Cultural Action and the Defense of Public Life

Abstract:

The article proposes a reflection on the consecrated idea of cultural action, which intends to revisit the notion of public life. Cultural action is thus understood in its historical development and it is questioned in its potentiality as an action in times of political and democratic crisis. From the dialogue with Political Philosophy and from the analysis of artistic and pedagogical practices, besides the public intervention of São Paulo artists, we reflect on the perspectives of cultural action in the current historical moment, focusing on it as an expression of the public sphere and political participation, broadening the spheres of sharing the sensitive field and re-singularizing the existential universes.

Keywords:
Arts and Politics; Cultural Action; Artistic Action; Theater and Public Sphere; Theater and Democracy

Resumo:

O artigo propõe a reflexão sobre a ideia consagrada de ação cultural, na qual procura se revisitar a noção de vida pública. A ação cultural é compreendida assim em seu desenvolvimento histórico e questionada em sua potencialidade como ação em tempo de crise política e democrática. A partir do diálogo com a filosofia política e da análise das práticas artístico-pedagógicas e de intervenção pública de artistas paulistanos, reflete-se sobre as perspectivas da ação cultural no atual momento histórico, enfocando-a como expressão da esfera pública e da participação política, a fim de ampliar os direitos de partilha do sensível e re-singularizar os universos existenciais.

Palavras-chave:
Arte e Política; Ação Cultural; Ação Artística; Teatro e Esfera Pública; Teatro e Democracia

Résumé:

L’article propose une réflexion sur l’idée consacrée d’action culturelle, qui cherche à revisiter la notion de vie publique. L’action culturelle est ainsi comprise dans son développement historique et remise en cause dans son potentiel d’action en temps de crise politique et démocratique. Du dialogue avec la philosophie politique et de l’analyse des pratiques artistiques et pédagogiques et de l’intervention publique des artistes de São Paulo, il se reflète sur les perspectives de l’action culturelle dans le moment historique actuel, en la considèrant comme une expression de la sphère publique et de la participation politique, afin d’élargir les droits de partage du sensible et de re-singulariser les univers existentiels.

Mots-clés:
Art et Politique; Action Culturelle; Action Artistique; Théâtre et Sphere Publique; Théâtre et Démocratie

One must live up to the words he says and is told. And, above all, one must continually ensure that these words destroy and explode pre-existing words. Only the struggle of the words not yet spoken against the words already spoken allows the rupture of the given horizon, allows the subject to invent himself in another way, that the self is another one (Larrosa, 2011, p. 40).

Introduction

This article is an a posteriori reflection on the author’s PhD research, published in 2019 under the title Poemas de água: teatro, ação cultural e formação artística [Water poems: theater, cultural action and artistic training] (Viganó, 2019). It is presented here an analytical cutout that proposes the dialogue between the theory on cultural action, presenting the ideas of André Malraux, Francis Jeanson, Phillipe Urfalino and Zygmunt Bauman and political philosophy, bringing us closer to the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Félix Guattari and Jacques Rancière on political action and democracy.

The abovementioned research investigated the concept of cultural action allied to the idea of artistic action, as observed in the practices of the theater groups subsidized by the public power in the city of São Paulo between 2013 and 2015. The trajectory of the concept of cultural action was examined, its ideals, its relationship with public policies of culture and its influence on theatrical practice, in artistic-pedagogical terms, in the contemporary São Paulo context.

In addition, it was investigated the correspondence between the fostered groups and the artistic training programs of the Municipal Department of Culture, which became a network of actions, artistic-pedagogical propositions and interventions in the public space of the city, especially in the eastern and southern outskirts of São Paulo.

Cultural action was thus investigated from the perspective of the trajectory of São Paulo’s theatrical artists as educators and cultural agents, broadening the debate on public policies of culture and the reflection on artistic practice as a pedagogical and political action.

In this article, we start from some concepts and conclusions developed in the doctoral research and update the reflection to the current context (2019), in which the threat to human rights and democratic invention, to the secular State and public policies as a field of cultural valorization and distribution of the conditions of sharing, of both material and symbolic goods, is verified.

Thus, it is proposed to reflect on the foundations of cultural action in contrast to the alienation of the public sphere, questioning the directions of aesthetic-political practices hitherto consolidated and observing the need to reinvent cultural action as a social performance and an artistic, pedagogical and political practice.

What is Cultural Action?

At its birth, at the heart of André Malraux’s French Ministry of Culture, the first dedicated exclusively to cultural affairs, cultural action emerged as the foundation of a public policy aimed at democratizing access to artistic works. Thus, spaces were created in which art could be enjoyed and practiced, ensuring the organization and passing on of cultural heritage and aesthetic experience.

This rather ambitious undertaking was directly linked to the strengthening of the French state in the post-Second World War period, establishing the idea of Nation based on a cultural identity, referenced by notions of heritage and memory. Understanding culture as a dynamic process in constant construction, the Malraux’s Ministry established a set of actions that inserted culture into the French government’s long and medium term planning, consolidating the idea that culture - as well as education - was a founding element of the structured and unified national identity.

Moreover, art was understood as a practice of sublime quality, capable of elevating man beyond the daily misfortunes and fatality of his condition, surviving time and space. Malraux said: “l’art c’est l’acte par lequel l’homme arrache quelque chose à la mort” [art is the act by which man pulls something out of the inescapable character of death] (Azzi, 2010, p. 12)⁵. Such vision - although elitist, by privileging the status of consecrated artworks and proposing the replacement of a parochial mentality by a universal culture - postulates art and culture as belonging to the sphere of public life, contributing to the strengthening of the secular Modern State and of the free and democratic nations in the post-war period, with art taking the official place of religion as the expression and experience of the human spirit.

Despite the Enlightenment heritage observed in the Malraux’s sense of culture and art, the French left-wing influence was also noted in issues concerning the popularization of culture. The Houses of Culture were the direct result of this policy of diffusion, a project through which cultural action also began to embody itself in its pedagogical aspect. Francis Jeanson, philosopher, militant and director of the Casa de Cultura de Chalon-sur-Saône (1967-1971), elaborated the idea of cultural action as a process that “[...] is summarized in the creation or organization of the necessary conditions for people to invent their own ends and thus become subjects - subjects of culture - and not their objects” (Coelho, 1985, p. 14). The same Jeanson developed the notion of non-public, which would correspond, in general terms, to the population that would be separated from the means of cultural production and from the diffusion of the main artworks, supposedly centralized in Paris.

With the movement of May 1968, the cultural democratization proposed by the Ministry is put in check. The situation of socio-economic and generational cultural rupture in France is highlighted, attacking the privileges of bourgeois hereditary culture, regarding the access to cultural goods. The artists involved in the movement, many of them officials of the Ministry, or subsidized by it, set themselves the mission of breaking the isolation of the so-called non-public, allowing them to find the tools to leave the ghetto and situate themselves more consciously in their social and historical context, freeing themselves from oppression. This mission would be achieved through what they claimed to be an “authentic cultural action”:

We are not the students, nor the workers, and we have no numerical power of pressure: the only conceivable justification for our public existence and our demands lies in the very specific nature of this function of relating to and illuminating the social context in which we exercise it. But such a function would be doomed to become impracticable if the means were to refuse to claim to be creators in all the areas of their appeal. To speak of active culture is to speak of permanent creation, it is to invoke the very resources of an art that does not stop being in process. And theater itself appears immediately as a privileged form of expression among all other possible forms of expression, because it is a collective human work proposed to the collectivity of men. [...] We commit ourselves then to maintain in any circumstance this dialectical place between theatrical (or more generically artistic) and cultural action, so that their respective demands do not cease to enrich each other, even in the contradictions that will never cease to arise between them (La Déclaration de Villeurbanne apud Abirached, 2005, p. 195-196).

The reformist perspective brought by the 1968 Movement reverberated not only in a paradigm shift in the sense of art and culture (specially linked to the avant-gardes, to political participation, to the expression of new values and to the questioning of traditions) but also in the practice of cultural action. Based on the new logic in practice in this field, the notion of plural culture is emphasized, also attributing to the non-public a culture of its own that needed to have its expression and production facilitated and confronted in the public sphere. It was claimed that the idea of cultural democratization proposed by the Ministry would not succeed if social inequalities were maintained. In this sense, the pedagogical aspect of cultural action gains strength, and mediation between public, art and production becomes responsible for the encounter and confrontation between social forces and cultural expressions.

From the 1960s, the relationship between culture, cultural action and democracy has expanded, both in the academic sphere and in public policy. New classes of artists, intellectuals and cultural agents emerged as protagonists of this process, experimenting new ways of making art and relating to the spectator and the public space. In addition, the ways of managing the sphere of culture in institutional political life have also been transformed, strengthening the notion of economy of culture and creative economy from the 1980s onwards, with the privatization of cultural institutions and sponsorship by the corporate world standing out in this scenario.

Thus, we trace the history of cultural action, ranging from the sense of art as the elevation of spirit and culture as a national unifying power to the conception of multiculturalism and the affirmation of cultural identities. In addition, there is an emphasis on its power as a contesting action, promoting counter-conducts⁶. On the other hand, we have its trajectory initially embraced as a public policy, later decentralized into civil society actions and public/private partnerships.

A diversity of forms and principles expressed in cultural action can be observed today, animated by different ideologies and worldviews, which run on the edge of a razor, oscillating between revolutionary ambition and social appeasement. It is based on this trajectory that we propose to analyze, given the current socio-political context, the vocation and the possibilities of effective cultural action in Brazil today.

Cultural Action, Politics and Public Space

From Jeanson’s definition, which takes cultural action as a practice that leads individuals to become subjects of culture rather than its objects, one observes a character that is both positive and negative. On the one hand, to become the subject of culture, to act on it, to constitute it affirmatively, as an active citizen (in the democratic sense) constitutes its positive character. On the other, the negative is the refusal to become the object of culture, that is, not to be subjected to it and not to be subjected to the agencying mechanisms of culture and to the cultural industry. Therefore, the classic definition of cultural action postulates both a denial of the condition of subjected and an affirmation of the condition of activity on the public sphere.

According to Hannah Arendt (2003), no human activity can achieve excellence unless it is exercised in the public sphere. For her, the term public means the place of what is common to all and in which differences dwell. Moreover, it is a condition of the existence of this sphere that what is placed there remains, being built not only for the present, but for future generations. The meaning of public life is then consolidated in the importance of being seen and heard by others from different angles and places: “[...] the public sphere, as a common world, brings us together in the company of one another and yet prevents us from colliding with one another, so to speak” (Arendt, 2003, p. 62).

By aiming at the production of subjects of culture and the opposition to social forces of subjection, the cultural action becomes evident as an element of public space, by integrating in its constitution the dialogue between the fields of art, politics and education. From its understanding as a public thing, cultural action is taken as a privileged place of practices that relate culture and politics in an ambivalent sense: it allows them to conjugate both as a construction of identities and as spaces of rupture. We can then question whether this ambivalence is an intrinsic condition of cultural action or if it is expressed only by the use that is made of it.

According to Bauman (2012), the idea of culture would also embrace a contradictory character, since, by focusing on the human condition, it brings together instincts, wills and powers in the creation of a world that must be rationally determined in order to constitute itself as a place of sovereignty of human action and works. At the same time, it opens space for freedom and self-determination, thus oscillating between the place of creativity and invention and the place of continuity and social order.

The ambiguity that matters, the ambivalence that produces meaning, the genuine foundation on which the cognitive utility of conceiving the human habitat as a ‘world of culture’ is based, is between ‘creativity’ and ‘normative regulation’. The two ideas could not be more distinct, but both are present in the composite idea of ‘culture’, which means both inventing and preserving, discontinuity and continuation; novelty and tradition; routine and breaking of standards; following the norms and transcending them; the odd and the regular; change and the monotony of reproduction; the unexpected and the predictable (Bauman, 2012, p. 18).

In the same way, cultural action carries within itself the possibility of embracing different practices and worldviews, in different conceptions of culture, inscribing itself directly in public life, from policies that privilege either a universalizing or a pluralist notion of culture. Hence, we highlight the power of cultural action as effective not only in artistic practices, but also in spaces of political action. In this way, it transforms the cultural agents themselves, their own conceptions about artistic practice and their inscription in the field of culture. While it affects the contours of cities and public life, its agents are affected by the meetings that take place there, creating transversality and correspondence.

According to Jacques Rancière (2018), politics is the art of local construction of the universal. At the same time, says the author, it is not the consensual community of interests that come together, but a community of interruptions, of fractures, punctual and local: a community of worlds that are intervals of subjectivation, built between identities and places. For him, politics ceases to exist where there is no space for the distance between identities, where the whole community is reduced to the simple sum of its parts.

Cultural action, both in its artistic and pedagogical practice, supports a political aspect. In the case of theater, through the power of its community constitution and collective participation, it establishes contact with the public sphere, with communities and beginning artists, expanding, on one hand, the system of cultural production itself. On the other hand, it mediates the present conflicts between the idealizations of artistic projects and the socio-cultural reality, and between the institutionalization of State programs, their equipment and society, in its inequalities and pluralities. The aesthetic training undertaken by cultural action thus facilitates processes that enable multiple discourses, new forms of artistic expression not established by professional or academic parameters, and the consolidation of cultural practices.

It can be observed in the last fifteen years in the city of São Paulo a new circulation of artistic practice and its reflection, as a result of cultural action practices, linked to Public Programs of Artistic Training (such as the Programa Vocational and the Programa de Iniciação Artística, of the Municipal Department of Culture) or to the counterparts established by the subsidized groups.

For Rancière, political action is always a movement that displaces borders, building democratic spaces of convergence. In this way, even if the cultural policy which took place in the city of São Paulo between 2000 and 2015 was incipient as a whole, it advanced in the construction of democratic spaces and also in the strengthening of social actors who gained visibility as subjects of culture, which did not fail to generate conflicts, contradictions and fractures in the social fabric. Thus, among other aspects, it can be observed:

1. The correlation of theatre with the public space, through a large number of cultural interferences and artistic interventions;

2. The creation of bonds between artists and the population in local, central or peripheral communities;

3. The expressive flourishing of various modalities of theater-making in the peripheries, either in scenic works or in structures and processes of creation;

4. The popularization of group theatre and the circulation of its artists throughout the various regions of the city;

5. The enlargement of the scene of amateur and professional artists producing works and claiming the job market;

6. The development of reflection and theatrical pedagogy processes by subsidized groups and by Artistic Training Programs;

7. A broader dialogue between artists from the city center and its peripheries;

8. The development of research perspectives in various fields of theatrical activity⁷.

We are then interested in questioning the validity, the possibility and the destiny of cultural action at the socio-historical moment in which we live, with the decay of public life and democratic conditions and the rise of the extreme right on a national and international level. So far, we have understood cultural action as a set of practices and spaces that provides conditions for individuals to reencounter their personal and collective identities and thus build paths of sensitive intervention in the public sphere, facing socio-cultural conflicts and understanding themselves as subjects of culture.

To the extent that - as it is evident in Brazil today - the power of the State and the power of wealth tend to combine in the management of the flow of money and of populations, an effort is made to reduce the spaces of politics. The democratic State has the duty to request the participation of all in the movement for political creation and sovereignty. However, a democracy in crisis alienates the population from the public sphere, creating mechanisms that deviate from the perception of what is common. According to Hannah Arendt (2003, p. 67):

When the same identity of the object can no longer be discerned, no common human nature, let alone the artificial conformism of mass society, can avoid the destruction of the common world, which is usually preceded by the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to human plurality. This can occur in the conditions of radical isolation, in which no one else can agree with anyone, as it usually occurs in tyrannies. But it can also occur in the conditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where we see everyone suddenly behaving as if they were members of a single family, each manipulating and prolonging the perspective of the neighbor. In both cases, men become entirely private beings, that is, deprived of seeing and hearing others and deprived of being seen and heard by them. They are all prisoners of the subjectivity of their own unique existence, which remains unique even though the same experience is multiplied countless times. The ordinary world ends when it is seen only in one aspect and only one perspective is allowed.

Phillipe Urfalino, when analyzing the change of political paradigm on culture and cultural policies after the 1968 Movement, asks: “How to continue the cultural action when its previous foundations collapsed? (Urfalino, 2015, p. 253). In the same way, we ask ourselves here: what would cultural action be at the time of culture crisis? How can cultural action be continued in a threatened democracy?

Equality of Rights and Class Inequality: the hate to democracy

In analyzing contemporary democracy, Jacques Rancière defends its meaning on the condition of equality. Equality is dreamed by the Enlightenment’s rationalism, which postulated the foundations of the Modern State. For him, democracy would be the egalitarian field of misunderstanding, of the common space of the various singularities and of the ways of distributing the conditions of sharing. To be effective, however, it would need the rescue of the sensitive to common space, the politicization of public affairs and the invention of democracy in controversial places.

Democracy is neither the form of government that allows the oligarchy to reign in the name of the people, nor the form of society regulated by the power of market. It is the action that continually removes from oligarchic governments the monopoly of public life and wealth the omnipotence over life. It is the power that, today more than ever, must fight against the confusion of these powers into one and the same law of domination. To recover the uniqueness of democracy is also to become aware of its loneliness. [...] The equal society has no equal society on its flank. The equal society is only the set of egalitarian relations that are traced out here and now through singular and precarious acts. Democracy is naked in its power with wealth, as is the power of affiliation that today helps or challenges it. It is not based on any nature of things and is not guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not brought about by any historical necessity and it does not bring any. It is entrusted only to the constancy of its own acts (Rancière, 2014, p. 121).

The alienation from public life, through the spheres of state power and wealth, also provokes the alienation of art in the sharing of the common and the weakening of cultural bonds through the action of industry and cultural media. The isolation resulting from the political and social uprooting of individuals generates a new policy of hatred: against oneself, by his/her condition of exclusion or deprivation; or against the targets created by the media for this purpose.

It is in this sphere that we suggest the role of artistic intervention, expressed in various forms of cultural action. These actions, however, are reconstructed from their own crisis, from their negative: the refusal of subjection. By constituting itself in a moving terrain, alternating its legitimization with resistance to a contrary force to public life, which is its sustenance, cultural action, in order to survive, needs to be justified before society, at the same time as it needs to find convincing ways in the face of social performance. Would this moment indicate the need for a rupture?

Urfalino states that when the State subsidizes, it also chooses its grantees (Urfalino, 2015). How then to regulate the State’s action? Hence the need for confrontation in the public space, for the common exercise of our excellence from a multiplicity of perspectives. And it is through the analysis of public life today, with which misconceptions and complexities it operates, from which mechanisms of operation and agencying it is constituted, that we can find ways to propose a forceful cultural action that guarantees the reconquest of the public sphere and the right to aesthetic sensitivity.

In this sense, cultural action is connected, on the one hand, to the aesthetic experience as a process of de-subjectivation, acting on others not to demand something from them, but to get them to constitute themselves in a relationship of self-determination. On the other hand, it connects to the interference in the social fabric, appropriating it as a performative space of representation. In this way, cultural action can highlight not only the artist/citizen relationship, or the dialogue between the private and public spheres, but also a symbolic dimension that becomes activated.

The Sensitive and the Reinvention of the Things that Are Said

It is not possible to state what paths cultural action will find to remain active in public life. However, it is essential to invest in the articulation of social actors with a view to maintaining spaces for participation and public policies for culture, which pave the way for cultural action to become effective. However, this outline requires today, more than ever, an uprising of artistic and pedagogical actions that occupy the commonplace and make us reflect, in a forceful way, on the value of the artistic sphere in human life and on the conditions of sharing imposed by our unequal society.

Cultural action can be understood as an ambition that is shared between a large number of actors: State and its different representations; and also, private initiative, artists and their spectators. Culture and art, in our country, have never been a priority in the different government projects. However, they do not occupy a despicable role in the political game, since they appear as a showcase for projects and political propaganda, even when they are apparently absent, what represents the visions of world and society that each State proposes to build (or destroy). It is then up to us, artists and citizens, to ask: in what way should the sensitive be shared?

From the analysis of the artistic-pedagogical movement of group theater in São Paulo, it was observed, as previously mentioned, the dialogue (not always harmonious, however democratic) between cultures, aesthetic options and diverse ways of life present in the metropolis. The circulation of artists throughout the city, in the amplitude of its centers and peripheries, opened perspectives for the theatrical action in the pedagogical and artistic fields, understood in a broad way, as an exercise of citizenship.

Other examples, presented by researchers in the field of performance and artistic intervention in the public sphere (Melo, 2019; Zarvos, 2019; Stranger, 2018; Chiari; Braga, 2019), point to the occupation of public space as the encounter between the body, aesthetics and politics, in addition to the creation of new collective agencying and renewals in artistic language and forms of manifestation:

This means that, more than the institutional recognition of art as a title, the interest here lies in a creative way of observing and recreating everyday life, as well as the relationships present in the public sphere (Melo, 2019, p. 2).

On the contrary, what is most disturbing about the protests of the first decade is the relationship with a series of visible multiplicities. In fact, most of the events dealt with the disappearance of the status of an artist in a kind of becoming-anonymous. The history of visibilities in these cases is established by processes of social change and the reinvention of language, perception, substances, in different scales (Zarvos, 2019, p. 12).

However, as Melo (2019, p. 27) points out, “[...] the progressive field seems to be focused on a policy [...] based on the immediate differentiation from the opposite field, and thus produces political impacts that are very restricted to its own micro field of action”. We invite artists and researchers to deepen their view of the possibilities of cultural action as a performing, pedagogical and citizenship practice, in order to break the isolation resulting from the political and social uprooting of individuals, in a movement that is contrary to hate policies.

The sphere of science and art is responsible for the exercise of reinventing forms of expression, conviviality, action, housing and debate on the complexity of public life, exercising the multiplicity of speeches and views on reality, emphasizing the human right to the fruition and development of aesthetic sensitivity and shared participation in the sphere of the common.

It is debated that the primary value of art lies in the unique contribution it brings to the subjects’ experience and to the understanding of life and human interference in the world. The ability to poeticize existence opens up the possibility of deviating from the path of poverty and dispossession in order to take possession of its sensitive wealth. In the same way, the experience of artistic experience, and especially theatrical activity, can emphasize the diversity of cultural manifestations, strengthen the exercise of empathy, dialogue and the very broadening of the meaning of existence. It is then up to cultural action to open the space for this investigative curiosity, so that one can question not only the places of action and representation in the world, but also propose their revision, starting from the destruction and reinvention of things that are said in a culture.

By being affected by artistic forms, daily transits are reinvented, spaces and knowledge are destabilized, and the body is made evident as experience. In this way, the artist addresses himself to his fellow human beings, and there is no anticipation of what is to be seen, understood or known. From the conversion of this experience into shared equality, new ways of life are investigated and shared. The political experience is revealed to the extent that artistic action displaces its participants from their usual places, empowering bodies that turn to something other than the domination of the processes of subjectivation.

As Rancière says, the distribution of knowledge is only socially effective to the extent that it is also a (re)distribution of positions (Rancière, 2009). By being placed in an artistic process, by being confronted in the fruition of the work of art, both the artist, the apprentice and the spectator find possibilities to share the sensitive, not from imposed truths and beauties, but by carrying out a continuous exercise of displacement, making it possible a new dwelling of spaces and social roles.

Foucault, working with the idea of subjectivation, takes up from Nietzsche the matter of the power of life and its imprisonment by man. It would then be a matter of liberating life in man himself, of working with the folds of the line between life and death, constantly reinventing a vitalism with an aesthetic background. This requires an opening generated by extreme, violent or pleasurable forces, which detonates the experience of new sensibilities, the perception of needs that are managed, investigated and even diverted from their original projects, opening to new life possibilities.

According to Guattari (2008, p. 33), “[...] the only acceptable purpose of human activities is the production of a subjectivity that continuously enriches its relationship with the world”. In this way, cultural action emerges as a zone of risk between art and culture, meeting the socio-cultural experience as an ethical and aesthetic reinvention of public life.

We are approaching a time in which, with the antagonisms of the Cold War wearing thin, the main threats that our productivist societies pose to the human species, whose survival on this planet is threatened, not only by environmental degradation, but also by the degeneration of the fabric of social solidarity and psychic lifeforms that should literally be reinvented, appear more distinctly. The re-foundation of the political must go through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions that are involved in the three ecologies: the environment, the socius and the psyche (Guattari, 2008, p. 32).

It is thus up to the artist and to the cultural agent to promote the confrontation between the various world views, highlighting the criticism of the forms of exercise of power and enabling the generation of counter-conducts through the creation of new forms of life and poetic expressions about existence. Thus, by going through the three spheres raised by Guattari and by emphasizing the resumption of public life, they fulfill, like the teacher and the researcher, the role of the one who recreates, refounds and reinaugurates knowledge, from the confrontation and sharing of experiences, proposals, attempts and mistakes in the sense of aesthetic and social learning. Cultural action can then be revitalized in the experience of its negative and in the rupture of known horizons, helping subjects to dig their way into existence, reinventing the collective senses and becoming a presence in the world⁸.

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  André Malraux in his speech in honor of Greece in 1959.
• 2
  Foucault (1995) observed that, in the contemporaneity, in the midst of the governmentalized way of operating power, resistance struggles made specific movements emerge, having as objective the search for new conducts, of defining a new way of conducting oneself (in opposition to the way of the rationalized, normative and homogenizing control of the governmentality). Among the current forms of counter-conduct, Foucault observes those that confront forms of domination; those that contest ways of exploitation; and struggles against subjection. These struggles question the status of the individual and the privileges of knowledge and seek ways to govern oneself, to free oneself from a form of subjectivities domination.
• 3
  For a more detailed description of the relationship between the Artistic Training Programs in São Paulo and the groups subsidized by the Lei de Fomento [Development Law], as well as the conflicts, reflections, productions and artistic actions resulting from it, see the author's doctoral thesis Por entre as trilhas chuvosas de uma travessia: teatro, ação cultural e formação artística na cidade de São Paulo [Among the rainy trails of a crossing: theater, cultural action and artistic training in the city of São Paulo] (Viganó, 2017).
• 4
  As relevant to the research undertaken, we can also mention the works of Delmanto (2019), Desgranges and Lepique (2012) and Pupo (2012).
• This original paper, translated by Suzana Schmidt Viganó and proofread by Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.
• Editors-in-charge: Verônica Veloso, Maria Lúcia Pupo e Gilberto Icle

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Mar 2020
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  13 Aug 2019
• Accepted
  29 Nov 2019