De la imagen desiderativa del futuro a la pesadilla distópica del presente, del fin y después: sobre máquinas y automatización, espacio y tiempo ayer y hoy

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of the uses of dystopia in the past and in the present, through a journey. In this journey, we research two time-spatial instances of configuration of the dystopian: firstly, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the area of ​​the so-called German and Austro-Hungarian fin-de-Siécle. In this context, we will refer to some works by well-known writers (Meyrink, Kafka) and to the cinema of the time, focusing on a work entitled The Other Side [Die andere Seite] [1908], by Alfred Kubin, in order to present the fundamental features that define the utopian, as a program and as an impulse (travel, the primacy of the spatial, the alternative social or collective order, the problem of the political, the body, time and the individual, etc.), paradoxically represented in the dystopia as "world at reverse". Secondly, we will return to the present to review the ways in which these motifs outlined in literature and cinema not only maintain continuity but have become more acute in connection with the development of "capitalist realism" of our time (FISHER , 2021). To do this, we will focus specifically on the dystopian linked to the areas of the city, technology and automation (as forms of alienation) and the problem of time, through various images that represent these topics. The dialogue between the analysis of the works and the images of dystopian representation in the past and in the present, proposes not only a reflection on dystopia, but, above all, to rescue utopia for the present.