Apuntes en torno a tiempos de inflexión histórica y cambio epocal, ¿leer la realidad en clave distópica?

Abstract

We live in times of uncertainty and perplexity, not only because the optimistic
predictions post-1989 have crumbled, but also because ours is now a moment of historical
inflection in which the foundations and coordinates that have built and organized the political,
social, and cultural life of the West over the past centuries have been fractured. At the same time,
we are facing a new civilizational project that we have yet to decipher, one that finds in the
scientific and technological revolution one of its fundamental pillars. In this context, what is the
current scope of the analytical and conceptual parameters of social thought, given a reality that
still eludes definition? Are the traditional theoretical languages of Sociology no longer
sufficient? Are not cinema, television series, and indeed literature the best repositories of
"sociological imagination"? It is not by chance, then, that dystopian fictions have flourished in
literature, but also in the visual arts, in a register certainly different from that of the social
sciences, yet offering with notable lucidity and sharpness a guiding, but also accurate and
disturbing, cartography to navigate the bewildering and tumultuous seas of a contemporary
world whose future horizon is still nebulous.