Author Archives: Susana Costa Amaral

Susana Costa Amaral

Brian Edward’s “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations” argues, “we are witnessing a shift in a sustaining if fraught relationship between culture and politics, between what has been called soft power and hard power” (28). Edwards points out that “the history of technology and society itself has long been central to politics” (idem), from the Industrial Revolution to the popularization of the printed press. For the author, digital technologies relationship to new social forms is directly implicated to both the rise of global populisms and what he calls “the selfie-determination of nations”.

            The selfie-determination of nations refers to “a digitally mediated, imagined community in which individual citizens, bots, and trolls exist side by side. [And] It is at times difficult to know who is real and who is a digital creation (39). Although a bit simplistic, Edward’s argument is a pungent one. The author recognizes the impact of globalized economies in the way we communicate but it fails to extend his analysis outside US-politics. The rise of global populism is rendered as an American “cultural export”, without any thought given on how American neoliberalism is slowly turning into a neofascist wave around the globe, a transformation led by economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating.

            Following Edward’s “exportation” argument, Jair Bolsonaro, “the trump of the tropics” as he has been called by US-media, is certainly following Donald Trump’s media strategy, with a more explicitly fascist approach. Like Trump, he uses twitter to communicate with his followers, where he is always in control of the narrative. Manipulation by bots and trolls organized action is becoming ever more common, actually interfering on how people perceive politics, and posing a dangerous threat to democracies all around.

To Machiavelli, the state is an amoral entity, a force without no inherent purpose, and whose direction is always imposed by the ruler. Different from Aristotle, whose beliefs led him to think about the education of the citizens as a means to maintain the spirit of the polity, Machiavelli regarded the citizens as inert beings, completely divorcing the politics of the State from the ethics of the people. If the State is no longer an instrument for achieving the good life, then what is the State for? Even though Machiavelli had the Monarchy in mind when he wrote The Prince, the question that arises after reading his book is possible the same question that has being raised by several anti-government movements today, in our democratic world.

The bitter conclusion that the state, the nation-state as well as any other, is not an inherently beneficent entity, but a dynamic, expansive and aggressive force with no ethical principle, also calls into question the belief of the state as the guardian of the sovereign rights of its people. Nowhere in The prince is there any limitations placed upon the power of the state, no regard for human rights or equity. The core of the state, according to Machiavelli, is power. However, persuasion is much needed for a ruler, and Machiavelli attributes this not to learned or earned authority, but to the appearance of strength, rendering power visible to the subjects. The appearance of strength should not only be the main concern for the prince, as it also should be his political strategy. Appearance, Machiavelli suggests, trumps reality.

As Machiavelli explains “love is helped by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails” (69). The proposition that the power of the prince is maximized through fear rather than love highlights the importance of affection in the political process, since fear, for Machiavelli, can be generated, as opposed to love which is guarded by Machiavelli as an internal feeling. According to the author, fear ultimately results in more control, maximizing the power of the prince. No wonder why his work was so important to fascists rulers around the world, from Stalin to Mussolini…

Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment” traces a “genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases” (23) “against the background of a history of bodies” (25). According to the author, the function of the penal system is to maintain social order and to reinforce “sovereign power”, by preserving the pre-existing power structure. More importantly, as Foucault notes, in the penal and juridical system, “the body is invested with relations of power and domination” and inserted in a system of subjection, where “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). That is why “the sentence that condemned or acquits is not simply a judgment of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization.” As René Girad also notes, the “difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality” (Girad 21).

If “torture is a technique” (Foucault 33), its objective is to exert the “sovereign power” by means of revealing the “truth” (Foucault 44) of the crime and the criminal – the abnormality of it -, as well as “the operation of power” (Foucault 55) that established this dissymmetry of forces and its mechanisms – “its visible manifestations” (Foucault 57).

As a “political ritual”, the public execution sought to “recharge” (Foucault 57) the “sovereign power”. The spectacle surrounding it had the effect of educating the people on the consequences of disturbing the social order and defying the “sovereign power”; that is the consequence of acting abnormally. This was possible because the people were to “take part in it” (Foucault 58) both as spectators and witnesses of this power, dismantling any possible trace of solidarity with those who had been condemned, for “[I]t is not enough for the social bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed” (Girard 15).

The political problem posed by solidarity was that it led to the intervention of the people in the spectacle of the executions, questioning the “right to punish” attributed to the “sovereign power”: If the execution “spectacle” was poorly performed, it carried with it the danger of turning into a “carnival” (Foucault 61), where roles were flipped, and so was power – authorities were mocked while criminals were transformed into heroes.

The threat posed by “solidarity” is then neutralized in the modern penal system, where visibility turns into secrecy. Diana Taylor addresses this operation of power in her analyze of Griselda Gambaro’s play Information for Foreigners, where the theatrical representation of Argentina’s violent politics is made visible. By staging this visibility in a “theatre” setting, Gambaro’s confronts the spectator’s position as a passive bystander, also calling into question the lack of solidarity in the face of political repression. Gambaro not only de-normalizes the spectator passivity but by “showing” what was intended to be “invisible” to the public, she also exposes the “percepticide” (Taylor 123) that prevents kinship to take form as a political affect.

In the performance entitled after the homonymous work of Brazilian fiction writer Conceição Evaristo (in: Olhos D’água, 2014) and intentionally misspelled as “A gente combinamos de não morrer” (“We agreed not to die”), transgender Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça (Monstra Errática) carefully manufactures handmade knives with precarious materials such as branches, shards of glass and red string. With the performance’s title, also inscribed on the artist’s forearm, Mombaça proposes a form of “pact of surviving”, articulating through afro-diasporic lenses issues of violence and resilience among non-normative and non-white bodies. The performance ends with the artist surrounded by a variety of newly crafted objects that resemble, at the same time, both weapons and tools (see Fig. 1). Mombaça wields each one of them and points to the spectators, staring firmly and forward, ready for the attack to come, but also, and strategically, in position to counter-attack (see Fig. 2). Vulnerability here becomes a twofold position: a set of knowledge gained through shared experiences and a form of power that guides a practice of survival.

“A gente combinamos de não morrer” intersects matters of race and sexuality in a combined manner in order to create a network (“A gente” / “us”) brought together by the precariousness of life and the possible responses it may invoke in the context of political cultures in post-colonial worlds; where norms, social and political organizations have developed in contexts of power that maximize precariousness for some and minimize it for others. In the post-colonial world, the one that Mombaça claims not to exist[i], “death has become the most profitable business in existence”[ii], and “life” can only be ethically articulated in the plural tense. Through an alliance, Mombaça’s pact of survival establishes a nonidentitarian and transnational lineage, where the historic memory of the minoritarian becomings surfaces as strategies of resistance and social transformation in the context of a “death-world”[iii].

Similarly, the political practices that take shape inside contemporary feminist movements in Latin America, such as the “Ni una menos” and “Vivas Nos Queremos” movements, confront the necropolitics that systematically murders trans and cis women, and that excludes them from the opportunities of life. These movements mobilize alliances through the performative exercise of rights, demanding “the right to have rights”[iv], to follow Hanna Arendt’s axiom. And even though there performativity surfaces in a linguistic manner – “Ni una menos”, “Vivas Nos Queremos” –, it gains visibility, hence political intelligibility, through corporal movements, acts of resistance and the creation of improvised and ephemeral assemblies.

I’m especially interested in how these feminist alliances are taking shape within the expansion of what Sayak Valencia calls the “necro-liberalism”, in a moment when far-right politicians are surging to power around Latin America based on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and patriarchal family values. More specifically, in the case of Brazil, this call for alliance takes place in face of the recent elect government of Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s rhetoric is not strange to what Valencia identifies as the “hetero-necro-patriarchy”[v] and its reliance on the neocolonial governance, “where death is a kind of civilizing technology that persists until today and connects the current context with colonial intermittency”[vi]. Through the suppression of certain people produced as disposable or unwanted, the neocolonial governance also radically denies their “right to appear” (Butler 2015). Violence and death become common elements, where necropolitics create the state of emergency in which trans women, cisgender women, and other minoritarian becomings have to survive.

In order to counterpose the neocolonial governance of contemporary far-right governments, Valencia proses the incorporation of transgender discourse into feminism as an epistemological tool, generating strategies of common resistance between cis and trans women that refuse altogether the biological model of womanhood, while also potentially creating bridges in communities highly exposed to social and state necropolitics, “in spaces where vulnerability and damage to the bodies of women and nonbinary people and injustice are the norm”[vii].

This perspective calls into question the idea of demanding rights as separate and exclusive claims to separate identitarian groups, divorced from the violent web of relationships that concede or cease these rights in the first place. As Butler explains: “Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social institutions to persist”[viii]. However, transfeminist alliances like the one proposed by Mombaça’s performance are not necessarily directed towards “political and social institutions” represented by the power of the State. Rather, it’s a gesture that, from the start, recognizes the State apparatus’s participation in the differential allocation of vulnerability, and therefore, it is not an ally.  The objective of Mombaça’s pact is first and foremost to enhance the potentiality of survival for those who are considered unintelligible[ix], for those whose vulnerabilities are maximized by the action or absence of the State. Ultimately, it is a critical form of alliance, one that proposes a participatory and interchangeable practice of resistance in the present and not the claim of a right.

Keywords for the final project: Alliance; Transfeminism; Space of Appearance; Resistance

Political Spectacle: In 2019, traditional samba school Mangueira won the Rio Sambadrome competition parade with a show that paid tribute to Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco, who was assassinated the year before. The lyrics talked about the unsung Brazilian heroes, many of them indigenous, black or females, such as Franco. The parade’s last image is of a Brazilian flag in the samba school’s official colors (green and pink). Instead of the traditional national motto “Ordem e Progresso” (“Order and Progress”) , the flag had a curved band inscribed with the phrase “Indians, blacks, and poors” —> https://youtu.be/scKZBmi3-F0?t=3071

[i] In another performance entitled “The Colonial Wound Still Hurts” (Venice, 2015), Mombaça writes on top of a map with the artist’s own blood: “The colonial wound still hurts. The post-colonial world doesn’t exist”. Not only the phrase is inscribed with the red liquid, but also the national borders of territories such as the US, Europe, Russia, Israel, Brazil, India, China and South Africa are highlighted with blood. As it asserts itself as a bodily fluid with the potentiality for tainting everything it touches as it spreads around the geographically constructed body of the world, blurring and redefining its borders, Mombaça’s bloody inscription emphasizes the correlations between territorial conquest and violation (both corporal and geographically), challenging the euro-centered cartographic representation of the world through its modes of visibility. Mombaça’s intervention operates in order to redefine this visibility, for there can be no postcolonial world while the colonial bodies still bleed.

[ii] Valencia 2019: 16.

[iii] Mbembe 2003: 40.

[iv] Arendt, Hannah. “O declínio do Estado – Nação e o fim dos direitos do homem”. In: O sistema totalitário. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1978.  p. 347-374.

[v] Valencia 2019: 183.

[vi] Idem.

[vii] Valencia 2019: 186.

[viii] Butler 2015: 97.

[ix] See Butler, Judith. “Política de gênero e direito de aparecer”. In: Corpos em aliança e a política das ruas: notas para uma teoria performativa de Assembleia. Translated by Fernanda Siqueira Miguens. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2018, p. 57.

Looking back at last week’s readings in light of Boal, Brecht and Taylor’s text for this week, is possible to draw a line of thought connecting political participation and spectatorial participation. The question would then be: Does contemporary art still have the potential for “turning society upside down” (Brecht 185) and redistributing the sensible? If spectators are “taught to refrain from intervening or resisting the hegemonic vision of persuasive drama” (Taylor 77), what happens when the situation staged demands for the active participation of its spectators? Brecht’s Marxist theater is one that invites the spectator to participate in a critical way – more intellectual than sensorial, also resisting the “alienation effect” – where “the rules emerging from this life in society are treated as imperfect and provisional” (Brecht 205), “impermanent” (Brecht 190) and where all “actions [are] performed as experiments” (Brecht 195).

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed follows similar guidelines, believing that “todo teatro é necessariamente político” (Boal 13), for all human activity is – potentially – political. However, while Brecht’s dialetical approach is based on the role of the actors as responsible to employ and encourage “thoughts and feelings which help transform the field [of human relations] itself” (Brecht 190), Boal invests the spectators with the power to transform the “scene”, and to interfere actively and critically – thus the use of the term “spect-actors” – in order to change what was previously staged. It is important to note that both texts were written during oppressive historical circumstances, Brecht in response to the European fascisms of the 1930s and ’40s; and Boal in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). Arguably, harsh political circumstances call for new artistic interventions, expanding the horizon of the visible, audible and sayable, the distribution of the sensible.

To finish, I would like to highlight the pedagogical strategy in this week’s books. The three of them seem to have not the expert, but the common folk in mind, making their points (and political views) clear and accessible, as well as practical, in the sense that they can be performed and acted out in the real world, and not only as theory.