Ancestorfuturism - by Fabiane M. Borges

Fabiane M. Borges is the main academic writing about Tecnoxamanism. In this text, published in our blog in July 17/2016, she proposes a double articulation: 1) To elaborate the concept of Ancestorfuturism 2) To share both the research and the experiments that we have been undertaking in the field of Free Cosmogony and Do It Yourself Rituals, on the meetings of technoshamanism network

ANCESTORFUTURISM

Ancestor + Futurism are two terms that apparently emerge from an impossibility, from the ambivalence between two disparate realms: archaism and future. Future, broadly speaking, is a term linked to the modern age, which is generally understood as the age that would remove humanity from obscurantism, false beliefs and superstitions, to place it in the path of progress and evolutionary development dominated by science and technology. Ancestry, according to this perspective, is considered a series of traditional values ruling over archaic societies that are oblivious to scientific truth and cultivate obsolete knowledge devoid of empiric evidence. Nevertheless, ancesterfuturism requests concepts that work with other notions of time and resignify the assumed linearity between past and future, i.e., concepts that deconstruct the idea of vertical time and history — from archaism pointing towards the future — and that horizontalize this perspective

Modernity generates ever-increasing suspects about its promise of “future”. In a moment of climatic changes in which the anthropocene (and its parallels, capitolocene, chthulucene, etc) becomes the earth’s age, the future being heralded is that of modernity floundering in the muds of Mariana or in Fukushima and Chernobyl’s nuclear disasters3. We are in face of what Isabelle Stengers calls “Gaya’s intrusion”, when she mentions that to the humans will no longer be given the freedom to ignore Gaia as they have until now

This incompatibility between a future presented by modernity and a future verifiable in contemporaneity has been serving as a platform for a wide range of speculations, in fields ranging from economy to philosophy, science to metaphysics. It is in this conjuncture that technoshamanism presents itself as a speculation network too, as countless other social movements that dwell in this dilemma. It produces conjectures, it constructs narratives and develops practices that endorse a provocation against the present order of relations between culture and nature, and additionally proposes alternatives while it experiments with new and remixed processes, one of them being ancestorfuturism, with its free cosmogonies and do it yourself rituals.

Contrary to the understanding of an attempt at creating a monism5, or a unit, in the conjunction of the words ancestor + futurism, the goal here is an activation of ancesterfuturism’s senses so that these permeate, connect and intermingle themselves, and generate other concepts and practices while at the same time not becoming paralyzed in one division or in one irresponsible union, where only one of the parts would survive. In order to understand ancestorfuturism’s magnitude it is necessary to build a network of concepts that supports it, so that it can assume its creative character, so that it functions as a rupture device with systems fixated on metaphysical interpretation (theology/religion) and becomes a generator of free imaginaries.

In this sense, fiction enters here as a fundamental alliance, for as Donna Haraway says it is necessary to add science fiction and speculative fabulation in order to destabilize our own stories with other stories and with series of thought denormativization, in order to destabilize worlds of thought with other worlds of thought, in order to destroy worlds so envisioning other worlds becomes possible, or when she quotes Virginia Woolf in “Think we Must”: “it matters what stories tell stories, it matters what thoughts think thoughts, it matters what worlds world worlds”

(…)

Link for the full text: https://tecnoxamanismo.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/ancestorfuturism-freecosmogony-doityourselfrituals-english.pdf

3 Likes