Based mainly on community ties and experiences of political resistance to the social oppressions that occur in the peripheries, cultural collectives "reinvent forms of productive organization, constituting local arrangements based on other logics, distinct from the neoliberal productive paradigm," according to Professor Dennis de Oliveira, from the Department of Journalism and Publishing at USP's School of Communications and Arts (ECA), a participant in IEA's Sabbatical Year Program in 2019.

From July to December, he will develop the project "Insurgent Outskirts: the Culture and Communication Collectives in the Peripheries of São Paulo," in which he will map the performance of these groups and analyze three aspects:

• the experiences of the collectives in relation to the role of communicative processes as guiding axes of their organizational perspectives;
• the resignification processes of the peripheral territories from the collectives' action;
• the relations maintained by the collectives with government agencies, companies, universities, and other institutions.

Some of the reflections of the IEA's Research Group Humanities and the Contemporary World will be exhibited during the workshop The Society of Undifferentiation: Identity, Trauma and Mythical Violence, organized by Professor Olgária Matos, from the USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH).

The discussions to be held from February 22 to 24 are part of the activities of the thematic project "Time Acceleration and Post-Democracy: Violence and Communication" (in Portuguese), that will be transdisciplinarly developed during the period 2014-2017 by the research group coordinated by Professor Matos. The events will take place in the former room of the University Council.

Olgária Matos, a professor at FFLCH-USP.

"The society of communication, information and knowledge lives an intensification of nervous stimuli, producing an acceleration of time and some significant breaks with tradition. The changes impact the notion of identity and consistency of its meaning, and also the memory and the past. We do not know yet if the development of science and technology can be conducive to the emancipation of the human being, or will lead to destruction," says the coordinator.

The meeting will gather researchers from various disciplines of the humanities such as philosophy, anthropology, history, psychoanalysis, psychology and others. The conferencist will be Georges Jean Marie Gaillard, a professor of psychology at the Institut de Psychologie of the Université Lumière Lyon 2.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Programme:

February 22

2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

February 23

2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

February 24

10:00 am - Trauma and Management Technologies in Institutions.
2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

“What kind of informative environment would we have in this totally fragmented scenario? What kind of impact can this have on information mediation and on public debate? How will democratic societies be impacted by this trend? And what can happen to the business models that support professional journalism?”

These are some questions raised by political scientist José Álvaro Moisés, coordinator of IEA’s Quality of Democracy Research Group and USP’s Public Policies Research Center (NUPPS), organizers of the symposium Transformations and Fragmentation of the Structures of Traditional Media, with journalist Ricardo Gandour, content director of the Estado Group.

The debate will take place on November 25, from 10 am to 12 pm, at the IEA’s Events Room, with commentary by political scientist Marco Aurélio Nogueira, professor at São Paulo State University (UNESP), Araraquara campus, and by social scientist Marco Antônio Carvalho Teixeira, from EAESP-FGV (São Paulo School of Business Administration of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation).

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

The new digital world is transforming not only the form and the content of information, but also the production processes of communication and journalism, says Moisés. “The traditional organization of newsrooms may be waning, giving rise to scattered communication initiatives, such as blogs, groups, nuclei and other structures deemed alternative until recently,” in his view.

The speaker

Ricardo Gandour graduated in Journalism from Casper Líbero and in Civil Engineering from USP’s São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC). He has worked in several newsrooms of the mainstream press, including Folha de S. Paulo, Editora Globo and Diário de S. Paulo, before becoming content director of the Estado Group.

He has remained associated with academic life and has worked in prestigious schools of communications, including USP’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA), Casper Líbero and Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM).

Recently, Gandour accepted an invitation by dean Ernest Sotomayor and will become a Visiting Research Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, taking leave from the Estado Group. At Columbia University, from January to June 2016, he will carry out a research project on the risks for democracy of the fragmentation of the press.

In summary, this is the idea behind the ‘technototemism’ theory developed by sociologist Derrick de Kerckhove and presented by him at the conference ‘Technology: the New Totemism’, held by the IEA on October 17 and coordinated by anthropologist Massimo Canevacci, visiting professor at the institute.

Disciple of Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Kerckhove is considered one of the most important researcherss of the relationship between digital technologies and society. He teaches at the University of Toronto, where he has directed the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology for more than 20 years.

USER vs. CONTENT

To support his theory, Kerckhove sought inspiration in the thought of French anthropologist Phillip Descola, more specifically the concept of totemism - form of identification between man and the natural world marked by the absence of rupture between culture (human) and nature (non-human).

Transposed to the context of a technological society, totemism translates itself into continuity between mind (man) and machine (technology), according to Kerckhove. For the sociologist, that continuity brings out the Mcluhanian statement that media condition both the interiority as the externality of individuals, so that the user becomes content .

‘There is an interdependence between the self and the networked world: technology has become an extension of the body and a defining element of human identity’, he said, noting that the most symptomatic effect of this is the proliferation of identities in the network, such as digital people, avatars, identification numbers and electronic entities, among others. According to him, there is maybe an ongoing process of anthropological mutation triggered by the emergence of the digital IT, as suggested by French theorist Pierre Lévy.

CENTRALITY OF NETWORKS

To illustrate the centrality of networks in the process of mutation, Kerckhove has compared the internet to the limbic system - a component of the nervous system responsible for the control of emotional behavior and motivational impulses, i.e., the mechanism by which an emotion leads to a process of decision-making and, after this, an action.

According to the sociologist ‘we are moving from biology to technology: the internet works as a global limbic system because it brings out emotions and passions able to culminate in actions with viral progression’. To exemplify, he has mentioned movements that have gained strength in the networks, such as the Arab Spring, Indignados, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, in addition to the global activism initiated by Wikileaks and carried forward by Edward Snowden.

CONNECTION OF MINDS

‘When communicating through the internet, people connect their minds and share thoughts, composing a kind of digital unconsciousness’, said Kerckhove, introducing what he claimed to be his contribution to the theory of Freud. The sociologist said that while there is no way to prove the existence of the unconsciousness, ‘the digital unconsciousness is there, composed of all that is known about anyone on the network’. For him, this phenomenon is becoming as crucial in the lives of people as paternal and maternal influences.

The digital unconsciousness would, according to the speaker, arise from a hybridization between real and virtual, marked by reduced interiority, connected to the self, and an extended externality linked to the networked world. For Kerckhove, it is the result of a new emotional anxiety. ‘What is Web 2.0 but the entry of the excitement factor in an environment where there was only information? People want to share news and also feelings, tips, thoughts, opinions’, he said.

But the sociologist warns that analyzing this new reality requires a dose of skepticism, because the sharing of content, the exponential multiplication of the number of emitters in the media, the possibility to express outrage, the increasing transparency of information, the expanding of transculturalism, among others, all come at a high cost: privacy. According to the lecturer, in the era of technological totemism, trying to have control over personal information posted on the internet is like rowing against the tide.

Photos of the event

The speaker will be Scott McQuire, from the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication. The researcher will discuss digital networks and urban space, focusing on the possibilities of creating a participatory public space through the use of new media.

According to him, since "the networked interactions have become an everyday dimension of negotiation of the contemporary public space, there is an urgent need to think about how this trajectory transforms the oldest geometries of power in the city".

The opening of the meeting will be in charge of anthropologist Massimo Canevacci, visiting professor at the IEA, who will give a lecture on 'Communicational Metropolis and Ubiquitous Subjectivities'.

The event will be broadcast live from IEA's Event Room at www.iea.usp.br/aovivo.

The meeting has been organized by the IEA with the support of UNESP, organizer of the '2nd International Seminar on Gender, Sexuality and Media', that will be hold from October 1 to 3 in Bauru, and also attended by McQuire.

In partnership with

Organized by anthropologist Massimo Canevacci and sociologist Bernardo Sorj, both visiting professors at the IEA, the meeting will focus on four key issues:

What are the implications of monitoring systems that collect data from citizens, companies and countries, including information of private nature, and place them at the service of corporations and states?

How do new information systems affect international relations?

Which mechanisms should be mobilized to protect citizens and countries from permanent surveillance?

What are the results of digital reification and visual fetishes that penetrate the body-mind of whom participates actively,  occasionally or creatively in this process?

Besides Canevacci and Sorj, journalist and economist Gilson Schwartz, professor of USP’s School of Communication and Arts (ECA) and former visiting professor at IEA, and Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, professor at the Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), will also attend the meeting.

The event will be broadcast live from IEA's Event Room at www.iea.usp.br/aovivo.

Professor at the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ and visiting professor at the IEA since March, his interdisciplinary studies mobilize referentials of communication, anthropology and critical theory, focusing on empirical research.

In the following interview to IEA’s journalist Flávia Dourado, Canevacci explains some of the concepts of his authorship, questions the idea of an alienating culture - a ‘standard determined by the economic and political structure’ - and proposes a relaxation of the classic scientific method through ‘reflective ethnography ‘, a methodological strategy that does not let itself stiffen by the rupture between subject and object.

Your works speak of a transition from the ‘industrial city’, focused on productivity, class conflicts and political dialectic, to the 'communicational metropolis', marked by 'multi-centrism' and by modifying the perception of space-time. Is that what the concept of ‘ubiquity’ is?

The dualistic logic of the industrial city was replaced by the multi-centrism of the communicational metropolis, in which the characteristic flexibility of digital culture prevails. This transformation is related to the size of ubiquity, which complicates the perception of space-time.

The person who passes through the network and the communicational metropolis can, in the same space-time, communicate with people from completely different contexts. This ubiquitous experience - unimaginable and nonexistent in the industrial city - raises enormous challenges for communication and ethnography: what kind of relationship with others does it cause? What about the issue of otherness? An ubiquitous connected (not collective) person is affirmed.

Before, in anthropology, the ‘other’ was the indigenous culture. But today I speak with the Bororo or the Xavante [indigenous peoples studied by Canevacci], who live in the state of Mato Grosso, through Skype or the website Aldeia Digital. They talk in Portuguese, sometimes in Spanish, but continue to speak Bororo and Xavante, and use the same digital technology as I ...

In the communicational metropolis, each person sets up an ‘other’, not as a radical alterity, but based on small differences. If, in the past, the concept of approval prevailed, in which everyone followed a pattern determined by the economic and political structure, currently the major challenge of communication and ethnography is to penetrate in each of these differences - differences that configure specific types of otherness and together form a patchwork, a glocal syncretic dimension that ranges in space and time.

Is it this possibility of going in different space-times that brings out the multividual?

The formative of industrial culture, always developing an identical identity to itself, no longer works. In digital culture, identities are not fixed but floating. The concept of multividual modifies the classical concept of the individual - a Latin word that  translates the Greek word ‘atomom’,which means indivisible. The multividual is divisible, plural and fluid. Ubiquitous. The same person may have a multiplicity of identities, various ’I’s, and so 'multividualizes' its subjectivity.

One symptom of this is the idea of gender. Male and female are no longer perceived as a biologically defined division. Gender is seen as a cultural construct that does not contain a binary, dualistic logic anymore. It is understood that it is possible to have a multitude of erotic sensual experiences.

Fashion is another example: the multividual is not represented by a specific, unique fashion style. It modifies its styles according to the different contexts in which it lies. This poses major challenges for the study of fashion, which should no longer be taken as something that manipulates, because each multividual chooses different elements and, from that, creates its own performance.

And what is the relationship between the emergence of this multividual and digital culture?

Ubiquitous decentralization of the individual is a type of identity that is characteristic of digital culture. The desire to live an internal otherness used to be shared only at specific times, as in carnival. Today, with the explosion of digital culture, this desire for otherness, of multivocal, can be lived all the time, anytime. One just has to get on the internet to be able to express coexisting differences and heteronomous styles of writing, representing and connecting.

This transitive person characterized by floating multividual ‘selves’, who are claiming themselves as ‘others’, has the advantage of use of digital technologies - technologies that become more widespread on the ease of use, the price reduction, the acceleration of languages and the possibilities of standalone edition.

Of course, the digital culture also brings security problems - such as fraud – to be fought. Because digital culture is part of a conflict, a dialogical, a tension that we need to solve.

So the manifestation of the multividual is linked to the emergence of a more horizontal communication, made ​​possible by digital culture?

Digital culture modifies the ‘communicational division of labor’ (expression inspired in the concept of social division of labor, proposed by Marx) between the narrator and who is narrated. The idea of ​​self-representation arises: people want to represent themselves, and no longer be represented. And, from anywhere in the world, they have the technological and cultural conditions to do so, and never grant a third party the right to represent them. This comes from the desire of each voice, narrating its own story. In comes the criticism of the status of ‘who has the power to represent whom’.

The dichotomy between who is representing on one side and who is represented on the other has dropped. This is the right that each person has to politically and aesthetically self-represent and also to represent who is representing them. That means putting in permanent crisis the dualistic and dichotomic view between nature and culture, male and female, good and evil, who represents and who is represented. Therefore, we need to develop differentiated logics of thought that allow to harness the potential that digital culture offers us.

You defend the adoption of a ‘reflexive ethnography’ in anthropological research. Does this epistemological shift emerge as an effect of the phenomenon of self-representation?

Self-representation changes ethnography profoundly. It becomes more reflective and dialogic. The interviewer is also interviewed. My Bororo and Xavante friends do research on me at the same time they are being surveyed and together we build a self-representation into which we put our personalities, experiences, emotions and values​​. The emotional involvement becomes a constitutive part of ethnographic strategy, because the researcher is part of the research, and not out of the analyzed context. Thus, one does not insist in objectivity related to the object so that the object is no longer the object: it is a subject in all its complexity and in dialogue with the researcher.

Self-representation means that, as an anthropologist, I can no longer represent the culture of the Bororo and Xavante or the outskirts of São Paulo, because both indigenous and ‘paulistano’ youth assert their right to represent themselves and to represent me as a researcher.

By giving up the policy of objectivity and assuming the principles of dialogism and reflexivity, isn’t the researcher at risk of being criticized for lack of scientific approach? How does academia deal with this issue?

The paradigm that underpins the scientific dimension is largely based on physics and Euclidean mathematics. But from the 1950s the post-Euclidean vision began to rise up in the exact sciences as well. In the laboratories of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research), for example, the context in which the experiments are placed is part of the evaluation, because it is understood that the context modifies the result. Subjectivity and objectivity, universality and particularity are connected and are part of the results.

Pure objectivity was important in the past. Now what we need is to combine the aesthetic force of imagination and subjective experience with scientific accuracy by means of what I call ‘exact imagination’. Post-Euclidean logics...

The works created by architect Zaha Hadid illustrate very well the emergence of this post-Euclidean culture. She developed a type of digital elaboration able to create architectural fantasies that do not belong to our everyday geometric experience. She applies a hybrid selfgenerative multidimension in architectural diagonal forms that have never existed before and that are not based on classical Euclidean geometry, composed of square, circle etc.. Thus, Zaha creates an innovative metropolitan experience, challenging our eyes, accustomed to rectangular and pyramidal buildings with modernist form.

Still within the epistemological transformations linked to ethnography, could you explain your concept of ‘methodological stupor’?

The ‘methodological stupor’ is an innovative way to position your body and mind in one porous dimension to find the unknown. It is a practice to open self corporeality and prepare it for the encounter with the stranger, who, precisely because it is strange, is desired. The problem of this meeting is essential in ethnography. It may be a chance encounter with something that is very close, on Facebook or on the street, for example. Because sometimes, while surfing the internet or walking down the street, we find elements that create a kind of awe. And you have to be prepared when that meeting happens. You must be trained in time to face the unknown, which is both alluring and amazing. It is necessary to grasp the moment, which is unique and can escape. To develop an ethnography of the youth in São Paulo, focused on the desire for creative urban movement, it is important to implement the self-representation or the stupor as ubiquitous methodologies.

In your studies on digital culture, you rely on authors of critical theory linked to the Frankfurt School, including Kracauer, Adorno and Benjamin. This option seems contradictory if we consider that in the theories of communication the Frankfurt School is associated with the idea of the culture industry as a place of handling and disposal. Does this contradiction actually exist?

Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer were the first to empirically study the mass culture that was rising. Adorno focused on the analysis of radio, cinema, music, and the authoritarian personality. He was a philosopher who was not just thinking, because he was also doing empirical research. Kracauer, by studying cinema of the 1920s, had already understood that self-representation was a new paradigm that new reproducible film technology offered.

Critical theory from the concept of approval is a superficial reading. Just as it is superficial to understand the cultural industry as an absolute form of mass. For Kracauer and Benjamin, for example, it was the possibility of inserting reproducible technology in release processes of the poor social classes, which could, from this technological resource, enjoy the aesthetic culture.

In recent years, Germany and the United States are seeing the rise of an innovative current that makes a different reading of critical theory. What is the mass media today? The concept of mass is dead, as well as the idea of ​​media as mediatior between cultural industry and the public. In digital culture, each one can develop its own narrative. The fundamental problem now is how to make a critically oriented empirical research on digital culture - a culture that is changing the mass media and prefiguring the concept of self-representation.

Related news

Art and Hacktivism in debate