The beginning of the 21st century we are witnessing displays a tendency to systematically question the binary legacy of the past centuries. The global emotionalization anchored in the normalized societies and in the immediate enjoyment through consumption makes the policies of sensibilities the central point of dispute and the source for “other orders”.

The policies of sensibilities make reference to the set of cognitive-affective social practices that tend towards production, management and reproduction of prospects of action, disposition and cognition. Such prospects refer to: 1) the organization of everyday life (the day-to-day, wakefulness/sleep, eating/fasting, etc.); 2) the information used to set order to preferences and values (adequate/inadequate, acceptable/unacceptable, bearable/unbearable); and 3) the parameters employed for time/space management (displacement/emplacement, walls/bridges, infrastructure for the valuing of enjoyment.)

The sensibilities, a “vertex of the co-border” formed by politics, the market and the sciences outline the limits and frontiers of nomadic emotions that correspond to the elaboration of bodies-in-transit.

Politics and its institutional correlate, the State, which are involved in the dialectical back and forth between pornography and transparency, are tailored to fit the Power to make, accumulate, distribute and reproduce sensibilities.

The Market -setting the creation of value in and through the tension between sensation and emotion, and making them “the” merchandise of the new century- surpasses politics and the state in terms of their roles in ensuring the elaboration of a planetarized political economy of morality.

Those sciences which intertwine with the Market, on the one hand, elaborate the conditions of production of endocrine disruptors, nano-robots, cellular design and genetic manipulation; on the other hand, they get involved with the management of sensibilities through the new neurocognitive and affective sciences. These sciences guarantee the colonization (depredation?) of the Internal Planet.

The connections and disconnections between science, politics, and market lead to the basic dispute about the conditions of fraternal bonds, joy and potential reciprocities in terms of commodification of the emotions that correspond to love, happiness, and gratitude. The dispute in contemporary capitalism is about the design, production, management and distribution of feelings.

In this light, it is easy to notice that the current publication in the Latin American Journal of Studies on Bodies, Emotions and Society (Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad, RELACES) implies a kaleidoscopic way of looking at power/weakness of the bodies/emotions as locus of conflict and order, as the axis of multiple disputes and resignations, and as sources of normalizations and of interdictions and interstices as well.

Pharmaco-politics is a path for the colonization of the Internal Planet. This path is directly linked to the depredation of bodily and emotional energies as foundation and architecture of indeterminate subjection. The multiple and current connections between “molecular medicines”, neurocognitive interventions and state management of subjectivities are reminiscent of the old industry, army, and state triangle. One of the main aspects of this problematic field is approached in the article “Mental health, subjectivity and the contemporary pharmacological device” by Jonatas Ferreira, who states in his abstract:

The following article intends to discuss the crisis of the idea of subjectivity in contemporaneity as a biopolitical ideal, to which would be associated other modern normative and political contents, such as reflexivity, autonomy and psychic normality. Faced with the technological acceleration that governs informational capitalism, the result of the planetary realization of liberalism itself, its success as a technical and economic ideal, and everything that demands the full availability of individuals, there is an erosion of the whole set of concepts associated with the subject’s metaphysics, paradoxically, this is the very basis of liberal thought. Investments in reflexivity, sanity, autonomy of individuals can no longer support the dromological needs of capital. From this perspective, and having the work of Canguilhem as support, we intend to understand the technical meaning of the psychopharmacological device that presides over the life of a considerable part of the individuals in the contemporary world.

Another central aspect of the current global emotionalization processes is the series of abrupt changes in the proximities/distances between the individual and the collective, the embodied and the virtual, and the urban and rural conundrums. Rogelio Luna Zamora and Lucia Mantilla pick up this issue in their article “From the Sociology of Emotions to the Critique of Biopolitics”, in which they briefly introduce it as follows:

This work introduces a comparative analysis of the approach to the study of emotions from the perspective of sociological thought and the criticism of contemporary biopolitics.” The objective of this work is to get close to point out the differences between classical sociology -in particular, the sociology of emotions- and the studies of contemporary biopolitics. The critique of biopolitics is approached through the elaborated thoughts of Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben rather than with the classic work of Michael Foucault. What is displayed, in particular, is the transition from rural to urban societies or the process of modernization that involves the loss of the community and the preeminence of the individual from both perspectives. A case study is put forward for the analysis of this process from the sociology of emotions point of view; the subject of analysis will be the way criticism of biopolitics allows us the opportunity to question the dichotomies of Western thought which underlie the analysis of emotions.

Emerging features of societies 4.0 that stand out are the increasing complexity and restructuring of the so-called risk societies: consumption, depredations and expropriations of unlimited environmental assets homogenize the planet. In consonance, tsunamis, epidemics, earthquakes, and floods, among other “phenomena”, encounter an exhausted planet that supposes a set of diverse and multiple “emotional assets”. In their work “Bodies/Emotions of Emergency before the Earthquakes of Mexico, 2017”, Margarita Camarena Luhrs and Surya Mariana Salgado shed light on the sensibilities emerged in a particular earthquake, stating that:

This article addresses the bodies/emotions that emerged after the quakes that struck in Mexico, in September 2017. We consider a reflection on the interruption of the continuum of these environments that are interrelated. We try to show that the momentary suspension brought about by the earthquakes caused intermediate bodies/emotions to emerge and disappear. It is important to us to show that the rupture of the places that were identities gave way for fear, horror -during and immediately after the earthquakes; and once the scale of the fatal outcome of the earthquakes was collectively verified, the events prompted mainly a sort of collective action which is oriented towards social sensibilities, which uplifted the best of human beings.

Perhaps one of the axes of the upcoming changes that will take place in the current century is, precisely, the experience of what is designated as a body run across by multiple possibilities of intervening it, designing it, modifying it and regulating it. It is a phenomenon that finds a primary tension in the discussion of sexuality, although various ways of addressing non-binary colonizations to the external-internal planet are added to it. It is Adriana Fuentes Ponce who, in her publication entitled “Implication of the Relationship between Body and Sexuality when Determining the Intelligible”, challenges us to think on one of the possible sides of such discussion. In her article, she summarizes it as follows:

The news spread in 2009 which raised questions about the veracity of the Semenya Mokgadi Caster’s genre is the starting point in this article to problematize the interweaving between gender, body, and sexuality. This has led to difficulties in understanding the complexity of such implications in the social imaginary which is governed by binary knowledge sustained and materialized in a heteronormed functional body which shows specific and immovable characteristics for men and women. The purpose of this text is to show the connections and processes of how we become to exist in a body and the insistence on keeping framing the truth in the biological paradigms that have categorized the subjects. Such paradigms thus link them with normality and animosity according to the intelligibility of the bodies, whose feminization-masculinization, appearance, functionality and morphology produce daily constraints. The discussion on the regulatory system that seeks the homogeneity of corporeity is based on contributions made by Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam and Robert McRuer. It was opened up so as to make the development of social interaction explicit, the one that reasserts the tendency to believe that only a few or just a minority is affected or subjugated, when it is not like that, actually, since it is not possible to be spared.

Following the previous space line conformed by the new -and old- ways of controlling bodies, contemporary societies are creating new forms of rationalities that “incorporate” the sensibilities of other reasons. But everyday life and the daily commodification promote the systematic reproduction of a kind of reasoning that seeks to control everything. Part of this scenario is retrieved in “Reason, Body, and Social Resistance (A study on the corporeity in three historical moments of reason)” by Álvaro Reyes Toxqui, in which he explains his motives in the following way:

Reason is not a mere aspect of the gnoseological capacity of the human being. Its scope is not restricted to epistemological studies. From its Greek origins, reason has been an important bodily technology which the Western civilization has constructed based on the exclusion of other kinds of knowledge and from the social construction of the normalized, dominated, and disciplined body. The criticism of reason and the emergence of alternative philosophies and aesthetics also imply processes of social resistance stemming from corporeality.

Among control, discipline, and violence, the naturalization of death emerges as one of the features of societies excited in the ecstasy of enjoyment through consumption. The end of this “journey” is analyzed through the notion of Thana-Capitalism that Maximilian E. Korstanje has created to make evident the necrophilic tendency to consume death. In his article “9/11 and the rise of thana capitalism: towards a theory of emotins?”, he presents one of the basic features of the aforementioned process. The author outlines it in the following way:

The present essay explores the subject of dark tourism, to what extent the risk society has already been left behind, after 9/11, starting a new capitalist phase where the main allurement is death. In true Thana-Capitalism, -far from what the specialized literature establishes- competition, the need to feel different, and individualism prevail.

The media and the entertainment field have made death into not only a criterion for fun, and recreation, but also a parameter for status and exclusivity.

The article “Love, Death and Fear” by Geoffrey R. Skoll serves as closure for the section of works with an excellent proposal to think about the revolutionary potential of love, which the author recaps in the following way:

In this essay, based on Marx’s and Freud’s central ideas, love, fear, and death are examined from a social and historical perspective. The proposal put forward for analysis is about the contemporary state of social relations. The main argument is that hostile aggressiveness has triumphed over love by making people fear each other. However, although this essay is, on broad terms, pessimistic, there is hope that love can finally triumph, but this requires a revolution to destroy the current capitalist system.

It is, without a doubt, this transition through the interstitial powers of one of the most disputed emotions of capitalism what places us at the beginning this introduction: only the systematic reflection on love, happiness and gratitude will lead us to a radical criticism of the cunning of modern reason and the emotionalization of the 21st century.

Issue number 25 of RELACES is rounded off with two quite interesting reviews: a) “Contributions to a Sociology of Bodies and Emotions from the South” by Luciana Martínez Albanesi from the book Scribano, A.; Aranguren, M. (Comp.) (2017) Contributions to a Sociology of Bodies and Emotions from the South; and b) “Internal Time and Social Time: Reflections on a Body-Centered Therapy” by Francisco Falconier, from the book: Melucci, A. (2016) Cuerpos Extraños (De Sena, A.; Scribano, A. (Trad.).

This issue of RELACES, which gathers a series of articles from different countries such as Mexico, Argentina, USA, Brazil, is framed within those discussions on social sciences at the service of emancipatory knowledge, concerned with naming those empty, overlapping and places that were hidden for a reason that, since its inception, has been gaining shape in the heat of expropriation.

We thank the authors and all those who have sent us their manuscripts. We remind you that the call for articles is permanently open.

To conclude, we must reiterate that, since issue number 15 of RELACES, we began to publish up to two articles in English in each issue. As we have been reminding you for a long time: in RELACES, together with all its Editorial Team and the Editorial Board, we believe it is necessary to take up each article of our journal as a node that allows us to continue down the path of dialogue and scientific/academic exchange as a social and political task in order to achieve a freer and more autonomous society. It is in the previous context that we want to thank all those who trust us as a vehicle to instantiate such dialogue.

It is not possible to finish the presentation of this issue number 25 without dedicating at least some words to the fact that we have reached this number of issues and that it occurred, coincidently, on the Latin American Association of Sociology (Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología, ALAS) Working Group on Sociology of the Bodies and Emotions 10th anniversary.

These 25 issues outline a path to follow, we only need 75 more to reach 100. Reaching such number of issues is just a matter of time if we maintain the key aspects which allowed us to get here: open, do not close; persist, do not give up; collectivize, do not individualize; interest, no disinterest. Those have been the edges defining our clear commitment to the critical character of reason.

These 10 years of WG 26 (one of its founders, Rogelio Luna, whom we congratulate, has published in this issue), are also proof that the virtues of the collective prevail over our own individual defects. In the coming days, at the XXXI ALAS Congress in Uruguay (from 3rd to 8th of December) with almost 400 works, we are opening, once again, room for disciplinary discussion. This began its final process of institutionalization in sociology ten years ago, a fact that fills us with joy and makes us very proud.

Two birthdays and the shared joy in this December to be conquered.

Breaks, normalizations, and disputes: the bodies/emotions as locus of conflict and order

Breaks, normalizations, and disputes: the bodies/emotions as locus of conflict and order