Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Alienocene Dis-Junction Giuseppe Cocco A
Alienocene Dis-Junction Giuseppe Cocco A
_________________________________________________________________________________
1
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
self and thus endowed with humanity, culture, religion, God. Put simply, if
this other has a soul. Inclusion, in turn, relates to the anthropophagic or
primitive societies, for whom the vomit logic would seem scandalous, for
they do not define themselves by asserting an identity, but through a constant
and open relation with all exteriority. Hence otherness is no pretext for
probing the nature of the other to determine if it equals the self. It is rather
an opportunity to investigate the interference this other may cause in the very
self. That is to say, otherness acts as a destabilization and reconfiguration
power. Exteriority is thus more important than interiority, in the sense that
the society is continuously (de)defined and (un)founded as it devours the
relations it establishes with the outside, becoming other in the process.
According to Lévi-Strauss, instead of excluding the other from the social
body in order to assert their identity and reaffirm a preexistent sameness,
anthropophagic societies work by mobilizing the outside in a way that
paradoxically constitutes the very social body as a dynamic and driving
principle of immanent exteriority.
In August 2012, the graduate program in Arts from the State
University of Rio de Janeiro and MAR, the Museum of Art of Rio de Janeiro,
organized a seminar called “Vomit and Negation: Anthropoemic Practices
in Art and Culture.”ii In retrospect, we could say that the event was
embedded in the wave of political and cultural upheaval following the
protests against the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
(Rio+20). The whole turmoil had just taken place in the city, stirring an
effervescent flow that would culminate with the June 2013 uprising of the
Brazilian multitude, which was particularly intense throughout the
metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro. Embracing the Lévi-Straussian ideas
on anthropoemy and anthropophagy as theme, the organizers’ main concern
– as they themselves announced – was whether or not postmodern
capitalism has become anthropophagic. The point in question was to know
if the anthropophagic strategy had simply turned into a mechanism for
strengthening the current regime of flexile accumulation. The initial
provocation even speaks of an “anthropophagic capitalism” when raising the
following question: “In the context of an economic (and social, cultural,
6/17/2018
political, etc.) system that devours anything and adapts to everything, we ask
if this wouldn’t be the moment to reconsider anthropoemy as a necessary
2
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
3
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
4
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
5
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
***
6
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
7
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
8
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
9
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
of such topology, the living source which can neither be suppressed nor fully
controlled at the risk of devitalizing the parasitic process. The Left is
constantly defeated by neoliberalist forces because it still has not abandoned
the aspirations of the first generation of Jesuits, that is, imposing a form
(state-form, development, redeeming industry) to the living matter of
underdevelopment. Those forces, in turn, caught up with the second wave
of less optimistic priests like Vieira and recognized its inner power. So instead
of trying to mold the living matter, they let the flows run and then govern
within the very flexibility. This is what neoliberalism does better, it is its
expertise and raison d’être. Defusing the collective consciousness from the
oedipal-narcissistic fixations of a form-lover Left is undoubtedly part of the
schizo-Amerindian effort of the Oswaldian program. However, overcoming
neoliberalism implies a second movement, a second affirmation, namely,
accelerating the process, devising a theory of subjectivity within
underdevelopment, connecting to the biopolitical factory of strategies,
following the lines of what we call the becoming-Brazil.
After we have traced a genealogy of the biopower mechanisms in
Latin America and outlined a positive program of minor politics, we engaged
then in the task of writing an Ethics of the anthropophagic unconscious
amidst the swirling flow of the 2013 uprising throughout Brazilian
metropolises. Deleuze and Guattari claimed that the whole theoretical
endeavor of Anti-Oedipus was an attempt to adapt the Ethics of Immanence
to the new flexible coordinates of capitalism, to the point of saying that the
Spinozian substance reappeared in the fluid and mad concept of Body
without Organs (BwO). And each of us have our own BwO, we all make
our own BwO. In this sense, we could say that the present book operates an
interaction between the displacement towards biopower with the political
and ethical formulations of the figure of the body of the poor. Always with
the struggles and for the struggles, our whole work of dismantling the great
theoretical-political buildings of developmentalism, of positivist rationalism,
of progressivism, of the promises of national formation, of the redemptive
proletarianization, and of the popular culture project of a statist and
statolatrous Left suffering from a guilty conscience thus culminates in the
6/17/2018
10
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
11
ALIENOCENE – DIS-JUNCTION
6/17/2018
12