Research processes, knowledge production and processual creativity : schizoanalytic cartographies in Brazil

Abstract

In this thesis I analyse Felix Guattari's notion of schizoanalytic cartography in its theoretical and pragmatic development in Brazil. Cartographic practices have been developed extensively in Brazil since the 1980's, stemming from the theories and practice of Guattari and from French and Italian institutional analysis. Schizoanalytic cartographies are broadly developed as a tool to work through collective processes, as a device to analyse the collective agency of desire. Cartographies both map and create: they are realised by those who want to produce their own lives, while resisting oppression, and modes of capitalist subjectivation subsuming desire, affect and creativity itself. This thesis therefore traces schizoanalytic cartographies that devise new research processes and new propositions of organisation, subjectivation and institutionalization in Brazil. It explores key Guattarian terms ‘transversality’ and ‘micropolitics’, to analyse the practices of research processes in academia, such as Contemporary Subjectivity Research Group, and theatre groups working in transversal with mental health care, such as Ueinzz Theatre Company. I focus on how these processes work across institutions, theatre practices, the clinic and the social field. The thesis traces their work on “processual subjectivation” and “processual creativity”, proposing the “processual” as the core form of assemblage between subjects, modes of expression and institutions. This thesis argues against reductive notions of politically engaged art that pose oppositions between aesthetics and political practice, and against institutionally circumscribed definitions of practice-based research. Instead, the thesis proposes new frameworks and different genealogies of practice that transversalise and radicalise aesthetic production, connecting it in new ways to political grounds, outside of the agenda of larger cultural institutions, art worlds and markets. Through the examples of practices analysed, it argues that schizoanalytic cartographies bring “processual creativity” and the “production of subjectivity” into relation, and allow us to reassemble the fields of politics, aesthetics and knowledge production.