The trumpets are sounding: Demodystopian discourse in the third millennium

© 2014, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. All right reserved. In the new millennium, dystopian-style texts, pronouncements and declarations about the population have spread and proliferated beyond the bounds of literary fiction. This article takes the form of a hermeneutic exploration of different texts in the political and scientific domains in order to identify the main types of discourse that might be described as dystopian, with particular emphasis on those that have appeared since the onset of the economic crisis. It explores three hypotheses: 1) that the different forms of literary (or artistic in general), scientific or political pronouncements derive from the same social mindset and mutually influence each other; 2) that the dystopian form adopted in discussions about the population continues to be both an instrument and aim of government; and 3) that the start of the economic crisis triggered a change in neoliberal discourse on governability, which has taken dystopia as its frame of reference wherein the concept of resilience is reworked.