Subaltern-futurisms (a Nepantla-futurism?). Part I.

1. Post-digital territories and backwardness

For a long time I wondered how the postdigital spaces and discourses are articulated with the socio-political dimension of the lower classes. In other words, noise, queer theory, bdsm and even cyberpunk seem to emerge from the middle classes and respond to their individual aspirations. At least with at first sight. Can something that originates from the middle classes be called revolutionary (in a radical sense)? Does it truly originate there? The true revolution can only come from the grassroots. Many years ago I even shared this doubt with Mercedes Bunz, when in 2008 I wrote a presentation on the concept of the subject on the internet. There I actually asked her what sense it made to reflect about digital theory in an economically and technologically backward country as Argentina. She replied that this was a political mistake of the left, the rejection of technology. Omar Acha shared my table, and in addition to having to endure my postmodern dilettantism, coincided to my surprise with Bunz. I guess they were both right. Poverty is digitalized. Access to the internet, cell phones and television reaches all social strata. In this sense, no person living in a city is free from the influence of digital capitalism.

Now, the question is: how is it possible to appropriate cyborgs, cyberpunks, noise, posmo-sadomasochists, etc., so that they really serve to build a revolutionary alternative to advanced capitalism? With each victory on the left the right regroups. Capitalism does not want to be associated with the right. It is more clever than that. For neoliberalism, the incorporation of minorities into the juridical system means the incorporation of consumers in the market. Equal marriage and gender identity do not go against the great Capital. They feed it. They might not totally change anything, it is true, but they introduce a bug that can later explode: a dislocation. That is what it is about. As Donna Haraway puts it: from new forms of oppression new forms of unity and organization must emerge. “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive,” she says. It is about writing, or dancing, as Pina Bausch and Kazuo Ohno would say. It is time to think about the post-digital as something opposed to the “virtual”, precisely, as post-virtual. The logic of interruptions is not a dream, a fiction. Intellectuals who underestimate the problems of the media and the body, as if they were subjects for science fiction, are blind to the true evolution of Capital. Marcelo Tinelli appropriated the homosexual body reducing it to a physical instance. The newscasts reduce the body to the corpse, the body to the crime: the victim’s body. They are the two bodies that television gives us: pornography and the corpse. That gays, lesbians and transgender people can appear on television and speak does not mean that our sexual customs are going to be revolutionized overnight. We must re-ask ourselves the big questions about production systems. There is nothing to take for granted. Pleasure seeks to overflow. But why think that there is something emancipatory in pleasure? Or in extreme aesthetics? What does it mean to suppress libidinal energy? Before, sex was not profitable. Sex is the topic of money. The current openness to sex is the incorporation of sex as an ideological commodity. Can we deconstruct sex without selling it? Can we live without selling? Is there a non-repressive or non-mercantilist sexuality? Aesthetics and sex come after the means of production. But this genetic asymmetry is not an ontological asymmetry. Post-digital logic is the logic of dislocations.

2.Futurities 

There have been many attempts (not in the sense of something ‘unfinished’ but in the sense of ‘ongoing’ achievements) to think and articulate new futures and futurities. Afrofuturism is one of the most powerful and representative examples. The concept itself, in its origins, wanted to emphasize the lack of representation of black people in the discursive universe of science fiction (SF) and technology. SF in its beginnings was not seen as a genre fittable for black literature. To begin with, black characters were rarely depicted in those narratives. On the other side, due to the white monopoly of technological clusters, technology itself was seen as something belonging to ‘white culture’. Alondra Nelson writes: “In popular mythology, the early years of the late-1990s digital boom were characterized by the rags-to-riches stories of dot-com millionaires and the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress” (Nelson 2002, 1). Hard core science fiction and space opera in general was characterized by an immaculate image of high-tech imaginaries. It was in the 80’s with William Gibson and the cyberpunks, that the optimist idea of SF started to fall permitting the space proletariat to show off its pain. Racial prejudices were however deep-rooted and if we think for example about some popular american cyberpunk films from the 90’s-2000’s, we still encounter there mainly white main characters. The concept of afrofuturism aims to destroy that epistemic illusion and re-appropriate technology and SF through new scopes.  

Notwithstanding it would be a big mistake to state that SF was always a monolithic phenomenon. Cyberpunk has found in Japan a very fruitful soil. Some of the early cyberpunk productions like Akira (1988) or Tetsuo (1989) are asian-futurisms in their own right and a crude reflection of the Japanese Bubble-economy. 

There are other kinds of futurisms. For example, within Latinxfuturism, we have Chicanxfuturisms that transforms the heritage of Aztec imagery into symbols of empowerment, as Laura Molina’s comic The Jaguar shows. Gulf futurism inhabits the inhospit techno-landscapes of oil-centered societies. Aesthetic serves here to imagine alternative topologies of power and to subvert the normalized hierarchical relations. Like post-digital aesthetics, I will argue that these new futurisms, although conceived in the field of art and literature, can play an important role as philosophies on their own.

The case of Sinofuturism has its own characteristics. As Lawrence Lek shows in his video-essay on Sinofuturism, China has become a economical and technological global power. On the other hand, as a counterpart of the West, Chinese people, as other Asians, did suffer different kinds of colonialism and discrimination. Symbolic violence also reached a new peak after the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, reinforcing the traditional stereotypes of the exotic and the oriental Other of the West. This same stereotype forecludes the multiplicity and the tensions inside China itself. The task of a self-consciouss Sinofuturism should therefore consist in articulating these multiple layers in a critical way. As Yuk Hui states in his book The Question Concerning Technology in China: “A sinofuturism, as we  may call it, is manifesting itself in different domains. However, such a futurism runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical  thinking. Ultimately , it is only an acceleration of the European modern project” (Yuk Hui 2016: 297).

I will call all these ‘-futurisms’ ‘subaltern-futurisms’, because they aim to rehabilitate the way in which marginalized groups deal with the future. These futurisms allow us to imagine alternative ‘futurities’, challenging at the same time the status quo of the future placed as an horizont by capitalism. Under a traditional linear representation of time, a present is open to many – if not infinite – futures. The word ‘futurity’ offers a wider meaning. If we think of it as ‘the quality or the state of being future’, we could state that the present belongs to a futurity: even if it is not future, it has the quality of being future. Thus, a futurity includes the present and should not be thought as a multiverse of infinite roads, but rather as a ‘nepantla’ of possibilities. Of course, the image of a crossroad implies already choosing something in the present that will produce a change in the future. But the futurity implies not a single decision, but a framework of a collective imagination where multiple dislocations can happen. As Laclau writes in Dislocation and capitalism, social imaginary and democratic revolution (1990): “The imaginary is a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an absolute limit which structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object” (Laclau 2015, 48.)

3.Challenges

There are at least 3 objections that could be made against this co-existence of subaltern-futurisms: a) relativism, b) eurocentrism and c) techno-pessimism. 

a) Relativismuskritik

I wonder how we can think about a futurism that does not fall into the trap of idolizing subjectivity. I am not saying that afrofuturism or chicanxfuturism do this, but both depart from concrete embodied experiences. It would be therefore possible to argue that these futurisms guide us to a dead-end of perspectivism. But this is not the real problem and the possible counter-proposal of universalism seems to be also a bad option. Nevertheless, to think about intersectionality in a radical way we need some trans-subjective alliances. The problem is hard, because to reduce the multiplicity of futures to a meta-futurity of any kind without reducing the uniqueness of each futurism could be seen as another plain strategy to re-introduce whiteness and colonialism in a space that should stay completely free from these discourses. 

I do not want to offer any solution to this dilemma. An usual objection against intercultural philosophy is that it presupposes what it actually condemns: culture. But this is a superficial claim. Interculturality is already a critic of culture. The difference is that intercultural philosophy is aware that this critique is always embodied and therefore, that there is not possible to criticize culture from outside. Subaltern-futurism, in this sense, allows us to theorize technology from the bottom up.

b) Eurozentrismuskritik

It could be said that supporting this multiplicity of futurities is just an evasive strategy. It is nothing more than what Sorel called an utopia, i.e. an intellectualist construction intoxicated with a blurry vision of the future that will never be actualized. Those who crave for distant futures become reformists. On the other side, the obsession with futurism, with post-apocalyptic aesthetics could also be understood as a symptom from a mind infected by the capitalist logic itself. In Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto, the group Indigenous Action states that:

“Apocalyptic idealization is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is the linear world ending from within. Apocalyptic logic exists within a spiritual, mental, and emotional dead zone that also cannibalizes itself. It is the dead risen to consume all life. 

Our world lives when their world ceases to exist.

As Indigenous anti-futurists, we are the consequence of the history of the colonizer’s future. We are the consequence of their war against Mother Earth. We will not allow the specter of the colonizer, the ghosts of the past to haunt the ruins of this world. We are the actualization of our prophecies”.

A similar critique is made against afrofuturism here.

In this sense, to ask for a post-apocalyptic consciousness seems like an eurocentric-eccentric behaviour. In the best case, it is nothing else than pristine naïvity. It is true that post-industrial futures arise from industrial realities. The construction of alternative, intercultural post-world futures seems to suppose exactly that what we are supposed to fight against. Only assuming that capitalism is an universal logic would be possible to preach the need for subaltern-futurisms. Nevertheless, this critique does it’s own thing by putting on the same niveau technology and capitalism. The contribution of subaltern-futurisms would be, on the contrary, to create new concepts of technology.

In-between is not the center. 間柄 (aidagara) is not  中心 (chûshin). Futurism is not only about alternative futures, but about alternative presents. In this sense it works as an intellectual device for augmented reality. 

c) Technopessimismuskritik

The Gegenkritik to this last objection would be the accelerationist one. For example, it could be said that imagining multiple ‘broken futures’, rehabilitating ‘primitive technologies’ and having a playful approach to technocapitalism are reactive strategies with nothing to do with the real global condition.

Franco Berardi gives a great characterization of accelerationism in his Text: Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body (2013):

“The train of hypercapitalism cannot be stopped, it is going faster and faster, and we can no longer run at the same pace. The only strategy, therefore, is based on the expectation that the train is going to crash at some point, and the capitalist trajectory is going to lead to the subversion of its own inner dynamics”. 

Here lies a different type of futurism, perhaps, one that resembles the first Italian futurism. For accelerationism, we don’t need to dislocate weird futurities within our own present, but to advance within the capitalist logic itself toward the future. That is, bringing the future nearer. Subaltern-futurisms, by proposing non-standard logics of technology will prevent underrepresented communities from participating fully in public global development. It could be said that subaltern-futurisms do not even decelerate development, they just obstruct it.

Nevertheless, Berardi concludes: “This is an interesting proposition to consider, but it is ultimately untrue, because the process of autonomous subjectivation is jeopardized by chaotic acceleration, and social subjectivity is captured and subjugated by capitalist governance, which is a system of automatic mechanisms running at blinding speed”.

Then, without idolizing subjectivity, subaltern-futurisms should narrate the histories of those subjectivities. In the meanwhile, the space created by those micro-narrations, should be the horizont of broken futurities, the nepantla del post-mundo.

F. Wirtz, March 2020