Introduction

Abstract

What happens when worlds fade, grow cold, or simply disappear? How can we recognize the other worlds that are beginning to make their presence known, no less intensely, but certainly with less precise contours? These questions, without defined forms and without my knowing precisely the kinds of experiences they referred to, were constantly with me throughout the 1990s. It became increasingly clear that we were experiencing a series of transformations for which a sufficient or suitable conceptual arsenal did not yet exist. In addition to the profound turn our lives took under the neoliberal Peronist government of those years (under which the hegemony currently enjoyed by the same party was established), we experienced a series of global political, economic, and technological transformations that affected the world of labor, the public sphere, and private and intimate life. These changes were not abstract: they managed to shake the mainstays of custom and daily life. The emergence of unprecedented jobs, new urban trajectories, a near-permanent link to computer networks, the intensification of consumption as a form of individual or group identity, the omnipresence of audiovisual media, mutations in the manifestation of sexuality, the incorporation of economic exclusion as something familiar and irrevocable in the social imagination, and the alteration of traditional political practices—these are some of the verifiable changes that we have witnessed in recent years.