Sensibilities, subjectivities and poverty

While the issue of poverty is neither new nor recent in Latin America, it began to be closely linked to social policies in the 1980s and especially the 1990s. Likewise, since the beginning of the 21st century, processes of social structuring have been characterized by changes in their content, limits, and

The scope of social policies as builders of specific sensibilities, which intertwine the tensions between poverty, state intervention, and the management of social conflict. While the issue of poverty is neither new nor recent in Latin America, it began to be closely tied to social policies in the 1980s and especially the 1990s. Likewise, since the beginning of the 21st century, processes of social structuring have been characterized by shifts in the content, limits, and scope of social policies as builders of specific sensibilities, which intertwine the tensions between poverty, state intervention, and the management of social conflict. These policies have managed the sensibilities of those whom one can only "assist," as state practices that perform the social sphere with the capacity to construct sociability. The normalization of the social is both a consequence and a generator of mechanisms of social bearability and devices for regulating sensations, which are the product of social structuring processes that construct new realities, transmitting certain "images of the world," which imply the way in which agents presuppose their mode of existence, time, space, and relationships with reality.

Observing poverty means examining social policies as builders of specific sensibilities that intertwine state intervention and the management of social conflict; since these policies "make society" insofar as they are positioned as state interventions directed toward the production and reproduction of the living conditions of different sectors of society. Their analysis allows us to access the ways in which the transformation of the conditions of production and the possibilities for the reproduction of populations are resolved—that is, the relationships between capital accumulation and consumption.

In direct connection with the current state of both the vectors of social structuring and the nodes of the politics of sensibilities, a set of challenges arises for understanding and explaining society, for justifying such knowledge, and for intervening in the social sphere, which both consolidate and challenge the conjectures put forward. These dimensions produce modifications in the geometries of bodies and the grammars of actions that constitute the politics of bodies and the politics of emotions, and which appear as the central nodes of the politics of sensibilities in transformation.

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Photo taken by Joel Gómez as part of an investigation by the National University of La Matanza, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina (November 2019)