to buy to replace their old parts, creatures of our era, without ideas of their own, mechanized and ready to pass on to the state of insects, particularly ants.27

In this paragraph describing her painting, made almost a hundred years after Zola’s book was written, Varo mentions the word “mechanization” twice. The figures, she says, are mechanized through wheels, which the creatures use to flock to the same place: the shop where all their desirable replacements parts are sold. The creatures and the pieces are all homogenous except for their red and green colors. The ant-buyers, according to Varo, are mechanized because they lack their own ideas, as their desires have been preprogrammed by the department store: their senses are overwhelmed by their desire for the merchandise, presented to them seductively and intoxicatingly.

In his novel, Zola lays out the mutation in desire brought about by consumption targeting women specifically, explaining it as a form of exploitation through sexual seduction:

It was for woman that all the establishments were struggling in wild competition; it was woman whom they were continually catching in the snares of their bargains, after bewildering her with their displays. They had awakened new desires in her flesh, before which she fatally succumbed, yielding at first to reasonable purchases of articles needed in the household, then tempted by her coquetry, and finally subjugated and devoured.28

By drawing out the specific femininity of the world of consumption, seduction, and the rush of shopping and modern life, Zola’s novel and Varos’s painting pinpoint the mix of alienation and conformism (Varo also describes it as mechanization or automatization) that generates the experience of consumption. Fleeced by the seller (Zola: “When he had emptied her purse and shattered her nerves, he remained full of the secret scorn of a man”), the female consumer’s desire is desexualized. This represents the beginning of the hyper-semiotization of desire by means of the separation of language from material reality.

Paradoxically, according to popular culture, consumerism on the eve of the twenty-first century coincided perfectly with female emancipation: almost all aspects of consumer culture came to be seen as feminist and empowering, including shopping, pole dancing, stripping, self-exploitation at work, eating chocolate, and being promiscuous.29 Second-wave feminism emerged in tandem with the sexual revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, an age that posited sexuality as a primary site of collective repression. Writer Michel Houellebecq describes this era, however, as the antechamber of new forms of repression to come:

It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.30

For Houellebecq, the gradual disappearance of the nuclear family, religious rituals, and archaic forms of social relations in the wake of May ’68 allowed the colonization of affect, sex, and sexuality, incorporating them into commercial machinery. In other words, hedonism and seduction became the grounds of the capitalist market: libido was scattered throughout the social body, soaking everything that is produced under capitalism. This transformed pleasure and injected phantasmic desire into cycles of production and exchange. Consequently, merchandise is tempting and seductive; it libidinizes our consumption habits, draining sexuality and eroticism from the sexual act, reducing sexual relations to physiological needs, and turning the desire for amorous attachment into something cruelly optimistic—the simulacra of desire. And while consumption and female empowerment came to be synonymous under neoliberal capitalism, women still have a secondary role in economic and political terms, and have grown more vulnerable to being attacked, raped, mutilated, and murdered as gender violence has increased globally since the 1990s.

6. Unwanted Penetration, or I Hate Myself for Loving You

According to Daniela Barragán, eleven women are killed every day in Mexico.31 This is only one example of a femicide epidemic: femicide has expanded globally, especially to formerly colonized countries. In Canada, the femicide of Indigenous women has reached alarming numbers; it is also intensifying across Europe and the rest of North America.32

Violence against vulnerable communities accords with the logic that drives extractivist capitalism. Emanuela Borzacchiello calls this an apparatus for the “expropriation-dispossession of the body”; this apparatus destroys affective ties and instrumentalizes feminized and dissident bodies as means to exercise power.33 Inaction before this kind of violence legitimates heteropatriarchy and destroys communal links and the capacity of communities to collectively sustain life. Gender-based and extractivist violence, which go hand in hand, are rooted in capitalism, which is itself embedded in colonial systems that have never been dismantled and is perpetuated and institutionalized by nation-states.34

Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Fringe, 2007. Minneapolis Institute of Art, gift of funds from Donna and Cargill MacMillan Jr., 2010.56. © Rebecca Belmore.

Rebecca Belmore’s 2007 photograph Fringe is a chilling representation of the confluence of gendered violence and colonial legacy. At the same time, the photograph evokes resilience, healing, and resistance. The artist is Anishinaabe and a member of Obishikokaang (Lac Seul First) Nation. For the image, she used her own body to address the legacy of colonial violence against her people, especially women.35

In Fringe, we see a female figure in a reclining pose emblematic of European art history, but atypically, we only see her back. On her back is a tremendous wound, a slash from shoulder to hip. A description of the photograph on the website of the Smithsonian Art Museum explains that the deep scar is makeup, and the red drips coming out of the laceration are strings of small red beads.36 According to Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, colonialism rips Indigenous people away from land, language, culture, and family. It takes them away from their own knowledge systems and away from the ability to feel at home in their own bodies: dispossession is both intimate and expansive.37

By depicting her own body as a primary site for colonization, Belmore speaks of her and her peoples’ history. Yet despite the graveness of the injury, Fringe is also about healing. The scar will never go away, but it is stitched together with beads that symbolize Indigenous resilience and resistance—a refusal to vanish. Fringe is not the first time Belmore has addressed gender violence against Indigenous women. In 2002, she did a performance that resembled a ritual, in which she named several murdered Indigenous women and shredded flowers with her teeth.38

In Regina José Galindo’s video and performance The Shadow (commissioned for Documenta 14 in 2017), we see the artist running away from a World War II German tank known as a “Leopard,” which is coming after her in a dirt field reminiscent of a battle site. She runs in circles until she reaches exhaustion and has to surrender. The artist states that the performance highlights the under-recognized fact that Germany is a major arms exporter (with Guatemala as a main client)39 and also alludes to American military intervention in Guatemala during the latter’s civil war and genocide from 1980 to 1996. Galindo’s performance also refers to ongoing forms of colonialism that loom over the lives of Guatemalan women, especially Indigenous women. “Progress” and “modernization” have made them even more vulnerable to femicide, forced displacement, and migration. The Leopard is an allegory for the predatory capitalist system ruling over us. As philosopher Paul B. Preciado explains, the predator also comprises the epistemologies, representational regimes, techniques of power, discourses, and images operating since colonial times to uphold heteropatriarchy.40

Neither classical notions of power and sovereignty, nor human rights discourses, are sufficient to explain the corporate and government technologies behind heteropatriarchal extractivist capitalism. They also fail to explain the new forms that hegemony has taken in its drive to legitimize necropower, the waste of the female shopper, and the waste of the fast food chain.

7. Third-World Modernization and the Self-destructive Desire for Development

How did formerly colonized populations become complicit in their embeddedness in these toxic agglomerations of flesh, soil, and waste? Because of their desire to become modern. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, anti-colonial leaders and thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru subscribed to the romance of modern progress, which kept hidden the dispossession, environmental destruction, and mass alienation necessary for modernity to thrive. Anti-colonial thinkers fell in love not with the material aspects of modernization but with Enlightenment values, and they spoke earnestly about ending poverty through modern development.41

In Chakrabarty’s view, the European project of modernity was appropriated by various national projects in postindependence countries, leading to the suppression of local cultures in the name of development and modernization. The very existence of the third world was a managed and negotiated outcome of the modern politics of representation. As a regime of representation, modernization was linked to an economy the produced both commodities and desire, but also closure, differentiation, and violence, which came to be the sources of postcolonial identities. The transformation of the modern industrialized world order into a global open market, the weakening of the working class, and the “culturalization” of social struggles are all hallmarks of a neoliberalism that altered the very meaning of development and progress. These elements eventually laid the groundwork for a new way of integrating geographies and societies: privileged populations developed enclaves in the former developing world and created belts of third-world misery within the first. The new social and spatial arrangements created differentiated territorial sovereignties and vulnerabilities, with the remaindered populations administered through forms of necropower.

It is becoming more and more difficult to ignore the global structural division between human lives that are “valuable” and those that are “remaindered.”42 Historically, capitalism and colonialism have disrupted how people connect with each other and share what they need to survive. We have been forced into systems of wage labor and private property that have led to the concentration of wealth, inequality, and environmental devastation. Plagued by racialized colonial hierarchies and the competition against each other for survival, we have no choice but to rely on hostile systems like healthcare-for-profit and industrialized food production. This structural situation has led to injurious forms of interdependency. There are sacrifice zones whose populations are targeted for destruction and displacement, enabling populations living in mostly urban enclaves of privilege not only to survive but to thrive through excess consumption. In other words: “progress” has a human and environmental cost and makes the land and its resources more valuable than the labor that can be extracted from them—or the people who already inhabit them.

In formerly colonized territories, becoming modern used to mean overcoming “underdevelopment” through forced assimilation, following the lure of modernization—the dream of being part of the circuits of consumption and production. Necropower has transformed formerly colonized populations from an exploitable labor force to an undesirable mass, redundant and “remaindered.” Following Neferti X. M. Tadiar, we live in a time when human life has become disposable and the destiny of certain populations is to become waste. Wasting human lives becomes the central object or medium of capitalist production, which steals, destroys, consumes, and expends human lives marked by colonial racism and heterosexism.43

An example of “wasted lives” is the reproductive labor done globally in privileged enclaves, mainly by Indigenous women from Latin America (in Latin America, the US, and Spain), Southeast Asia (in the Middle East and North America), and sub-Saharan Africa (mostly in Europe). For Tadiar, these women’s lives are wasted in the sense that they must give up their own lives (hopes, dreams) because caring for others takes up all their time. What is worse, this sort of labor is racialized, badly paid, and invisibilized. Care workers lack rights and are frequently mistreated.

The desire for modernity persists—and people continue to find ways to resist. Mexico City–based Puerto Rican artist Miguel Ventura’s video Mexican War Fair is set in an imaginary future in 2060. The New Interterritorial Language Committee (NILC) has taken over the whole American continent, creating a homogenous territory based on racial and linguistic mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing) and military repression. The fifty-minute video shows archaeologists finding footage dating from the beginning of the twenty-first century. The footage depicts the early integration efforts of the NILC consortium, which includes a performance in Frontera de Corozal, a village on the Guatemalan-Mexican border. Two bureaucrats are visiting the town to implement the regime’s integration strategies: inviting the inhabitants to visit an “Indian house,”44 handing out NILC chocolate bars, and showing them a ritual in which a chair is dunked in liquid chocolate. We get the feeling that the chair is sacred, and we learn that it was created by Donald Judd and has been imported from Marfa, Texas. We also know from the video that the chair and the chocolate captivated the villagers, causing racial and linguistic differences to disappear, giving way to a new race of men and a world free of racism and socioeconomic inequality. In this fragment of Mexican War Fair, Ventura creates a kind of primal scene of colonization by way of the instrumentalization of desire, using an icon of art history and chocolate to represent the lure of modernization that hides structural damage: the expropriation and the commodification of life.

In the ritual, Judd’s chair is dunked in chocolate and reborn as “black,” as Ventura states. Neoliberal extractivist capitalism (or “Empire,” to use an old word) has been able to co-opt anything to legitimize itself, including discourses and practices of diversity, equality, and inclusion. Paradoxically, the many artists, thinkers, and other creators of emancipatory languages discussed in this text have participated in building these modern worlds. In Mexican War Fair, to be a “modern artist” is to serve the machine and even institutions that embrace diversity (represented by Ventura’s “Indian house”), making everyone complicit in maintaining colonial violence.

Ventura’s video is reminiscent of Jean Rouch’s classic Moi un noir, a docu-fiction shot in the 1950s in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The camera mostly follows two villagers, Eddie Constantine and Robinson, who have migrated to the modern city. We see them struggling to feed themselves in their daily routine, while they dream of being able one day to move to the modern neighborhood of Meseta. Their hopes and efforts to become modern motivate their attempts to insert themselves into the local cheap labor market and consume leisure: they attend boxing matches and go to bars with European and American names. In Mexican War Fair as in Moi un noir, the filmmakers unveil the main element inherent to the primal scene of modernity: libidinal investment in becoming modern through consumption. In Moi un noir, the lure is the world promised by Hollywood films (references to which abound in the film).

At the end of Mexican War Fair we are back in 2060. We see the fully modernized future of Frontera de Corozal’s inhabitants, happily cheering for NILC’s regime among the ruins of the modernized periphery they inhabit. With his video, Ventura goes a step further than Rouch. His gross parody of globalization and the culture industry’s complicity with neocolonialism flips even the possibility of decolonial art on its head. The film ends with NILC’s counterrevolutionaries burning down the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UNAM, Mexico City. Achille Mbembe calls this the “becoming black of the world,” where being human is defined as suffering the virtual imposition of enslavement by new forms of power.45 Libidinal investment and jouissance are gone from the modernized subject, as is a belief in Enlightenment values. What remain are pathologies resulting from unhealthy libidinal drives, such as addiction and self-destruction and sheer rage.

8. Becoming Unmodern, or Gut Brain against Necropower

Western civilization is built upon the separation between humans and nature. This is linked to the grounding of Western philosophy and epistemology in the cranial paradigm of human intelligence and vision as the main sites for knowledge. As nature is thought to be detachable from culture, so reason is thought to be separate from the body. The entire system that sustains life on the planet—the technosphere—follows this logic. The idea that nature is separate from human systems implies that modern humans have “made the world” for five hundred years through technology. This belief also has an epistemological function: planetary life is expendable, documentable, and translatable into algorithms, information, and images; it is subject to predation and to measures of value and profit; humans are placed within a racialized hierarchy and subject to graded forms of necropower. In this framework, modern technologies are at the center of a project of a future worldmaking—or terraforming, as bioengineering, accelerationism, and design—linked to a self-destructive dependency on fossil fuels, penetrative potency, and toxic masculinity. Contrary to what modernism proselytized, we are not protected by a shell of technology independent from the environment we inhabit. Our links to the world and other living beings are real and complex, and our bodies are permeable; they mirror the outside world because we exist in symbiosis with the environment.

For several decades, science has shown that the gut is a crucial form of bodily intelligence—a nonconsciousness “brain” in charge of maintaining homeostasis, that is, a balance between the “inside” and the “outside” of our porous bodies.46 Insofar as humans exist in symbiosis-sympoiesis with others and the environment, the contemporary epidemics of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases show that environmental devastation is reflected in our diminishing microbiomes. Part of this devastation is a result of the twentieth-century war against bacteria and microbes, for which antibiotics and pesticides were invented; this war was intrinsically linked to colonialism’s struggle to modernize, valorize, and purify. In this context, we must bear in mind that our condition is now “post-human”: forever chemicals, pesticides, and plastics are part of our bodies now, as much as they are part of our ecosystems. Disabled, ill, and addicted bodies are managed by necropower through the pharmacological and alimentary industrial complexes.

In order to ensure the long-term survival of humans in symbiosis with the planet, we urgently need a cognitive emancipation from inherited Eurocentric subjectivity, aesthetics, and politics. We need to create reciprocal networks of life to regenerate, reproduce, repair, and rebalance human, more-than-human, and nonhuman life systems on earth. As in Belmore’s self-portrait, Fringe, the wounds in our bodies and environments may be deep, but they can be sutured—not through the erasure of what has happened, but through rethinking what healing can look like.