as if

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

The Hill from Ipanema

– Chico Buarque / gringocarioca

Two Brothers, in the dark of night
After setting down the instruments
How I learned to respect the sight
And suspect the marked silence

I think I hear the pulsing beat
Of echoes of another existence
It's as if the waves of the sea
Washed away the passing moments

It's as if the rhythm of nothing
Were every rhythm from within
Or else, an old song hovering
Still over a mountain in motion

Morro Dois Irmãos

– Chico Buarque

Dois Irmãos, quando vai alta a madrugada
E a teus pés vão-se encostar os instrumentos
Aprendi a respeitar tua prumada
E desconfiar do teu silêncio

Penso ouvir a pulsação atravessada
Do que foi e o que será noutra existência
É assim como se a rocha dilatada
Fosse uma concentração de tempos

É assim como se o ritmo do nada
Fosse, sim, todos os ritmos por dentro
Ou, então, como uma música parada
Sobre uma montanha em movimento

anti-

"Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the antiobjective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility – that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies...."

(Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto" – 1918. Trans. Ralph Manheim)

CEP 20.000

fotografado: gringocarioca

fotógrafo: Ricardo Rodrigues

ESPAÇO CULTURAL SÉRGIO PORTO

rua humaitá, 163 (fundos / 2266 0896)

10 / 12, quinta feira

de 20 às 20:30 / 4 reais.

HOMENAGEM A MÁRIO BORTOLOTTO

com leitura e textos de / para mário por

rogério skylab, chacal, fausto fawcett,

carmen molinari, fabrício corsaletti, graça carpes, edu planchêz,

beto brown, pardal, ericson pires, fran fillon

e quem chegar

*******************************************************

art-action com

tavinho paes, arnaldo brandão, betina kopp

beatriz provasi, juju hollanda, marcela giannini,

layanna lossë

******************************************************

marco gringo carioca, daniel, zé urbano, gabriel,

ricardo rodrigues, microfone aberto

À SAÚDE E À RECUPERAÇÃO

DO GRANDE ARTISTA E IRMÃO

atire a primeira palavra

são os bandidos são os assaltantes são os traficantes são as facções rivais é o crime organizado é o tráfico de armas é o tráfico de drogas é o contrabando são os bandos de maconheiros e chincheiros é a crackolândia são os viciados são os usuários são os marginais é a contracultura é a esquerda é a direita é o poder é o sistema é o estado é o governo é a corrupção são os políticos são os ladrões são os caras sem vergonha na cara são os sem caráter é a impunidade é a injustiça é a polícia é a repressão é a proibição é a opressão é a guerra às drogas é a guerra às pessoas são as guerras em geral é o terrorismo são os estados unidos é o velho inimigo amigo tio sam é a nova ordem mundial é o imperialismo é o neoliberalismo é o neocolonialismo é a dominação é a exploração é o dinheiro é o mercado é a bolsa de valores é o capitalismo é o consumismo é o materialismo é o simulacra é a modernidade é o pós-moderno é o pós-humano são os homens são os ignorantes e arrogantes e mal-educados é a sociedade são as classes sociais é a pobreza é a miséria são as favelas é a exclusão é o racismo é o preconceito é a intolerância é a diferença é a alteridade é a subalternidade é o relativismo cultural é o discurso atual é o ceticismo é o cinismo é a mídia são as notícias e a propaganda são os jornais e as revistas é o rádio é a televisão é a internet é o mal do bom gosto é a opinião pública privada de bom senso são as marchas e protestos são a paz e o amor são os movimentos a favor e contra são os fanáticos é a hipocrisia são as ideologias são as diversas bandeiras é a desordem e o regresso é a desigualdade é a disparidade é o subdesenvolvimento é a falta de infraestrutura é a falta de recursos é a falta de vontade é a falta de solidaridade é o excesso de agressividade é o excesso de tudo é o excesso de todos é o luxo é o lixo são os shoppings são os ricos é a ambição é a ilusão é a decepção é a mediocridade é a banalidade é a burguesia é o conforto é o conformismo é a complacência é a cumplicidade é o status quo é o normal é o cotidiano são as festas são os festivais é o carnaval é a boemia são os artistas são os poetas são os críticos são os critérios são os demais ...

sou eu

sou eu que falo

sou eu que falo e não me calo

sou eu que falo e não me calo mas não faço

sou eu que falo e não me calo mas não faço nada

sou eu que falo e não me calo mas não faço nada e mais nada

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

* * *

10/12/2009

CEP 20.000

Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto

Rio de Janeiro

samba da paixão

quando se acha que um amor não tem mais jeito 

dá uma dor, que bate lá no peito 

dá tanta vontade... 

dá tanta vontade... 

dá tanta vontade... 

de morrer 

há quanto tempo não aproveita o momento 

o cheiro da flor, o canto do vento 

dá tanta saudade... 

dá tanta saudade... 

dá tanta saudade... 

de viver 

deixar a vida levar 

deixar a morte chegar 

deixar a chama apagar 

não dá pra deixar... 

não! a paixão deve ser 

a solução, pode crer 

e vai ver o velho amor se renovar

 

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

The Writer's Technique ...

"Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next."

"In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds."

"Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it."

"Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight."

"Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there. "

"Stages of composition: idea – style – writing…. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style."

"The work is the death mask of its conception."

(Walter Benjamin, “Post No Bills: The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses,” One-Way Street. Trans. Edmund Jephcott)

In Memoriam ...

"Although I am going to talk about what I have written, my books and papers and so on, unfortunately I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished. There is probably going to be some trouble about that. But nevertheless I think there is also something significant about it, in that I don't have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left."

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning.)

new logo ...

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

On "Essences and the Signs of Art" ...

“But whatever the importance of this process of analogy in art, art does not find its profoundest formula here. As long as we discover a sign’s meaning in something else, matter still subsists, refractory to spirit. On the contrary, art gives us the true unity: unity of an immaterial sign and of an entirely spiritual meaning. The essence is precisely this unity of sign and meaning as it is revealed in the work of art.” (p. 40)

“Art therefore has an absolute privilege, which is expressed in several ways. In art, substances are spiritualized, media dematerialized. The work of art is therefore a world of signs, but they are immaterial and no longer have anything opaque about them, at least to the artist’s eye, the artist’s ear. In the second place, the meaning of these signs is an essence, an essence affirmed in all its power. In the third place, sign and meaning, essence and transmuted substance, are identified or united in a perfect adequation. Identity of a sign as style and of a meaning as essence: such is the character of the work of art.” (p. 50)


(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs. Trans. Richard Howard)

olhar tudo

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

the OTHER voice ...

“Between revolution and religion, poetry is the other voice. Its voice is other because it is the voice of the passions and of visions. It is other-worldly and this-worldly, of days long gone and of this very day, an antiquity without dates. Heretical and devout, innocent and perverted, limpid and murky, aerial and subterranean, of the hermitage and of the corner bar, within hand’s reach and always beyond. All poets in the moments, long or short, of poetry, if they are really poets, hear the other voice. It is their own, someone else’s, no one else’s, no one’s and everyone’s. Nothing distinguishes a poet from other men and women but those moments – rare yet frequent – in which, being themselves, they are other. The possession of strange forces and powers, the sudden emergence of a store of psychic knowledge buried in the most private depths of their being, or is it a singular ability to associate words, images, sounds, forms? It is not easy to answer such questions. But I do not believe that poetry is simply an ability. And even if it were, from where does it come? In sum, no matter what it may be, what is certain is that the great oddness of the poetic phenomenon suggests an ailment that still awaits a physician’s diagnosis. Ancient medicine – and ancient philosophy too, beginning with Plato – attributed the poetic faculty to a psychic disorder. A mania, in other words, a sacred fury, an enthusiasm, a transport. But mania is only one of the poles of the disorder; the other is absentia, inner emptiness, that ‘melancholy apathy’ that the poet speaks of. Fullness and emptiness, flight and fall, enthusiasm and melancholy: poetry.”

(Octavio Paz, “The Other Voice.” The Other Voice. Trans. Helen Lane. p. 151-152)

tia

para Suzana Guedes Bacellar da Silva (1934-2009)


tia, me dá um trocadinho, tia!
a gente tá com sede,
a gente tá com fome ...

tia, me dá uma moedinha, tia!
a gente tá sem cara,
a gente tá sem nome ...

tia, me dá uma comidinha, tia!
a gente já nem bebe,
a gente já nem come ...

tia, me dá um carinho, tia!
a gente já não acorda,
a gente já não dorme ...


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

"A fiction that by no means savours of barbarity"

“Come boldly, every one of you, and assemble together to dine off me, for you shall at the same time eat your fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has served to feed and nourish this body. These muscles, this flesh and these veins are yours, poor fools that you are! can you not see that they still contain the substance of your ancestor’s limbs? Relish them well, you will find that they have the flavor of your own flesh.”

(Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals.” Trans. E. J. Trechmann)

(k)no(w) (k)no(w) ...

“I would have every man write about what he knows, and no more than he knows, not only in this but on all other subjects. For a man may have some particular knowledge or experience of the nature of a river or a fountain, who otherwise knows no more than what everybody knows. Yet he will undertake, in order to circulate this little scrap of knowledge, to write a book on the whole science of physics. From this fault spring many great abuses.”

(Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals.”)

à luta

vai pro puteiro
guerreiro
e vai ver
que quem vence
a luta
é a puta
que te pariu

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

the lovers

"lovers" – Augusto de Campos / gringocarioca

"eis os amantes" – Augusto de Campos

translation as re-creation ...

“Once we admit, in principle, the thesis of the impossibility of translating 'creative' texts, it seems that we may also admit, in principal, the corollary of this thesis, the possibility of re-creating the texts.” (p. 315)

“We may say, then, that every translation of a creative text will always be a 're-creation,' a parallel and autonomous, although reciprocal, translation – 'transcreation.' The more intricate the text is, the more seducing it is to 're-create' it. Of course in a translation of this type, not only the signified but also the sign itself is translated, that is, the sign’s tangible self, its very materiality …. The signified, the semantic parameter, becomes just a kind of boundary marker for the 're-creative' enterprise. We are, then, at the opposite end of the 'spectrum' from the so-called literal (or servile) translation.” (p. 315-316)

Translation of poetry (or of prose with an equal degree of difficulty) is, above all else, an experiment in introspection into the world and technique of the text to be translated. It is as if one took apart and, at the same time, put back together again the machine of creation, that frail and apparently inaccessible beauty that offers us a finished product in a foreign language but which, nevertheless, is able to give itself over to an implacable vivisection, to an operation in which it will literally be disemboweled and then reformed, reconstituted, in a new and different linguistic body.” (p. 323)

(Haroldo de Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism.” Novas: Selected Writings. Trans. Antonio Sergio Bessa, Odile Cisneros)



“Admitida a tese da impossibilidade em princípio da tradução de textos criativos, parece-nos que esta engendra o corolário da possibilidade, também em princípio, da recriação desses textos.” (p. 34)

“Então, para nós, tradução de textos criativos será sempre recriação, ou criação paralela, autônoma porém recíproca. Quanto mais inçado de dificuldades esse texto, mais recriável, mais sedutor enquanto possibilidade aberta de recriação. Numa tradução dessa natureza, não se traduz apenas o significado, traduz-se o próprio signo, ou seja, sua fisicalidade, sua materialidade mesma .... O significado, o parâmetro semântico, será apenas e tão somente a baliza demarcatória do lugar da empresa recriadora. Está-se pois no avesso da chamada tradução literal.” (p. 35)

“A tradução de poesia (ou prosa que a ela equivalha em problematicidade) é antes de tudo uma vivência interior do mundo e da têcnica do traduzido. Como que se desmonta e se remonta a máquina da criação, aquela fragílima beleza aparentemente intangível que nos oferece o produto acabado numa língua estranha. E que, no entanto, se revela suscetível de uma vivissecção implacável, que lhe revolve as entranhas, para trazê-la novamente à luz num corpo linguístico diverso.” (p. 43)


(Haroldo de Campos, “Da tradução como criação e como crítica”. Metalinguagem e outras metas.)

poemargens ...

"Parto de um princípio, não sem antes pedir licença poética: a poesia é, por natureza, discurso marginal. Por quê? Porque só se torna existente e interessante na medida em que cria um espaço FORA ('à margem') DENTRO da linguagem, pertubando a cartografia do território das letras. Alguma desestabilização de fronteiras tem de ocorrer para que a linguagem produza poesia."

(Fernanda Medeiros, "Poesia 70 e Poesia 90," O Carioca, Primavera 1998)

a note on distraction ...

“Então escrever é o modo de quem tem a palavra como isca: a palavra pescando o que não é palavra. Quando essa não palavra morde a isca, alguma coisa se escreveu. Uma vez que se pescou a entrelinha, podia-se com alívio jogar a palavra fora. Mas aí cessa a analogia: a não palavra, ao morder a isca, incorporou-a. O que salva então é ler distraidamente.”

(Clarice Lispector, Para não esquecer)


“Thus writing is the method of one who has words as bait: the word fishing for what is not word. When this non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Since what is between the lines has been caught, the word could be thrown away with relief. But there the analogy ceases: a non-word, in taking the bait, has incorporated it. The only salvation is distracted reading.”

gringocarioquismos ...

“Onde quer que você esteja, você está sempre aí.”

“Quando tiver uma chance, consulte o seu destino.”

“Se não fosse redondo, o mundo seria bem chato.”

“Aproveite o agora, antes que vire depois.”

“O que seria do presente se o futuro não passasse?”

“Tomara que tome providências contra a Providência!”


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

monumovementality (remix)

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

make it (re)new ...

“Todo presente de criação propõe uma leitura sincrônica do passado da cultura. A apreensão do novo representa a continuidade e a extensão da nossa experiência do que já foi feito ...”

(Haroldo de Campos, “Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda.” A Arte no Horizonte do Provável.)

liar, liar ...

“If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your Histories would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.”

(Umberto Eco, Baudolino. Trans. William Weaver)

Porque ...

Escrevo sem saber o que falar,
Falo sem saber o que dizer,
Digo que não sei falar do que escrevo
Quando começa a ser.

Acordo de manhã cedo e volto a sonhar.
Sonho que acordo e jamais volto a dormir;
Mas durmo, no escuro, durmo
Sem acordar do meu sonhar.

O sol me levanta ao amanhecer;
Eu não quero mais cair
Mas caio, só caio
Na solidão de ser só.

Sou o quê, afinal?
Não chego a saber.
Mas chega a hora de sair –
Saio sem chegar a lugar nenhum.

Vou, então, para onde vou
Sem saber para onde ir,
Onde vou a lugar nenhum
Para chegar a algum lugar.

E a vida vai assim
Até que me pergunto:
Por que?

E daí tudo pára e me responde
Apenas o meu eco sonoro:
Porque.

Vem a resposta da pergunta
Sem responder o que pergunto,
E respondo sem perguntar
Por que.

Respondo com o meu silêncio
Sem refletir no que se espelha
Diante da reflexão:
Porque!

Por isso escrevo o que não sei falar,
Falo o que não sei dizer,
Digo que nunca falo do que escrevo
Quando acaba de ser.



Copyright © 2005 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

paz

uma vela acesa
na favela

um rapaz reza
pela paz


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

cannibal logic ...

“Só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente.”

“Só me interessa o que não é meu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago.”

“Tínhamos a justiça codificação da vingança. A ciência codificação da Magia. Antropofagia. A transformação permanente do Tabu em totem.”

“Morte e vida das hipóteses. Da equação eu parte do Kosmos ao axioma Kosmos parte do eu. Subsistência. Conhecimento. Antropofagia.”

“A transfiguração do Tabu em totem. Antropofagia.”

“A luta entre o que se chamaria Incriado e a Criatura – ilustrada pela contradição permanente do homem e o seu Tabu. O amor quotidiano e o modus vivendi capitalista. Antropofagia. Absorção do inimigo sacro. Para transformá-lo em totem. A humana aventura. A terrena finalidade. Porém, só as puras elites conseguiram realizar a antropofagia carnal, que traz em si o mais alto sentido da vida e evita todos os males ... catequistas. O que se dá não é uma sublimação .... É a escala termométrica do instinto antropofágico. De carnal, ele se torna eletivo e cria a amizade. Afetivo, o amor. Especulativo, a ciência. Desvia-se e transfere-se. Chegamos ao aviltamento. A baixa antropofagia aglomerada nos pecados do catecismo – a inveja, a usura, a calúnia, o assassinato. Peste dos chamados povos cultos e cristianizados, é contra ela que estamos agindo. Antropófagos.”


(Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago”)



"Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically."

"I am only interested in what is not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagus."

"We had justice as codification of vengeance. Science as codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem."

"Death and life of hypotheses. From the self-equation part of the Kosmos to the Kosmos-axiom part of the self. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy."

"The transfiguration of Taboo into totem. Anthropophagy."

"The struggle between what one might call Uncreated and the Creature – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his Taboo. Daily love and capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To turn him into totem. The human adventure. The earthly finality. However, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal anthropophagy, which carries inside the highest meaning of life and averts all the ills ...of catechism. What happens is not a sublimation .... It is the thermometric scale of anthropophagic instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. If affective, love. If speculative, science. It deviates, it transfers itself. We reach vilification. The base anthropophagy merged into the sins of catechism – envy, usury, calumny, murder. Plague of the so-called cultured and Christianized nations, that is what we are acting against. Anthropophagi."


(Oswald de Andrade, "Anthropophagic Manifesto." Trans. Maria do Carmo Zanini)

the Book ...

“... all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.”

“What, then, will the work itself be? I answer: a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion.”

“The foldings of a book … have an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls.”

“… of what avail is that extraordinary addition of folding (like wings in repose, ready to fly forth again) which constitute its rhythm and the chief reason for the secret contained in its pages? Of what avail the priceless silence living there, and evocative symbols following in its wake, to delight the mind which literature has totally delivered?”

“Yes, were it not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established, that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we are about to turn.”

“The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and in its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction.”

“We, in turn, will misunderstand the true meaning of this book and the miracle inherent in its structure, if we do not knowingly imagine that a given motif has been properly placed at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light. Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again. Otherwise, we will miss that ecstasy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation. If we do not actively create in this way (as we would music on the keyboard, turning the pages of a score), we would do better to shut our eyes and dream.”

“Thus, in reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in turn, less noisily, reach its meaning. All our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation; but, unlike music, they will be rarified, for they partake of thought. Poetry, accompanied by the Idea, is perfect Music, and cannot be anything else.”


(Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.” Trans. Bradford Cook)

On peripheral writers ...

“... to write, especially in peripheral countries, is to occupy a space that is already occupied.”

“It is characteristic of a peripheral writer, trained in the conviction that great literature is in other countries, to be anxious to know – in addition to its own – so many others; only a writer who believes that everything has been written devotes his work to reflecting upon the the quotes of others, upon reading, translation, and plagiarism …”

(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 75)

task of the writer ...

"All the supports of modern art – novelty, individual celebrity, signatures that seem to confer authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism – are fragile fictions .... Perhaps the task of the writer at a time when the literary is formed in the interaction of diverse societies and different classes and traditions is to reflect upon this posthumous situation of modernity .... the postmodern scene ... this vertigo generated by the rituals of cultures that are losing their borders ... this perpetual simulacrum of the world."

(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 76)

Because !?!

Alone in a crowd. Where am I? Another self lost in a sea of desolate faces. Who am I? Emptiness within and throughout. Consummate fire of existential doubt. A blazing pillar of solitude. A foundation for the soul. Wanderer. Awkwardly traversing a path riddled with answers. Arriving exhausted, bewildered, at the question: Why?

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

(post)vanguard & postmodern experimentation ...

“This narcissistic exacerbation of discontinuity generates a new type of ritual, which is in truth an extreme consequence of what the vanguards came to do …. Given that the maximum aesthetic value is constant renovation, to belong to the art world one cannot repeat what has already been done – the legitimate, the shared. It is necessary to initiate noncodified forms of representation (from impressionism to surrealism), invent unforeseen structures (from fantastic to geometric art), and relate images that in reality belong to diverse semantic chains and that no one had previously associated (from collages to performances). No worse accusation can be made against a modern artist than to show repetitions in his or her work.”

“Such transcultural experimentation engendered renovations in language, design, urban forms, and youth practices. But the main fate of the vanguards and of the disenchanted rituals of the postmodernists has been the ritualization of museums and of the market. Despite the desacralization of art and the artistic world, the experimentalists accentuate their insularity. The primacy of form over function, of the form of saying over what is said, require from the spectator a more and more cultivated disposition in order to understand the meaning. Artists who inscribe in the work itself the questioning about what the work should be … exclude the spectator who is not disposed to make of his or her participation in art an equally innovative experience.”

“It is necessary to rethink the efficacy of artistic innovations and irreverences, the limits of their sacrilegious rituals. Attempts to break the illusion in the superiority and the sublime in art (insolence, destruction of one’s own work, the artist’s shit inside the museum) are, in the final analysis, according to Bourdieu, sacralizing desacralizations ‘that scandalize no one but the believers.’ Nothing demonstrates better the tendency toward the self-absorbed functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion, which ‘the most heterodox guardians of artistic orthodoxy’ finally devour.”


(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 26-27)

conversa complexificada

– E aí?
– Tou aqui.
– E daí?
– Sei lá!
– Como é?
– É assim . . .
– Assim como?
– Isto é . . .
– Essa não!
– Isso sim!
– Pois é?
– Pois não.
– Então tá.
– Até que enfim!
– Já vai?
– Vou indo . . .

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

reinscriptions ...

“Between the cause and its intentionality falls the shadow. Can we then unquestionably propose that a story has a unique meaning in the first place? To what end does the series of events tend if the author of the outcome is not unequivocally the author of the cause? Does it not suggest that agency arises in the return of the subject, from the interruption of the series of events as a kind of interrogation and reinscription of before and after?” (p. 272)

“In the process I’ve described as the return of the subject, there is an agency that seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to renegotiate the third locus, the intersubjective realm.” (p. 274)

“The process of reinscription and negotiation – the insertion or intervention of something that takes on new meaning – happens in the temporal break in-between the sign, deprived of subjectivity, in the realm of the intersubjective. Through this time-lag – the temporal break in representation – emerges the process of agency both as a historical development and as the narrative agency of historical discourse.” (p. 274)

“This ... enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary, as having positive or negative dimensions. It allows the articulation of subaltern agency to emerge as relocation and reinscription. In the seizure of the sign … there is neither dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of the given symbols of authority that shift the terrains of antagonism. The synchronicity in the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds of engagement have been displaced in a supplementary movement that exceeds those terms. This is the historical movement of hybridity as camouflage, as a contesting, antagonistic agency functioning in the time-lag of sign/symbol, which is a space in-between the rules of engagement.” (p. 277)


(Homi Bhabha, “The postcolonial and the postmodern,” The Location of Culture.)

Cultures of Survival

“In this salutary sense, a range of contemporary critical theorists suggest that it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking. There is even the growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality – as it emerges in non-canonical cultural forms – transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the concept of culture outside objects d’art or beyond the canonization of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival. Culture reaches out to create a symbolic textuality, to give the alienating everyday an aura of selfhood, a promise of pleasure.” (p. 247)

(Homi Bhabha, “The postcolonial and the postmodern,” The Location of Culture.)

monkey see, monkey do ?!?

“… colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.” (p. 122-123)

“What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents …” (p. 125)

“Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask …. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.” (p. 126)

“In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. Its threat, I would add, comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’. And that form of resemblance is the most terrifying thing to behold …” (p. 128-129)

“The ambivalence of mimicry - almost but not quite - suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal. What I have called its ‘identity-effects’ are always crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part- object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its ‘otherness’, that which it disavows.” (p. 129-130)


(Homi Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man,” The Location of Culture.)

Poema de sete caras

Quando nasci, um anjo malandro
desses que vivem na Lapa disse:
Vai, gringo! ser carioca na vida.

Os morros olham os rapazes
que cantam as garotas.
A noite não fosse alta,
talvez houvesse menos segredos.

Na rua passa um bando de bundas:
bundas brancas negras mulatas.
Nossa Senhora, tanta bunda, dizem meus olhos.
Mas minha cabeça não diz nada.

O homem atrás da máscara
é curioso, inquieto e maluco.
Quase sempre inventa.
Tem muitos, vários sonhos
o homem atrás da fantasia e da máscara.

Cristo, por que estais de costas
se és o nosso Senhor,
se rezamos por aquele abraço?

Mundo mundo vagabundo
se fosse mais profundo
seria até bacana, não seria esse lixão.
Mundo mundo vagabundo
mais vago que nem palavrão.

Eu devo acrescentar
que esse sol
que esse sotaque
deixam a língua enrolada como outra.


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

desordem e regresso

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

The Third Space ...

“The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code.” (p. 54)

“It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew.” (p. 55)

“This meditation … reveals the cultural and historical dimension of that Third Space of enunciations which I have made the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference …. It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or post-colonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory – where I have led you – may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.” (p. 56)

“And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.” (p. 56).


(Homi Bhabha, “The commitment to theory.” [Questions of Third Cinema]. The Location of Culture)

tupi or not tupi ...

“The process of translation is the opening up of another contentious political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation. Here the word of divine authority is deeply flawed by the assertion of the indigenous sign, and in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid – neither the one thing nor the other.”

(Homi Bhabha, “The commitment to theory.” [Questions of Third Cinema]. The Location of Culture, p. 49)

a politics of culture ...

“Is the cause of radical art or critique best served, for instance by … [one] … who announces, at a flashpoint in the argument, ‘We are not artists, we are political activists?’ By obscuring the power of his own practice in the rhetoric of militancy, he fails to draw attention to the specific value of a politics of cultural production …. Forms of popular rebellion and mobilization are often most subversive and transgressive when they are created through oppositional cultural practices.”

(Homi Bhabha, “The commitment to theory.” [Questions of Third Cinema]. The Location of Culture, p. 29)

sorria!

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

cidade maravilhosa

entre mar e montanha
a estátua abraça
uma cidade maravilhada

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

copy

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Kafka Q & A ...

“Why is it meaningless to ask questions? To complain means to put a question and wait for the answer. But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered. No distance divides the interrogator from the one who answers him. There is no distance to overcome. Hence meaningless to ask and wait.”

(Franz Kafka, The Diaries:1910-1923. Trans. Martin Greenberg. p. 343)

ab ... d

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

in-between spaces and borderlines ...

“What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”

“Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority'. The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a 'received' tradition. The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress.”

“The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.”

(Homi Bhabha, “Border Lives: The Art of the Present.” The Location of Culture.)

complex words ...

“It is possible, without contradiction, to conceive of a more vital, freer use of the revealed spoken language, in which it would lose none of its dignity. This is not true of its written form, which allegory laid claim to being. The sanctity of what is written is inextricably bound up with the idea of its strict codification. For sacred script always takes the form of certain complexes of words which ultimately constitute, or aspire to become, one single and inalterable complex. So it is that alphabetical script, as a combination of atoms of writing, is the farthest removed from the script of sacred complexes. These latter take the form of hieroglyphics. The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script - there will always be a conflict between sacred standing and profane comprehensibility - leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics.”

(Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” Trans. John Osborne. p. 175)

Nothing is possible ...

“Such is the scale of the problems, so narrow and so precarious are the paths hitherto trodden, so final the annihilation of tract after immense tract of the past, and so uncertain the bases of our speculations, that even the briefest reconnaissance on the terrain plunges the enquirer into a state of indecision, in which feelings of humble resignation fight for supremacy with moments of the insanest ambition. He knows that the essentials have gone for ever and that all he can do is to scratch the surface. Yet may he not stumble upon some indication, preserved as if by a miracle, which will shed new light upon the whole problem? Nothing is possible: everything, therefore, is possible. The darkness in which we grope our way is too intense for us to hazard any comment on it: we cannot even say that it will last for ever.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John Russel. p. 247-248)

wisdom in writing ...

“Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt- whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature- indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences- those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning- and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple- inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth.

For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not as aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in an outward stage and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder rises how a generated world can be so excellent.

For, one who knows must declare his wonder that this Wisdom, while not itself containing the causes by which Being exists and takes such excellence, yet imparts them to the entities produced in Being's realm. This excellence whose necessity is scarcely or not at all manifest to search, exists, if we could but find it out, before all searching and reasoning.

What I say may be considered in one chief thing, and thence applied to all the particular entities:”


(Plotinus, 5th Ennead, Eighth Tractate, Section 6)

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn483.htm

mystic art ...

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city."


(Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage. p. 48)



"Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?"

(William Massey)

convergences ...

“… the art of our era is one of convergences: the intersecting of times, spaces, and forms. This end of a century has also seen a return of times; we now discover what the ancients knew: history is an empty presence, a blank face. The poet and the novelist must restore the human features of this face. It is an undertaking that requires imagination, and moral courage as well. The literature we write doesn’t turn its back on history, though it rejects the simplifications of ideological art and its categorical affirmations and negations. It is not an art of certainties but one of exploration; it is not a poetry that shows the way but one that seeks it. It is an art and poetry sketching the sign that, from the beginning of time, humanity has seen in the sky: a question mark. The hands that trace this sign may be Latin American, but its meaning is universal.”

(Octavio Paz, “A Literature of Convergences.” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Trans. Helen Lane. p. 226)

who's got my barack?

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

la vida en paz ...

“—¿la vida, cuándo fue de veras nuestra?,
¿cuándo somos de veras lo que somos?,
bien mirado no somos, nunca somos
a solas sino vértigo y vacío,
muecas en el espejo, horror y vómito,
nunca la vida es nuestra, es de los otros,
la vida no es de nadie, todos somos
la vida – pan de sol para los otros,
los otros todos que nosotros somos –,
soy otro cuando soy, los actos míos
son más míos si son también de todos,
para que pueda ser he de ser otro,
salir de mí, buscarme entre los otros,
los otros que no son si yo no existo,
los otros que me dan plena existencia,
no soy, no hay yo, siempre somos nosotros,
la vida es otra, siempre allá, más lejos,
fuera de ti, de mí, siempre horizonte,
vida que nos desvive y enajena,
que nos inventa un rostro y lo desgasta,
hambre de ser, oh muerte, pan de todos”

(from Octavio Paz, Piedra de sol)

riddle-images of desire ...

“The novel associations of images that the poet, the artist, the scholar bring forth are comparable in that they take some grid of a particular texture, whether this texture be concretely that of a decrepit wall, of a cloud, or of anything else: some prolonged and vague sound carries this melody that we needed to hear, excluding any other. What is most striking is that an activity of this kind which, in order to be, requires the unconditional acceptance of a more or less lasting passivity, far from limiting itself to the world of the senses, has been able to attain, in depth, the moral world. The luck, the fortune of the scholar or the artist when they find can only be thought of as a particular case of human luck; it cannot be distinguished from that in its essence. A person will know how to proceed when, like the painter, he consents to reproduce, without any change, what an appropriate grid tells him in advance of his own acts. This grid exists. Every life contains these homogenous patterns of facts, whose surface is cracked or cloudy. Each person has only to stare at them fixedly in order to read his own future. Let him enter the whirlwind; let him retrace the events which have seemed to him fleeting and obscure among all others, which have torn him apart. There-if his questioning was worth it-all the logical principles, having been routed, will bring him the strength of that objective chance which makes a mockery of what would have seemed most probable. Everything humans might want to know is written upon this grid in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire.”

“Real objects do not exist just as they are: looking at the lines that make up the most common among them, you see surging forth – without even having to blink – a remarkable riddle-image which is identical with it and which speaks to us, without any possible mistake, of the only real object, the actual one of our desire. Needless to say, what is true of the complementary graphic image in question is no less true of a certain verbal image upon which any poetry worthy of the name has never ceased to call.”


(André Breton, Mad Love. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. p. 86-88)

Só lido

Boa noite,
Solidão.

Bom dia,
Sol.

Boa tarde,
Só.


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira