The central objective of this book is to make evident the connections between social policies and the politics of sensibilities. Using an analytical perspective that articulates and potentiates the sociology of bodies/emotions with the sociology of social policies, we try to show how social policies build sociabilities, experiences and sensibilities, thereby producing processes of conflict avoidance and consecration of the given. It is intended to facilitate the observation of the processes by which the state manages to neutralize the effects of inequality, producing a containment of the subjects through compensatory consumption.
Social Policies, Emotions and the Global South
Emotions are elaborated, circulated and reproduced in and through social practices since they are practical. As we will see later, an emotion is characterized, among other things, by being a practice that transforms the world (sensu Sartre). Social policies are state actions, which, among other traits, are qualified by deliberately seeking to suture failures of state, market and civil society in the equitable reproduction of the social structure, that is, changing the social world by suturing their conflict breaks. In the process of the aforementioned social intervention, the state develops sociabilities, experiences and sensibilities. Each state action evokes, manages and uses the capacity of emotions as a basic element to operate the conflict suture and thus transform the perceptions and sensations of the subjects before the failures that originate the various conflict networks upon which social policies are focused.
It is in this way that it is possible to understand how states are interested, in emotional management and regulation on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the elaboration of intervention practices that contain and channel absences of enjoyment through consumption through direct state actions, whether they are in the form of services, money and/or “accesses”.
The book contextualizes the situation of violence that women experience as a starting point to understand the current state of social policies, and then tries to describe how the “place” and the “value” of education has become a central feature of social policies in order to disband conflict, and in the same vein shows the connections between bodies with little energy available for action and food policies. The text also explores the “practical conceptions” regarding universal, focused or massive policies, as well allowing us to rethink massiveness, “occupability”, intergenerationality and “lifetime coverage” as central features of social policies today. It seeks to make clear the “place of help” in the experiences narrated by the subjects receiving a conditional cash transfer programme. In the same way, it points out how receiving a set of benefits from the state “keeps busy” the beneficiaries in such a way that it reinforces the character of all social policies as a conflict avoidance mechanism. The last two chapters explain the emergence of a social phenomenon that, at least, has been consolidating in the last sixteen years in Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular—the compensatory consumption system—and emphasize the emergence of the “assisted citizen” as a result of this.
Taking as a starting point the empirical data on Argentina and the information associated with the problems of social policies in Latin America and the rest of the world, the book presented here attempts to elaborate a view from the Global South. The chapters that compose it make it clear how the elaboration of sensibilities through social policies is part of a double process of coloniality: (1) the one carried out at the planetary level that results in colonial time/space enclaves that constitute the Global South, and (2) the one carried out on a personal level as a coloniality of the inner planet (sensu Melucci). It is from this double perspective that many of the consequences of social policies are colonial.
There are no objective possibilities to explain Argentina or Latin America in particular, and the Global South in general, without accepting its current colonial situation. Beyond the proximities and distances, beyond the agreements and disagreements that may exist between postcolonial, post-Western and/or decolonial approaches, with what will be presented here, the central “problem” of these perspectives is sustained; and our fundamental divergence is its diagnosis of the state of imperialism, dependency and the colonial situation. Our argument has, as its starting point and horizon of understanding, the acceptance that the current material conditions of existence and the dialectic of world domination—at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century—are characterized by a “renewed” colonial situation that we designate as post-independentist. This designation is intended to emphatically emphasize the persistence of colonial ties and the inadequacy of the description of the current period as postcolonial. For us, this situation can be characterized as follows:
- 1.Capitalism has been transformed (emphasizing some of its previous features) into a large predatory energy machine—especially bodily—that has configured and redefined its social bearability mechanisms and devices for the regulation of sensations while being a great international repressive apparatus.
- 2.The privileged route of connection between collective actions, phantoms and social fantasies is the acceptance that the body is the locus of conflict and order. It is the place and locus of conflict where a good part of the logic of contemporary antagonisms passes. From here, it is possible to observe the constitution of a political economy of morality, that is, some modes of sensibilities, practices and representations that put domination into words.
- 3.At present, the emergence of religion of colonial helplessness can be observed. Thus, the (institutional) policy must create the new religion of the dependent colonial countries that replaces the—already old—trinity of the “industrial religion” based on unlimited production, absolute freedom and unrestricted happiness, for the trinity of the expelled composed of mimetic consumption, solidarity and resignation. A religion whose liturgy is the construction of social fantasies, in which dreams fulfil a central function as a kingdom of heaven on earth and the sociodicy of frustration, plays the role of narrating and making present the phantasmal hells of the past, now made present continuous.
The occupation and expropriation to which the entire populations of the planet are subjected by global capitalism is imperial aggression that, although it takes various forms and densities, manifests itself in colonial relations.
There is no colony without a state of dependency, and this state is not verified without the imperial plot imposed by the “dominant groups” at the global level. These three ways of presenting the subjection on a planetary scale are indeterminate, complex and changing forms that the capitalist system of exploitation and expropriation adopts to model, maintain and reproduce itself. From the perspective of the upward twist of the constitutive spiral of global domination practices embedded in the aforementioned forms, the colony, as usurpation, overlaps and condenses the expropriation states of dependence, which, in turn, implies the imposition of the governance of the groups that “represent” the imperial situation.
From a downward perspective on the same spiral, the imperial situation, with the concentration of capabilities to “make-the-world”, enables and promotes the inescapable depredation in the structural dependence between cities, territories, nations and states that produce and consume the “wealth” that, in turn, is anchored in the planetary dispossession organized as a colony. It is in this context that we maintain that:
- 1.When there are on the earth social groups that centralize the concentrated capacity of the imposition of needs, desires and actions constituting a political economy of morality that enshrines excess expropriations—thus avoiding all forms of autonomous practices—it is faced with a modality of imperialism;
- 2.When there is a coalescence of relations between territories, nations and states that socialize the destructive effects of the processes of accumulation of environmental assets, and these relations are conditioned by the state of the productive fields of high profitability—structured by means of the connections of the global dominant classes—we are facing a situation of dependency;
- 3.When there is class segregation behind walls that contain and reproduce the moments of expropriation and dispossession, enshrined in the racialization of the relationship between colonist and colonized, the current colonial situation becomes effective.
It is not our interest here to discuss “philosophically, punctually and in detail” the distances that separate us from the various approaches (and authors) that have thematized the relationship between coloniality and knowledge in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, as well as the proximity that binds us to them. The multiple works of Quijano, Lander, Escobar, Coronil, Dussel, Mignolo and Castro-Gomez (among others), strongly associated with various intentions to “reconstruct” the possibilities of thinking from the margins of coloniality, beyond existing differences among them, are those that surely mark the field of discussion in which the present work is inscribed. Therefore, it is appropriate to emphasize that the presentation made here does not have any “overtaking” claim, but rather slides the aforementioned field of discussion towards the constitution of another space where the Social Sciences of the South can discuss the current colonial situation.
This book was written with the conviction that elaborating a critical view of social policies as constructors of sensibilities is a task with a double relevance: theoretical, in terms of improving the comprehension of the place and weight of emotions in the contemporary world, and critical because it allows a systematic reflective act on the processes of loss of autonomy for people in the face of states and markets.
Book Content1
The introduction has a double objective: (1) to summarize the theoretical focus of the book, and (2) to point out the connections between the chapters, their themes and the epilogue. In first place, the theoretical and epistemological view of the sociology of bodies/emotions as an analytical reference framework for studying society is summarized. This implies making explicit our vision about the connections between emotions, social structuring and politics of sensibilities. Secondly, our perspective on the meaning of social policies, the intervention of the state in society and the current state of the so-called social question is developed. In a third moment, we show which are the connections that we find between social policies and the politics of sensibilities from the perspective of bodies/emotions. Once the aforementioned theoretical presentation has been completed, the reader is introduced to the content of the chapters and the central conclusions of the book to provide a general framework ...