Coda

Lingua Membra begins from a poem, but it does not end by placing itself under the poem’s authority. It receives the desideratum, analyses it, and puts it to the test. It does not install soul, spirit, blood, creed, nation, race, class, civilisation, or any other privileged Name as the invisible substance that first gathers the Members⁠ into a unified body. Its masterlessness therefore concerns more than the absence of a ruler. No head, heart, sovereign, lawgiver, priest, party, artist, archive, or other Master Member⁠ is authorised to speak for the Body⁠ as a whole. Nor may the Body itself become the ultimate One whose supposed completion subordinates its members as parts. It remains an unfinished field of relations. Its members are not equivalent, interchangeable, or fused; they remain members of one another across differences that no sovereign unity is permitted to abolish.

Lingua Membra did not arise from a theoretical wish to invent another language. It arose from necessity: from profound grief, and from anger at the repeated conversion of suffering into silence, abstraction, or political irrelevance. The work gives that necessity a form without pretending to resolve the grief, discharge the anger, or master the Pain⁠ from which it comes. Its grammar does not explain suffering; it refuses to leave suffering without the possibility of public address and transmission.

Lingua Membra is not a natural language, and it does not turn Pain into a proposition or the Wound⁠ into a representation of Pain. In Lingua Membra, the execution is a Wound: a response through which Pain enters public address and becomes answerable through resonance. No execution can exhaust the rupture to which it responds, make inward experience transparent, or transfer one body’s sensation into another. Yet these limits are not an alibi for indifference or rest. Lingua Membra gives the desideratum lungs, but not voice alone. Through scream, breath, the Muffled Hum,⁠ movement, and silent aperture, it cuts a passage from rupture into public address. Its grammar does not explain Pain or tame it into meaning. It makes the Wound recognisable, repeatable, and transmissible; it disturbs the rest around it and carries the possibility of response from one body to another.

Public address is necessary, but it does not stop a bullet, open a prison door, restore citizenship, shelter the displaced, or compel a state to honour rights it has chosen to violate. Humanity, common origin, shared vulnerability, visibility, and even the declaration of universal rights do not by themselves secure protection. A person may remain human while being driven from the political place in which their speech, actions, and rights can count. Lingua Membra cannot substitute for citizenship, law, shelter, freedom, or material protection, alas. It enters earlier, where a life, a calamity, or an entire population may remain visible and yet be rendered unfelt, abstracted, and politically disposable. It cannot confer rights; it can resist the disappearance that prepares their denial.

Nor does exposure guarantee compassion. A distress scream may cross linguistic boundaries before any sentence can be understood, yet a listener may turn away, reject it, enjoy it, mistake it for something else, or remain indifferent. Shared physiology is not morality. It gives distress a route into another body, but it cannot decide what that body will do. Lingua Membra works in this dangerous interval: between the capacity to be struck and the capacity to refuse response. It brings an inherited bodily sensitivity and an invented procedure into collision, so that another’s Pain may enter a relation of possible response.

Not every aspect of an execution can be prescribed in advance without contradicting the autonomy the system is designed to preserve. The Somatic Script⁠ supplies the shared rules that make executions recognisable and repeatable; the optional Free Score⁠ leaves room for the bodily, cultural, and temporal decisions of the executing body. Local adaptation allows the name of the work to be re-rooted in different languages and its execution to respond to different bodies, calendars, sites, dangers, and capacities. The Resonance Commons⁠ preserves, registers, and connects executions without becoming the source of the Wound or the authority that validates the Pain behind it. The system faces two possible losses: without enough common structure, an execution may cease to be legible and transmissible across distance; if every aspect is prescribed from a centre, it loses the local autonomy on which its masterlessness depends. The balance lies in keeping what is shared recognisable and transmissible while allowing each execution to remain responsive to the bodies, histories, risks, and temporal forms of those who carry it out.

Lingua Membra makes no therapeutic promise. An execution may bring relief or become overwhelming; it may leave those taking part exhausted or disoriented, or produce no outwardly discernible affective change. None of these effects is required of an execution. The work does not treat screaming or any other mode of execution as a cure, purification, confession, or recovery of an undamaged self. Its ethical conditions are consent, risk awareness, non-coercion, bodily safety, and responsibility towards Fibres,⁠ Circles,⁠ wounded persons or communities, and witnesses; they do not include a guarantee of benefit. Lingua Membra is a procedure for those in Pain and those who answer Pain; it must not become a legitimating theatre for perpetrators, conquering powers, states, armies, police forces, parties, sects, corporations, or ideological bodies acting in their institutional name. Individuals associated with such bodies may participate only in a personal capacity that does not overwrite, appropriate, or instrumentalise the Wound of those harmed. When an execution concerns identifiable living persons or communities, Fibres should seek consent or accountable consultation wherever feasible and must not disclose identities, images, voices, or locations without considering the risks created by that disclosure. A Fibre can give Pain public form as a Wound without presenting the execution as a cure, a benefit, a form of redemption, or a claim to possess another’s suffering.

Lingua Membra is published not as a finished doctrine, but in order to invite criticism and to be tested in execution. This publication presents the work through the written account together with sketches, photographs, and videos documenting our first tests, while the accompanying legends provide the necessary procedural and contextual information. These materials do not constitute Lingua Membra by themselves, nor do they exhaust it. They record an initial stage in the development of a work whose claims concerning accessibility, resonance, safety, legibility, and transmission must remain answerable to what it actually does when different bodies execute it in different languages, places, conditions, and forms. Criticism, refusal, failure, adaptation, and reports from Fibres are therefore not external reactions to a completed work, but part of the process through which both this publication and Lingua Membra may evolve.

This openness does not make the work authorless, abolish attribution, surrender its legal protection, or determine in advance the terms under which its text, notation, images, documentation, and procedure may be reproduced or adapted; those terms must be stated separately. It means, rather, that authorship and copyright must not turn the work into a sealed doctrine protected from criticism, testing in execution, or necessary revision.

Lingua Membra is designed to escape my custody in this more exact sense. Its Circles may enlarge, multiply, divide, and take other forms as new Fibres and Members join, answer a Wound, or carry the work elsewhere. Those who receive it are not the guardians of any doctrine, because Lingua Membra is not doctrinal. They can test it, expose what excludes, repair what fails, and alter its forms to make it more accessible, while preserving the shared rules that keep an execution recognisable and transmissible. Its growth does not descend from a benevolent centre, nor does it culminate in one complete or universal Circle. Its reach is tested precisely where recognition collapses: where the neighbour is cast as a threat, the citizen becomes stateless, the dissident becomes disposable, the prisoner becomes inaudible, the wounded population becomes an abstraction, or the suffering of nonhuman beings and damaged living systems is placed outside obligation. No Circle can contain this field once and for all. Each execution may open a passage towards another body, another place, and another possible response; in passing, the language itself may be tested and modified.

At times, a single Fibre is enough to begin. No Circle, institution, archive, or authority is required to authorise the first Wound. It may remain solitary or be answered by two bodies, an arc, a line, an outward-facing formation, or another execution across a border and at another time. No formation completes it, and no answer possesses it. The work lives only while the relation keeps moving: from rupture to execution, from execution to exposure, from exposure to response, and from one response towards another without returning to a commanding origin.

Lingua Membra neither reconciles the Members into one body nor heals the Wound, completes the Circle, or promises that Pain will be understood. It gives Pain a means to refuse disappearance, cross the distance between bodies, and trouble the silence imposed around it. It offers neither consolation bought with forgetting nor unity bought with submission. It is a masterless method of transmission that denies indifference the shelter of innocence.

Barbad Golshiri
Exile, July 2026