Sentimento da Dialética

Two exhibitions

2024-10-13T12:26:47-03:00

The two themes addressed long ago by Otília Arantes remain relevant today in the presentations of Ester Grinspum’s exhibitions (Stultifera Navis, at Galeria Paulo Figueiredo in 1986) and Bela Gold’s (The Book of Memory, at the Lasar Segall Museum in 2004): "Madness" and the "Holocaust," respectively. According to Otília Arantes, Ester Grinspum’s series of drawings, rather than theatricalizing madness or conjuring the delusions of an exasperated subjectivity — the monsters of the "sleep of reason" —, primarily suggests the confrontation between reason and unreason, articulated through the clash of two forms: on one side, a monolithic, closed form, a rock or "Theater of the World" (as titled in her preliminary studies); on the other side, an irregular, open form, a bird or "Ship." Grinspum’s drawings inevitably evoke the world's disarray without producing a detailed chronicle but instead trace the painful outline of anonymous abstraction, characteristic of the contemporary age. At the heart of this confiscated experience lies the very structure of bourgeois society, literally schizophrenic. Thus, the entire body of drawings serves as a grand allegory of madness and the world that feeds it. By delving into 15th-century iconography — the oddities and absurdities depicted by Bosch, Brueghel, or Dürer —, Grinspum is not interested in the historical framework supporting these works but seeks to capture the zero-degree of the plastic physiognomy of madness. If Foucault is also an important source for the artist, while the philosopher examines pictorial imagery to uncover the ultimate cipher of a technology of reason, the artist takes the opposite path and sees in these images the prefiguration of a modern threat.

Similarly, the Argentine artist Bela Gold undertook the difficult task of bringing the greatest horror of the 20th century, the Holocaust, into the realm of art — if an aesthetic expression of it exists and, if possible, if it can be truthful, as Otília Arantes notes. The hesitation surrounding the artistic representation of absolute evil, a leap into the inferno of the unpresentable, is not unique to the artist but recalls Adorno's ambivalence, who alternated between deeming any poem written after Auschwitz barbaric and regarding art as a fragile barrier against the return of such horrors. Bela chooses the latter view and, to circumvent the prohibition against transfiguring horror into art, employs fragments of reality — lists of names, photographs, letters, signatures, inscriptions, and tags — rescuing the memory of countless victims from anonymity. All of this is done without fanfare or superficial effects, in the restrained form of conceptual or minimalist art (as characterized by Rita Eder), avoiding the trap of post-catastrophe stylization and inviting silent reflection on the death drive of a new system of violence forming on the horizon. "Fearing the worst, let us salute the restraint and modesty of Bela Gold's art of remembrance," concludes Otília.

Keywords: Adorno, Bela Gold, Ester Grinspum, Foucault, Holocaust, Book of Memory, Madness, Stultifera Navis, Theater of the World.

Klee and the Utopia of Movement

2024-10-05T18:56:07-03:00

Published in Revista Discurso in 1976, Klee, the Utopia of Movement, an essay that essentially marked Otilia Arantes' debut upon her return from her doctoral studies in France, "steeped" in French Philosophy, as she stated in an interview, serves as a historical document of a particular moment in her critique—at the time, more focused on the visual arts. The text is, in fact, an extended commentary on Paul Klee's famous statement: "Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible": "A vision without a correlate, painting would retreat from the seen to seeing itself, from the objects that strike the eye and the forms that take shape there, to the eye itself and the act of seeing—from the constituted to the constituting, from meaning to the genesis of meanings. Through the absence of an object ('art... makes visible'), visual perception would gain precedence over the given world, and painting, no longer figurative, would achieve the status of a 'figured philosophy of vision'—as Merleau-Ponty defines it, making Klee the fortunate illustration of his theoretical formulations. However—and here Otília begins to distance herself from the Philosopher—the 'utopia of a purely dynamic work of art' pursued by Klee may not exactly correspond to the mere 'interweaving of vision and movement,' as read in L’Oeil et l’Esprit, that is, through simple contamination. To escape the pictorial tradition, subject to the despotism of sight and, therefore, to 'representation,' the painter proposes, in contrast, especially in his courses at the Bauhaus, a painting as 'pure movement,' drawing inspiration either from the movements of nature or from the arts of movement, such as music and dance—'motor-forms' capable of acting on the spectator in such a way as to transform their passive visual reception into a corporal and active one. According to Klee, moving from objects to sensations means transitioning from a knowledge of the eye to a knowledge (or sensation) of the body itself, abandoning pure understanding or reason in favor of sensuality, or something akin to 'desire,' not in the Freudian sense of Wunsch (which implies teleology, i.e., fulfillment), but as a productive force—the concept is from Jean-François Lyotard in Discours, Figure, who also uses Paul Klee as an example, and serves as a guide for the conclusions reached in the young Otília Arantes' essay."

Keywords: The Body, Desire, François Lyotard, Gesture, Line, Merleau-Ponty, Movement, Music, Nature, Sight, Paul Klee, Representation, Sensation, Vision.

Formation and Deconstruction

2024-04-08T21:20:19-03:00

The texts collected in this volume, written between 1989 and 1995, mark the end of a phase in Paulo Arantes' thought, a phase he traces back to the early 1970s. It was then that he first conceived, under the label of the "ABC of German misery," a project to redescribe the critique of ideology through the lens of the intellectual experience typical of peripheral national realities. It might be beneficial to start by clarifying what these texts are not, given that the subject could lead to some misunderstandings. Indeed, all of them, to varying degrees, revolve around the hypothesis of a "French Ideology" within the scope of post-war Western thought: an original creation by Arantes, albeit supported by one or two precedents, whose significance will need to be investigated in some detail. For the moment, limiting ourselves to its undeniable evocative power, the first misunderstanding would then be the expectation of finding here a humanist-materialist protest against the Parisian Destruction of Reason in the post-Sartrean era of French thought, and subsequently, Franco-American thought: something akin to a transcendent critique of the now-infamous "postmodern left." This is far from the author's intentions. Indeed, Arantes' reflection possesses, throughout its entirety, a materialist core in the most basic and never abandoned sense of the term, evident in the constant search, against the socially necessary trend towards the autonomization of ideas, for "a system of historically specified mediations," still focused on the negative gravitational force of material production relations. In this sense, "the elucidation of repressed and obscured conflicts" continues to be advocated as a standard of critique in opposition to the aestheticizing "shiver" (Foucauldian, in this case) "faced with the indistinction of ideological formations without a reverse side." However, this elementary layer is a starting point, not a destination; precisely, the problem of ideology critique can be seen as a privileged angle to reconstruct Arantes' trajectory towards an original specification of its meaning based on spatial coordinates—peripheral displacements—and temporal ones—historical transformations of the world-system. Anticipating: this involves not only classical objections (but not always absorbed) to the mechanical reductionism of the economistic determination of culture but also questioning that linear-progressive confiscation of historical materialism, which had been associated with mechanicism since the days of the Second International, and which undoubtedly constitutes, along with certain local implications, one of the main targets of Arantes' critique—let's say—from 1964 to 2018.

(Excerpt from the Afterword by Giovanni Zanotti)

Keywords: Bento Prado Jr., Deconstructive Turn, American Philosophy, Foucault, French Theory, Gérard Lebrun, French Ideology, Kojève, Lacan, Rorty, Brazilian Literary Tradition, Literary Avant-Garde.

CHAI-NA

2024-03-10T11:15:41-03:00

Written over 10 years ago, Otília Arantes's book, "Chai-na," was initially motivated by the rapid rise of urban and architectural mega-projects, largely fueled by events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics or the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Beyond being a historical document, we believe it can be read as, in a sense, an anticipation of what we are witnessing today – somewhat like a coded diagnosis of what would happen with China's unrestrained growth. The very title, "Chai-na" (which translates to "demolish there" in Mandarin), already announces that it is a reverse reading of China's much-vaunted modernization. According to Otília Arantes, Mao Zedong's maxim – "without destroying, there can be no construction" – which had served as an alibi for the country's de-urbanization, was resurrected in the 1990s, albeit with a reversed sign, to reclaim old cities and create new ones. All of this occurred in a kind of avalanche of cyclopean proportions, with the same violence as the historically predatory occupations of foreign territories. While the use of major projects or mega-events such as the Olympics as pretexts is not new, what is remarkable is the scale and speed at which such destructive creation occurred, almost compulsively. It is, therefore, an essay on the Chinese growth machine, whose false bottom reveals the great urban fetishes that, despite everything, have survived until now, at least until the awakening of the Chinese dream, from a Great Leap Forward to a scenario of catastrophes. Drawing on old experiences of dreamed worlds that have been collapsing for over a century, the book "Chai-na" seeks to interpret what was happening in the New China, as well as the phantasmagorias of our time expressed in its extreme urban forms. In the words of Adrián Gorelik, in a review for Vitruvius, it might be read as "a Benjaminian fable about the current world."

This is a reproduction of the EDUSP edition (in facsimile, unlike most other volumes on the site), intended to preserve it in its original form, including its graphic design (by Carol Pedro, also responsible for the final revision of this virtual edition), given its importance in the book, where the images are not just occasional illustrations but compose something like a complementary visual narrative, making the book's form almost as essential as its text.

Keywords: China, Deng Xiaoping, Reform Era, Evil Paradises, Fredric Jameson, Herzog & De Meuron, Hyperurbanization, Koolhaas, Mao Zedong, Growth Machines, Moscow, Olympics, Paris in the 19th century, Beijing, Perestroika, Ruins of the future, American Dream, Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, Shanghai, Special Economic Zones.

Resentment of Dialectics

2024-02-20T12:09:39-03:00

Averse to idealist readings, Paulo Arantes conceives of dialectics primarily as an attempt at conceptual transcription, a formalization of a determined intellectual experience. If it is indeed true that the historically situated social availability of certain intellectuals forms a predisposition towards dialectics, the inherent free oscillation of this intelligentsia and the dialectics somehow converge. This crossroad between social tendency and formal schema, pursued and mapped in its diverse configurations, constitutes the master line of a multi-tiered construction. On one level, the comparison of Hegel’s thought with other modern versions of dialectics frequently disqualified as subjective and negative forms (the "brilliant" conversation of worldly life, irony, nihilism, etc.), grounded by Arantes in the common soil of intellectual experience, by establishing new leads for the comprehension of the intellectual genesis of these dialectics, allows for an unparalleled appreciation of the uniqueness of the Hegelian dialectic. Once the ensemble of circumstances that presided over the modern resurgence of dialectics is recovered, here we break with a secular procedure: instead of taking Hegel's dialectics as a logical apparatus ready to be applied to the world's facts, that is, as a timeless method, Arantes attributes cognitive value to the exposition of its historical genesis, treating its concepts as the formalized transposition of actual interconnections, objectified by the world’s course. This bidirectional passage between critique of epistemology (or culture) and critique of society, or, in another scope, the interest in the intellectual and historical trajectory of dialectics, signifies a critical dialogue with the tradition of Western Marxism, particularly with some of its most notable works. "Dialectic Resentment" would not be feasible and at the same time we would forego one of its most original aspects if we did not regard it at least as a partial critique of a lineage that includes, among others, Georg Lukács's "The Young Hegel" (but also studies on German literary culture), Herbert Marcuse's "Reason and Revolution", Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" (especially the parts referring to intellectuals and their organization of culture), Jean-Paul Sartre's "What is Literature?" (whose concept of bad faith is here complemented by that of resentment), Theodor Adorno's "Three Studies on Hegel" and "Negative Dialectics". Anchored in his particular reading of Marx and Engels's "The German Ideology", Paulo Arantes reconstructs the ideological-political history of the modern European intelligentsia. What allows him—thanks to the structural affinity between the various modalities of historical "delay" resulting from the uneven and combined development of capitalism—to systematize the diverse national circumstances of late capitalism (Germany, Italy, and even France). Besides the undeniable gain for understanding the peculiarities of capitalism, this mapping becomes essential for understanding a stratum, the intellectuals, whose inclination to assume conflicting social roles constitutes the ground of modern dialectics. Whether because of a sense of mission of a directive vocation, or due to the very resentment that sometimes propels intellectuals to align with revolutionary classes. This analysis is as significant for an evaluation of Marxism's triumphs and tribulations as for the establishment of a future emancipatory agenda.

(Ricardo Musse, book flap of the original 1996 edition)

Keywords: Bildung, Culture, Dialectics, Diderot, Goethe, Gramsci, Hegel, German Idealism, French Enlightenment, Intelligentsia, Irony, Lukács, Marx, German Misery, Modernization, Nihilism, European Periphery, Russian Populism, Rahel Varnhagen, German Romanticism, 19th Century.

Mário Pedrosa

2023-10-02T10:25:54-03:00

This volume comprises some of Otília Arantes' texts on Mário Pedrosa that can be read as Appendices – initial drafts or subsequent supplements – to her book Mário Pedrosa, Critical Itinerary (from 1991, reproduced on this site). In the opening, a public intervention - tribute to the Critic on the occasion of his 80th birthday and the launch of the first edition of his thesis, On the Affective Nature of Form. Dated 1949, it had remained inexplicably unpublished until then, although pioneering (and not only in Brazil) in adopting Gestalttheorie as a key to understanding the work of art. The preface to this edition, organized by Otília, opens the second part of this volume. Speech and preface by which the Author begins her incursions into Mário's work, trying to discover in it a line of continuity given by his constant attempt to reconcile the rigor and universality of the artistic form with its at the same time particular, affective or expressive dimension, leading him to combine, for example, the lessons of the masters of Gestalt with those of other authors, more attentive to the specificity of artistic perception. A synthesis that will later find itself exemplarily realized in neo-concrete art. In that same period (early 80s), Otília, along with the CEAC group, was researching the artistic production of the 1960s, when Mário was the great intellectual mentor of the neo-avant-gardes of the Rio-São Paulo axis, which he preferred to call post-modern, at a time, moreover, when the expression had not yet been adopted by international criticism. Thus, in the Arte em Revista issue (published by the group) on Post-Modernity, a selection of texts by the Critic was included, preceded by an introductory note by Otília: "Mário Pedrosa in the face of the post-modern" (although partially resumed in the Conclusion of the book cited, it is reproduced here in its original, more detailed form). In sequence, still in the first part of this volume, a communication to the Seminar Art Studies from Latin America, from the Getty Foundation in Buenos Aires, from 1999, “Mário Pedrosa and the construction of Brazilian Modernity”. In truth, a recapitulation of the Critical Itinerary, but focusing on a theme as controversial as central in Mário's critique, especially with regard to our modernization: the national/international relationship in Brazilian art and architecture. In the second part, two more prefaces, from EDUSP collections, stand out for offering an overview of artistic production over the last two centuries. More specifically, both focus on the analysis of movements and Brazilian artists - "From Academics to Moderns" (from the French Mission to the neo-avant-gardes of the 60s/70s, architecture included) –, and foreigners, from the West and the East - "Modernity here and there". Closing, a small controversial Appendix, "Untimely Mário Pedrosa", a speech, in 2000, at the Latin America Memorial, on the occasion of Mário Pedrosa's centenary and the launch of the fourth volume of the EDUSP series, where the Author questions the amalgam, by the curators of the "500 years +" Exhibition, between what was being proposed as Rediscovery of Brazil and the Critic's positions in defense of primitive forms of artistic expression.

Keywords: Brazilian Modern Architecture, Abstract Art, Concrete Art, Japanese Art, Neoconcrete Art, Brazilian Artists, Brasília, Calder, Cézanne, Widener Collection, Di Cavalcanti, Artistic Form, Gestalt, Frente Group, Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, Lygia Clark, Mário Pedrosa, Miró, French Mission, Modernity, Modernists, Morandi, Neo-avant-gardes, Oiticica, Pop'art, Portinari, Post-Modernity, Surrealism, Tachism, Visconti, Volpi, Worringer.

10 Years of the June 2013 Journeys

2023-09-24T13:59:30-03:00

What did the Journeys of June 2013 signify for a solitary intellectual? For better or worse, that is the question guiding Paulo Arantes' discourse in the seminar Visions of June. By invoking the expression reminiscent of the Spring of Nations in 1848, when the French people attempted (unsuccessfully) to storm the heavens of Paris for the first time, Arantes re-elaborates his immediate enthusiasm for the movement initiated by MPL and justifies the exaggeration: this hyperbolic force is nothing other than enrapture. This simple word, which might appear Parnassian and misplaced for political elaboration, gains historical determination and conceptual strength in the professor's terms. The political mobilization is thus considered an indispensable mystical ecstasy to militant action, due to the collective impetus that the belief in the destruction of the existing social order can generate. As Arantes reminds us, this hypothesis was strongly advocated by Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology. However, the mystical enrapture demystifies the end of an era, namely, it concerns the fright that the end of the end of history sparked among laymen and well-educated individuals. Beyond the tedious period of institutional rotation, initiated with the redemocratization and FHC's victory, Brazil experiences a rendezvous with the resurgence of global history, thickening the brew of revolts sparked by the Arab Spring (another spring, indeed). It is among incredulous and intoxicated individuals that we witness the uprising of local social movements, where new agents are willing to contest the agreements hitherto established for maintaining social peace in perpetually war-torn civil societies. The pact has crumbled! It is no longer conceivable to acknowledge the lifelong victory of democratic capitalism. The theological underpinning of this enrapture is so strong that it mobilizes not only the autonomist left, but also the Christian faith revolutionaries, affiliated with the far-right and willing to militarily dispute the gates of Armageddon heralding the extinction of an unsustainable earthly life. Herein lies an inflection point: an alternative within the end is needed. This new dispute appears to enrapture us.

(Review by Nathalia Colli)

Keywords: Enrapture; Far Right; End of History; Journeys of June; Political Theology.

Reconquered Berlin

2023-08-14T20:14:20-03:00

The present essay more aptly termed a chronicle, which could also be titled "Berlin in the Year 2000," is the result of a literature review and on-site verification surrounding the urban transformations in Berlin following the fall of the Wall. These were observed and documented during the author's trip to Berlin in 2000, while simultaneously reflecting on and comparing them to the initiatives of the IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin) of the '80s, also visited by her in 1990, when the reunification process was beginning. That is, a project by Germany to create a unique metropolis, a capital not only local but global, presenting itself to the world as a significant business and cultural hub, whose cutting-edge architecture would make it shine as a Global Cultural City. This includes establishing, either through numerous cultural activities (traditional or alternative) or physical, functional, and social variety, a stark contrast with the rest of the West: Culture (German) versus Civilization (liberal, bourgeois, philistine, etc.). The great trump card of this capital's rebirth would be the much-acclaimed "Mischung," the heart or ultimate symbol of which, according to the author, was the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, with its architectural variety, functions, and purportedly human aspect, with its cultural and recreational spaces alongside residences and offices (where some of the biggest German companies, such as Sony, Daimler-Benz, and Brown-Bovery, would be represented) – a veritable hinge in the heart of the two Berlins. At the same time, the text traces the various changes occurring in both the old Mitte and the different neighborhoods of East and West Berlin (in the name of a not-so-visible diversity...), retrospectively analyzing critical efforts, always guided by the ideology of "mixture," such as those of Bauhaus, to create, since the '20s, the "Siedlungs" - in replacement of the early-century "Mietkasernen" - and the housing complexes of the GDR.

Twenty years later, many data or forecasts may have changed, but the essence of the trends that were already emerging, despite the good intentions that might guide yet another strategy to set in motion a great growth machine – in this case, lubricated by culture –, can certainly still be considered current. Either way, we believe it to be an essential document for Otilia Arantes' discussions about Strategic Plans, adopted by large cities racing for global supremacy, and certainly not only at the level of images.

Keywords: Berlin, East Berlin, West Berlin, Berliner Ensemble, Brown-Bovery, Bundestag, World Cultural Capital, Chancellery, Cine Imax, Daimler-Benz, Berlin Philharmonic, Global City, Grésillon, Hans Kollhoff, Hans Scharoun, Höfe, IBA, Kreutberg, Leipziger Platz, Microcity-event, Mietkasernen, Mischung, Mixture, Mitte, Berlin Wall, Norman Foster, Prinzlauer Berg, Potsdamer Platz, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Sony Center, Staatsoper, Stefan Krätke.

Rainha Lira

2023-08-13T18:47:34-03:00

A partir da leitura de Rainha Lira, última peça teatral de Roberto Schwarz, Paulo Arantes busca revelar a novidade do gênero literário diante de sua forma híbrida: embora escrita nos moldes dramáticos, a obra encontra o ensaísmo clássico do crítico brasileiro. Segundo Arantes, isso decorre a partir de certa técnica composicional cuja multiplicação de vozes está no centro da estrutura estilística. Nesta assembleia em que ninguém é interrompido, as ideias apenas seguem em fluxo contínuo formalizando certa contradição generalizada que assume ares machadianos em suas incongruências e multiplicações, dando a cada uma das personagens complexidade singular e força sintética em seu conteúdo histórico, já que a voz da multidão ficcionalizada pede interpretação cuidadosa, mesmo quando envolvida pelo linguajar das ruas. Um ensaio sui generis, portanto. Pois se trata de um retrato de época armado por um intelectual veterano de 1964 diante do problema Brasil, objeto que ocupou o centro de suas investigações ao longo da vida. Rainha Lira, assim, se consolida como a primeira manifestação artística de fôlego sobre a última década brasileira: não seria possível pensar um ensaio em seus moldes clássicos, tampouco elaborar uma dramaturgia que coubesse nos palcos, foi preciso encontrar a saída ambígua entre a flexibilidade literária e o pensamento vivo do ensaio para elaborar uma imagem do contemporâneo, sem correr o risco de cravar um veredicto final sobre o período histórico que segue em aberto. Algo como sustentar o impacto de 2013 não só na política, mas também na composição artística e intelectual, cujo abalo sísmico das ruas perturbou a paz até mesmo dos que o assistiram de suas escrivaninhas. A experiência da formação reencontra o chão da vida social e lança uma hipótese para contribuir com o enigma da história brasileira, enfim decifrado pela figuração do Coiso. E se não for assim, não há de ser um erro, já que a liberdade do texto dramático não implica necessariamente em um acerto de contas com a história.

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: Roberto Schwarz, Rainha Lira, Junho de 2013, bolsonarismo, ensaio, teatro, Machado de Assis, Cultura e Política, dualidade de poder, populismo.

Urbanism Reviewed

2023-01-21T14:53:07-03:00

The first part of this collection, which has been especially organized for sentimentodadialetica.org, comprises five texts (mostly conferences, one of them never before published), written from 1993 to 2000, which represented important turns in the author's studies on the impasses of urbanism: from the exhaustion of the Modern Movement’s planning model to the prescription for “modest” interventions, which quickly turned into an apology for the fragmented and even chaotic city, eventually reviving the issue of planning, but in new terms—the “Strategic Planning”, which was beginning to spread throughout in Brazil with the presence of the Catalan masters. Mentioned at the end of the 1993 conference that opens the sequence (“Urbanismo em fim de linha”), strategic planning would finally be detailed at the International Symposium on Urban Spaces and Socio-Spatial Exclusion organized by FAU-USP at the end of 1998, in a conference entitled “Culture in the New Urban ‘Strategies’”, when, possibly for the first time in Brazil, such an acid criticism was made of urban “entrepreneurship”, which suited this new model of city “management”. Although the conference was made available to the public and was the reason for numerous debates, including a debate with one of the formulators of the model we were importing, Jordi Borja, at the 4th São Paulo Architecture Biennial (1999), it had never been published before. An abridged version can be found in an essay named “Vendo Cidades” from the same period. Finally, among the numerous subsequent lectures and texts by the author on the subject, we chose the speech given at the Goethe Institute in São Paulo (2000) about “event-cities”: “Culture and Urban Transformation”, a first draft of the essay that would be part of A Cidade do Pensamento Único (which can be found on this website in “Culture, Power and Money in City Management”).

The second part comprises a long interview given to Adalberto da Silva Retto Jr. (published by Vitruvius), in which, based on the author’s book Berlim e Barcelona: Duas Imagens Estratégicas (Annablume, 2012), many issues raised in previous texts are recapitulated, now focused mainly on the transformations that took place in Barcelona during the 1992 Olympics and Berlin after the fall of the wall. Finally, there are two reviews included as an appendix. The first one is about Camillo Sitte’s book City Planning According to Artistic Principles (a must-read for the contextualists or place theorists mentioned in the first texts of this collection). The second review is about Ermínia Maricato’s book A metrópole na periferia do capitalismo (HUCITEC 1996) and is an important addition to the texts and speeches gathered here, as it questions the allegedly “successful” cities, describing the disastrous effects of mundialization, especially for the cities of peripheral capitalism.

Keywords: Barcelona, Berlin, Bohigas, Borja, Camillo Sitte, Castells, Chaotic City, Fragmented City, Occasional Cities, Peripheral Cities, Contextualism, Corbusier, Market Culturalism, Indovina, Occasional Interventions, Logan, Location, Growth Machine, Molotch, Mundialization, Non-place, Peter Hall, Peter Eisenman, Planning, Strategic Planning, Purini, Teyssot, Urbanism.

Modern Architecture in the Old Days

2023-01-16T20:44:17-03:00

The texts gathered here—essays, conferences, and interviews—from the late 1980s and early 1990s summarize the author's account-settling position towards the surprising and more than extemporaneous defense of Modern Architecture, so to speak, at the end of the Enlightenment Project era, originally presented by Jürgen Habermas and subsequently replicated among us by architects and architectural theorists, according to which, freed from its functional overload, the New Construction would survive as the matrix of Western Rationalism. On the countercurrent, this collection opens with a 1988 conference where Otília sought to demonstrate, for the first time (the argument would be developed later, in a book and other essays), that the aging of the Modern Movement and its corresponding loss of social voltage was structural. The central motto, that Modern Architecture had been exhausted not by detours or setbacks, but by the very execution of its program—that is, it had not been neutralized because times changed, but because it fulfilled its promise, due to its strict fidelity to the principle of progressive rationalization, the same absolute rationalization that defines the social logic of the capitalist order—is resumed in subsequent texts: responding to Roberto Schwarz's objections and, in an interview given to Architecture students, refuting the dissociation in Anatole Kopp’s argument, according to which Modern Architecture should be understood more as a cause than as a style.

There are two conferences that continue this discussion. The first one questions Philip Johnson's maxim that was adopted by postmodernists: “we love history while the moderns hated it”. The second one diverges from the attempt to frame the specificities of Brazilian Modern Architecture in some kind of Critical Regionalism.

To illustrate her arguments, Otília analyzes Brazilian Modern Architecture based on three of its greatest exponents, Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, presenting as well as problematizing the point of view of Mário Pedrosa, a quintessentially Modern critic, or Lúcio Costa himself with regard to the “formation” of this architecture. Finally, we added a brief digression in which the author questions the so-called neomodern or “minimalist” phase in Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s work.

Keywords: Adorno, Anatole Kopp, Modern Architecture, Postmodern Architecture, Brazilian Modern Architecture, Brasilia, Constructivism, Corbusier, Habermas, History, Ideology, Lúcio Costa, Mário Pedrosa, Mies van der Rohe, Minimalism, Oscar Niemeyer, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Critical Regionalism, Postcritical Regionalism, Roberto Schwarz, Theo van Doesburg.

French Architecture in Two Parts

2022-08-24T12:20:52-03:00

The two essays that compose this volume were written a little more than 25 years apart. The first one was written in 1988. The second one, although written in 2014, had not yet been published. Now combined as a comparative review, they mainly intend to address the transformations of French architecture in two moments that were full of excitement but also extremely different. They range from the aftermath of 1968—of which Beaubourg (1976) is the most complete expression, and when the state elected culture as an official policy, with large (and flashy) cultural facilities (especially the Great Projects of the Mitterrand Era) accompanied by a complementary counterpoint of patrimonial valorization and “modest” and contextual architecture—to a new outbreak in which France, and above all Paris and its surroundings, gave in to the global race for high-end real estate assets, disputed by cutting-edge offices and construction companies which, at least since the turn of the century, have started calling the shots (even when subsidized by the state). That period saw the convergence between culture and the business world (which was also obviously present in the first period—“culture is our oil”, said Minister Jacques Lang) ultimately give in to the strict impositions of the latter, and, with no holds barred, new fronts inevitably opened up, with countless cultural centers being gradually replaced by boutiques (including museum boutiques), corporate buildings, public buildings (or buildings that should be public by nature), vineyards, shopping malls or sports facilities. In these new projects, as François Chaslin rightly said, “the teams are impressive, the financial aspects are fundamental, and the architectural issues are relatively secondary”. An undoubtedly global wave, but in which France, form its undeniably avant-garde position—at least when it comes to the great cultural turn of the last quarter of the 20th century—becomes a mere follower. This double review, where the first essay was written on the eve of the bicentennial of the French Revolution and at the height of Mitterrand's mandate, and the second was written at the end of the conservative cycle with the presidency of Sarkozy, also serves as a pretext to illustrate the directions and misdirections of world architecture in half a century: from great ideals (and projects) to great business—when it starts to obey, above all, the imperatives of the market, falling into the excesses of aesthetic irrelevance (despite the formal extravagances). In other words, these essays go from Beaubourg to the Vuitton Foundation and its more prosaic variants.

Keywords: Cultural Animation, Modest Architecture, Beaubourg, Bernard Huet, François Chesnais, Gaudin, Gehry, Grand Louvre, Great Projects, Grumbach, Jacques Lang, Jean Nouvel, La Défense, Mitterrand, Modern Movement, Heritage, Pei, Perrault, Portzamparc, Renzo Piano, Ricciotti, Rogers, Sarkozy

The Museum Trend

2022-08-17T11:24:35-03:00

The five essays that compose this volume are, in general, conferences held at museum-related events. Although many passages from these oral presentations have been included in other publications or interviews, the idea that by bringing the original texts together in a small thematic volume we would facilitate the access of a future generation of researchers to that decisive chapter of capitalism in times of productive restructuring was more important. The first essay is a speech given at the exhibition “New Museum Buildings in the Federal Republic of Germany”, in 1991, and addresses the spectator-artwork relationship in those museums as opposed to modern museums. Starting from Adorno's meditation, motivated by the confrontation between Valéry’s and Proust’s views on the neutralization of artworks in those spaces, the essay concludes that, in any case, and precisely because of their neutrality, they still allowed the solitary visitor the pleasure of concentrating on selected works. Fifty years later, the new museums would be far from providing any kind of retreat, demanding from the public, at most, a distracted attention. From the multiple activities they offer to their architectural extravagance, these museums mobilize countless resources to satisfy a new contingent of visitor-consumers while housing an artistic production increasingly conceived on a mass scale, that is, in the exact extent of consumption in an affluent society. The text entitled, not by chance, “Contaminations” summarizes the road map followed by those transformations, when different branches of activities seem to work in an immense network of equally “entrepreneurial” connections, having the permanent circulation of people as one of the main ingredients: museum/cultural-center/shopping/theme-park, from Beaubourg to the latest Guggenheim museums, where the muses have progressively given way to the masses, and the museums have given way to other spaces, such as large designer stores—which is the subject of “From Haute Culture to Haute Couture”. All these issues are also addressed in the final conference, from 2005, which analyzes the effects of this cultural turn in the “arts system” and its circuits, from mass production to large installations.

Keywords: Adorno, Cultural Animation, Art Autonomy, Art and Politics, Beaubourg, Benjamin, Brecht, Boltanski and Chiapello, Christa Bürger, Contaminations, Curator, Age of Culture, Age of Museums, Aesthetic Experience, Gehry, Guggenheim, Guy Debord, Herzog & de Meuron, Hollein, Interdisciplinarity, J. Rifkin, J.I. Pei, J.P. Jeudy, Jameson, Lévi-Strauss, Lipovetsky, M. Botta, Fashion, Lasar Segall Museum, New Museums, OMA – Koolhaas, P. Valéry, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Proust, R. Meyer, Rosalind Krauss, Arts System, Stirling, Thomas Krens, Transculturalism, G. Vattimo.

Extinção

2022-02-06T19:02:15-03:00

Os escritos reunidos em Extinção constituem uma crítica radical, sem subterfúgios e sem concessões, “impiedosa” – como a definiu certa vez o jovem Marx – do mundo da cruel “máquina capitalista de moer”, do estado de sítio permanente. Paulo Arantes se define como frankfurtiano de esquerda, (...) poderíamos também defini-lo como marxista ilegal, em oposição aos marxistas legais brasileiros, cuja longa marcha pelas instituições culminou na “fusão da intelectualidade tucana com as altas finanças”. Neste livro ele analisa, como ensina Brecht, não o bom antigo, mas as novidades ruins. Entre estas, elementos que de certa forma dão unidade ao processo imperialista atual: o retorno à Acumulação Primitiva, a reconquista colonial do mundo, a realização das formas supostamente arcaicas de exploração e dominação. Diante do “matadouro das limpezas sociais” que encontramos em um país como o Brasil, como organizar a resistência dos oprimidos? Tarefa mais difícil hoje, quando o partido que supostamente os representava conheceu “a pior das capitulações: sem combate e por adesão prévia ao programa do inimigo”. Este livro, tônico e irônico é um salutar antídoto “idiotia triunfante e bem pensante” do novo Febeapá.

(Extraído da orelha de Michel Löwy para a edição da Boitempo)

Palavras-chave: Acumulação primitiva, Anos Lula, Arturo Ui, Brecht, Capitalismo de acesso, Cultura do excesso, Danilo Zolo, David Harvey, Era tucana, Errol Morris, Estado de sítio, Fukuyama, Guerra cosmopolita, Guerra do Iraque, McNamara, O novo imperialismo, PCC, Trabalho da guerra.

Bento Prado Jr.

2022-02-06T19:29:37-03:00

“pelo âmago de tudo, e no mais fundo
decifro o choro pânico do mundo,

que se entrelaça no meu próprio choro,
e compomos os dois um vasto coro”.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Relógio do Rosário

Não é novidade que a literatura brasileira foi responsável pela movimentação das grandes ideias nacionais – de algum modo, a ficção era o lugar onde a periferia alcançava o centro. Bem se sabe que alcançar o centro sempre foi uma preocupação da nossa formação, e a literatura, talvez meio desavisada de seu tamanho (talvez por isso mesmo), alcançou o feito que o país buscava. Como nos narra Paulo Arantes (narra mesm, pois se trata de uma prosa íntima entre a filosofia, a literatura e a construção de uma amizade), foi Mário de Andrade quem primeiro alertou que faltava à literatura nacional elaborar ideias, formular enquanto imaginava. Dado o alerta, qual não foi a surpresa de um jovem estudante de filosofia, em 1956, militante da Juventude Comunista, ao se deparar com a poesia de Carlos Drummond de Andrade? E não só com sua poesia mais facilmente palatável a um militante comunista: não foi a “rosa do povo” que provocou Bento Prado, mas sim a rosa outra, a Rosa das Trevas, de seu hermético livro Claro Enigma. Paulo Arantes, nesta conferência de lançamento do livro Ipseitas, de Bento, nos enlaça no clima nacional onde se forjou a formação (em sentido forte, Bildung) do amigo, professor e autor. O cenário era mais ou menos o seguinte: Bento, filho de uma família erudita, entra para a recente Universidade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, vindo de uma posição militante ativa, sobretudo antifascista, que se formava entre os intelectuais e jovens de esquerda do país. Grande leitor e admirador da literatura, principalmente da poesia de Drummond, buscava encontrar um caminho para a filosofia que tomasse certo rumo romanesco, onde a poesia do coração se encontraria com a prosa do mundo (Hegel). Segundo Arantes, essa espécie de Hans Castorp, na Montanha Mágica da Vila Buarque, queria alcançar com a filosofia, nada mais, nada menos, que a definição de si mesmo ao se articular com o ser outro. A empreitada era ousada, além de divertida e nada ingênua. Formado em berço drummondiano, importava a Bento Prado Jr. encontrar o sentimento do mundo capaz de dar vida ao engajamento do sonho rousseauniano. Isso, aqui no Brasil, isso, depois do fim do mundo em 1945. Para Paulo Arantes, esse engajamento radical, político e filosófico elaborado por Bento Prado Jr. só pôde brotar de certo sentimento compartilhado entre a literatura brasileira e a transformação da filosofia francesa durante os anos de ocupação nazista. O entrecruzamento de Sartre e Drummond foi possível diante de um engajamento contrário ao horror do mundo, fosse o horror nazista, o norte-americano das bombas ou o soviético. O feito de Bento Prado Jr., para Arantes, foi ser capaz de radicalizar esse engagement da autonomia do pensamento diante da catástrofe histórica. Não é esse também um entrecruzamento entre o coração e o mundo? Fica a pergunta.

Conferência realizada no dia 6 de junho de 2017 no contexto do “Colóquio Bento Prado Jr.: aventuras da filosofia brasileira”, que por sua vez marcou o lançamento do livro póstumo de Bento: Ipseitas.

Palavras-chave: Bento Prado Jr.; engajamento; Juventude Comunista; filosofia francesa; filosofia nacional; Antonio Candido; Mário de Andrade; Edmund Husserl; Jean-Paul Sartre; fenomenologia; Jean Jacques Rousseau; ipseitas; Vagner Camilo; Sentimento do Mundo; Claro Enigma; formação; literatura; romance; Hegel

Cultura y coaliciones de poder y dinero en las nuevas gestiones urbanas

2021-12-08T20:20:44-03:00

Este volumen contiene una comunicación y dos ensayos de Otilia Arantes, publicados en México y Argentina, respectivamente, sobre conceptos y estrategias de intervención en las ciudades con miras a 'regenerarlas' como 'lugares' debidamente 'animados' por la reactivación de sus centros históricos y valor simbólico, es decir, debido a su "sesgo cultural". Un programa de 'regreso a la ciudad' después de los Modernos que pretendía restaurar a sus poblaciones a una vida pública obstaculizada por los planes regulatorios de la ciudad funcional. El tema central de la ponencia presentada en 1995, en un Coloquio de Arte y Espacio de la UNAM, la Autora cuestiona hasta qué punto tales intervenciones, que pretenden ser conservacionistas y modestas, apuntando a la restauración de lugares llenos de significados colectivos, acaban convirtiéndose en lo que parece su exacto contrario: la causa sorprendente de un urbanismo anárquico de apología de la ciudad caótica, plural, fragmentada, soft etc. donde los conflictos serían escamoteados por una especie de estetización de lo heterogéneo, recubierto por la transformación en escenarios comandados por la lógica de la fascinación. O sea que, el lugar, inviable por las propias condiciones objetivas, materiales, fue convirtiéndose, de a poco, en su opuesto, el no-lugar de los espacios virtuales de una vida pública definitivamente transformada en un repertorio de representaciones simbólicas. El énfasis ya no es predominantemente técnico, como en el período anterior, para recurrir al vasto dominio de paspartú de lo "cultural". Cuando las ciudades empezaron a verse como un repertorio de símbolos, todo se convirtió en cultura. Este es el eje de los dos ensayos que siguen (publicados en 2000 en dos revistas argentinas, Punto de Vista y Block): en un mundo, al mismo tiempo dominado por el mercado, la cultura y el dinero terminan uniéndose: la centralidad de la cultura en el capitalismo avanzado, como enfatiza Fredric Jameson, y, al mismo tiempo, una superposición paradójica entre dos instancias que, en principio, deberían ser antagónicas. Simultáneamente, el proceso inducido de 'gentrificación' adquiere la forma más flexible de algo que se aproxima a lo que los viejos 'propagandistas' de la identidad - referidos en esa comunicación - llegan a defender como atributos fluctuantes, derogaciones, deconstrucciones, derivas. En esta fase (especialmente en la década de los 90), se produce un retorno reactivo a la planificación, pero luego, designada como estratégica, donde la 'racionalidad' pasa a ser principalmente la de la economía, apuntando a la inserción de las ciudades en el circuito global de las grandes empresas, lo que agravará aún más la expansión cultural, que ha prevalecido desde que los gobiernos y los inversores comenzaron a abrir una nueva frontera de acumulación de poder y dinero: el negocio de las imágenes.

Palabras clave: Arquitectura del lugar, Atopia, Barcelona, Berlin, Christopher Lash, City-Marketing, Ciudad-empresa, Ciudades ocasionales, Cultura de imágenes, David Harvey, Desconstrucción, Espacio público, Expo 98, Frank Gehry, Fredric Jameson, Fundación Guggenheim, Gentrificación, Jordi Borja, Manuel Castells, Marc Augé, Megaeventos, Memoria, No-lugares, Olimpíadas, Patrimonio, Peter Hall, Planeamiento estratégico, Potsdamer Platz, Recalificación, Richard Sennet, Sharon Zukin, Venturi, Virilio.

Sale Boulot

2021-11-27T22:08:43-03:00

Este pequeno livro é uma contribuição para a genealogia contemporânea do que se convencionou chamar trabalho sujo. Mais especificamente, é um comentário da noção de “trabalho do mal” elaborada por assim dizer a quatro mãos por Christophe Dejours e Joseph Torrente a partir de uma visão histórica do Holocausto, baseada na descoberta da experiência coletiva do “trabalho atroz” como chave explicativa da destruição dos judeus na Europa. Em resumo, a revelação de como o horror do Terceiro Reich deriva da imposição do genocídio como um trabalho de massa realizado por uma legião de colaboradores zelosos. Uma hipótese até então adormecida na melhor historiografia que precisou esperar a intensificação do sofrimento social pelo trabalho sujo do neoliberalismo hoje para enfim despertar e sugerir este curto-circuito explosivo num verdadeiro diagnóstico de época.

Publicado originalmente em 2011 na revista Tempo Social do departamento de sociologia da USP (v. 23, n. 1) e incluído posteriormente como segundo capítulo do livro O novo tempo do mundo: e outros estudos sobre a era da emergência (Boitempo, 2014).

Palavras-chave: Christophe Dejours; Joseph Torrente; trabalho sujo; trabalho atroz; zelo; Holocausto; Eichmann; Hannah Arendt; banalidade do mal; zona cinzenta; neoliberalismo; colaboracionismo.

What is left for the Left

2021-11-15T16:15:23-03:00

What is left for the Left is a compilation of articles written by Paulo Arantes, as well as interviews and other expositions provided by the author from 1997 to 2003. Originally conceived to close the namesake collection directed by Arantes and Iná Camargo Costa for the Vozes publishing house, the work ended up being released as part of the “Baderna” collection from the Conrad publishing house in 2004. It is also the first group of essays published by Arantes after he formally retired from the university—which, according to Roberto Schwarz, marked the beginning of Arantes’s “second career”, more audacious and incisive.

The wordplay of the title indicates the impertinent position that permeates this book: a rejection of both the capricious nature of the good old left and the pragmatism of the new results-oriented progressivism. The first and last essays express the historical impasse faced by the author. While the first one diagnoses the PSDB era’s blackout and the eclipse of the Brazilian critical tradition, the last one goes from the suicidal conversion of the newly elected Lula administration to the fundamentalism of economic orthodoxy. We thereby find ourselves in an inverted world where the center increasingly resembles the periphery, the Marxist discourse emerges as a tool of the ruling class, and the destructive threat to order comes from not from the bottom, but from the top. Acknowledging that the left no longer has “the compass of 'significant' words that allowed it to lead the path to emancipation”, the book aims to rethink, from scratch, what it means to criticize ideology amid a “single thought” system. In fact, as the author continues, recapitulating the reformulations that Western Marxism had to undergo in order to address the singularities of our peripheral dynamics—at once archaic and modern—, starting from scratch is our specialty.

Faced with the hegemony of a new type of imperialism, anchored in the shifting ground of world currency issuing, backed by nothing but pure military power since 1971, the essays fire at both the globalization apologists and the motto of an incomplete national formation. The aforementioned absence of stable references imposed by the circumstances can be sensed in the vertiginous writing, which articulates apparently disparate issues such as the Brazilianization of the world, the link between intellectual experience and the national imagination, the business grammar of the NGOs, the up-to-dateness of the Communist Manifesto and May 68, the reception of Marcuse's work in Brazil, the meaning of ‘utopia’ and ‘revolution’ today, the aestheticization of money, the spectacularization of the artistic institution, and the “besieged individuality” of the consumer subject in image-driven capitalism. Meanwhile, the Frankfurtian diagnosis of a non-antagonistic society where “reality becomes an ideology of itself” is updated to twenty-first-century capitalism. After all, what is left for the left, once the development of the productive forces has swallowed, along with the society of labor, the very evolutionary horizon that fostered not only the positivism of the liberals but the struggle dynamics of their socialist opponents? The answer, of course, is up to the reader.

(Book review by Artur Renzo)

Keywords: Brazilianization; globalization; imagined communities; nationalism; nation; Benedict Anderson; Herbert Marcuse; Jürgen Habermas; Ernst Bloch; Robert Kurz; Slavoj Žižek; 1968; FHC; Lula; contemporary art; NGOs; World Bank; risk society; utopia; revolution; ideology criticism; fetishism; imperialism; Critical Tradition; single thought; São Paulo school of thought.

1964: um país feito num só golpe

2021-10-17T11:53:37-03:00

Em 1964: um país feito num só golpe, Paulo Arantes retoma alguns argumentos centrais de seu texto sobre o período para indagar, à luz de 2014, os objetivos do golpe militar de 64. Direto ao ponto, Arantes sustenta que um dos objetivos do golpe seria extinguir da memória nacional a ideia de que por aqui já houve inconformismo político, não um inconformismo qualquer, mas aquele que mobiliza as pessoas comuns para o desejo de se organizar politicamente. Não se tratava, portanto, de interromper uma revolução em curso, mas de extirpar pela raiz a movimentação do povo, incontrolável e ameaçador. Pautado na definição nada ortodoxa de Greg Grandin, Arantes defende que a política é uma dimensão de encaminhamento das expectativas humanas, algo como uma dissonância entre a realidade e as ideias que mobilizam uma época, como se na base da utopia estivesse um espírito messiânico da transformação, capaz de atingir a todos. Eis que por aqui a contrarrevolução veio antes da revolução. Para Arantes, o golpe veio à América do Sul com intuito de arrumar a casa, antes que essa tivesse base suficiente para a insurgência popular. O mérito do golpe, então, cumprido com eficiência ao toque do terror completo, foi manter o horizonte de expectativas numa espécie de reconciliação democrática com o progresso (utopia negativa). Sem política, sem golpe. Nas bases da mediação e do equilíbrio, o que restou de 1964 para o Brasil foi defender, civilizadamente, a parte que lhe cabe do latifúndio global, digo, restou ao subdesenvolvimento manter-se atado ao subcapitalismo, dando razão à formulação de FHC, quando este ainda era apenas um sociólogo. Socialismo fora do jogo, ao Brasil sobrou uma democracia de baixa intensidade. Algo como afirmar que só sofremos o golpe porque não defendemos a democracia o suficiente, com o golpe ficamos diante da fratura brasileira da barganha política do pós-guerra: se a revolução não vier, o welfare state está mantido, do contrário, é guerra. Guerra, aliás, com Bomba Atômica e ameaça latente de destruição mútua. Passados cinquenta anos de golpe, a política de transição segue incompleta, talvez porque a democracia de baixa intensidade que nos foi entregue não seja uma vitória à esquerda, mas uma missão cumprida com sucesso pelos militares. Mas é também nesta data redonda, com meio século de distância, em que algo fora das instituições democráticas volta a chacoalhar a política no Brasil: junho de 2013 marca o fim de uma era apaziguada e as expectativas humanas são novamente mobilizadas para algo. Para o quê ainda não se sabe, se a direita saiu à frente na luta contra a institucionalização da política, há também uma massa de trabalhadores precários, entre motoboys e atendentes de call center, que flertam com o desemprego, bem como com a fúria pela sobrevivência.

Conferência e debate de lançamento de "O novo tempo do mundo", com Paulo Arantes no Espaço Cultural Latino Americano (ECLA). Realizado no dia 15/05/2014, o evento integrou o ciclo "A ditadura que não passa" do seminário Labirintos e trincheiras promovido pelo coletivo Zagaia.

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: Golpe; 1964; Militares; Democracia; Marighela; Política de Transição; Comissão da Verdade; Guerra - fria; Junho de 2013; FHC; Diretas Já; Ameaça atômica; Prazo; Expectativa, Política; América do Sul; Guatemala; Greg Grandin; Socialismo; Democrático Popular; Populismo; Trabalhismo; Assalariamento; Entregadores; Call Center; Desemprego.

Lucio Costa’s Summary

2021-10-14T08:56:48-03:00

In this essay—especially written for the Torcuato di Tella University’s Block magazine, Buenos Aires, 1999 (and partially published three years later in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, a facsimile of which is available on this website: “Lucio Costa’s Summary”)—Otília Arantes resumes and develops the main argument of another text, a review of the book Registro de uma vivência published in Folha de São Paulo on April 12, 1996, and republished, with a few changes, in The Meaning of Formation (Sentido da Formação, Paz e Terra, 1997, also available on this website). It should be noted that Lucio Costa told the history of Brazilian architecture from the point of view of an “already-formed” and “successful” architecture, in the sense that its cycle was completed in a short period of time, from the Ministry of Education to the Pampulha Modern Ensemble or the Brazilian Pavilion in New York, culminating in Brasília. From independent manifestations to the system, less than two decades went by—an impressive apparatus indeed, especially for the technical expertise it demonstrated. A “miracle” that would baffle foreign critics. Formation as part of the Brazilian cultural system, in the sense used by Antonio Candido in Formação da Literatura Brasileira (The Formation of Brazilian Literature)—and by Caio Prado and Celso Furtado, about the economic formation). It is, therefore, about national formation, against the ever-present background of colonial heritage that should be overcome. At the same time, as a dependent country, the external inflow remains dominant, insomuch that its update also reveals the inconsistency of its origin. A historical mismatch that was translated into Brazilian architecture as a certain formalism, whose aesthetic bias paradoxically revealed the truth about Modern Architecture in its matrix—its “false bottom”, so to speak. As it turns out, Lucio Costa, historian and leading figure in this story, might be who bests summarizes the contradictions and illusions of the Modern Project. At the same time, his career—and how he sees it—is surely the key to the author’s interpretation of the Modern Movement.

Keywords: Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, National School of Fine Arts, Modern Architecture, Brazilian Architecture, Brasília, History of Architecture, Formation, Mário Pedrosa, Antonio Candido.

The Neo-Enlightenment Aesthetics of Jürgen Habermas

2021-02-26T17:45:06-03:00

This essay was prepared especially for the issue 49 of Cultural Critique (2001) as an extract of the argument presented in Otília and Paulo Arantes’ book Um Ponto Cego no Projeto Moderno de Jürgen Habermas (A blind spot in Jürgen Habermas’ Modern Project, 1992) (which remain untranslated into English). While Habermas has seldom addressed the question of aesthetic directly, here the authors reconstruct why architecture becomes the aesthetic side of predilection for him. What the authors call a “neo-Enlightenment aesthetics” in Habermas involves a reconfiguration of the judgement of taste, as conceived in the Enlightenment, but now projected through the lens of communicative action where the rules of engagement have left the spectacle behind. A Kantian aesthetic with airs of Benjamin and Brecht, they contend, became the ingredients which Habermas tried to get beyond the impasse that Peter Bürger had already pointed out with regard to idealist aesthetics, namely how the process of the autonomization of art is simultaneously a process both of its consolidation and its eventual demise. How then to talk about aesthetics after Avant-Garde? For Habermas, architecture becomes a place of encounter for his own ideas about the public sphere, rational engagement, and aesthetic engagement.

The Arantes, however, contest Habermas’ abstract defense of Modern Architecture by showing how, in the word and specially in Brazil, each phase of its development is intimately tied to specific moments in capitalism development. They follow in Adorno’s footsteps in arguing that the site of Modern Architecture in Brazil is a cipher of glass and concrete that evinces the silence of the spellbound rather than the emergence of a public genre with enlightenment functions.

(Sílvia Lopes)

Keywords: Habermas, Modernity, Modern Design, Modern Movement, Postmodernism, Ideology, History, Benjamin, Utopia, Communicative Action, Linguistic Turn, Enlightenment, Reason, Critical Theory, Welfare, Brazil.

From "Opinião 65" to the 18th São Paulo Biennial

2021-10-12T17:28:10-03:00

Published in 1986, this essay by Otília Arantes proposes a critical review of the visual arts of the 20-year dictatorship period, from “Opinião 65” (Opinion 65), an exhibition that explicitly purported to represent resistance, to the 1985 Biennial, marked by the large corridor devoted to the so-called neo-expressionist paintings, with works by both Brazilian and foreign artists. While the artworks shown in the 1960s were accompanied by neo-avant-garde manifestos and denied any identification with international art—even the American pop art, which was undeniably similar in form, here acquired an openly disruptive and protesting tone—, the works at the 18th Biennial showed an unrestricted adhesion to the internationalization of our art. According to the author’s emphatic warning, the memory of the “Brazilian material” was thereby fading, even though expressionism was perhaps the most suited painting style for our modernity, at least from Mario de Andrade’s point of view. Well, those new expressionists sought precisely to distance themselves from the modernist paintings—also exhibited at the Biennial—which they considered to be a “sub-cubism”, dismissing any kind of Brazilian art to seek inspiration directly from great international artists. In retrospect, this internationalist boom could be explained as being in tune with the illusion of that time: that Brazil was finally catching up with the developed world. The most substantial part of the essay, however, is related to the Brazilian visual arts of the period that lasted from the coup d'état to the Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), when artists still had some space for a certain “exercise of freedom”, as put by Mário Pedrosa, and intended to use art to make politics. This effort to fight the status quo is retraced by Arantes with a special focus on Hélio Oiticica and the emergence of Tropicalismo with all its “ambivalences”—as seen and preached by Oiticica: adding to the predatory violence, related to enshrined values and the awareness of underdevelopment, a strong constructive élan. A past that was anthropophagically devoured to project us towards the future—a door that was closed, at least temporarily, from 1970 onwards. The return to figuration, to the easel, the well-behaved painting, as well as the critical representation, or “non-representation”, always more indirect, of the artistic creations of that period are compiled by the author to finally reach the revenge of the youth from the 1980s, finishing this reviewing effort in a committed, quasi-manifesto tone.

Keywords: 18th Biennial, Casa7, Rex gallery, Gerchman, Gregório Gruber, Hélio Oiticica, José Resende, Lygia Clark, Mário Pedrosa, Neo-expressionism, Neo avant-garde, New Objectivity, Opinião 65, Malasartes magazine, Roberto Schwarz, Sérgio Ferro, Tropicália.

Ruins of the Future

2021-10-03T11:10:02-03:00

The two essays in this e-book—“Ruins of the future” and “The era of extreme urban forms”—were written, strictly speaking, in sequence. The first one is an introductory reflection on the book Chai-na—a case study of China as a fast-paced machine of urban growth, boosted by the 2008 Olympics. The second essay is a conference at the 2012 ENANPARQ (National Meeting of the National Association of Research and Postgraduate Education in Architecture and Urban Design), which draws consequences of what is outlined in the second part of that book, namely, the hyper- and trans- urbanizations in big Asian and African cities (or agglomerations), and identifies the obscene counterpoint represented by the proliferation of what Mike Davis and Daniel Monk called “evil paradises”. These studies complement each other to provide an overview not only of the monstrous contrasts that define the contemporary world but the original context of what would later be called “military urbanism” (a time where cities are under siege, with scanning systems, and target populations are tracked, monitored, preventively contained, and addressed according to risk profiles).

In order to analyze China and its megalomaniac fantasy of a future that purports to be infinite, Otília Arantes starts the volume by searching the past for the collective aspirations (of achievement or overcoming) that nurtured the history of the modern capitalist society, the dreamworlds that fostered the daydreams of prosperity of the people from both the Eastern and Western blocs of the Cold War. When they awoke from that utopic dream of mass production and consumption, they had to face the harsh reality: on the one hand, the huge expansion of the “planet of slums” closing the urban frontier; on the other hand, the concealment of its contradictions by the “follies” of the Star System in architecture. The reference to Benjamin in the first essay is directly related to the observation of the phenomenon that generally accompanies these great mass events: the collective dream of bliss, happiness, and power. This colonization of dreams, which started in the nineteenth century, was a fact that, despite his focus on an awakening to the revolution, Benjamin did not ignore. Today, according to Arantes, the belief that the reshaping of the world by the industrialization-urbanization would lead the masses to paradise has crumbled. The two essays show two types of dreamworlds compared at the very moment of a false awakening—the second one focusing on cities of the so-called third world.

Keywords: China, Dreamworld, Hyper-spatiality, Hyper-urbanization, Lagos, Luna Park, Mike Davis, Moscow, Delirious New York, Evil Paradises, Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, Perestroika, Planet of Slums, Rem Koolhaas, Rockefeller Center, Ruins of the future, American dream, Star system in architecture, Stephen Graham, Susan Buck-Morss, Susan Sontag, Skyscraper, Trans-urbanization, Military Urbanism, Walter Benjamin

A atualidade do pensamento de Roberto Schwarz

2021-10-03T10:59:42-03:00

“Trata-se apenas de um crítico literário”, esta observação é repetida várias vezes ao longo da fala de Paulo Arantes, observação, aliás, nada ingênua e que coloca o público para pensar nos motivos que o levam a se reunir em torno da figura simples e desajustada de um crítico literário da periferia. Isto porque, ao relembrar a obra de Roberto Schwarz para averiguar a atualidade de seu pensamento, Arantes retoma ao centro de sua fala o papel duplo do crítico na história brasileira. Roberto Schwarz pertence a tradição crítica que ganhou corpo local nos anos em que a ideia de formação era uma obsessão nacional. Herdeiro, portanto, de certa postura que remonta a figura de Joaquim Nabuco em sua radicalidade temporária em plena escravidão. O surto de “radicalismo” que acomete e forma essa tradição crítica é descrito por Paulo Arantes como parte dos movimentos ascensionais da socialização brasileira capitalista, que visava a construção nacional e a superação mínima do subdesenvolvimento, enquanto críticos ocupados em pensar a sério soluções nacionais dentro da ordem econômica vigente, como se essa fosse nossa única chance. Crítica afirmativa, portanto, que contava com um horizonte de expectativa sempre inflado pela promessa civilizatória. Tudo medido, para Arantes, é a partir da leitura de Antonio Candido, em sua Dialética da malandragem, que Schwarz é posto diante do negativo nacional que revelaria certo ordenamento mundial, de modo que a balança entre a ordem e a desordem, vista na literatura de Manoel Antonio de Almeida, descortinasse para o jovem crítico literário a possível intervenção brasileira em um capítulo internacional. Schwarz que começou sua trajetória fazendo crítica imanente (de fôlego, bom que se diga), ignorando a princípio a matéria local, porém inspirado no que havia de melhor no marxismo Europeu, descobre o negativo da sociedade brasileira e passa a escrever como quem entrega ao capitalismo sua verdade autodestrutiva. Como se Roberto Schwarz estivesse sim amparado por um longo percurso de mediações, mas dá através de seus textos o passo político necessário à crítica: sua radicalidade é a não conciliação. O simples crítico literário, de repente, é o autor da análise de conjuntura mais contundente da ditadura militar, longe da economia, longe da sociologia. Cultura e Política 1964 - 1969 revela ao leitor um processo em curso, que corre às margens do comunismo de caserna do PCB, bem como ao largo das expectativas desenvolvimentistas. Foi também o crítico literário quem ressaltou a luta armada como um dos horizontes possíveis para o Brasil daquela época. A tradição inaugurada por Schwarz é então outra, é do crítico literário de intervenção, capaz de sintetizar alguns pontos de virada entre a imaginação e a sociedade. Por isso, também foi possível a ele destacar Estorvo, de Chico Buarque, como o sismógrafo de uma era de gangsterização e colapso do ideal modernizador. Ele também anunciou um Fim de Século calamitoso que foi recebido como exagero de um marxista catastrofista e que agora se faz sentir por todos, diariamente, no próprio ar que se respira.

Roberto Schwarz, ao lado de Antonio Candido, é sem dúvida um dos maiores críticos literários da atualidade. Nesse encontro realizado na Unifesp-Guarulhos em 2017 e organizado por estudantes, temos uma análise do pensamento e importância de Roberto Schwarz nos dias de hoje feita pelos professores Leandro Pasini e Paulo Arantes, com mediação de Sílvio Rosa Filho. Organizadores: Leonardo Sandrin Botelho e Cesar Marins com o apoio do grupo Teoria crítica brasileira -EFLCH

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: Roberto Schwarz, Antonio Candido, Modernização, Radicalismo, Joaquim Nabuco, Luta Armada, Ditadura Militar, Teoria Crítica, Crítica Literária, Cultura e Política, Dialética da Malandragem, Formação, Caio Prado Jr, Antonio Calado, Lulismo, Colonialismo, Collor, Imperialismo, Militarização, Estorvo, Fim de Século.

Among the Wreckage of the Present

2021-09-22T14:51:26-03:00

Pondering in the eye of the storm of what might be the “worst crisis in our national history”, Paulo Arantes gropes around among the ruins of a “perfect storm” in an attempt to understand what is new and bad in the new Brazilian time. More than shedding light on the arguments presented in O novo tempo do mundo (literally, “The new time of the world”), which had just been released, these four (and a half) interviews conducted between 2014 and 2015 deploy the book’s categories and principles to diagnose an entire collapsing cycle in real time. Contrary to the good old progressivism from which the left has become almost indistinguishable, he insists that what was falling apart at that decisive moment was not an expanding horizon; what was actually happening was the aggravated confirmation of a brutal decrease in expectations that had been deepening in the preceding decades. This is because, for us Brazilians, the downfall of our half century of developmentalist modernization and shift into the new global era of decreasing expectations coincided with the excitement caused by the process of ending the military dictatorship. Seen from this perspective, the two decades of PSDB and PT administrations could only be read as a unit, as part of the same emergency contraption to stop social disintegration. Without overlooking, among other things, the curious (to say the least) fact that neoliberalism here is an invention of the left, Arantes focuses on the main absurdity: that, in this presentist regime of reduced horizons, politics has become synonym for mere management—of barbarism, in this case. Therefore, it is not surprising that it was in the antipolitics that broke out in the streets in June 2013 that we saw the re-emergence of that essential channeling of human expectations. By the way, as Arantes remembers, this is also the key to understanding the novelty of the insurgent right that, not incidentally, is now starting to show its teeth.

(Review by Artur Renzo)

Keywords: Impeachment; Dilma Rousseff; Lula; Petismo; Workers’ Party (PT); PSDB; PSOL; Human Rights; June 2013; new right; presentism; new world order; decreasing expectations; punitivism; management; World Cup; Wolfgang Streeck; Loïc Wacquant; crisis; wait; time; politics; dictatorship; coup; 1964; developmentalism; progressivism; polarization; cultural wars

O que 68 tem a dizer sobre nós?

2021-09-14T08:30:49-03:00

Em O que 68 tem a dizer sobre nós?, Paulo Arantes dá início à conversa invertendo a preposição, não se trata do que 1968 diz sobre nós, mas, sobretudo, para nós, no Brasil de 2018. Partindo do 68 Europeu, Arantes analisa três conjunturas distintas para viabilizar a discussão, a saber, o maio Francês e suas consequências imediatas; o chamado Anos de Chumbo na Itália e, por fim, o encontro tardio entre a juventude alemã e o pensamento da Escola de Frankfurt. O mote da análise não está tanto nas movimentações aguerridas da época, mas em certo espectro do passado onde os levantes pareciam buscar escopo. A França desfrutava de promissora tranquilidade e avanço nos direitos trabalhistas desde o pós guerra, o welfare state parecia ter afastado o monstro fascista para longe, reconstruindo desde então o potencial civilizador do capitalismo. Em trinta anos de crescimento e pacificação capitalista (essa possível apenas pela retaguarda da bomba atômica), o antifascismo dos aliados foi engavetado, dando como página virada da história o tempo do horror. Os blocos rígidos, divididos pela guerra fria, tratavam de administrar e salvaguardar o bem estar social de suas populações, garantindo a normalidade. O ponto de virada, portanto, parece ocorrer quando a tranquilidade material do centro europeu deixa de garantir o contentamento da sociedade diante da vida: algo como um novo tédio contra o establishment sacode o chão francês. Diante da tentativa de “ataque aos céus”, a repressão recrudesceu, fazendo surgir dali um novo sinal de alerta contra o falecido: a repressão é o fascismo! A paz liberal acabou militarmente com o fascismo, mas não com suas raízes. A movimentação autônoma, por fora das organizações burocráticas stalinistas, passam a preocupar novamente os donos do poder, colocando na ordem do dia a discussão sobre o antifascismo. Embora a ideia do fascismo tenha se tornado um jargão comunista, algo como um excesso retórico durante o pós-guerra, alguns sismógrafos artísticos (entre eles Bergmann, Bertolucci e Visconti) apontavam na virada dos anos 60 para os 70 os perigos da paz social militarizada. Na Itália, em resposta à sua modernização tardia e relâmpago, algo anômalo brota do desenvolvimentismo: uma espécie de transgressão de extrema direita, sustentada pela máfia e por poderes paramilitares, se junta à democracia cristã para fazer vingar em território atrasado a sociedade de consumo. Uma junção entre capitalismo de gestão, exclusão, militarismo e gangsters. Arantes chama atenção ao termo de Pasolini para definir o período italiano: trata-se, para o cineasta e ensaísta, de uma mutação antropológica, que passa a ordenar um novo fascismo. O que é sustentado, também, pela redescoberta alemã dos textos radicais de Adorno, Horkheimer e Marcuse, que já apontavam antes do fim da guerra à impossibilidade de expulsar o fascismo do mundo, como se ele fosse sempre a saída última para o esgotamento da burguesia. O esgotamento político do início do século XX, resolvido pela brutal gestão modernizadora fascista, agora encontrou um novo teto: o colapso econômico e ambiental do capitalismo o encaminha para um novo período de extinções, como se um novo corvo ecoasse que não há solução para uma civilização que já se autodestruiu.

Palestra de encerramento do simpósio “O que 68 tem a dizer sobre nós?” pelo Prof. Paulo Eduardo Arantes, em 30/11/2018 - Prédio de Letras - FFLCH - USP

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: Maio de 68; Fascismo; Antifascismo; Adorno; Marcuse; Horkheimer, Welfare State; pós-guerra; Pasolini; Berlusconi; Máfia; Itália; Alemanha; Autonomismo; Consumo; Extinção; Crise ambiental; Crise econômica; Modernização; Brasil, 2018; Primeira Guerra Mundial, Segunda Guerra Mundial; Bomba atômica.

Horizontes brasileiros: de qual estamos falando?

2021-08-31T18:25:26-03:00

Paulo Arantes, a convite da Casa de Cultura do Parque, fora provocado a discutir sobre os “horizontes brasileiros”, tema complexo que exigiu um debate mais detido: Afinal, sobre “qual horizonte estamos falando?”, indaga o expositor. Paulo reconstrói o conceito de horizonte, perpassando por nomes centrais da sociologia, história e filosofia ocidental, entre eles: Kant, Husserl, Ernst Bloch, Gadamer, Koselleck, Benedict Anderson e outros. Sua intenção foi a de reconectar a palavra ao seu sentido histórico-político, demonstrando sua força simbólica e seus diversos sentidos, sensíveis às clivagens de classe constitutivas da realidade social brasileira. Ou seja, não há horizonte (de expectativas) e projetos de país que não sejam demarcados pela posição social que grupos e instituições ocupam no cenário nacional. Neste sentido, dois campos sociais se confrontam. Visto de cima, o horizonte brasileiro orientado para o futuro se apresenta como um projeto de construção nacional, a famosa passagem da Colônia à Nação. Visto de baixo, é experimentado pelas classes despossuídas como o horizonte sem luz de um povo embrutecido pela opressão e destinado a perecer nas trevas, conforme se lê num manifesto de operárias-costureiras em greve. Embora antagônicas e díspares, é feita de expectativas, invariavelmente condenadas à frustração pela sua condição periférica, a matéria prima da energia política que move as duas esferas em permanente colisão.

Há, porém, uma zona de contato entre ambas, operada por uma certa classe média, cujo radicalismo, ora de ocasião, ora sistemático, Antonio Candido estudou. Daí o fenômeno inusitado, e que ocupará boa parte da exposição, representada por uma franja esclarecida no topo da horrível pirâmide social brasileira. Nesse momento, Paulo Arantes abre um parêntese para um inusual estudo de caso, na figura do que chamou “pensamento Piauí”, em cujo epicentro localiza e analisa um diagnóstico de época formulado pelo cineasta e ensaísta João Moreira Salles a certa altura, no ano de 2007, acerca justamente de um encurtamento do horizonte nacional e do rebaixamento das ambições do país, que a seu ver se tornaram medíocres, em contraste com os supostos anos dourados da década desenvolvimentista. Juízo paradoxal, pois naquela quadra a grande mídia internacional anunciava e celebrava o taking off do país do pré-sal e da nova classe C empreendedora.

Passando ao polo oposto, dos desclassificados, cuja alienação violenta remonta à herança colonial, Arantes evocará, através de um rápido sobrevoo pela Tradição Crítica brasileira, as sementes de utopia plantadas em seu solo pela presença intermitente das promessas e frustrações de uma sociedade do trabalho que nunca se completa.

Ao longo de toda a exposição paira a redescoberta dolorosa, propiciada pela explosão brutal do bolsonarismo, do estado de guerra permanente que vem a ser, e sempre foi, a vida social no capitalismo. Daí a inesperada e paradoxal apreciação do renascimento do sentimento antifascista em alguns setores esclarecidos da burguesia brasileira, mesmo na hora de sua dominação sem limites.

(Resenha de Rafael Cosentino)

Palavras- Chave: Antonio Candido, Benedict Anderson, Classes sociais, Ernst Bloch, Escravidão, Gadamer, Guerra Permanente, Horizontes de expectativas, Husserl, João Moreira Salles, Kant, Koselleck, Nação, Nacionalidade, “Pensamento Piauí”, Projeto de país, Revolução, Simone Weil, Trabalho, Utopia, Violência estrutural.

The Meaning of Formation

2021-08-15T20:01:32-03:00

The concept of formation has been “a true national obsession”, we are told right at the beginning of The Meaning of Formation. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Brazilian society and its structures were dissected in historical-economic, anthropological, and aesthetic terms by intellectuals who, each in their own way, sought to establish and understand a peripheral, displaced, and (consequently) different national situation. Therefore, Caio Prado Jr.’s Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (The Formation of Contemporary Brazil) outlined for the first time, in (consequently) Marxist terms, the social structure bequeathed by colonization; Celso Furtado’s Formação Econômica do Brasil (The Brazilian Economic Formation) explained the meanings of backwardness and the deadlocks of underdevelopment; and Raymundo Faoro’s Formação do Patronato Político Brasileiro (The Formation of Brazilian Political Patronage) revealed the social strata in which our political elites were anchored. It was in 1959, a few years before the 1964 coup d'état, that Antonio Candido gathered this accumulated intellectual experience from the social sciences and Brazilian essay-writing (including the pioneering works of Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque) and published Formação da Literatura Brasileira (The Formation of Brazilian Literature), bringing those same concerns to the field of cultural analysis and inaugurating the critical tradition that this book addresses to investigate its assumptions.

From Antonio Candido to Roberto Schwarz, ‘formation’ meant a remarkable leap in the cultural and political understanding of Brazil, emphasizing the need to analyze how the aesthetic formalization process of a specific historical experience takes place. As part of this new tradition—contemporary of the already stabilized speculative achievements, Modernism, the subversive imagery of Cinema Novo, the debate over the meanings of abstraction in the visual arts, and the boldness of the New Architecture—and as a result of that leap, the role of the critic guided by what we can now call the dialectic ideals of the concept of formation was redefined: understanding the vicissitudes of the cultural experience in the periphery of capitalism by transcending expert analysis (but not dismissing it) in order to respect the relative independence of the object, collecting the dispersed and fragmented knowledge from the humanities in the contemporary context.

It is within this tradition and these assumptions that the reader will find The Meaning of Formation, a study that analyzes the figuration of the Brazilian cultural experience in three different fields (literature, painting, and architecture) by addressing aspects of those nineteenth- and twentieth-century artistic movements as well as the views and attitudes of their first main critics: Antonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza, and Lúcio Costa. In this book, the authors review, through a very careful reading, how our best critics and our best artists created ways to overcome a certain state of dependence, seeking to establish, based on previous historical examples, an evolutionary line to clarify the specific driving forces of the Brazilian cultural life—which is occasionally defined here as the Brazilian difference. After all, this is what this book is about, the “gradual figuration of a society depressed by its own image”, a society where, both in the past and in the present, letters, shapes, backgrounds, plans, and monuments are looking for a country.

(Flap text written by Francisco Alambert)

This virtual edition of The Meaning of Formation partially reproduces the edition published by Paz e Terra in 1997. The essays on Antonio Candido and Lúcio Costa have been kept in their entirety; the essay on Gilda de Mello e Souza does not include the appendixes (which can be found in the book devoted to Gilda, published as part of this collection). Also included at the end is an interview by Ricardo Musse about the book from the 4^th issue of Praga magazine (1997).

Keywords:

Formation, National Reality, Brazilian Illustration, Grupo Clima, Antonio Candido, José Veríssimo, Eliot, Lúcia Miguel Pereira, Sílvio Romero, Gilda de Mello Souza, Lúcio Costa, Brazilian Painting, Almeida Jr, Mário de Andrade, Roberto Schwarz, Brazilian Modern Architecture, Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia.

The Sense of Dialectics in the Brazilian Intellectual Experience

2021-03-13T21:29:46-03:00

What are the premises of a truly dialectic criticism? This is the question that Paulo Arantes seeks to answer in this book from 1992, where he analyzes the works of two major Brazilian critics: Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz. The interest goes far beyond the literary field. The author contextualizes the critics’ writings, discusses the explanatory theories on Brazilian reality developed at that time, and demonstrates how, in their most distinctive works, Candido and Schwarz sensed a structural homology between literary work and social organization that had a great impact on the study of culture in a peripheral country. As the author puts it: “For the first time, cultural criticism, based on a review of the implications of a dual society, thoroughly examined the artistic-ideological effects of capitalism’s uneven and combined development.”

Bento Prado Jr., in a review published here as an afterword, states that “with Paulo Arantes’s The sense of dialectics (O sentimento da dialética), we have not only a great reflection on Brazilian literary historiography. Much more than that (which is no small feat), it is the Brazilian philosophy exceeding the narrow boundaries of its relatively ‘technical’ seminars (which usually ignore that the essence of philosophical ‘techniques’ is never really technical) to dive into the ‘experience’ and Brazil itself”.

Keywords: Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, education, dialectics, duality, dualism, marxism, Brazilian literature, literary criticism, Brazil, national consciousness, colonial system, slavery, trickery, criticism of cultural, underdevelopment, dependency, periphery, Machado de Assis, Aluísio Azevedo, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Novais, USP.

The World as a Target

2021-07-12T21:35:34-03:00

We have been living in a targeted world for a while. We ourselves are targets of countless enterprises, from the most innocently commercial to the most nebulous undercover operations. A simple search on Google (not accidentally, a colossal machine for ‘finding targets’) will surely show a million occurrences, mostly in languages that operate in this same world full of targets. This inflation must say something about the society in which we live and the direction it is going. More than one author has said that we are turning into targeted societies. In the meantime, another theorist has shown that we have been living in an age where the world itself has become a target. Since we cannot directly face, speaking as an open and merely conceptual field, the hypothesis that we now live in a targeted society beyond discipline and control, as respectively put by Foucault and Deleuze, we can start by making a detour to test a variant of that hypothesis: the targeted society where we are struggling is the accumulation point of a long process of military definition of reality. If we can equally suggest that the so-called surveillance capitalism could be somehow explained by the expansion of that process of definition of reality, we might have sensed the specific tone of the tremendous war of the worlds that has been waged around us. In other words, to summarize this view of the world as a target, we can say that it is also an alternative hypothesis about contemporary militarization.

Keywords: Atomic Age, Emergency Age, Anthropocene, target audience, strategic bombing, militarization, security devices, Surveillance Capitalism, military metaphysics, Wright Mills, Veblen, Adorno, Virilio, targeted society.

A desconstrução que estamos vivendo

2021-07-26T18:02:36-03:00

Desconstrução é palavra-chave para desvendar a originalidade substancial do presente momento brasileiro e mundial. É esta a aposta de Paulo Arantes ao refazer o itinerário da “ideologia francesa” a fim de investigar por que a terminologia desconstrutivista tem pipocado no discurso e na prática de figuras da nova direita como Steve Bannon e Jair Bolsonaro. Sempre atento à perspectiva da periferia e à articulação histórica entre processo material e discurso filosófico, ele lembra que no Brasil já somos pioneiros de uma “desconstrução realmente existente” – ao menos segundo a boutade de Roberto Schwarz, que ao comentar o desembarque do desconstrucionismo literário entre nós, sublinhou a ironia de que era a própria matéria histórica da periferia em desintegração social que parecia imitar o novo jargão filosófico. Eis o pano de fundo para historiar como o frisson apocalíptico original da chamada “virada linguística”, com sua ruptura radical com o referente, foi gradualmente se cristalizando em torno de certos fundamentos “indesconstrutíveis” até se ancorar em identidades vitimizadas cuja reparação deve ser administrada politicamente. Terminado esse percurso paradoxal da “ideologia francesa”, fica evidente a novidade da encrenca que enfrentamos: se, no plano da teoria crítica, “desconstrução” vai desaguar em política de defesa dos Direitos Humanos, Justiça Social e governamentalidade progressista, seu viés apocalíptico inicial agora reaparece na intransigência aceleracionista do ataque da nova direita ao “Estado administrativo”. Por isso talvez não seja mesmo nenhum desatino falar na “revolução que estamos vivendo”. No último movimento da conferência, Arantes acrescenta uma pista para decifrar, para além das guerras culturais, o sentido da poeira desconstrucionista na qual estamos submersos: a idade histórica da desconstrução, com sua autorreflexividade e aniquilamento referencial, é precisamente a da Era Atômica.

Transmitida ao vivo online, a conferência foi dada como aula inaugural do Curso de Mestrado Acadêmico em Filosofia da Universidade Estadual do Ceara-Uece, no dia 13 de maio de 2021, e contou com mediação de Gustavo Costa.

(Resenha de Artur Renzo)

Palavras-chave: desconstrução, desconstrucionismo, ideologia francesa, virada linguística, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Steve Bannon, Jair Bolsonaro, bolsonarismo, Vladimir Putin, Brexit, Era Atômica, Direitos Humanos, nova direita, Alt Right, identitarismo, teoria da justiça social, justiça reparativa, pós-verdade, privilégios, aceleracionismo, Estado administrativo.

Left and right in the mirror of the NGOs

2021-07-21T20:01:49-03:00

In this article, Paulo Arantes questions the “citizenship rights” lexicon used by companies and government authorities linked to the social field—a simulacrum system, since it enables the shuffling of roles and camouflages the real interests of the social segments involved, in a game of "interchangeable things". Examples of that language used by the NGOs include: "civil society", "social spaces", "commitment" and "engagement" among the "actors", leading to "citizen participation". From the corporate field, we have "business experience", "complicity", "engagement with your surroundings", "partners" and "market interlocutors", "citizen company". This lexicon is part of the compensatory policies recommended by the sponsors of the ongoing economic and social restructuring led by the World Bank. This framework of changes includes a new conception of the role of the state, with the reduction of a specific portion of its functions—mainly that of social policy enforcer—engendered under the auspices of Keynesianism. The implementation of these policies is now delegated to "civil society partners", non-profit entities, and relies on transfers of public funds. (...) They advocate a managerially lean Voluntary Sector, a facilitating/partner state that should "strategically" withdraw as soon as non-governmental organizations "demonstrate" the superiority of their comparative advantages—a victory that required little effort, since there was no one else with whom to compete, except for the scrap prepared for demonstrative purposes. As for the companies, Arantes now identifies the existence of "a schizophrenic crisis, since they act—but above all speak—in a way that implies they are fundamentally non-profit social organizations", without really losing their intrinsic commercial tendency. Companies capitalize on the "voluntary" work that they induce their employees to do with "communities", transforming it into a competitive advantage by adding the "citizen company" reputation to the products and/or services they put on the market. The phenomenon can be summarized by the distorted usage of the words it denominates, or as Vera da Silva Telles said, an "astonishing semantic slippage", which contextualizes it and exposes its intention to turn the world "upside down", clouding the mind and causing confusion. This lexicon therefore fulfills the functions of ideology, seeking to conceal the unequal distribution of wealth and power within capitalist society.

(From Maria Rosa Lombardi’s review)

Keywords: NGO, State reform, citizen company, civil society, voluntary sector, social organizations, World Bank, partnerships, citizenship rights, marketing, target audience, managerial logic, empowerment, privatization, language, semantic slippage.

Lucio Costa's Summary

2021-07-17T19:42:13-03:00

In 2002, Lucio Costa would have been 100 years old. The Mais! supplement from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published a special issue as a tribute to the architect and urban planner on January 24, including this article by Otília Arantes. In “Lucio Costa as a Summary”, Otília resumes and further develops the main argument of another text, also published in Folha on April 12, 1996, which reviewed the book Registro de uma vivência and was included, with a few changes, in The Meaning of Formation (Sentido da Formação, Paz e Terra,1997). The main argument was that Costa retells the history of Brazilian architecture from the point of view of an “already-formed” and “successful” architecture, in the sense that its cycle was completed in a short period of time, from the Ministry of Education to the Pampulha Modern Ensemble or the Brazilian Pavilion in New York, culminating in Brasília. From independent manifestations to the system, less than two decades went by—an impressive apparatus indeed, especially for the technical expertise it demonstrated. A “miracle” that would baffle foreign critics. Formation as part of the Brazilian cultural system, in the sense used by Antonio Candido in Formação da Literatura Brasileira (The Formation of Brazilian Literature)—and by Caio Prado and Celso Furtado, about the economic formation). It is, therefore, about national formation, against the ever-present background of colonial heritage that should be overcome. At the same time, as a dependent country, the external inflow remains dominant, insomuch that its update also reveals the inconsistency of its origin. A historical mismatch that was translated into Brazilian architecture as a certain formalism, whose aesthetic bias paradoxically revealed the truth about Modern Architecture in its matrix—its “false bottom”, so to speak. As it turns out, Lucio Costa, historian and leading figure in this story, might be who bests summarizes the contradictions and illusions of the Modern Project. At the same time, his career—and how he sees it—is surely the key to the author’s interpretation of the Modern Movement.

Keywords: Lucio Costa, Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, National School of Fine Arts, Modern Architecture, Brasília, History of Architecture, Formation, Antonio Candido.

O mundo-fronteira

2021-07-09T22:46:52-03:00

Paulo Arantes explora a imagem original de fronteira que nasce com a modernidade e reflete sobre seus desdobramentos na atualidade geopolítica. O ponto de partida é a tese do sociólogo polonês Zygmunt Bauman de que os atentados de 11 de setembro de 2001 teriam marcado o fim simbólico da “era do espaço” e inaugurado uma era de vulnerabilidade permanente que ele denomina “terra de fronteira global”. Arantes recupera a teoria schmittiana de “nomos da terra” para explicar a transformação em curso. Interessa-lhe sobretudo o poder de desmistificação do pensamento liberal moderno que a franqueza do jurista alemão reacionário oferece. Afinal, sua teoria da vinculação intrínseca entre ordenamento jurídico e enraizamento espacial permite reconhecer na descoberta do Novo Mundo e na experiência colonial a precondição da instauração do jus publicum eruropaeum, do reconhecimento mútuo de Estados soberanos europeus e da consequente racionalização e descriminalização da guerra próprios da constituição do capitalismo. Na contramão da euforia globalizante da ideologia contemporânea, a teoria de Schmitt revela como o núcleo orgânico do capitalismo e sua periferia colonial surgem juntos e devem terminar separados, pois o fosso entre ambas seria constitutivo. A segunda consequência extraída é de que se o fundamento do estado de direito na Europa é seu avesso no ultramar, esse processo também é coetâneo de um pensamento por linhas globais. É nesse contexto que Arantes procura refletir sobre a novidade identificada por Bauman e já intuída por Schmitt no pós-guerra com o surgimento de uma potência nacional fora da Europa e que passa a reivindicar autoridade sobre um espaço já não é mais nacional. Demarcando uma nova linha global denominada “hemisfério ocidental”, os EUA inaugurariam também um novo conceito de soberania que despreza a antiga noção de anexação territorial e desarticula a relação intrínseca entre direito, Estado e territorialidade – processo que remonta tanto ao esgotamento da sangrenta expansão na frontier estadunidense quanto à vitória bélica avassaladora da jovem nação americana no desfecho das guerras mundiais às portas da Era Atômica. Os atentados contra o World Trade Center e os desmandos da política externa do Governo Bush aparecem assim como apenas as manifestações mais recentes e vistosas desse novo paradigma histórico em que tudo tornou-se fronteira e cuja marca é a generalização do estado de sítio.

Realizada no dia 18 de agosto de 2004, a conferência fez parte do programa “Balanço do Século XX” promovido pelo Espaço Cultural CPFL, no módulo: “A teoria pós-moderna, a contemporaneidade e a vingança da história”, com curadoria de Bento Prado Jr.

(Resenha de Artur Renzo)

Palavras-chave: guerra, soberania, colonização, liberalismo, Estado, globalização, Carl Schmitt, nomos da terra, Zygmunt Bauman, era do espaço, fronteira, linha global, 11 de setembro de 2001, Estados Unidos, estado de sítio, estado de exceção, Novo Mundo, imperialismo.

The Brazilian Fracture of the World

2021-02-15T19:36:35-03:00

In this essay, Paulo Arantes goes back to the past of the Brazilian future, namely, to a recurring topic among the national intelligentsia, some kind of compensatory mythology formed by the set of historical events that would have promised a great future for Brazil. In other words, it is the assumption that, despite our increasingly explicit miseries, we had created forms of sociability and culture that would eventually be seen as vigorous alternatives to the forms of sociability created by capitalism, while also feeling that we are always behind the pace of the developed world, especially when it comes to the industrial and technological revolutions. To a certain extent, it was like we had an appointment with the future and something to teach the world, despite our extremely cruel conservative modernization. The future, however, proved to be much more problematic. What happened was some kind of cunning of history. When the compensatory mythology of Brazil, “the country of the future”, faded away, the very way capitalism was implemented in Brazil, with its discrepancies between the archaic and the modern, order and disorder, liberalism and slavery, the polarization and dualism of marginalized individuals, always integrated as well as “deterritorialized”—all those aspects that seemed to prevent Brazil from reaching its mythical future—started to be seen as characteristics of first-world developed countries, in times of globalization, through the term “Brazilianization”. What could be our contribution to the world, the “singularity” of our culture and our forms of sociability, which are never fully gentrified, became the “new spirit of capitalism”. Paulo Arantes faces this turnaround in which Brazil becomes the future of the world, but going backwards, as an irreparable social tragedy, a horizontal class struggle (since those on the top have not been affected), with cities structured like fiefdoms, mass incarceration, and encouraged delinquency among the economic elites, who show no sense of guilt as they commit crimes in collusion with the financial market. The borderline between order and disorder, our inability to deal with basic rules of civility, the radical class division: everything has become a global rule. In other words, the “dialectics of roguery” now acts on a global scale. (From Marcos Lacerda’s presentation to the Portuguese edition.)

Originally published in 2001 as a chapter in José Luis Fiori and Carlos Medeiros (org.), Polarização mundial e crescimento. Petrópolis: Vozes, Col. Zero à Esquerda, 2001; then in Paulo Arantes. Zero à Esquerda. São Paulo: Conrad, 2004. And as a book in Portugal: A fratura brasileira do mundo. Lisboa. Cadernos Ultramares, 2019.

Keywords: Brazil, risk society, suburbs, underdevelopment, dependency, colony, dualization, inequality, progress, patriotism, polarization, integration, exclusion, violence, labor, disintegration, resentment, Brazilianization, globalization, political economy, cities, Antonio Candido, Celso Furtado, Caio Prado Junior, Francisco de Oliveira, Roberto Schwarz, Gilberto Freyre, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes, Sérgio Bianchi, Ermínia Maricato, Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Lind, Ulrich Beck, Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Edward Saïd, Manuel Castells, Robert Castel, United States, France.

1964-2018: A que ponto chegamos?

2021-07-26T15:57:51-03:00

Às vésperas do dia 28 de outubro de 2018, quando o então candidato Jair Messias Bolsonaro foi eleito presidente, Paulo Arantes é convidado a expor um panorama político entre dois “golpes” (1964 - 2018). Deste modo, Arantes busca reconhecer que entre o golpe em sentido forte, como o de 1964 e o golpe em sentido fraco, como o que se estabeleceu por vias legais em 2016, há uma “Era geológica” que os separam. Importante para o diagnóstico que aqui se desenha, então, é colocar em pauta as diferenças entre um e outro processo, já que a semelhança imediata entre eles ofusca a novidade do caminho político posto em marcha naquele momento: a dificuldade em ler a presente conjuntura está justamente em encarar as continuidades e as rupturas do governo Bolsonaro com o golpe militar de 1964. À luz de O 18 de brumário de Luís Bonaparte, análise feita por Karl Marx no calor de 1848, Arantes vai além do diagnóstico inicial do texto: não se trata de encaixar como uma fórmula histórica à realização de um golpe o jargão “primeiro como tragédia, depois como farsa”, mas sim de encontrar o movimento real que transforma um período insurgente numa catástrofe contrarrevolucionária. A semelhança entre as Jornadas de Junho de 1848, na França, e as Jornadas de Junho de 2013, no Brasil, estaria então na sua “temporalidade política decrescente”, onde a insurgência popular, por não ter como se realizar à esquerda, é abocanhada pelo seu oposto. O desgaste democrático evidenciado ainda no governo Dilma enseja o “despertar” de uma extrema direita nas ruas, e se em 2013 foi possível que a presidente acionasse a “Garantia da lei e da ordem” contra os manifestantes, já em 2016, essa mesma garantia de lei e ordem a coloca para fora do jogo parlamentar. É nesse cenário, onde os porões da ditadura se encontram com a legalidade institucional, que Bolsonaro surge. Diferente de 1964, o presente não rompe com os planos de governos anteriores, ele apenas acentua o gerenciamento militar da sociedade civil aberto pelo “neoliberalismo inclusivo” do governo petista. Quando o General Brilhante Ustra é conclamado herói por um presidente eleito democraticamente, é preciso encarar que ele rompe não só com a “democracia”, mas com a parte progressista que os próprios democratas guardaram da ditadura.

Fala realizada em uma edição especial do “seminário das quartas”, no auditório da geografia no dia 24.10.2018, poucos dias antes do segundo turno das eleições. Depois da fala, houve um extenso debate, que não está registrado mas deve ser publicado em breve. A gravação é de Carolina de Roig Catini.

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: Golpe, Impeachment, Militares, Eleições 2018, Jornadas de Junho, Junho de 2013, Jair Bolsonaro, PT, 1964, Ditadura Militar, 18 de brumário, Dilma Rousseff, Guerra Fria, Democracia, Direitos humanos, STF, Militarização, Ernesto Geisel, Desenvolvimentismo, Modernização, Imperialismo, Regressão, Progresso, Neoliberalismo progressista.

O último círculo: hipótese sobre a catástrofe brasileira

2021-07-26T16:02:32-03:00

Como sociedades colapsadas sobrevivem diante de uma situação impossível? Talvez apenas sob o signo da delinquência, como diria Schwarz. Delinquência com aparato de delinquência oficial, para se manter na paródia buarquiana. Segundo Arantes, a catástrofe brasileira está se armando ao menos há três décadas, e é preciso especular sobre sua origem para tentar lançar luz sobre a novidade do atual processo. Na companhia de Felipe Catalani, Henrique Costa, Silvia Viana, João Paulo Pimenta, Antônio Davi, entre outros jovens pensadores, ele sintetiza nosso período imediato, pré e pós eleições de 2018, como “a catástrofe entre duas esperas”, a saber, a espera por algo novo que se abre enquanto horizonte e a espera pelo fim apocalíptico. O interesse está em averiguar através de hipóteses recentes qual o caminho responsável por gestar o bolsonarismo, bem como dar conta da sombra histórica que o acompanha, espécie de fim último do ciclo de modernização nacional. Esta sombra, para Arantes, nos remete a 1964, tendo como abismo temporal uma ditadura modernizadora, em plena Guerra Fria, e uma eleição em pleno fim de linha institucional democrático. O abismo é este: o esgotamento capitalista reverte a conjuntura mundial, e as periferias, que antes rumavam em direção ao oásis do desenvolvimentismo, agora vagam diante dos destroços da modernização. Com a imagem dos nove círculos do inferno dantesco, a hipótese sobre “o último círculo” é, então, de que o exército brasileiro encontrou uma nova brecha de ação diante de uma sociedade pós-catastrófica, onde a anomia social, figurada por Chico Buarque em Estorvo, passa aos ares de institucionalização política e acelera a legalização do circuito de atrocidades locais. Somado à nossa bagagem periférica, tem-se o papel internacional do exército e sua moralidade no centro do capitalismo. Exemplar desse novo modelo de confiança generalizada nas forças armadas é a França, onde a população declara ter mais proximidade com os militares do que com os governantes eleitos. Outro imperativo militar que chama atenção mundial é o exército israelense, responsável pela “exportação” de know-how de tortura e controle de populações em estado de miséria. No Brasil, a Nova Era militar encontrou legitimidade na força disruptiva das ruas que, em sua indignação e direito cívico, elegeu um governo de extrema-direita. Governo esse que tem sua força garantida pela racionalidade de militares coerentes, prontos para intervir e gerenciar o fim de linha da economia capitalista. O que resta então à esquerda quando espreita com olhos de lince o esgotamento da era progressista do capital? Para Paulo Arantes, muita coisa, exceto o niilismo de caserna.

Fala realizada no dia 5 de junho de 2019 no auditório da Associação de Docentes da Unicamp (Adunicamp). Coordenado pela professora Carolina Catini, o evento foi realizado em parceria com o GEPECS – Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas “Educação e Crítica Social”.

(Resenha de Nathalia Colli)

Palavras-chave: eleições 2018, bolsonarismo, militares, Ditadura Militar, 1964, redemocratização, gestão, crise econômica, expectativas, tempo vivido, milícias, Empreendedorismo, General Villas-Boas, redes sociais, legalismo, sociedades pós-militares, Estorvo, modernização, formação.

The Train of Thought

2021-07-10T23:15:33-03:00

The Train of Thought (O Fio da Meada) was originally conceived as an afterword for Ressentimento da Dialética (The Resentment of Dialectics), where the author would explain why he chose to compile essays that had been written around fifteen years before about the intellectual origins of Hegelian dialectics reinterpreted according to the ABC of German Misery.

Actually, the afterword was just an excuse to co-opt the interviewers, who ingenuously and enthusiastically fell for the trick, lured by the challenge of participating in the book. But Paulo Arantes is not interviewable. Here he introduces a new style, the answer-question, through his diabolical ability to induce the questions he wishes to answer. This book might as well be considered as fiction, except for the true identity of the interviewers and the interviewee in the first part, and for the second part itself, which consists of ‘interviews’ previously published in the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo, and the magazine Teoria e Debate.

To paraphrase the author, this book could be called “The Drama of Conscience in Professional Philosophy”. Or, for the lay audience, it could be a manual called “Everything you always wanted to know about the Brazilian intellectual life but were afraid to ask”. And it is not only about Brazil: the reader will realize that there are more things in Brazil and the Rest of the World than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

The author and the book are so didactic and enlightening that, just like in children’s literature, it could be advised that “This book is suitable for reading aloud”.

(CR, ICC, and MEC, flap from the original edition, 1996)

Keywords: Adorno, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Antonio Cândido, Auerbach, Bento Prado, French overseas department, Philosophy in Brazil, USP Philosophy, Foucault, Giannotti, Hegel, French ideology, intellectuals, Marx, 1968 Revolution, Roberto Kurz, Roberto Schwarz, Ruy Fausto, Critical Theory, Brazilian critical tradition.

Mutating urban forms

2021-07-24T20:40:12-03:00

In this interview given to Vera Pallamin (School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo) as part of the thematic portfolio named “Produção e midiatização do espaço urbano no capitalismo contemporâneo” (Production and mediatization of the urban space in contemporary capitalism) created by Revista Eletrônica Internacional de Economia Política da Informação, da Comunicação e da Cultura (Eptic Journal, Jan-April 2014), Otília Arantes talks about the transformations that have been taking place in the shapes and appropriations of city spaces, especially in large urban centers—transformations to which old concepts like “public space” no longer apply, in an era of “extreme urban forms”. According to Arantes, this new urbanism is actually an anti-urbanism, or something beyond urbanism: a collapse of urbanity spreading through cities that no longer obey any plan except for limitless expansion, megalopolises that are continuously growing and self-destructing—the main examples being the big Chinese cities (studied by the author in the book Chai-na, EDUSP, 2011) and the big agglomerations of the “planet of slums” (as put by M. Davis), that is, from the compulsive gigantism of the eastern factoid cities to their pathological extremes, like the capital of Nigeria. Extreme urban forms that not only (obviously) designate their physical-spatial compositions and architectural contrasts, but also their abysmal social differences. We can say, therefore, that there is a convergence between the origins of the hyper-space of extreme urban forms and the geography of a “new war” of cities that are literally “besieged”.

In the second part of the interview, the topic proposed by Vera Pallamin is the political economy of culture, when the city culturalization that took place from the mid-twentieth century on not only turned culture into a central element in the configuration of social phenomena, but also converted the accumulation driven by capital-information, in an economy-politics of reproduction, into a cultural economy. When answering the question about the role of the architect in that context, Arantes returns to her arguments about the role of ostentatious architecture, especially cultural facilities, in the new strategies for the “requalification” of urban spaces in an image-centric era. (Please refer to Culture, Power and Money in City Management on this platform to read three texts from the 1990s.)

Keywords: Urban space, public space, extreme urban forms, megalopolis, Chinese cities, Lagos, Warfare State, Mike Davis, Koolhaas, Jameson, cultural economy, enterprise zones, collage city, Olympics, cultural facilities.

Culture, Power and Money in City Management

2021-06-27T13:36:02-03:00

This volume contains three texts/syntheses of different writings and presentations by Otília Arantes in the 1990s about concepts and strategies for city intervention that aimed to ‘regenerate’ cities as places ‘animated’ by the reactivation of their historic and symbolic value—that is, their ‘cultural side’. A ‘back to the city’ program that emerged after the Modern Movement to restore a public life that had been denied to citizens by the regulatory plans of the functional city. This is the main topic of the first essay, “A ideologia do lugar público na arquitetura contemporânea” (The public place ideology in contemporary architecture), where the author presents an overview of the theories that dominated the debate about cities in the second half of the twentieth century, which were driven, since the post-war period, by the desire to restore the urban fabric. The author addresses Camillo Sitte’s lessons against the “agoraphobia” of modern architects and urban planners, the defense of monuments, and the CIAM—especially the 1954 work about the cuore of the city—, as well as the exemplary restoration of Bologna and the different contextualisms (including critical regionalism)—to which she gives some credit, in line with Frampton’s optimism, just to subsequently raise questions about them in the second essay. In “Cultura da cidade, animação sem frase” (City culture, phraseless animation), essays on the ‘rediscovered city’ and related projects are scrutinized to show that such a reversal, employing a very up-to-date apparatus derived from post-structuralism, especially the deconstructionist theories, could barely hide an aestheticizing coexistence with more extreme forms of alienation, where everything should obey the key principle of “flexibilization”. The result was the primacy of design—from the urban layout to microspaces—and the corresponding type of symbolic representation. The emphasis was no longer predominantly technical (as it was in the previous period), resorting to the vast passe-partout realm of the ‘cultural’. When cities are seen as repertoires of symbols, everything is culture. In a world that is also dominated by the market, culture and money go hand in hand. Simultaneously, the induced process of ‘gentrification’ would gradually become closer to what the old identity ‘propagandists’ (mentioned in the previous essay) would call transculturalism, translocalism, nomadism, miscegenation, etc. Culture has become central in advanced capitalism, as Fredric Jameson emphasizes, with the paradoxical overlap between two instances that should typically be antagonistic. This is analyzed in the last essay, “Uma estratégia fatal, a cultura nas novas gestões urbanas” (A fatal strategy, culture in new urban managements). An apparent contradiction, as expressed by the title, indicating that culture is not reversing a detrimental process, but the opposite: culture is reinforcing it. At that stage (especially in the 1990s), planning made a comeback, now with a strategic focus to include cities in the global circuit of big businesses, which further aggravated the cultural bloat that prevailed since statesmen and investors started to break a new frontier of power and capital accumulation: the image business. The idea that ‘everything is culture’, from an era that seems to have started in the 1960s, would turn into what we may call MARKET CULTURALISM, with the (perhaps involuntary) convergence of two urban generations that until then considered themselves as opposites, the contextualists and the entrepreneurs, and an assimilation so complete that we could no longer distinguish between dissidents and adherents.

Keywords: Public area, squares, monuments, Place Theory, Contextualism, territory, Critical Regionalism, Benjamin, Simmel, Camillo Sitte, Cacciari, Cregotti, Rossi, Tendenza group, back to the city, gentrification, museums, Fredric Jameson, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Eisenman, Purini, Triennale di Milano, strategic planning, Market Culturalism, Cultural Turn, Paris, Barcelona, Bilbao, Lisbon, Berlin.

Mário Pedrosa

2021-06-21T14:43:24-03:00

In this book, Otília outlines the non-linear career path of one of Brazil’s greatest art critics, who closely followed, throughout most of the twentieth century, the comings and goings of international art. Mário Pedrosa, without ever giving up on political activism, never dissociated social revolution from the most advanced art, or independent art—which he did not always interpreted in the same way. In other words, despite his initial reservations about the modern art that, in the 1933 conference about Käthe Kollwitz, he identified as “a childish play of shapes”, he gradually realized, as a politician and revolutionary, how much the struggle for the liberation of humanity involved the preservation and expansion of the minimum initiative allowed in capitalist society. He started to see bourgeois art with different eyes, and tried to find the convergence, although incipient, between the art that he called hermetic, confined to aesthetic appearance, and the art that sought inspiration in the “dramatic fermentation” of society. When he returned from exile in 1945, although distanced from Trotskyism, he was still loyal to the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art’s motto—“The independence of art for the revolution, and the revolution for the complete liberation of art”—, starting a relentless battle for Brazil to abandon isolation and embrace the most advanced art from that time. This effort obviously met with typical obstacles of a peripheral country, where talking about artistic independence is at best problematic, but the breath of fresh air that it brought to Brazil forced our artists and critics to discuss the course that art—which was clearly going backwards in relation to the avant-garde achievements—would take among us. In defense of abstract art, he claimed that it provided symbols for an unprecedented visual language destined to ‘wake’ us from the everyday perceptual atony, hoping to shorten the distance that separates us from the “distant horizons of utopia”. Such an undertaking would culminate in Brasília—the great synthesis announced by the vanguards and reactivated by the abstract construction project—, a feat he not only recorded but also vehemently defended, promoting an international meeting of art critics in 1959 called “Brasília, síntese das artes” (Brasília: Synthesis of the Arts).

Originally published in 1991, on the 10th death anniversary of Mário Pedrosa, and republished in 2004, with the addition of “Atualidade de Mário Pedrosa” (The current relevance of Mário Pedrosa), a text written on Pedrosa’s centenary that places him among the greatest Brazilian critics. The latest edition has been kept in its entirety.

Keywords: Mário Pedrosa, Art Criticism, Proletarian Art, Abstract Art, Concretism, Neoconcretism, Gestalt, Postmodernism, Brazilian Architecture, Brasília, Biennials

A French Overseas Department

2021-06-13T13:49:53-03:00

This book, as attested by its subtitle—Studies on the formation of USP’s philosophical culture—, is an historiographic effort to retrace relatively continuous evolutionary lines; in other words, it is a project that favors formation periods. In this series—which includes Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (The Formation of Contemporary Brazil), by Caio Prado Jr., and Formação Econômica do Brasil (The Brazilian Economic Formation) by Celso Furtado, among others—, Arantes is closer to Antonio Candido’s theoretical horizon in Formação da Literatura Brasileira (The Formation of Brazilian Literature), both in its subject matter—the emergence of a cultural system that overcame sudden strays and independent intellectual curiosities and, through the intertwinement of works and specific problems, managed to “filter” the international supply of theories and models—and in its non-prescriptive description of the intellectual experience’s material accumulation through a process that collectively resulted in the historical productive force of an effective philosophical life. It is not, however, about the historical rearrangement of an accumulation period. This book itself refutes the idea of a philosophical continuity in Brazil, critically and thoroughly revisiting the main characteristics and outlines of its predecessors’ works (not only by Cruz Costa, the failed historian of Brazilian philosophy, but also by members of that 1960s generation that closed the formative cycle of Brazilian philosophy). Arantes broadens the scope of the philosophical essay-writing implemented by Bento Prado Jr. by adding Sociology and History to the dialogue proposed by the author between Literature and Philosophy, turning the expressive moment not into a way of revealing the rarefied space of language, but into an essential element of the (always mediated) investigation of culturally preformed objects. By examining the “belief in the connaturality between Philosophy and Literature”, Arantes deciphers not only the assumptions behind Bento Prado’s views—the theory of a “literary absolute”—but also reaches the “vulnerable core of Literature’s French ideology”. The two dimensions of this approach allow at once for interpretation of, on the one hand, European (or even world) culture, the core, and, on the other, Brazilian intellectual life, the periphery.

This approach results—to put it bluntly—from the Brazilian social and intellectual experience, which leads us, in a certain way, to the “sense of dialectics”. As that experience is transposed to the historical realm, we find the same concern as Giannotti and Ruy Fausto over the meaning of dialectics that gave rise to the Brazilian chapter—which this book somehow reinvents—of Western Marxism.

(Ricardo Musse, flap from the printed version)

Also available for download is the special issue of Caderno Mais! (from the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo – February 6,1994) devoted to the book launch, titled “A Aventura da Filosofia Paulista” (“The Adventure of ‘Paulista’ Philosophy”). It contains an interview with Paulo Arantes by Fernando de Barros e Silva and Vinícius Torres Freire.

Keywords: Philosophy and Literature, Philosophical culture, USP, French Mission, 1960s, Philosophy in Brazil, Formation, Structural Method, Jean Maugué, Víctor Goldschmitt, Martial Gueroult, Gérard Lebrun, Gilles-Gaston Granger, João Cruz Costa, Bento Prado Jr., José Arthur Giannotti, Oswaldo Porchat, Ruy Fausto.

Free public transport and popular mobilization

2021-03-31T13:11:39-03:00

On June 27, 2013, at the invitation of the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre – MPL), Paulo Arantes participated in an open class in front of the São Paulo City Hall (then under the administration of his former student, Fernando Haddad). Arantes set out to answer two questions. Firstly: “How do we explain that, in one week, a million people took the streets?”. And the second question was related to the motto of that huge mobilization, a metaphor based on the national anthem: “The sleeping giant on splendid cradle. If the giant has awoken, we should ask what dreams it had in these twenty years of deep sleep?”.

Besides watching the class, we recommend reading the ebook After June, peace will take over on this platform, which analyzes the meaning of the so-called “June Journeys”.

Keywords: June Journeys; MPL; activism; mobilization; civil rights; sit-in; black movement; public opinion; Brazilian people; public transport; popular power.

After June, Peace Will Take Over

2021-03-30T19:11:21-03:00

After June, peace will take over is the ironic title of the tour de force that ends our journey and addresses the relationship between pacification and insurgence. As he dismantles the clichés propagated by the right and the left—a street "riot” promoted by vandals that should be fumigated by security forces, or the childish leftism of a disorganized youth that has no direction and, consequently, will bring no results—, Arantes searches the recent literature on urban popular classes in Brazil and publications written by those who promoted the events to find ideas that allow building hypotheses about the genealogy of June 2013. The result is the most original interpretation of those events ever written so far. If we add the following (mostly indigestible) ingredients to the Brazilian pressure cooker: the Favela Pacification Program in Rio de Janeiro and its UPPs (Pacifying Police Units), which was actually a war strategy; the police violence against residents of urban outskirts; the forced removal required by mega-events; the public policies that, by promoting entrepreneurship among poor people, focus their energy on a governable activity while creating a residual group full of demands about to explode; the city fights put up by a generation of “insurgent citizens” demanding the democratization of urban land; the “agony of disposable labor, showing that the contemporary, religious-like capitalism has become a daunting and endless ‘ritual of suffering’”; the popular uprisings for free public transport; the syndrome of powerless civic participation; etc.—all topics have been analyzed by Arantes—, we may say that this set of phenomena creates a system and possibly explains the “new profanatory insurgence” that flooded the streets in June. (…) Facing this state of affairs and taking a step forward is the task of the new generation, who opened a door in June 2013.

(Excerpt from the introductory note written by Isabel Loureiro)

The book includes a link to the open class Tarifa zero e mobilização popular (Free public transport and popular mobilization) held on June 27, 2013, in the heat of the events, at the invitation of the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre – MPL), in front of the São Paulo City Hall. A summarized transcription of that class is also included in the e-book.

Keywords: June 2013, demonstrations, insurgence, uprising, pacification, youth, popular classes, workers, cities, labor, social suffering, transports, MPL, anti-capitalism, neoliberalism, democracy, social control, refusal, utopia, present time.

The Current Reality is Economicist

2021-07-09T23:07:43-03:00

In an interview for Adusp (USP Faculty Association) in 1998, Paulo Arantes considers the possibility of Fernando Henrique Cardoso—whom he refers to as Professor Cardoso—remaining in power for another four years as catastrophic. However, he believes Cardoso will be re-elected because of the left’s disunity and the efficient implementation of a social blackmail process that threatens the population with the return of inflation. According to the philosopher, there no longer seems to be any difference between the left and right because the economy has become something autonomous from society. He also criticizes the Workers’ Party (PT) and says that its only interest is to win elections and elect deputies. Regarding the university, Arantes criticizes groups that appropriate the USP “stamp” to sell courses and services. “This is a poor country, we should offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses. We do not have the political task of training great diplomats”, says Arantes.

Interview by Marcos Cripa and Adilson Citelli for Adusp magazine, April 1998.

Keywords: FHC, PT, USP, left, right, intellectuals, universities, single thought, minimal state, globalization, cynical reason, Marxism.

A Blind Spot in Jürgen Habermas’s Modern Project

2021-02-22T18:38:07-03:00

Written in 1990, the present text is an amplified version of an original study carried out by Otília Arantes and presented with the same title at the “Brasil Século XXI” (Twenty-first Century Brazil) international symposium in November 1988 at the University of Campinas. The dates are also important to note, since they evoke the 1980s discussion over the blatant inconsistency of Jürgen Habermas’s exception to the Modern Movement when, at the same time, the philosopher declared the production paradigm obsolete, approving the tremendous productive restructuring that was changing the face of capitalism for the worse. The ‘rescue operation’ advocated by Harbermas is even more incomprehensible when we consider that the Modern Movement in architecture was the most comprehensive and complete embodiment of the techno-utopia of labor and the twentieth century’s aestheticist machine-obsessed civilization. Ignoring the systemic impulses of everything that enabled the utopia of combining the aesthetic aspect of Constructivism with the most elemental social purposes, Habermas multiplied ad hoc categorial distinctions as he described the exhaustion of the Welfare State, for which the Ideology of Planning was more than a legitimizing façade, serving as a support column for any urban initiative. The attempt to identify the reasons of such historical nonsense was undoubtedly what triggered this study on the structural obsolescence of the Modern Movement. The mismatch that Habermas did not see, or the integral functionalization that he missed and converted into blind apology, was evident for anyone with a critical mind willing to examine the reasons for the formalist regression and other anomalies inherent to the history of the Modern Movement, which was gradually unveiled by the reality of that international triumph.

Keywords: Habermas, Modernity, Modern Project, Modernist Movement, Postmodernism, Ideology, Architecture, New Construction, Urbanism, Plan, Utopia, Labor, Communicative Rationality, Linguistic Turn, Illuminism, Reason, Critical Theory, Welfare, Brazil, Brasília, Adorno, Benjamin, Wellmer, Peter Bürger.

Waiting Zones

2021-02-12T15:13:03-03:00

A tremendous temporal shift has turned upside down the world currently rearranged and governed by the winning capitalism. This shift has resulted precisely in the punitive turn operated by the bifurcated state, as studied by Loïc Wacquant. There are two waiting zones: one aims to discipline the social insecurity fueled by the distress of unqualified labor; and the other poisons the perpetual excitement of the new comfortable classes that are simultaneously cherished and abused by capitalism. The main form of intervention in the name of order employed by the contemporary war derives from a punitive turn ruled by excess, from the Shock and Awe strategy to the surgical arsenal designed to imprint the perennial memory of pain in the minds of preferred targets, who are once again spread through liminal populations in the contemporary world-border—considering border as any kind of obstacle in a (social, economic, symbolical, etc.) no-man’s land where the dead weight of the punitive power has been awakened by the new Workfare States.

Originally published in 2012 as a chapter in Vera Malaguti Batista (Org.). Loïc Wacquant e a questão penal no capitalismo neoliberal. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, p. 229-280; and then as a chapter in Paulo Arantes. O novo tempo do mundo. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014, p.141-198.

Keywords: State of Exception, Loïc Wacquant, Giorgio Agamben, Labor, Incarceration, Refugees, Geopolitics, Contemporaneity, Capitalism, Waiting horizon, Ernst Bloch, Occupied territories, Palestine.

Um mundo coberto de alvos

2021-07-28T10:56:46-03:00

Um ano antes de Hiroshima e Nagasaki, mas já “depois do fim dos tempos”, Theodor Adorno vislumbrou nas bombas-robô de Hitler que alvejavam as cidades inglesas a confirmação pelo avesso da filosofia hegeliana da história. Na intuição premonitória dele, as ogivas V2 eram o equivalente contemporâneo do “espírito do mundo” encarnado (não mais a cavalo mas agora “sobre asas e sem cabeça”), e sua combinação aterrorizante de perfeição técnica e ausência de subjetividade exprimia a substância da própria horda fascista que coroava o processo de modernização. Essa é a primeira das ideias que Paulo Arantes começa a desempacotar da ilustração de capa da edição de maio de 2020 do Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil que lhe serve de trampolim para traçar uma genealogia da militarização contemporânea. A segunda, correlata, é de que a concepção de mundo como alvo configura o elo entre o atual pânico pandêmico e o “tempo do fim” que segundo Günther Anders a Bomba Atômica inaugura. Afinal, foi no momento em que o mundo começou a ser visto como um alvo que ele passou a ter um prazo de validade. Extraindo as consequências dessa automatização do artefato bélico tornado sujeito histórico cego (à maneira do Capital), Arantes coloca Rey Chow em diálogo com C. Wright Mills para demonstrar como a idade do mundo como alvo corre junto com um longo processo de definição militar da realidade. No berço dessa metafísica militar encontramos a acepção originalmente ambivalente do termo alvo: ora ofensiva, ora defensiva. Essa descoberta etimológica atribuída a Samuel Weber será chave para compreender a dialética do mundo como alvo, principalmente a partir do “acontecimento sideral” que para Arantes demarca uma bipartição no tempo do fim. Isso porque com a emergência do corpo político Terra, as sociedades de controle passam a conceber o planeta como um frágil organismo cuja destruição pode ser acelerada ou adiada, mas sobretudo gerenciada – movimento não por acaso coetâneo do surgimento da governamentalidade neoliberal. Se a esta altura o horizonte de desenvolvimento foi literalmente para o espaço, aqui as políticas sociais focalizadas, elas próprias de origem militar, entram em cena para fazer a alocação calculada de recursos cada vez mais escassos, sempre condicionada por reforços negativos disciplinadores, visando não mais que um controle de danos em países e populações-alvo. Eis o denominador comum da atual proliferação de alvos direcionados em que se converteu a sociedade contemporânea, marcada numa ponta pela dominação algorítmica do dito capitalismo de vigilância e noutra pela mira predatória do drone.

Conferência realizada no dia 11 de junho de 2020 e transmitida ao vivo no canal de YouTube do laboratório “Filosofias do tempo do agora” (CNPq/UFRJ) coordenado pela professora Carla Rodrigues.

(Resenha de Artur Renzo)

Palavras-chave: mundo com alvo; Era Atômica; pandemia; covid-19; Bolsonaro; fascismo; Theodor Adorno; Georg Hegel; Samuel Weber; Rey Chow; C. Wright Mills; Hans Magnuns Enzensberger; Robert McNamara; metafísica militar; militarização; espírito do mundo; tempo do fim; Bomba Atômica; sujeito automático; bomba V2; guerra; Guerra Fria; corrida espacial; acontecimento sideral; antropoceno; governamentalidade; neoliberalismo; drone; políticas públicas focalizadas; capitalismo de vigilância; sociedade do controle; algoritmos.

Do tempo

2021-07-26T16:05:31-03:00

Às vésperas de uma virada inédita na História da humanidade, que já ia nos alcançando no pós-carnaval de uma manhã daquele início de março de 2020, ali no espaço térreo do SESC da Avenida Paulista, no contexto da Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo, diante de um público que enfrentara fila para vê-los e ouvi-los, Paulo Arantes e Ailton Krenak ensaiam um encontro inusitado de perspectivas. Era a mesa de abertura de um seminário que trazia o título “Perspectivas Anticoloniais”, movido pela pergunta geral “o que ainda podemos fazer juntos?”, e que tinha como tema o tempo. Especialistas do fim do mundo como o conhecemos, Arantes e Krenak atacam, por assim dizer, os pressupostos de um mundo insustentável. Num caso como no outro, o tempo do mundo e sua ideologia do adiamento do fim são denunciados em seu enredo de devastação. Como sugere Krenak, a globalização é o outro nome de uma colonização aparentemente sem fim – e, aqui, a fisionomia própria de um mundo que não sabe morrer. Arantes, então, se alinha com a ironia krenakiana, e traça a história recente de um Ocidente que se define precisamente pelo relógio do adiamento, cuja lógica, todavia, é a do extermínio. Seremos capazes de evadir o tempo do fim? Desenha-se assim uma espécie de escapografia negativa, em que, escavando frestas na suspensão que nos captura, vemos o trabalho da imaginação no reconhecimento de outras temporalidades. Era um encontro de gente de teatro, e talvez não surpreenda a conversa nesses termos; isso, se Krenak estiver certo ao supor a arte como “o lugar mais provável” para encontros improváveis. A história da crise final tem a sua teologia, e resta saber se ainda temos tempo para dar um fim no juízo do deus-capital. O poder mimético de destruição do vírus, em toda sua viromaquia, nada revela senão os limites de um presente que devemos fazer passar.

Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo. Encontro Perspectivas Anticoloniais

Mesa: Do tempo. 06 de março de 2020. Curadoria: Andreia Duarte, Christine Greiner e José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo. SESC Avenida Paulista

(resenha do mediador do debate, José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo)

Palavras-chave: fim do mundo, adiar, tempo, colapso, insustentável, encontro, anticapitalismo, anticolonialismo, natureza, história.

Ainda se trata de era atômica: o tempo do fim

2021-07-09T22:59:51-03:00

Por mais que possa parecer ultrapassado, não há nada de anacrônico em dizer que estamos em plena Era Atômica. Paulo Arantes reconstitui o itinerário histórico da Idade Nuclear e seus intérpretes, demonstrando como nela se encontra a origem política de questões como o aquecimento global, o antropoceno e mesmo a crise pandêmica em curso. As implicações políticas e filosóficas dessa mudança epocal invisível, recalcada na euforia progressista da derrota do nazismo e do fim da Guerra Fria, são lidas através do roteiro de Günther Anders. Aqui, a incomensurabilidade própria do horizonte de destruição nuclear terá ancoragem não apenas no avanço tecnológico da modernização, como também na experiência material de desresponzabilização moral ligada ao processo de instrumentalização do trabalho. É também o que explica o desaparecimento da ideia de futuro: com os indivíduos desconectados das consequências de sua atividade, cada vez mais subsumida aos encadeamentos cumulativos do trabalho de zelo, a própria noção de fim torna-se um ponto cego da ideia de progresso. Por isso a tarefa política do “tempo do fim” é formulada como um esforço de adiar o “fim dos tempos”, que no entanto não chega a ser inexorável. Recuperando o debate europeu sobre a crítica ao “fetichismo nuclear”, Arantes aponta como essa cegueira também acometeu boa parte da intelectualidade de esquerda, que se recusou a levar até as últimas consequências o novo paradigma inaugurado com a Bomba. O último movimento da conferência se volta para a periferia e procura dar conta de como esse tempo do mundo é vivido pelo filtro das expectativas brasileiras. Se por um lado a tônica ascensional e modernizadora de superação do subdesenvolvimento aparece em estranho descompasso com os ponteiros do “tempo do fim”, um olhar atento para as intuições poéticas de Carlos Drummond de Andrade guardará um importante poder de revelação sobre os impasses dessa era do “mundo como alvo”.

Realizada no dia 17 de dezembro de 2020, a conferência fez parte do ciclo primeiro ciclo de Web Seminários “Hegel e a Política, novos rumos”, promovido pela revista Estudos Hegelianos e organizado pelos professores Emmanuel Nakamura (Unicamp), Fábio Nolasco (UnB), Inácio Helfer (Unisinos), Polyana Tidre (Unisinos) e Ricardo Crissiuma (UFRGS).

(Resenha de Artur Renzo)

Palavras-chave: Era Atômica, Bomba Atômica, tempo do fim, Günther Anders, Martin Heidegger, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Celso Furtado, subdesenvolvimento, novo tempo do mundo, progresso, trabalho de zelo, horizonte de expectativas, mundo como alvo, imperialismo, fetichismo nuclear, sociedade de risco, antropoceno, pandemia, Guerra Fria.

Da arqueologia do tédio para a metafísica da espera

2021-02-05T16:17:23-03:00

Se há alguém que viveu à altura do seu tempo, foi sem dúvida Walter Benjamin, sobretudo na hora final em que o fascismo bateu à sua porta. Verificar e comprovar a atualidade de seu pensamento hoje, depende assim de uma resposta de igual envergadura à mesma pergunta cuja urgência norteou desde sempre sua vida intelectual e política: em que tempo vivemos Ora, como Walter Benjamin no entre-guerras do século passado, voltamos a viver tempos apocalípticos, um tempo de "revelações" demonstradas por desastres cuja escala nos ultrapassa, do risco de catástrofe nuclear (100 minutos para meia noite desde 27 de janeiro de 2020...) à ameaça de extinção da vida no planeta. Acontece que o tempo do fim no qual passamos a viver, mesmo depois da derrota (apenas) militar do fascismo, já não é mais o mesmo tempo messiânico em cujo poder disruptivo Walter Benjamin ainda podia confiar, pois se tratava de um Tempo de Espera que para nós já passou, ou pelo menos assumiu uma feição que não sabemos mais reconhecer. No que segue, procuramos identificar esse primeiro termo de nossa comparação entre as duas respostas históricas acerca do tempo vivido nas dimensões do mundo em crise permanente. Para tanto, seguimos uma pista sugerida apenas de passagem por Susan-Buck Morss, a saber, que revirando pelo avesso a experiência oitocentista dominante do "tédio" e seus desdobramentos contemporâneos, seja nas suas configurações literárias maiores ou menores, como nos gestos emblemáticos de personagens exemplares como o flanneur, o jogador, o homem revoltado etc, Walter Benjamin estava de fato elaborando uma verdadeira Metafísica da Espera, aliás como tantas outras similares nas primeiras décadas do século vinte, por exemplo Kracauer, para ficar numa amostra maior e próxima, para não falar na Montanha Mágica etc. Mas uma Espera, a benjaminiana, cujo foco de expectativa máxima irradiava paradoxalmente de todo um feixe de promessas e frustrações dramáticas sedimentadas num passado de escombros acumulados. No decorrer ziguezagueante de uma exposição própria de uma live, nos depararemos assim com as mais variadas fontes dessa construção benjaminiana, dos bocejos satânicos dos românticos desviantes à vigília revolucionária surrealista, passando pelo espirito da utopia segundo Bloch e toda a legião de intelectuais dissidentes do messianismo judaico na Europa Central. Se é verdade que precisamos reaprender a esperar, a lição de Benjamin acerca da tradição da esperança adormecida no avesso do tédio mais envenenado e mortífero - e que hoje deve estar atendendo por outros nomes, do famigerado e sempre alegado ressentimento ao niilismo de massa - não poderia ser mais atual, apesar da disparidade quase intransponível dos nossos respectivos tempos de catástrofe.

Palavras-chave: Walter Benjamin, Tempo do Fim Apocalipse, Arqueologia do Tédio, A Metafísica da Espera, Scholem, Bloch, Breton, Temporização da História, A Grande Espera, Júbilo, Espera da guerra, Espera da revolução, Morrer de tédio, Expectativas nacionais, Angelus Novus, Políticas de reparação, Antonio Candido

Filosofia e crise da civilização brasileira

2021-01-20T10:24:55-03:00

O argumento desta conversa gira em torno de uma possível resposta "filosófica" - mais precisamente, nos termos da cultura filosófica institucionalmente aclimatada em São Paulo em meados do século passado - ao processo de descivilização, como poderia dizer Norbert Elias, cuja aceleração estamos vivendo desde que a sociedade brasileira dobrou espantosamente à direita e levou ao poder todo um projeto de reversão radical das expectativas progressistas descortinadas há cinquenta anos com o fim da Ditadura. O título desta intervenção não só parafraseia um enunciado similar do fenomenologo Edmund Husserl, como remete à tese central de seu derradeiro apelo à razão diante da irresistível escalada do nazifascismo na Europa dos anos 30, a saber: só uma restauração da Filosofia, em sua inteireza original de orientação no mundo da vida à luz da estrela guia da Teoria enquanto visão da verdade, poderia reverter a destruição fascista em andamento da razão. Ocorre que esta flagrante ilusão ilustrada de classe média reformadora -iniquidade social e mentalidade esclarecida são incompatíveis- encontra-se na base da resposta da cultura filosófica uspiana ao Golpe de 1964. A exposição partirá então, da persistência de longa duração dessa aposta nos efeitos políticos do Esclarecimento, para um sobrevoo histórico até o desmantelo atual, ao longo do qual se destacará a peculiaridade maior da assim chamada civilização brasileira, uma invenção de nosso Alto Modernismo artístico: a idéia de que a régua e o compasso da construção nacional por vir deveria ser buscada numa cultura de fundo popular historicamente pacificadora e antiburguesa. Seria então o caso de verificar se a miragem desta convergência entre utopia estética e utopia social não teria começado a se desfazer bem antes de seu defecho catastrófico atual. Restaria saber se ainda se poderia chamar de filosófica a reação mais apropriada a um acontecimento extremo e monstruoso como esse, o naufrágio de toda uma civilização material e espiritual de um país além do mais periférico.

Palavras-chave: Crise, Extinção, Emergência, Crítica dialética, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Filosofia, USP, Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, Jornadas de junho de 2013, Civilização, Antropoceno, Antropofagia, Francisco Bosco, Caio Souto, Conversações filosóficas.

Through the Prism of Aesthetics

2021-02-12T14:47:44-03:00

Interview given to Rapsódia, a journal from the Department of Philosophy of the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP), in 2002. In this interview, Otília recalls her academic and intellectual journey while sharing her thoughts on various topics that she had addressed until then, from Mário Pedrosa’s criticism to postmodern art, from the exhaustion of modern architecture to culture’s central role in new urban strategies, the new museums, the cultural industry and the culture of the spectacle, the role of criticism, and the central issue that permeates the whole interview: the death or endurance of art, and consequently of Aesthetics.

Originally published in 2002: Rapsódia: almanaque de filosofia e arte, n.2. São Paulo: Departamento de Filosofia FFLCH-USP, p. 221-264.

Keywords: Aesthetics, FFLCH USP, CEAC, Visual Arts, Modern Architecture, Gilda de Mello e Souza, Mário Pedrosa, Charles Baudelaire, Habermas, Roberto Schwarz, Aesthetic experience, Death of art, Hegel, Spectacle, Cities, Guy Débord, Adorno, Museums, Curatorship, Fashion.

Gilda de Mello e Souza

2021-02-12T15:54:35-03:00

The four essays in this book explore what we could call the “method” of Gilda de Mello e Souza’s essay-writing. Even though the specific tone of her prose is not limited to a method, it would not be an exaggeration to characterize her style as a highly elaborate version of what historian Carlo Ginzburg called “evidentiary paradigm”, which, in turn, converges with what Lionello Venturi defined as the “perito-conoscitore” (literally, “expert-connoisseur”). Following the Clima group’s typical lack of interest for theory, Gilda soon realized “the importance of this patient, thorough critical exercise, focused on the observation of the most insignificant features”. A great example of this procedure can be found in the essay about Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes’s film criticism, which Gilda considers as a very particular exercise of detective-like investigation. It is precisely this evidentiary approach that allows her to consider Almeida Jr. as the first painter to reveal the “Brazilian man”, introducing a new era of painting in Brazil, where the national representation used to be based on the European academic art. Influenced by her own experience as a child who grew up in the countryside, and above all by her trained eye from studying body techniques and describing them in her work about nineteenth-century fashion, Gilda was able to identify that figure—on the sidelines of imported cultural parameters—through minimal clues and signs that appear in the gestures and body postures of the painter’s figures. That is how something we could call the formation of Brazilian painting emerged on the horizon, culminating in Modernism, then unfolding into other configurations, like the houses painted by artists of the so-called Paulista School, or the emptied cities painted by Gregório Gruber. Gilda’s debt to the French “amateur” masters (Jean Maugüé, Lévi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide) is reviewed in the last essay. Added to the end of this volume is an excerpt from an interview given by Otília Arantes in 2016, on the tenth anniversary of Gilda de Mello e Souza’s death.

Keywords: Gilda de Mello e Souza, Aesthetics, Art Criticism, Art History, Visual Arts, Painting, Fashion, Formation, Almeida Jr., Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freire, The Brazilian man, The malarious, Gesture dynamics, 19th century, Eliseu Visconti, Mário Pedrosa, Tarsila do Amaral, Paulista Family, Gregório Gruber, Ensy-writing, Carlo Ginzburg, Evidentiary paradigm, Gombrich, Relational structure, Lionello Venturi, Clima group, Jean Maugüé, Lévi-Strauss, Roger Bastide, Amateur Criticism

Simulated architecture

2021-09-05T12:02:06-03:00

The two essays in this e-book, “Simulated Architecture” (1988) and “Margins of Architecture” (1993), contain Otília Arantes’s first observations about the architectural production that followed the exhaustion of Modern Architecture. This production emphatically contained the trademark of the new Spirit of the Times: the ostentatious and spectacular arrival—after all, this is about architecture and its new centrality in the emerging capitalist order—of one of the most ostensible dimensions of the so-called paradigm of Communication. We witness the metamorphosis of formalism that resulted from the exhaustion of the Modern Movement (here analyzed for the first time in Arantes’s works) into a universe of self-referred images elevated to the paroxysm of immateriality of the Simulacrum. To explain this mutation in architecture after the Modern Movement, the author invokes, among other materialist writings, Walter Benjamin’s observations about the tactile discipline of looking in the origin of this dubious triumph of pure visuality, remembering that it is precisely in the architecture of the city that we find the matrix of this Simulacrum civilization—as shown by the first essay. From the facade spectacle of the self-promoting architecture shown at the 1st Venice Biennale of Architecture (1980), with its Strada Novissima that resembled the streets of Las Vegas, the high-tech fantasies of a science-fiction architecture, such as that built by the English group Archigram, or the contextual architecture (which was then called “critical contextualism” by the author and, somehow following in the footsteps of Frampton, intended, at least in that context, to assume the role of an architecture of resistance), to the self-proclaimed “frivolous” architecture, in the same sense as used by Eisenman, or “futile” architecture (to use Derrida’s concept, an explicit theoretical reference for the architect)—in other words, to the limit of an architecture reduced to an endless game of combinations and deconstructions. The analysis is resumed and expanded in the second essay—the introductory text for Peter Eisenman’s exhibition catalogue at the São Paulo Museum of Art, focusing on the paradoxical work of the most emblematic architect of the deconstructionist turn. An architecture that stands on the “margins”—another keyword of the then brand-new French philosophy.

Keywords: Adorno, Aldo Rossi, Archigram, “frivolous” architecture, “obscene” architecture, mass art, Venice Biennale, B. Brecht, C. Lasch, CIAM, Le Corbusier, deconstruction, folding, experience and habit, F. Jameson, K. Frampton, G. Pasqualotto, Hans Hollein, high-tech, Hyperrealism, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, J-F Lyotard, Les Immatériaux, M. Tafuri, Modern Movement, P. Portoghesi, P. Eisenman, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, “Presence of the Past”, R. Moore, R. Venturi, critical regionalism, simulacrum and simulation, Strada Novissima, tactile and optical, W. Benjamin.

Manfredo Tafuri

2021-07-17T19:02:12-03:00

Chosen among Otília Arantes’s many lectures, classes, and interviews about Manfredo Tafuri, the two lectures in this book were given during two academic events at the University of São Paulo (USP): the first one is a tribute to the architect, historian, and critic and was given shortly after his death at a seminar on City History at the São Carlos campus; and the second one was given twenty years later, in February 2015, at an international seminar called “Manfredo Tafuri, his readers and their readings” at the School of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU). Both were mainly focused on the book Progetto e Utopia: Architettura e Sviluppo Capitalistico. In the first lecture, “A Arquitetura da Cidade: um ponto de vista” (City Architecture: A point of view), after contextualizing the author within the Architecture and Urban studies conducted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, Arantes makes a thorough analysis of the book, focusing on its diagnosis about the exhaustion of the Modern Movement, which was becoming increasingly linked, according to Tafuri, to the city as a productive structure, consequently reduced to an “operational mechanism”, while the “ideology of planning” was reduced to a “regressive utopia”. It also presents some considerations on the later so-called postmodernist expressions, and Tafuri’s criticism of it leads him to propose, as an alternative to the dominant historicism, a “niilismo compiuto”. The interpretation of this concept, then taken as an expression of a “paralyzing pessimism”, was reviewed two decades later, at the end of the second lecture, with a reading (that Arantes considered fairer) that viewed it as a natural consequence of a “philosophy of negation”. This is the main topic of “A dialética negativa de Manfredo Tafuri” (The negative dialectics of Manfredo Tafuri), where Arantes aims to retrace, in a dialogue with Asor Rosa, Tafuri’s Marxist roots, his dialectical point of view (only suggested in the first lecture)—more precisely, his participation in the Italian Marxist tradition and how it was influenced, at least from a certain moment, by a school of thought that began to spread in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the academic field): the critical theory of the Frankfurt School—without overlooking other references that make up what she calls “heterodox Marxism”, or “healthy eclecticism”, in Tafuri’s “non-linear” thinking.

The video of the second conference can be accessed by clicking on the button below the download links for the ebooks.

Keywords: Vanguards, Metropolis, Modern Movement, Ideology of Planning, Utopia, Antolini, Laugier, Corbusier, Bauhaus, Italian Architecture, Nihilism, Semiology, Structuralism, Nietzsche, Foucault, Genealogical Method, Ginzburg, Asor Rosa, Marxism, Dialectics, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht