BETWEEN CONVENIENCE AND DISSIDENCE: THE ABSTRACT MACHINE OF THE CULTURE POINT PORÃO DAS ARTES
Cultural convenience; dissidence; revolt-culture; subjectivity.
In contemporary discourse, it has become a premise that cultural policies function as a driving force for reconciling economic growth and social well-being. In this context, we highlight Brazil’s National Cultura Viva Policy (PNCV), particularly the Culture Points, for recognizing and supporting diverse groups and organizations across the country. On its twentieth anniversary in 2024, we observed that the research conducted for its updating displayed predominantly economistic, institutional, and bureaucratic objectives. Among more than 150 Culture Points in Rio Grande do Norte, we selected Máquina Abstrata do Porão das Artes for its resistance to artistic and cultural commodification and for producing singular subjectivities, even as these are captured by state and market dynamics. The notion of convenience (Yúdice, 2012) refers to the instrumentalization of culture as a social and economic resource; dissidence (Guattari, 1987), by contrast, operates at the micropolitical level of everyday relations, fostering singularization and autonomy. We therefore ask how this relation affects processes of subjectivation, how Porão appropriates cultural-management discourses, and how cultural impacts may be measured within social programs. To address these gaps, we consider subject formations as open to an ethico-aesthetic pragmatics through metamodelization (Guattari, 2012), in which dissident practice and revolt-culture (Kristeva, 2000) enable collective assemblages that escape instrumental rationality.