«There is a painting by Klee called “Angelus novus”. In it you can see an angel who seems to be moving away from something on which he is staring. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open and his wings are outstretched. The angel of history must look like that: his face is turned towards the past. Where to us it appears as a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe, which ceaselessly piles ruin upon ruin, and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stop, wake up the dead and put back together what was shattered. But a storm descends from paradise and swirls on his wings, and it is so strong that the angel cannot fold them. This storm drags him, irresistibly, towards the future, to which he turns his back, while the accumulation of ruins rises, before him, towards the sky. Such a storm is what we call “progress.” In this reflection, published in the essay "Thesis on the philosophy of history", The famous thinker Walter Benjamin describes the consequences of the myth of progress, which sells us modernity/capitalism and ties us to a way of being-in-the-world that disaffects us from the processes of life.
Capitalist modernity/coloniality, as a civilizational model, has not only created a project of systematic destruction of the basis of life, which has us immersed in today's crises; but, furthermore, in order to be able to produce this catastrophe - which incessantly accumulates ruin after ruin -, it has configured a subjectivity, in its own image and likeness, impregnated by a second nature, which makes us prey to a logic of commercialization, domination and crushing of life.
From Benjamin's moving and critical interpretation of the angel of history, a string of questions emerges: why, if we see the madness and devastation caused by the logic of capital, are we not able to react? Why, if we suffer the effects of the storm (crisis) caused by the myth of progress, are we not able to stop the suicidal race of capitalist modernity? Why can't we get off this train, to start putting back together what has been torn apart? Why don't we see that the idea of "progress" does not mean an approach to a better future, but rather a move away from the preservation of living conditions? Why, if we have the crisis wrapped around our necks, do we remain indifferent to the suffering of nature (human and non-human) caused by the modern-capitalist system? Why do we continue without putting a stop to many things that science is pursuing in a flight forward whose days are numbered? Why is it so difficult to leave the paradigm of existence imposed by modernity/coloniality? Why are we not able to look at the past as an alternative to life in the present? Why—as the French anthropologist Bruno Latour questions—do we keep dragging ourselves, uncontrollably, towards the “future”: “If we were never modern, what happened to us?”
In reality, there are plenty of reasons that prevent us from stopping to think, in the most vivid way, what the dreams and utopias we pursue mean.
Politically speaking, "modernize"—in Latour's approach—is a somewhat curious term: "Going back to Gilles Deleuze, we can say that it is an order, that is, a term that does not describe a situation, that does not fulfill a empirical objective, but an objective of mobilization: it is a kind of heartbreaking cry that shouts: “There is no alternative, we must modernize.” (…) Under no circumstances does the slogan, for example, appear: “Let's compose a modus vivendi”; or “Let's explore alternatives” or, “Let's adapt by innovating with caution.” “Modern” comes to define something like the link of a whole set of properties and goods, but also of positions, with respect to religion, customs, nature, etc. Everyone uses the term “modernize”; But, in reality, the process never stops. Thus, Paris is the capital of modernization that, in a continuous process of modernization, sends a terrible signal outwards. What is outward? "These are the places that are always asked to modernize."
Now, understanding the psychosocial impact of the imaginaries that are configured with the order of modernization is complicated, because, as we said in another think hard, the rationality that modern philosophy and science built and developed for itself (and that is taught and reproduced in almost all universities in the world) has been to justify, argumentatively, the myth of progress: the need to modernize and assume the system of values and beliefs of capital. It's a perverse setup. In fact, science, with modern reason, generates a religious way of regulating the world (and it is one of Latour's great denunciations), even when it makes us believe that, with it, we leave the religious behind. «Within the argument that urges modernization there appears a relationship with the religious, defined by the absolutely classic and controversial term of se-cu-la-ri-za-ción –details Latour–. In a first layer of meaning, “modernize” means moving forward on an increasingly secular path. The common idea that corresponds to the first features of the modern argument format is to say that in the archaic past one could still be religious. […] In the expression “modernize yourselves” a political theology appears. In other words: science imposes itself like a religion, to justify itself in everything it does, without looking at what consequences the irrationality of a way of existence whose horizon is the constant accumulation of wealth has for life. , in quantitative terms, despite the fact that this means the absolute dispossession of the life contained in the human being and in mother earth.
"Modernizing" then becomes the objective and desire of the people to achieve "progress", as if it were a mandatory arrival point, a "higher state." That is, going after a very particular way of being-in-the-world, invented by modern (ir)rationality. From here, another question arises: what implications does it have to be the repository of the expectation of "modernization"? That we only hope for what responds to what we imagine. Complex, right?
Let's see. Having more and more merchandise expresses, in the modern/capitalist paradigm, a future that is also present. It means the transition from poor to bourgeois, to "materialists", some would say (although, as Franz Hinkelammert clarifies, they are not materialists, they are idealists!, because they destroy matter, and replace it with money; then, they live for money, and money is not praxis).
Modernity/capitalism takes shape in the illusion of limitless progress, of infinite production that allows us to give ourselves "the good life": the possessed object, which gives meaning to existence. The incorporation of this horizon inclines people—from a matrix of perceptions and appreciations that structure our action from the inside (following the concept of habitus, by Pierre Bourdieu)—to perceive the reality invested by capital and accept it as natural; That is to say: to accept, reproduce, maintain and enforce the order of the modern world-system, even though it has led us to today's quagmire. As the Bolivian decolonial thinker Rafael Bautista explains, the paradigm that sustains the modern/capitalist economy, even in terminal crisis, can be replaced due to the correspondence it finds in the expectations of individuals, constituted in modern (bourgeois) subjectivity: «Wishes are not enough, when the only thing possible to imagine is the same world that we criticize so much. This is what the wise men point out when they say that “it is easy to leave the world, the difficult thing is for the world to leave oneself.” The [modern] world does not come out of us because the way in which that world is naturalized in our subjectivity is not precisely rational, but rather mythical-symbolic.
This internalized layer of meaning—which becomes a second nature, with the habitus as a system of dispositions or schemes—structures people's perceptions, feelings, practices, and needs. Capitalism generates, in us, the need to have, as a form of be successful, live better, be like those who have told us they are superior. In other words: it touches elements that are in the second nature, instituted, for centuries, by the rationality of greed, which always aspires to traditional and better, for which there is no end, but infinity. It is not just a matter of attitude, but rather it responds to a life experience that is installed in our bodies. That is to say: it is not only having things, it is experiencing the sensation of having them.
Modernizing, as a constant catchphrase, converted into daily practices in multiple spaces—to recover a problematization by the Venezuelan researcher José Félix Salazar—becomes a regulative ideal. This ideal guides everyday practices that seek to discipline the body, feelings, speech, tones of voice, ways of moving, ways of being in space, etc. In fact, one might ask: does constantly failing to reach that "higher state" give us the idea of having an "ontological failure"? How, from this constant lack, do we produce, at different times and in different roles, relationships of symbolic and direct violence, fueled by the shame of not being "modern enough"? Who become the judges-correctors, "channelers" of "the good", "the beautiful", "the just", "the necessary", on the surface of everyday life? Why do we continue to aspire to a “development/progress” that, in itself, is unviable? What happens to us in the face of defeat/shipwreck in the midst of that storm that drags us down?
Exorcise the ideological viruses that modernity has naturalized in our own expectations of existence, channeled in social relations and individual and collective contradictions, is not an easy task. Dreams are one of the most powerful energies of the human being: they correspond to the most basic level from the psychological point of view (sensation), and we involve them in interests, motivations, feelings, moods.
"Progress" is not only an idea, a concept: it is the pleasure of "moving forward", and this is capable of being administered according to how it is assimilated into our corporeality. That sensation sends to the brain the need for consumption and the desire for production to produce more, for a consumption that the body is demanding. Everything is interrelated! It is very difficult not to be seduced by the myth of progress and its promise of "the future": we have made it ours, in the most anthropological and most psychosocial sense, with science, technology, education, the aesthetics of the cultural industry.
What happens, then, when we hear that we have to return to our roots? We go to a universe of phobic representations and imaginaries that respond to the fear and cultural anxiety of Go back. Modern/capitalist common sense, that format that we assume by default, brings out a sense of fear of everything that is not modern. We associate the past with the archaic, with the backward, with deprivation, with illness, with poverty, with the non-modern, with the inconsequential (in the popular proverb: to the past trodden). That is to say: we associate the past with aesthetics and sensations that we do not want for ourselves. In other words: I don't want to see myself there! Because? Because we relate to the aboriginal, "to the indigenous", with all the prejudices that the civilizational project of modernity has always attached to it: the inferior, the obsolete, the old. For example, we talk about conuco, as if it were a practice from the past or a bucolic practice.
Talking about “Indian” has long since lost the little meaning it has among us; especially, when the cultural, political, economic, scientific, educational, urban references are the most modern, the most technological (at a supersonic level). If not, what is life in the city linked to? With the “good life”, with “progress”. Or, what do we relate science to? With modern technological advances and with modern instrumental rationality that allows our "comfort."
Hence, the suits that we wear or want to wear (identities) and their practical meaning. It is not only that we embody a phobic imaginary, a representation whose fundamental attitude is rejection. No! It doesn't stop at that. Thinking deeply requires digging into the notions of <strong>success</strong>, social ascent; in the imposed aesthetics: with what aromas, with what sounds, with what visual arrangements, with what colors we dream of that relate to us. As the Venezuelan community psychologist Fernando Giuliani explains, «phobic imaginaries, if we take them to social representations and the processes of attribution and categorization of others, express an affectivity towards what we want to be and a rejection of what we do not want to be. We imagine being like the winners, the successful. Sometimes, we don't even put words to what it means to not be “successful.” We only say that the successful are those who comply with this and that: they live in such a part; They have such a house, such a car; They express themselves in such a way. Those are mental typologies, and they exist in our representations. So, I get an idea of <strong>success</strong> and, later, I put there the person that I want to be and the people that I believe fulfill that; even to those people who fail and claim to be successful, even if they do not conceive of themselves as losers. Here, a very interesting topic is old age: who wants to see themselves in old age!? Capitalism makes an apology for youth. They sell you “the eternal young and beautiful.” This representation makes one reject aging. So, imagine that someone is proposing that, within what we reject, there are very valuable things, from which we have a lot to learn! The immediate tendency is to refuse, to move away from it.
Untying these knots merits a daily exercise of decolonization, at least in five dimensions: 1) to make one feel (to make one think) the imperative need to detach oneself, categorically and existentially, from the paradigm of existence imposed by modernity, due to the accumulation of ruins that climb on him. That is, making us feel the storm of a world-system that drags us towards death. 2) Inspire the desire to live well in community, from coexistence, solidarity, co-responsibility, as criteria to build new ways of living in the present, in dialogue with the conceptions of life that the native peoples bequeathed to us. This implies, according to the decolonial teacher Juan José Bautista, considering the need to clarify, with meaning, the new rationality of life presupposed in the idea of "living well", because, if we do not do so, it is very likely that this idea falls back on modern rationality, which is the opposite of "living well." 3) Understand that critical reflexivity not only depends on will, discipline, desire and individual effort. Get rid of the second nature It is not as easy as it seems: it involves assuming the contradiction of being, in part, the roots of indigenous peoples, but also carrying modernity/coloniality within. This recognition requires a displacement of the mythical horizon of modernity and proposing forms of existence that involve a resignification of life and a dispute of meanings, in terms of live good in community. We cannot forget that imaginaries, in addition to information, embrace attitude, and attitude is pure affectivity. Thus, they constitute consciousness and identity. What does this mean? That when our budgets are destabilized, certain bets are destabilized, sometimes our own project of existence. 4) Appreciate that what we consume determines how we feel and think. Juan José Bautista warns that, fundamentally, the materiality of food has to do with the way of thinking that emerges from the type of consumption; Therefore, "it is completely self-contradictory to want or think to return to what we do while simultaneously being consumers of capitalist and modern merchandise." 5) Fight for a story otra It involves weaving, spiritually and mystically, another level of aspirations and other models of existence. This exercise It requires working, even, on emotionality to make people dream of living well, and not on the suicidal logic that the logic of capital development promotes. Also assume that the only criterion that makes the existence of the future possible is the past.
The task of decolonization summons the past, history as creation. The present needs meaning to see where it can continue producing vital meanings; that is: go to the past, not backwards; «that is (alert teacher Rafael Bautista) a story that the neo-Kantians have invented, especially Hegel, with their philosophy of history that has made us believe that the past is behind; and the future, ahead. But they don't tell us that the future we all hope for is the future that the myth of development and progress has invented. It is not just any future, it is the future that they have imposed,” with its accumulation of ruins. Recomposing what has been shattered involves looking towards our denied past, as it does the angel of history.
Here is a necessary, current and urgent debate, so that our state of consciousness does not remain a prisoner of the modern/colonial/capitalist horizon of expectations and of that storm that drags us down.
