Covid was the way in which the abstract future burst into a sick present
In the midst of aesthetics of disgust, rabid leadership, industries of anothercidebelligerent consumption, visual viruses and elections that have become “natural laboratories” for new audiences, the book Us against Them (Siglo XXI, 2023) accounts for a new regime of polarization that expands a new phase of polarization that is increasingly influential in the intensity of our attachments and our hatreds, challenging the emotional supports of platform capitalism. In short, the emergence of political phenomena is convergent with the new multimedia distribution, analog and digital, of production-circulation and attribution of meanings.
Post-Fordist contemporaneity re-diagrams consensus platforms and “participation” strategies that worsen during electoral times. Polarization has become pregnant and discursive interaction is a factory of black capital gains. Political campaigns and operations on social networks privatize subjectivity, abounding in increasingly stronger damages. In short, we are witnessing a new state of immunization where fake news destabilize the primary function of the fact checker (verifiers) expanding verification processes infoxication and opening questions about the status of reality.
Under the new digital ecosystem, paranoia, vileness, ridicule, disparagement, denigration, and all vindictive (vexatory) practices lead us to processes of de-subjectification where the void of symbolism makes the subject read the “otherness.” ” as an object in a permanent attitude of annihilation.
The ritual of purification takes things back to a Hobbesian agency (degree zero) where digitalized rage is assumed by the subject in front of an other. non-adversarialbut before a total enemy and intolerable that only constitutes the “death drive.”
The neoliberal necrophilia finds here a place that merits a debate regarding the possible agonistic positions of information technology. In short, fanatical technologies prevent the subject who cannot metabolize (manage) under the expressive or deliberative modes of neoliberal communication, since the absolute enemy It could be the virological terrorist of Covid-19 or the neighbor who has “become a narco.” In the midst of a degraded institutional body, angry leaderships sharpen the technology of fear as a political affect to control the government of bodies and their transformative impulses.
Otherwise, it is not possible to produce a new governance agenda given that the void in the “social pact” is resolved through figures caesarists (Bolsonaro, Milei) as a government device. In sum, the ontological insubstantiality of presentism.
The author has a PhD in Social Sciences from the National University of Quilmes (UNQUI), a master’s degree in Economic Sociology from the National University of San Martín (IDAES-UNSAM) and a visiting professor of the UFRO-UACh Doctorate in Communication. She is a journalistic collaborator specialized in the Argentine newspaper Page 12 and in Le Monde Diplomatique/Ediciones Cono Sur. The activity will take place on Thursday, June 13 at the Central Library of the Universidad de la Frontera (6:00 p.m., Chi), where Natalia will present her latest publication made together with Ernesto Calvo, Us Against Them (21st century, 2023). Comments will be made by the Director of the Doctoral program, Dr. Carlos del Valle.
Link. Book presentation: Them against us. How networks work… / Dr. Natalia Aruguete (youtube.com)
Mauro Salazar J.
Doctorate in Communication UFRO-UACh
Border University.
