Banca de DEFESA: Igor Motta Gil

Between utopias and dystopias: the imagination of the future under the logic of late capitalism

Late capitalism; structure of feeling; culture industry; future imagination; distopias.

This research analyzes and interprets how dystopias, a subgenre of utopias that imagine socially pessimistic and totalitarian futures, were born and went through different stages of a theorization process that triggered their proliferation and consequent popularization, simultaneously with the reverberations and developments of such fictions that place them as sociological entities within the structure of feeling of late capitalism. I identify them as specific fruits of this stage of capitalism, as well as narratives that behave in a dilettante way and that add different elements of the human sciences in their fictional constructions, demanding an analysis that addresses such multiple characteristics of different areas, when linked to the universes of science fiction, outlining this research as interdisciplinary, with sociology as the empirical basis and guiding thread that interconnects the arguments and developments presented, intertwining cultural studies, Marxist studies and critical theory. Through such theoretical references, dystopias acquired social singularities based on the argument that they were disseminated through the paths of such a phase of the capitalist system, such as the heyday of the cultural industry, in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. , and the forms of massification and homogenization driven by the audiovisual and its reified historiophoties, the obscure mnemosyne atlas, enabling new forms of the ideological domination of capital, such as the recontextualization of historiographic and historiophotic narratives, and the concatenated instrumentalization of these as a tool of soft power in generalization of totalitarianisms, in the creation of the dystopian inevitability of the total and in the strengthening of the self-fulfilling prophecy that represents capitalism as the only option in the face of generic totalitarianisms. However, as the concept of dystopia goes through its theorization process, it acquires new social, geographical and historical characteristics, enhanced by the translation of these fictions into different media and their languages, increasing their complexities and the voices that compose them, enabling new critical approaches. which now echo old fears and fears, previously silenced. Gradually, technical progress generates a disconnection of the reciprocal relationship between the past, the present and the future, exhibiting the totalizing movements of late capitalism through the cultural industry and generic totalitarianisms that, once effective, are now pastiches of the idea of totalitarianism and are filled by capital's own conceptions, self-referencing, and opening structures of political opportunities. Considering dystopian fictions as aporias, insofar as open political opportunity structures are not necessarily occupied and do not result in social progress, added to the lack of political agendas, they also result in counterproductive effects, which equally does not nullify the existence of a militant pessimism that points to remnants of an impulse in imagining the future.