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