The absence of imagination is a way of preventing new constructions about the future and the past. In the history of Westernized cultures and peoples, the domain of the present tense presents immediate questions and demands that are in dialogue with the past or the future. Nothing is automatic, nor a mere exercise in unfolding time, but there is an intersection between the experiences and dimensions of time.
Exhaustion or inability to build another moment is what, in particular, immobilizes and creates the feeling of impotence today. There are controversial feelings: desires for change, recovery of links with the past and, paradoxically, an apparent and uncomfortable absence of utopian projects or manifestations.
Have we lost the ability to think and be bold? Do we lack utopias? At the genesis of the modern Western world, A Utopia (1516), by Thomas More, identified issues in a period of transitions. In the context of maritime travel and discoveries, there was the weight of imaginaries surrounding novelty and an expectation about the scope of changes experienced by European and American societies.
The anxiety of finding the “new” and establishing contact with what was “puerile” may indicate that the Western tradition preserves, in its genesis, a certain nostalgia that prefigures the utopian feeling. The forms of narration, especially through testimonial reports, populated the imagination and encouraged overcoming the difficulties of everyday life. What was ignored or even unknown encouraged navigators, curious people, thinkers and artists to produce situations in which another reality was glimpsed.
In More's work, for example, the traveler Rafael Hitlodeau is the mediator between two worlds: the old one, with its ills; and the new, with its virtues. Utopia, therefore, is heir to travel – not just as an act, but as a metaphor for the paths to be followed to reach an ideal point. This ideal point is another striking aspect of utopian discourse: reality and illusion merge in it. The utopian, in this way, is not the impossible, but only – as the etymology indicates – the non-place, what is not yet.
The resignification of utopia in the Americas
In the 19th century, utopia was given new meaning and came closer to the ideals of socialist writers such as Saint-Simon and Fourier. Faced with social demands, rebellions triggered by hunger, uprisings and assertions of freedom in opposition to absolutism arose, that is, situations in which utopian socialism presented itself as an alternative. Through it, men could find the best in themselves and subvert the supposed degradation that was underway.
In America, the combination of religious aspects bequeathed by Christianity, explanations about indigenous communities and socialist ideology were possible lenses to decode past experiences such as the mythical “Guarani Republic”, or the readings – following Fourier’s model – that the Agriculture, as a subsistence economic activity, would provide human happiness. The myth of the “inextinguishable fecundity of American soil” would produce a happy man, who, within traditions and community structures, would shape Latin America.
America, in this case, was a blank slate, in which coexistence with tyrannical regimes, such as those of Francia in Paraguay, Rosas in Argentina and, later, Porfírio Díaz in Mexico was not something to be considered. The continent where “all men are free” ignored the persistence of slavery in Brazil and other parts of the continent. The ideology of republicanism, thinking about what it expressed from the New to the Old World, was more important than the concrete conditions: free America, from the cycles of independence (1810-1825), possessed a vitality that would boost the Europe itself immersed in post-Napoleon monarchical restoration movements.
In this way, utopia in independent America, as Pierre Luc Abramson observed in his “Social utopias in Latin America in the 19th century” (1999), it would not just be a question of nomenclature, but the manifestation of the desire that different institutions could exist in the world.
Given this brief history, what I am interested in highlighting is the existence of a strong regressive component in the notion of utopia. As historian Quentin Skinner pointed out when analyzing the work of Thomas More, the author of the classic work was against the end of communal property and what the emergence of modernity in Europe meant.
In America, the utopian feeling has this regressive characteristic if we look at where utopias primarily flourished: Mexico, Peru and Paraguay. These are regions where a supposedly glorious past insists on dialoguing with the present time and, therefore, indigenous legacies are fundamental to the constitution of any political legitimacy that one wishes to establish.
The Republics, whether liberal or positivist, needed an appeal to the mythical past to justify themselves in their new political exercise and to indicate that the trip to be made was, in fact, a supposed rescue of a past that populated imaginaries. Therefore, when stating that there is a regressive assumption in utopia, it is not equivalent to saying that it is conservative. There is no a priori axiological judgment in this formulation, just an observation that utopian dreams were in the past.
Imagining horizons
The exercise of this brief essay is to stimulate a little reflection on current events in various corners of the world. There seems to be a hopelessness or insufficiency in thinking about the power of temporalities to emerge new expectations. Historical processes are dynamic and there are movements that move like tectonic plates: only when an earthquake occurs do we remember that they exist and their silent displacement.
Utopia and its ability to mobilize imagination dialogues with the past, but projects itself with a future development. What is rescued and what is proposed is something that must be understood in the specificity of its contexts and temporalities.
Thinking about what we have become in Iberian America, in the 21st century, is an invitation to think that the absence of imagination was never our characteristic. I hope that the dream, the imaginary, the field of a thousand possibilities never succumbs while we walk in a world full of disenchantment and without hope. Because, between dreams and reasons, we project ourselves a little further, like a paradise that is located right there, on another corner, as the title of a work by Vargas Llosa suggests.
