RESISTANCES TO THE AESTHETICIZATION OF THE WORLD: SCENES AND PERFORMANCES

Abstract

Lipovetski and Serroy, in their 2013 book, described an artist capitalism and an aestheticisation of the world, where competitiveness is played out on the terrain of the senses, of affects and of exacerbated creativity. Management of aesthetic experiences in organisations imposes a distribution of the sensible, limiting the possibilities of other experiences, expression and styles of existence, and is therefore eminently political. However, are not there also forms of resistance, forming scenes of contestation and subversion of this management? Embracing the turn to affect, we study the case such an aestheticisation imposed in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and the battles of MCs who divert a disused space in order to re-populate it with mobilizing and contesting affects. These duels construct an aesthetic experience that challenges the one dramatised by the city, and its staging of space favourable to consumption. Contrasting aesthetic experiences helps to grasp the extent to which such an aestheticisation imposes a gaze, the selective listening of certain voices, an occupation of space, a repositioning of the public and the common, an order in which everyone remains in their place. If the aestheticisation of the world promotes a theatricalisation, it is a theatre of representation and not of repetition, fighting against all scenes that would propose another distribution of thesensible. It is a theatre, as opposed to performances, wherein the bodies of those who feel having no voice play their own role and keep at their place. From a perspective that is very different from that of an exchange of rational arguments in the public space, the case reveals a guerrilla war of the sensible, where bodies, affects, territories and performances are at the heart of what is played out in cities and organisations.