O corpo como meio para metáfora

Abstract

In this dissertation there is an attempt to present a materialist ecology of media. With an intent to account for the relational entanglement of nature and technical infrastructure that is behind every singular artistic gesture, I present a conceptual vocabulary that combines media theory, Alfred Gell s anthropology of art and Gilbert Simondon s polyphasic philosophy. Starting from the ecological ideas of Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari and Matthew Fuller, and aligning myself with a current trend of dynamic and speculative materialism (that can be found in the work of authors such as Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Manuel DeLanda), this thesis is built on the principle that matter already has morphogenetic tendencies that the artist develops, systematizes and amplifies. The first part of the thesis focuses on the individual body as medium (and environment) for metaphor. The poetics of João Cabral and G.M. Hopkins are decomposed in their distinct dimensions of bodily concreteness. The metaphoric process is described not as focal point of meaning production, but as a specific case of the more general act of montage, a type of analogic and transductive coupling that enables figural compression and recursion. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the collective body as a medium (and environment) for metaphor, trying to present an understanding of mythology from the point of view of technics (as a gestural chain that configures a symbolic matrix). After mobilizing the mythic machine of Furio Jesi and the different types of mythic montage in Aby Warburg and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the dissertation tries to present elements from the ontological turn in anthropology as a solution for some problems of comparative literature in a globalized and post-colonial world. In the last chapter, we come to consider rhythm as a concept that may describe every aesthetic experience, capturing exactly the connection between individual and collective. The notion of entrainment in physics and biology is presented and extended as to describe collective processes of affective synchronization