Why Rhizome? ---- In botany, the term refers to Rhizome stem polymorph capable of giving
rise to different branches - flor?feros, fol?feros or roots - typically located beneath
the ground and provided with horizontal growth. In 1980, the book A Thousand Plateaus,
Giles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari's rhizome botanical appropriated to embody a
philosophical system devoid of fundamental roots, which articulates how integrated network
in which all links while supporting and derive the others. Complex and innovative
approach, the rhizome is concerned to delineate multiplicities in our world, in measuring
the underground lines that run through, set them by strata and segmentaridades,
associations and conflicts. Opens the rhizome, the possibility of pursuing the trait that
necessarily connects to other traits - the locus where everything is related to
everything: "a rhizome would not cease to connect semiotic chains, organizations of power,
occurrences that refer to the arts, science, social struggles. ".
Other thinkers endorse the intelligibility of the rhizome. And among these the best known
is Michel Foucault.
Equally attentive multiplicities, Foucault study the associations between conflict and
social forces, power asymmetries and strategies including the historical and spatial
clashes by the exercise of power. In the book Discipline and Punish, 1975, Foucault never
demonstrate how power is exercised by a single force and strictly repressive. The power is
appealing for several distinct groups, through a series of different devices and
mechanisms by ordering bodies, creating pleasures, exorcising souls, producing wealth.
If articulate the rhizome of Deleuze and Foucault Guatari the power of an analysis of our
own time and space, the seizure of traits hidden (or rather hidden) of our society becomes
possible.
S?o Paulo In current, from this perspective, notices immediately that there is a very
discernible social stratum and select which exercises the power and legitimacy. Some
groups are specialized, dynamic, and reciprocal association that exist: the rulers of the
state executive, legislative and bureaucratic supervisors, the judges, prosecutors and
judges of the judiciary, investors and speculators from large foundations and companies,
researchers and scientists aligned with interests of accumulation, conservative media
sectors, the military brass - the exercise of power spins the fabric that combines
underground.
Indeed, few places so completely reproduce this association as the University of S?o
Paulo: the senior bureaucratic rectory are nominated by the state government PSDB;
together, both advocate the submission of research support the marketing criteria, while
imposing standards on enterprise production and academic interaction; professors
technicist guarantee the perpetuation of this project in select university councils, the
development of this university - enterprise and capitalized - induces the presence of
walls, uniforms and weapons, always legitimate for a judge order and heritage;
conservative sectors of the media convey this project as "innovative" and "modernizing";
companies providing outsourcing services to university (as the Union and BKM), private
foundations with offices on campus (as the FIA ??and FIP), and large companies benefit
from the market research (such as Volkswagen and Bayern) and institutional support
financially the perpetuation of the rectory and managers of the state, completing the circuit.
Although USP is perhaps the most perfect example of corporate and institutional oligopoly,
this pattern of association exists throughout the social fabric in modernity, covering
other universities, judges, bureaucrats, businesses, banks, police, government officials ...
The student mobilization in recent years, both held at USP as in several other Brazilian
universities, specifically challenging oligarchic these circuits, since the rule of
university space, opposing their business standards and their knowledge of the market of
solidarity and self-management creative freedom that only the living can enable horizontal.
It is this opposition that motivates concrete prisons and criminal, evictions, layoffs,
slanders spread by the landowners of the information, the attacks on our living spaces.
Nevertheless, it is also because of this opposition that another circuit of association
gurpos between branches underground, as opposed to the oligarchic social stratum to be
realized in the exercise of reflection and practices of resistance - and not in the
reaffirmation of the relations of domination.
In other words, if there are branches that run through the governor's office, go through
the table of the dean and the deputy reached the parlor, there are also branches that may
integrate the targets of that domination in the practices of resistance, renewing them the
possibilities of a way of life fairer and more autonomous. Students mobilized from various
universities, staff and combative workers, intellectuals really critical, democratic
groups of judges, student unions and non-equipped, party groups outside the state and the
theater democratic, free media, social movements claim housing, land or labor - these
groups share the burden of oppression imposed by elites, while they join in the prospects
for a better future.
Analyzing the exercise of power in today's society through the eyes of the rhizome, so it
is clear that multiple social forces make up two larger sets that exist in conflict: on
one hand, the circuit oligopolistic working out the criteria to discern what can be and
what can not be done, who has the legitimacy to intern and incarcerating that appropriates
the spaces and collective work on behalf of values ??like "democracy" and "order" and the
other side of the circle of resistance, more volatile and constantly threatened, which is
expressed in different ways to ensure basic autonomy, to ensure their living spaces and
fellowship, to the survival traditions of art, production of conduct.
Clearly, the relationship between these two poles is larger complex and multifaceted, and
ultimately depends associations and minor conflicts that each multiplicity develops social
with others. It is also evident that these two sets do not match the totality of society:
they are situated between several other social multiplicities, which oscillate between the
two poles and can never be neutral judge.
However, it also seems undeniable that in recent years this has increased polarization
only, and conflicts as in Pinheirinho are real examples of new trends of radicalization
that open.
In the process of radicalization that foreshadows social change, students libertarians can
and should appear as relevant social agents. Because it holds can enjoy the privilege of
training with potential criticism of our society, besides being free from the constraints
that inhibit part and tame to most people. And they should because it is essential for
today's time that groups think and try new modes of collective life, thus making sharper
opposition to artificial and consumerist models that still dominate us. In short,
autonomous and libertarian students can contribute socially creating possibilities - even
if encased in a short duration - breaking with traditional chains hierarchy, overcoming
the performances and simulations of capitalism, encouraging self-management and
cooperation, enhancing marketing concepts not art, space, life.
It is against these perspectives that we organize at USP: a tendency to solidify between
horizontal and libertarian students that transcends the traditional expressions of
partisan left and suggest new possibilities of creation and reflection before a conflict
increasingly tense. A collective student must abandon notions of vanguard to erect the
flags of self-management, direct democracy, collective training theoretical emancipation
of public spaces.
An active group, a libertarian group, a group of students.
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