This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the colloquium On Cultural Translation. A Conference on Artistic Practice in a Context of Cultural Translation. U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, and Lettre International (Copenhagen, November 24, 2007).
The strong singularity of the Anthropophagic Movement in the international context of modernism is still relatively ignored outside of Brazil. The 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade—poet, playwright and experimental novelist—is its most well known reference.
The generic name of Tupinambá refers, in fact, to a great variety of indigenous groups that inhabited the vast territory taken hold of by the Portuguese colonization, where it “founded” Brazil.
Manuela L. Carneiro da Costa and Eduardo B. Viveiros de Castro, “Vingança e temporalidade: os Tupinambás,” Anuário Antropofágico 85 (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, 1986). This is how the authors describe the ritual: “A prisoner, after having lived for a few months or even years among his captors, would be killed publicly in front of the community. Adorned with feathers and body painting, he would carry out arrogance-packed dialogues with an equally bedecked executioner. ... Ideally, the killing should be done with a single blow of the Ibirapema [ritual stick], which should crack his skull.” Only then was the body devoured, following a rigorous ritual of distribution of its parts, and the killer would go into reclusion.
According to the same authors, the Portuguese wanted to employ the practice of capturing enemies in order to acquire slaves, which the indigineous people resisted. When it was not possible to escape the colonizers’ orders, they would rather offer family members as slaves than surrender their captured enemies and let go of the anthropophagic ritual, with the public killing and all its other stages.
This is how Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro describes it: “Colonisation in Brazil was carried out as a persistent effort to establish an Europeaneity adapted to these tropics and embodied in these miscegenations. But it always ran up against the stubborn resistance of nature and the whims of history, which made us thus, despite those grand designs: so opposed to whitenesses and civilities, so internalisedly un-European as we are un-Indigenous and un-Afro.” Darcy Ribeiro, O Povo Brasileiro. A formação e ou sentido do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995).
It is the case of the work of Lygia Clark, often included under Tropicalism, when the artist explicitly declared that she had nothing in common with the aesthetic of the movement. On this topic, see also the interview given by Caetano Veloso to Suely Rolnik for her archive: “Lygia Clark, fom the object to the event: activation of a work’s memory and context.”
Suely Rolnik, Cartografia Sentimental. Transformações contemporâneas do desejo (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1989, out of print). Second and third revised editions, with a preface (Porto Alegre: Sulinas / UFRG, 2006, 2007).
A coup d’état in 1964 put Brazil under the yoke of a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985, when the first civilian president was elected, indirectly. The first direct elections took place in 1989.
Both counter-culture and miltancy, the two poles of the 1960s and 70s generation’s movement, were the target of the regime’s terrorism in Brazil.
Suely Rolnik, “Schizoanalyse et Anthropophagie,” Alliez, Eric, ed.,, Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique (Paris: Synthélabo, 1998), 463–476. Brazilian translation: Suely Rolnik, “Esquizoanálise e Antropofagia,” Gilles Deleuze. Uma vida filosófica (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2000), 451–462).
In Latin America in general—and more so in Brazil—the works of Guattari, Deleuze, Foucault, and the entire philosophical tradition in which they are included (Nietzsche in particular), had a strong influence on the field of psychiatry, which resulted in a critical attitude, interested in problematizing the politics of subjectification in contemporaneity and confronting the symptoms derived from them. In Brazil, this singularity spread across therapeutic work in public institutions and private practices (even among psychoanalysts), as well as in academic training, where several universities offer PhD programs on these lines of investigation. Just to give an idea of the scope of this movement, the group of thirty professionals in charge of the Ministry of Health during Lula’s first term all came from this background.
Suely Rolnik, “Subjetividade Antropofágica / Anthropophagic Subjectivity,” Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa (eds.), Arte Contemporânea Brasileira: Um e/entre Outro/s, XXIVa Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), 128–147.
The notions of “cognitive” or “cultural capitalism,” put forward from the end of the 1990s, primarily by the groups of researchers presently associated with the French journal Multitude, are in part a development of the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari on the status of culture and subjectivity in contemporary capitalism.
Some of these essays can be found in the bilingual edition of Brumaria 8: “Arte y Revolución. Sobre historia(s) del arte,” Documenta 12 Magazine Project, 2007. In German, the majority of them can be read in Transversal 11/06 (Machines and Subjectivation) and 05/07 (Extradisciplinaire). See →.
The notion of “low anthropophagy” appears in the Anthropophagic Manifesto, which qualifies it as the “plague of the so-called cultured and christianized nations.” See Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófagico,” in A Utopia antropofágica, Obras Completas de Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo: Globo, 1990). Available in English at →.
It is obvious that the focus here encompasses only a part of the politics of subjectification and creation, which confront each other in our times. Other forces are involved in this struggle, among which the fundamentalisms that have, precisely, appeared with the installation of neoliberalism and its capitalistic flexibility. In this kind of regime, the identitarian principle is reactualized in its most extreme forms.
Suely Rolnik, “Zombie Anthropophagy,” in Ivet Curlin and Natasa Ilic, eds., Collective Creativity Dedicated to Anonymous Worker (Kassel: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2005). Bilingual edition (German/English). In Spanish/English: “Antropofagia zombie,” in Brumaria 8: “Arte y Revolución. Sobre historia(s) del arte,” Documenta 12 Magazine Project, 2007.
The notion of “flexible subjectivity” is partially inspired by that of the “flexible personality,” suggested by Brian Holmes, which I develop from the viewpoint of the process of subjectification. See Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality,” in Hieroglyphs of the Future (Zagreb: WHW/Arkzin, 2002).
Eastern Europe and Latin America share these situations that allowed the installation of capitalist flexibility to generate similiar effects like those suggested in the text (something that would merit a common investigation). Nevertheless, an entirely different phenomenon comes into play in some countries in Eastern Europe in the same context, which is the rise of fundamentalisms of all kinds, as previously mentioned in note 17.
Some of the signs of this phenomenon are: Brazilian agencies are often awarded top prizes in international advertising competitions; Rede Globo’s TV soap operas are shown in over 200 countries; Brazilian women, according to statistics, highly identify and subject themselves to the standard ideals of the feminine body established by the media, which places Brazil at the top of the world ranking in consumption of cosmetics, diet products, and plastic surgery.
Translated from the Portugese by Rodrigo Nunes.