The way we represent the world – with its metaphors and prosopopeias – is radically historical, that is, it responds to an ideological matrix that produces such representations. This occurs in the representation of the human body and its functioning, which is transformed at the pace of the transformation of social relations. In Once upon a time… lifea series of cartoons with which boys and girls born in the 80s learned their first notions of anatomy, the body was an almost exact representation of the modern state, or of any form of social organization belonging to modernity, such as the factory or the army.
Vertically, and always responding to the ultimate orders of a manager or supervisor, the body functioned precisely if each of the operators fulfilled the function assigned to them, without leaving an iota of their path perfectly delimited by tracks and docks. If this did not happen, the police intervened and arrived on site with ships for corrective purposes. The functioning of the body, like that of society, depended on the commitment or sense of duty – that is, the social contract – of the parties that constituted it, subjecting individual freedom to the common good.
The representation of the human body has changed radically in the film. Upside downwhose second part was released this summer, as in Once upon a time… the human body, We return to the inside of the body to see how it works. Yet, there is nothing left, in the representation, of this factory, this army or this modern State. Today, the body is managed – the choice of verb is not innocent on my part – from a kind of corporate board of directors where each of the members who make up the company, as if they were executive directors, must design strategies and make decisions to ensure the proper functioning of the company/organization.
Contrary to Once upon a time… the human body, In Upside down The workers barely appear in the background, performing tasks that ensure the proper functioning of the body, but they do so mechanically and not out of a sense of duty. As Juan Carlos Rodríguez would say to define the logic of advanced capitalism, we have gone from the social contract to consensus: a contract is no longer necessary because everyone assumes that the life we live is the only possible one. And this is not negotiated, it is simply done.
If in modernity power resides in the State, in postmodernity it resides in the company. The transformation of the representation of the body in these two fictions therefore responds to an evolution of social and power relations in contemporary society. But there is another radical difference, which is due to the dematerialization of representation. Yes, in Once upon a time… the human bodyThe characters who participated in the plot of the functioning of the human body were the organs and cells, in Upside down These are emotions.
This representation responds to the “affective turn” that contemporary culture has been experiencing in recent years, which inaugurates a new perspective for telling history based on emotions. The theory/history of affects/emotions opens a whole new path in the study of societies, their fantasies and imaginaries, their relationship to founding stories and the constitution of emotional communities that express themselves beyond the strictly political or social. Upside down She participates in this emotional turning point from the moment she conceives the individual as something more than an accumulation of matter, as a subject who, in addition to organs and cells, possesses a memory and feelings which not only constitute him, but dictate his steps.
The issue is not in the representation of emotions, but in the need to identify each of them in order to be disciplined or controlled. As a good neoliberal subject, the boy or girl must become a manager of himself or herself in order to become an autonomous, free and fully individualized subject, capable of overcoming any adversity that society presents to him or her.
But the issue is not in the representation of emotions, but in the need to identify each of them in order to be disciplined or controlled. As a good neoliberal subject, the boy or girl must become a manager of himself from a very young age to become an autonomous, free and fully individualized subject, capable of overcoming any adversity that society presents to him.
Well-being is not sought in the relationship with others, in the search for emotional bonds with others, but rather it is necessary to delve into oneself, into the emotions that constitute us, to achieve learning that allows one to respond to the image of the subject that society demands of him. Behave well and stop fucking with the ball. The children’s audience is well aware of the multiplication of stories that participate in this emotional turning point to identify, manage and discipline their emotions. The emotion that must be identified is almost always anger, it is this that triggers behavioral and conduct problems, and this is why it is necessary to learn to manage it.
We must fight anger, we must not let it be taken away from us, repressed or disciplined, depriving us of its potential opening towards rebellion, protest and resistance. The novelist Belén Gopegui and the novelist and illustrator Natalia Carrero participate in this dispute with fury of the cloudsa children’s book, not at all naive and of enormous poetic force, published in 2021 by the publishing house Somos Libros. In this book, boys and girls are invited to discover a new emotion, closely linked to anger: fury of the clouds.
It is a legitimate anger that does not come from within the boy or girl, but from outside, from the badly made world, full of injustice and inequality in which we live, which awakens our malaise, which generates our anger. It is a positive anger that should not be repressed because it appears in contact with indignation in the face of what is not fair. You do not need to learn to manage it either, because it appears when you least expect it. And it is also collective. fury of the clouds He claims the right to be angry at a world that we cannot love as it is created and to try to convert this anger into an instrument of struggle to make the world a better place.
My daughter and I have incorporated the concept of “furiaclouds” into our everyday language and we use them in multiple everyday situations. For example, when someone throws a paper or a cigarette butt on the ground or takes a seat on the bus with their backpack, preventing other passengers from sitting down.
With my daughter Giulia, we have integrated the concept of fury of the clouds in our everyday language and we call them in multiple everyday situations. For example, when a person throws a piece of paper or a cigarette butt on the ground or takes a seat on the bus with his backpack, preventing other passengers from sitting down; or when a less than exemplary citizen kicks a pigeon that crosses him on the sidewalk; but what else? fury of the clouds What wakes us up are the police cars when they enter, exceeding the speed limit, a pedestrian area where boys and girls play, without any emergency giving them the right to do so, just to remind us that they are watching us. It seems that they do not like that the neighborhood is ours.
We may be a little grumpy, but we will continue to claim our right to kick ass as long as the world remains messed up and we will continue to summon our fury of the cloudsour political rage, to try to make it a better place.
