The current state of capitalism on a global scale is characterized by a vast predatory machine that consumes water, air, land, and, especially, bodily energy. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the problems related to the production and reproduction of societies have led to strategies for addressing conflict and building social consensus. Thus, the social question took on diverse manifestations in the first decades of the 21st century, with poverty being an unavoidable aspect. By 2017, the number of people living in poverty reached 184 million, approximately 30,2% of the region's population, of whom 62 million were living in extreme poverty—10,2% of the population—the highest percentage since 2008 (ECLAC, 2019). Consequently, the strategies that states have designed to address this problem meant that, on average, public social spending reached 11,2% of GDP in 2016, the highest level recorded since 2000 (ECLAC, 2009). Along these lines, in the area of ​​poverty alleviation policies, the 1990s witnessed the development of income transfer programs, in line with the workfare approach and the first wave of targeted interventions. In the early 2000s, interventions based on human capital theories, the capabilities approach, and mass scalability were implemented, coinciding with the Post-Washington Consensus and the second wave of targeting (Martinez Franzoni, 2005; Lo Vuolo and Barbeito, 1993; Grassi, 2003; Andrenacci and Soldano, 2006; Perelmiter, 2011). Within this context, Conditional Cash Transfer Programs emerged as flagship programs for poverty alleviation in Latin America (Barrientos and De Jong, 2004 and 2006; Tabor, 2002; De Sena, 2016), financed and promoted by Multilateral Credit Organizations (Álvarez Leguizamón, 2005; Murillo, 2008; Aguilar, 2010).

Since the beginning of the 21st century, social structuring processes have been characterized by shifts in the content, scope, and reach of social policies as mechanisms for conflict avoidance. This type of cash transfer policy emerged in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century, during a period of full economic recovery and growth—with some precedents dating back to the early 1990s. Today, it represents the consolidation (in its 21st-century version) of the paradigm for addressing the “social question” linked to poverty par excellence in the region. Therefore, it is possible to trace that, since 1996, the number of poverty alleviation programs has steadily increased, both in the quantity of programs and their coverage levels, currently reaching 131 million beneficiaries (Cecchini and Atuesta, 2017).

In this context, one can observe the expansive development of connections between compensatory consumption, mimetic consumption, and the massification of the "financialization" of popular sectors, geared toward immediate gratification. Simultaneously, the sustained increase in the coexistence of precarious employment, informality, new technologies, and changes in labor management, along with the constant rise in connections between precarious occupations of space, poverty, and the massification of social programs, are evident. Beyond the different conceptualizations that can be given to each type of intervention, these have had a way of managing the sensibilities of those who can only be "assisted," as state practices that perform the social sphere with the capacity to construct sociability.

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 arise for understanding and explaining society, for justifying such knowledge, and for intervening in the social, which consolidate and strain the conjectures used here:

1) Brain, nutrients, endocrine disruptors, nanomanagement and genomic management of life are the central aspects of the material conditions of life in the 21st century; the social modes for producing, concentrating and reproducing power over and from these aspects demand systematic critical inquiries.

2) The social forms of immediacy entail specific surfaces where conditions of particular experiences are taken for granted and sociabilities are assumed.

3) The conditions of productivity and the commodification of sensations come together in a common "pre-origin" that is elaborated in "using-the-body" to relate to instruments/machines/devices.

5) Social ways of connecting with the world have shifted to our hands, fingers, and fingertips, primarily through communication devices. Thus, our daily lives are filled with cell phones, credit cards, transportation cards, stoves, microwaves, and so on, which have become intertwined across social classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages.

4) Societies that paradoxically become spectacular and at the same time concentrate on the individual, that get excited "about everything" but limit themselves to those closest to them, are societies that redefine the politics of touch, the conditions of the norms/rules of touching, being touched and being touched.

6) All sensory politics are activities aimed at resolving situations (sensu Thomas), at being successful in the social presentation of the person (sensu Goffman), and at developing readily available knowledge (sensu Schütz) that subjects use in and from the lifeworld. It is in this context that touch becomes relevant.

7) Millions of people-in-transit: displacements, expulsions, exiles, famines and misery create a complex global map where poverty, dependencies and authoritarianism are carried throughout the world redefining landscapes and horizons.

8) Millions of people-on-journeys: searches, explorations, inquiries, routes and journeys that create maps of proximity/distances, of differences/inequalities, of disabilities/abilities that imply modifications in the paintings of the world of bodies/emotions at the beginning of the century.

9) Transitions and journeys that color areas of bifurcations where being/existing in the social world implies new modalities of bodies/emotions. Bifurcations (sensu Arnold), singularities and renewed “morphogenesis” where trauma, sadness and suffering become “structural context” for the restructured sensibilities.

Today we live in societies normalized by the pursuit of immediate gratification through consumption. We are witnessing a constant restructuring of the political economy of morality through enjoyment. Consumer credit, consumer subsidies, and “official” incentives for consumption intersect and overlap with the consolidated and continuously developing state of capitalism in its inherent contradiction of predation and consumption. Thus, societies are produced and reproduced around a set of sensibilities whose context for development is the continuous effort to “keep consuming.”

In these societies, the journeys and transitions inherent in their precarity, uncertainty, and variability lead to bifurcations, demanding new epistemologies of the everyday that inscribe, within the cognitive-affective practices of individuals, instances of certainty and a re-examination of truth. Interventions emerge that seek to mitigate these situations and place the individual in a position of dependency. Twenty-first-century society must reflect on whether this remains a way of diluting conflictive situations or simply the new social question: millions of individuals who are consumers, poor, and dependent on aid.

Latin America and the Caribbean are shaped by a constant restructuring of the political economy of morality through the normalization of immediate gratification via consumption. To adequately characterize the "state" of these societies, it is necessary to clarify the experience of immediate gratification as the central axis through which the elaborations of possible normalizations occur. The operative centrality of the connections between consumption, gratification, and normalization becomes key to understanding the political economy of morality today. Immediate gratification is the mechanism through which the diverse and multiple ways of generating substitutes, replacements, and satisfiers through consumption are actualized, serving as a mechanism for reducing anxieties.

The connections between consumption, enjoyment, and objects take on the procedural structure of addictions: there exists an object that releases moments of containment/adaptation to a specific state of sensitivity with such power/capacity that its absence demands its immediate replacement/reproduction. Without these objects, a rupture occurs in the indeterminate emotional frameworks, such that a lack is experienced; an experience that induces/produces the need for a new and immediate consumption of the object in question. Thus, enjoyment can be understood as the complex and contingent outcome experienced as a "here-and-now" parenthesis, as a continuity in time, and which produces a state of subjective detachment.

For their part, the politics of sensibilities are understood as the set of cognitive-affective social practices aimed at the production, management, and reproduction of horizons of action, disposition, and cognition. In this sense, one can understand how the normalization of the social is both a consequence and a generator of the repetition over time of the mechanisms of social bearability and the devices for regulating sensations, which regulate expectations and promote conflict avoidance. The former embody the practices of suppressing conflicts and antagonisms that contribute to life being lived as a perpetual "it will always be this way." The latter normalize the tension between senses, perceptions, and sensations that structure individual and collective ways of appreciating and being appreciated in the world.

Poverty has been one of the ways in which expressions of the social question have gained relevance in contemporary societies. For their part, the processes of social structuring under capitalism have entailed particular sensitivities linked to the conditions of production and reproduction of life for populations in specific circumstances. At this point, the material conditions of existence of populations have been affected by the processes of capitalist structuring, which have become practices and sensibilities within the context of shaping the daily lives of individuals.

Accumulation regimes involve not only the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, but also the regulation of how individuals behave. In this sense, the politics of bodies and emotions are central to understanding the role of social policies within a regime that persists despite, and even from the outset, generating conditions of poverty and exclusion. Social policies and sensibilities constitute a central aspect of the mode of social and political regulation (NEFFA, 2006). Thus, what appears to reside in the subjective intimacy of actors, such as sensibilities, has a strong correlation with social norms, customs, institutional traditions, and so on.

From sociological perspectives on social policies, it has been argued that these policies "shape society," as they are positioned as state interventions aimed at producing and reproducing the living conditions of different sectors of society. Thus, while being products of social structuring processes, they construct new realities, transmitting specific "worldviews" that shape how individuals and groups presuppose their mode of existence, time, space, and relationships with reality. Research has shown that social policies impact bodies and emotions, as they influence how the lives of the target populations are produced and reproduced (De Sena, 2014; Cena, 2015; De Sena, 2016). Furthermore, recent research indicates that transfers provided by social programs are primarily used for consumption: either to pay off past debts or for the immediate purchase of goods and services. This empowers recipients to position themselves as consumers, directly impacting their sensibilities and the process of structuring social relationships.

The dimension that crystallizes in social policies as builders of specific sensibilities intertwines, among other things, the tensions between poverty, state intervention, and the management of social conflict. 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, which appear as the central nodes of the politics of sensibilities in transformation. We understand that social policies, by acting upon the material and symbolic conditions of life, construct and shape subjectivities and sensibilities; that is, they create society or societies. These constitute forms of state intervention that, due to their place in the processes of social structuring, are ambiguous; they express, define, and institute the social question; they possess a normative potential, not only by standardizing and normalizing a social problem and those who embody it, but also because they are potentially susceptible to being positioned as governmentally recognized rights.

The analysis of social policies allows us to understand how the transformation of the conditions of production and the possibilities for the reproduction of populations are addressed; that is, the relationship between capital accumulation and consumption. It is in this context that the connections between systemic compensation and public policies emerge as highly central (Halperín Weisburd, 2008).

It is extensively documented that these systems regulate the levels of capital accumulation and the levels of production/reproduction of populations included in or excluded from the labor market, thus regulating levels of social conflict. On the one hand, they establish the limits and possibilities of the expanded reproduction of life (Grassi, 2003; Danani, 2004 and 2005b; and Andrenacci and Soldano, 2006); on the other hand, they allow the reproduction of the capitalist accumulation regime by being a nodal part of the mode of social and political regulation (Titmuss, 1974; Esping-Andersen, 1993; Adelantado, Noguera, and Rambla, 2000; Greffe, 1975; Corvalán, 1994; Bickel, 2009; and Yazbek, 2000). Thus, the functionality of social policies consists not only in their compensatory character, but also in their systemic functionality (Offe, 1990; Gough, 2003; Halperin Weisburd, 2008).

Thus, these relationships are taken as the foundation of theoretical relevance to the challenges that the social context linked to sensibilities, subjectivities and poverty pose to us, expressed as the central dimensions of the aforementioned structuring processes that influence the politics of sensibilities in contexts of societies normalized in immediate enjoyment through consumption.