Research Processes, Knowledge Production And
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Research Processes, Knowledge Production and Processual Creativity: Schizoanalytic Cartographies in Brazil Cristina Thorstenberg Ribas Goldsmiths University of London Ph.D submission in Art I hereby confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. __________________________________________ Cristina Thorstenberg Ribas 31st October 2016 2 Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to all those who have been writing, trafficking books, translating and editing. For those who have been listening to each other, touching and rolling on each others bodies, taking care of each other, sweating together with no words. This thesis is for those who have lost their way, in or out, or are searching for nothing. This thesis is dedicated to those who like to accompany each others trajectories, that like to look together at something, that like to share perspectives and perhaps get lost. This thesis is for those who like to look at two things at the same time, to whom like diagrams, cartographies, complexities, … intense things, perhaps purposeless, perhaps full of political desire. This thesis is part of a process of discovery in itself. Acknowledgements are to be taken as gestures amid this process of discovery, even if they address bodies and relationships already known. The accomplishment of a thesis appears to me as a matter of maintenance of many elements, coefficients, routines, but above all of reconfiguration. I express my thanks to all thinking through the fact that this “I” that here appears, actually, is a fragment that addresses itself to a collective body, but being part of this collective body. Even if cartographies deal with our memory of travels, perhaps here you wont find any trajectory, but some discoveries and failures. Thanks to all of you who have been building this with me all through these years. I want to make tribute to the funding received for this study, without which nearly none of this would have been accomplished. I am extremely thankful to CAPES – Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento Pessoal de Ensino Superior, the Brazilian Foundation who has financed my studies, and who has payed for our costs of living, for me and for my daughter Hannah. This thesis claims for the maintenance of public fundings for studies, and claims for the free access to public education in basic and academic level. 3 I am extremely thankful to Susan Kelly and John Cussans, whose close look into my processes of estrangement, accompanying with me the development of this research process, and with much companionship were crucial to shaping the thesis as such. Thanks as well to Edgar Schmitz who made crucial points about the framing of the thesis. I am very thankful to the Art Department, specially to Andrea Phillips and John Chilver and my PhD colleagues for the shared years. Thanks as well to Michael Newman and the students in the Art Writing course where I had the experience of sharing some of my ideas around writing, research and artistic practice. I am extremely thankful to friends in the Brazilian territory with whom I have corresponded along these years, sharing doubts, and who have been sending me crucial material for the research - André Mesquita, Cristiane Knijnik, Helena Soares, Iazana Guizzo, Luciana Knijnik, Monica Hoff, Ricardo Basbaum, Rodrigo Nunes, Tiago Regis. Thanks to all actors in Ueinzz Theatre Company for their frankness, openness and care when I had the chance of 'following' them for 8 days in Glasgow. This encounter could not have happened if not by the fortunate invite made by Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre of Arika for me to work with Ueinzz in 2015. This encounter demarcates a big process of discovery and reaffirms a few experiences I was living, bringing a significant shift in my artistic practice. As Peter Pál Pelbart wrote to me 'what is a journey for, if not to change us?'. Special thanks to all the participants of the project Vocabulário Político para Processos Estéticos, and to all the participants of the workshops Protocol to Intersect Vocabularies. Special thanks to my lovely friends who were there 'on the ground' constructing the project Vocabulário Político in Brazil many ways: Sara Uchoa, Inês Nin and Priscila Gonzaga. Thanks as well to Mark Phillip and Raphi Soifer for translations and revisions. 4 Thanks to all the participants of the meetings Cartografia do Êxodo I have organised in London between 2014 and 2015, specially to Letícia Paes and Angelo Martins. With love to my mum Valdiria Thorstenberg who has shown me, from practice, much research and reasoning, what making a PhD can do to your life, and how that changes lives of the others, for good. All this luckily tempered with a good amount of poetry and romanticism. With love to my sisters Priscila and Anamalia. Priscila, for the extreme vitality and beautiful voice that teaches much about the possibilities of the body. Thanks specially for Anamalia who has been listening to all my doubts and rantings about the practice of psychology and psychoanalysis. With much love to Chris Jones (and family), for all we have been building together, for cartographies that diverge and converge in many ways, for the sharing and scrounging of his library and immensely for the care of our daughter, Hannah. This thesis is dedicated to her, who teaches us so much about 'processes' and 'changes of path', and who has been waiting for me to finish this 'long book'. She told me she has 'finished hers already'. Many thanks to lovely friends who have been following this process from very close in many ways, Arnoldas Stramskas, Gabriela Saenger Silva, Janna Graham, John Cunningham, José Miguel Nieto Olivar, Julia Ruiz, Maria Berríos, Marina Commanduli, Marc Herbst, Paolo Plot. Thanks to the lovely friends and admirable researchers Manuela Zechner and Paula Cobo Guevara, and as well to Pantxo Ramas and Bue Hansen with whom we made a series of small encounters in Barcelona sharing thoughts in schizoanalysis and anti- psychiatry, moments that were crucial for me to understand what could emerge from this research as a contribution to contemporary activations of such. This work is done with a lot of inspiration on Jakob Jakobsen's projects and on Howard Slater's research and writing, to whom I'm very thankful for few conversations and several 'passages of knowledge and anti-knowledge', eager that in 5 the future my work can dialogue more closely to their work. I dedicate this thesis to the friends and researchers of Red Conceptualismos del Sur, willing this thesis contributes to the several cartographies through history, arts and militancy produced by this network. Im deeply thankful to my friend and artist Fabiana Rossarola who provided me with the happy chance of encountering the work of Suely Rolnik many years ago, who's work has unpredictable effects in my trajectory, and to who's work I aim at contributing with this thesis. Thanks as well to Peter Pál Pelbart, 'a hungarian living in Brazil', who doesn't let us forget that we can always be strangers even if in our own lands. Thanks for all the conversations and for his small interventions, analysis, incitations, inevitable to the navigation in this present in which our grounds crack very often. Thanks to Ivan Edwards for the reawakening of the body through contact and improvisation classes. Thanks to River and Veronika Szabó for the workshops on Theatre of the Oppressed. * 6 Synopsis In this thesis I analyse Félix Guattari's notion of schizoanalytic cartography in its theoretical and pragmatic development in Brazil. Cartographic practices have been developed extensively in Brazil since the 1980's, stemming from the theories and practice of Guattari and from French and Italian institutional analysis. Schizoanalytic cartographies are broadly developed as a tool to work through collective processes, as a device to analyse the collective agency of desire. Cartographies both map and create: they are realised by those who want to produce their own lives, while resisting oppression, and modes of capitalist subjectivation subsuming desire, affect and creativity itself. This thesis therefore traces schizoanalytic cartographies that devise new research processes and new propositions of organisation, subjectivation and institutionalization in Brazil. It explores key Guattarian terms ‘transversality’ and ‘micropolitics’, to analyse the practices of research processes in academia, such as Contemporary Subjectivity Research Group, and theatre groups working in transversal with mental health care, such as Ueinzz Theatre Company. I focus on how these processes work across institutions, theatre practices, the clinic and the social field. The thesis traces their work on “processual subjectivation” and “processual creativity”, proposing the “processual” as the core form of assemblage between subjects, modes of expression and institutions. This thesis argues against reductive notions of politically engaged art that pose oppositions between aesthetics and political practice, and against institutionally circumscribed definitions of practice-based research. Instead, the thesis proposes new frameworks and different genealogies of practice that transversalise and radicalise aesthetic production, connecting it in new ways to political grounds, outside of the agenda of larger cultural institutions, art worlds and markets. Through the examples of practices analysed, it argues that schizoanalytic cartographies bring “processual creativity” and the “production of subjectivity” into relation, and allow us to reassemble the fields of politics, aesthetics and knowledge production. 7 Table of Contents Introduction . 10 a. Subsumption of Desire, Affect and Creativity . 26 b. The Beginning of a Cartography . 28 c. Touching a Brazilian Ground . 37 1.0 Guattari's 'Encounter' with Brazil . 43 1.1 Suely Rolnik . 50 1.1.2 Chronology of Guattari's books published in Brazil . 53 1.1.3 The Brazilian democratic reopening . 57 1.2 Definitions and Theory . 61 1.2.1 What is Schizoanalytic Cartography? . 67 1.2.2 From Rhizome to Transversality .