Exploring Antifutures:
About non-places, negative spaces and heterotopias in Latin America.
Abstract: In Latin America and the Caribbean it is common that when we talk about the future, we mention "how far behind we are" with aspirational discourses in comparison to industrialized nations and other centers of knowledge. In this article we present the concept of antifuture to define it as a negative space of possibility, with a local temporality captured by dependent, exogenous, colonized and out of place ideas. This concept is situated with the myth of El Dorado describing it as a non-place, spaces of non-belonging that face a complex characterization, that appear in the negative spaces of the possible futures. In this article we show the usefulness of the concept of antifutures with three Latin American cases that, in spite of their thematic and ontological and geographical differences allow distilling the presence of one or more antifutures. The first is the energetic transition that does not advance in Puerto Rico; the second is the science-society relationship in Chile since its Future Congress and the third is the self-construction of Mexican mobility. The notion of antifutures contributes to understanding and deconstructing exogenous futuristic discourses in Latin America and provokes the challenge of devising own futures, situated and local that are produced from the localities that will live them.
Summary: In Latin America and the Caribbean it is common that when we speak of the future, we mention "how far behind we are" with aspirational discourses in comparison to industrialized nations and other centers of knowledge. In this article we present the concept of anti-future to define it as a negative space of possibility, with a local temporality captured by dependent, exogenous, colonized and out-of-place ideas. This concept is situated with the myth of El Dorado describing it as a non-place, spaces of non-belonging that face a complex characterization, appearing in the negative spaces of possible futures. In this article we show the utility of the concept of anti-futures with the presentation of three Latin American cases that, in spite of their thematic, ontological and geographic differences allow to distil the presence of one or more anti-futures The first one is the energetic transition that does not advance in Puerto Rico; The second one is the relation science-society in Chile from its Future Congress and the third one is the self-construction of the Mexican mobility. The notion of anti-futures contributes to the understanding and deconstruction of exogenous futurist discourses in Latin America and provokes the challenge of devising own, situated and local futures that are produced from the localities that will live them.
Keywords: antifutures, disowned futures, imported futures, Latin American futures, heterotopy
The Latin American experience with the future is as nebulous as at any other latitude. But unlike elsewhere, the concepts of planning, foresight, and evaluation are a little more elusive in everyday vocabulary. For this reason, it is common that when we speak of the future, we speak of "how far behind we are" with aspirational discourses in comparison with industrialized nations and knowledge centers - something long described in Latin American Thought on Science, Technology and Development in the 1960s and 1970s[1] - and we must proceed to do a work of vindication of our present or an exercise of future uprooted from the local.
As a sample button, two examples about the future of work in 2018: Manuel Castro reflects in a column in the Ecuadorian newspaper La Hora how much attention has been paid to the fourth industrial revolution in his country[2]. In the southern cone, Argentinian economist Eduardo Levy Yeyati in his essay "After Work" situates the end of work in Argentina, as well as its effects on the daily life of Argentines[3]. Both are recent reverberations of a long image of Latin America as the past of industrial countries. Spaces where the future has not yet arrived. At the same time, they show an urgency to "reach" desirable futures. Both examples illustrate common expressions in the citizens of the region.
So, how can we understand this phenomenon in Latin American temporality? What elements cause this decoupling between the capacity to imagine local futures and the need to reach other people's futures? What effects do these paradigms produce in Latin American identity and its futures? In this article we present the concept of anti future to define a negative space of possibility, with a local temporality captured by dependent, exogenous, colonized and out of place ideas, based on the work of Perez Comisso and Najar Arevalo (2018)[4]. Our objective is to be able to identify a radical alternative of the future, that in spite of its contradictory name, allows us to observe a phenomenon that is daily in our region and at the same time, to deepen the disjointed and contradictory nature between located knowledge and possible futures. In particular, we believe that the notion of anti-future manifests itself in situations where local actors are disempowered by the discourses, expectations, and presents from/to other places.
In the first section of the article, we analyze regional components that situate the (non)-place where we define and situate anti-future based on the El Dorado Myth. In the second section we characterize the concept from an intersection between future studies, post-colonialism and science, technology and development studies. Subsequently, we illustrate this notion with three recent cases that illustrate specific events and places a manifestation of an anti-future. In the last section, we discuss some possible approaches and present some possibilities on how anti-futures are a generative notion in a present, which is usually felt, with less and less alternatives in front of the climate emergency, digital transformation and, strongly polarized societies.
In the 16th century, the Spanish conquerors of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (in a territory that today comprises parts of Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador) sought a place described as an ancient city of gold (although authors such as Perez have disputed this idea[6]). This story attracted the interest of the Spanish colonists, as well as their mestizo descendants, who continued their search for several centuries, displacing in their legend the potential location from Colombia to the Guianas, as previous speculations were discarded. Despite dozens of expeditions, no legendary location was ever found.
El Dorado has become an inaccessible place where no one can ever get to, but which everyone talks about. Its influence on Latin American culture is so relevant that even creators from other latitudes imagined it. Thinkers such as Voltaire (in Candide or Optimism[7]) and even film director Stephen Spielberg (in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull[8]) described this inaccessible place as a possible point of arrival in fiction. El Dorado as a place, following Marc Auge's notion of place,[9]is constituted by its history, identity and relationships, even if they are speculative.
What happens when a place is inaccessible? When you are looking for something that is not really accessible? On the El Dorado expeditions, explorers and treasure hunters toured dozens of transit sites. Using Auge's territorial analysis, we can say that they explored non-places. Non-places, according to Gaudino di Meo[10] are sites of "anonymous transit, the limited spaces between the inhabited and the abandoned, where the nooks and crannies of blind and indolent architecture are built".
Non-places as spaces of non-belonging face a complex characterization. The participant's subjectivity plays a fundamental role in non-identification with a site, producing a complex web of relations between one's own meaning and the collective relations. For example, an incipient rural road may not mean anything to a bus driver on his route through a mountain, to a farmer it may be the long journey he makes to get to his school. F or the same reason, the capacity to distinguish a place from a non-place presents an intimate, historical and identity dimension, since the conception of Marc Auge. Niccolo Massini (2015)[11] illustrates this nature:
The perception of a space as a non-place is, however, strictly subjective: any given individual can see any given location as a non-place, or as a crossroads of human relations.
Understanding this intimate dimension, we can affirm that non-places, such as the exploration routes to El Dorado or a rural road, are configured intersectionally from the experience of the subject's identity, where gender, age, nationality, socioeconomic class, language, academia, ethnicity, sexual orientation, among many other elements, are factors in the configuration of a non-place. From the intersectional condition, it is common that in the Latin American tradition elements of crossbreeding, Christianity and European languages are assumed to be dominant in the experience of its inhabitants and as results of processes of colonization that mediate the common history of the region.
Gaudino di Meo (2014) considers that non-places "reaffirm that the relations between space and time are produced not only by the typology and spatial arrangement but also through the way of inhabiting, perceiving and experiencing space". A non-place is very difficult to perceive, because it is not habitable under the dominant subjectivities of what is possible, preferable or desirable in the Latin American experience. A favela or a callampa population are places that are to some extent undesirable, but possible. An alternative for "those who have less". It is easier to imagine a dystopian place (like an alienated city) or a utopian one (like El Dorado) than to find ourselves in a non-place.
Non-places are elusive, like appreciating the negative space of a work of art. Negative spaces in art are what surround an object, they are irrelevant to an observer, but fundamental to give meaning to a piece. For example, the logo of the multinational company FedEx composes an imperceptible arrow between the E and the x. This perceptual exercise deceives our senses, challenging the observer to explore beyond the apparent. Like non-places, they result from an exercise in confronting the observer's subjectivity and meeting expectations about space.
Temporariness is also a fundamental element for locating a place. Like El Dorado, which was sought after for several centuries in various mobile locations, a path changes as time goes by. But the ways in which it can change present a group of alternatives that for future studies have different value. Hancock and Bezold (1994)[12] propose a way of characterizing possible futures in their "cone of futures" that defines and describes the relationships between temporality and possibility.