The beyond-reform space is one of four “spaces of enunciation” in the social cartography of responses to modernity’s violence mapped by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew and Dallas Hunt (2015), later carried into the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. Their map runs from an “everything is awesome” space through soft-reform (inclusion and access) and radical-reform (recognition of epistemological dominance) to this final space. What sets it apart is the recognition of ontological dominance: the insight that grafting other ways of knowing onto an unexamined modern foundation cannot change a system whose power works by prescribing particular ways of being.
(Hospicing Modernity)
From here, modernity is read as “inherently violent, exploitative, and unsustainable” — and, crucially, as irrecoverable. No reform, however radical, escapes its underlying grammars and logics, so critique tends toward one of three moves.
Three responses
- System walk out — building alternatives “with guarantees” in spaces outside mainstream institutions.
- Hacking — bending institutional rules from within to re-orient people’s desires away from the system.
- Hospicing — learning from a collapsing system in order to make different mistakes while tending the arrival of something not yet nameable.
https://decolonialfutures.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/gce-heads-up-and-questions-handout.pdf
Also see The House of Modernity and Four Socially Sanctioned Denials