By Adil Lepri and Marcelo Ribeiro, in September, 2024. 1To quote this text: LEPRI, Adil; RIBEIRO, Marcelo R. S. History and conceptual frameworks of the group (an)archaeologies of the sensible. GAS – group (an)archaeologies of the sensible, 2024. Available at: https://gas.ufba.br/en/about/history-and-conceptual-frameworks/.
The research group (an)archaeologies of the sensible (GAS) seeks to reflect on images in a broad sense from a historical and anthropological perspective, with an open interest in various possibilities for studies and experiences. Created in April 2018 and based at the School of Communication of the Federal University of Bahia (Facom/UFBA), the group was reconfigured in 2023, when an initial period under the name Archaeology of the Sensible, under the joint leadership of Marcelo R. S. Ribeiro and Marcelo M. Costa, came to an end. After the latter was transferred to the Federal University of Pernambuco, it was renamed as (an)archaeologies of the sensible in 2022. The following year, Adil Lepri joined Facom/UFBA as a professor and joined the group, which has been led by Marcelo R. S. Ribeiro and Adil Lepri since 2023.
Based on institutional contexts related to film and audiovisual studies and communication, we aim to explore possibilities for dialogue between perspectives from the fields of history, anthropology, literature, art and visual culture, and digital humanities, among other interlocution horizons, to make it possible to establish a research network. What defines this network under construction is the shared interest in an expanded empirical horizon, defined by the concept of the sensible, and a radical methodological openness, defined by the concepts of archaeology and anarchaeology, intertwined in a spelling that makes both their duplicity and pluralization legible: (an)archaeologies.
The field of film and audiovisual studies is essentially interdisciplinary in its history, but it is not certain that the radical openness that corresponds to this condition remains operative in its current configurations and in the research that finds a fundamental part of its conditions of possibility in such configurations. This group is partly related to a desire to reclaim interdisciplinarity, understood both as mobility between different institutionalized disciplinary fields and as the active refusal of any form of disciplinary and institutional capture of discourse and imagination. It aims to develop an interstitial research program inscribed in the indisciplinary in-between place that makes all interdisciplinarity possible – called (an)archaeologies of the sensible.
Refusing disciplinary and institutional capture is not to assume a neutral, non-disciplinary, and non-institutionalized space but to engage in the production of a space of undisciplined rigor and counter-institutional drift of thought, research, and experimentation. The intermediate space of indisciplinarity should not be confused with that designated by the concept of transdisciplinarity, as consolidated in the Charter drafted by Lima de Freitas, Edgar Morin and Basarab Nicolescu, adopted at the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, in the Arrábida Convent, in Portugal on November 6, 1994 (Freitas, Morin, and Nicolescu 2002), but the two are related. In fact, it can be said that transdisciplinarity and indisciplinarity are two ways of shifting the general economy of interdisciplinarity, which is based on constructing a multidisciplinary order of knowledge and establishing communication procedures between disciplines.
If transdisciplinarity operates under the sign of the integration of multidisciplinary knowledge, indisciplinarity demands the recognition of fractures, gaps, and fissures, which reserve possibilities for disjunctive associations. If, as Article 3 of the 1994 Charter states, “Transdisciplinarity complements disciplinary approaches,” (2002, 148) indisciplinarity supplements it, adding to the gaps between disciplines an excess that remains irreducible to them and to the sum between them, refraining from the possibility of fitting in and integrating. If, finally, “Transdisciplinarity does not strive for mastery of several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to that which they share and to that which lies beyond them,” (2002, 149) defining a transversal relationship with multidisciplinary knowledge, indisciplinarity establishes a geological relationship with the general economy of disciplines: not a crossing that must finally obey the border laws that separate them, but a profound displacement of the plaques, landmarks and landscapes in which the possibility of the border must seek its foundation each time it is demarcated, while remaining impossible to fix.
As an indisciplinary program, the (an)archaeologies of the sensible stem from the production and reproduction of tension, maladjustment, and restlessness in the face of the forms of disciplinary and institutional capture that haunt them, situated within diverse fields such as history and art history, sociology and anthropology of art and culture, cultural studies, art and visual culture studies, film and audiovisual studies, digital humanities, and platform studies, among others. In this way, the (an)archaeologies of the sensible are not reducible to any one of these fields, to which they are related in a variable and ambivalent way, as they look for questions, procedures, and interests in each of them, while reintroducing strangeness within them and shifting their coordinates. To understand how this reintroduction of strangeness and displacement of coordinates operates in the relationship between the (an)archaeologies of the sensible as an indisciplinary and counter-institutional theoretical-methodological nebula, on the one hand, and the constellations of institutionalized disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields with which they dialogue, on the other, it is necessary to define the concepts of sensible and (an)archaeologies.
The concept of the sensible
The expanded empirical horizon indicated by the concept of the sensible should be understood as part of a questioning of closed classifications of artistic and cultural forms, based on notions of media specificity, the autonomy of forms, and the constitution of social fields that need to be questioned rather than taken for granted. In this sense, the concept of the sensible refers to images in a broad sense, covering objects associated with the institutional context in which the group is situated – film and audiovisual media; the latter is a common notion, albeit imprecise, but in the context of the group, it focuses specifically and centrally on videos in the context of social networking platforms – and also including literature and dance, to give two examples of artistic disciplines that are very different from each other, or architecture and trance experiences, to give two examples of modalities that indicate the overflow of art.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2014, 163–64) wrote: “Art preserves, and is the only thing in the world that is preserved,” but “it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last,” since “[w]hat is preserved […] is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects”. Thus, if art is defined as the composition of blocs of sensations that preserve and are preserved, that is, more simply, of images that last and configure aesthetic experiences, the concept of sensible implies the possibility of an overflow and of a passage toward the spheres of images that are lost, which are transmitted only in a fleeting way, whose form of appearance is inseparable from its way of disappearance, such as dream images or scattered sensations (which do not amount to blocs and remain below the condition of artistic composition, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari).
At the same time, we are interested in thinking film and audiovisual media histories based on the acknowledgement of their constitutive modes of inexistence, in a double relationship to the archives and corpora we study: not only the histories of the films that were already made, as Jean-Luc Godard repeats throughout Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), but “all the histories of the films / that were / never made”; not only the histories of the blocs of sensations in art and its formal constellations, but the histories of that which does not consolidate as bloc or form, the histories of the nebulae of the formless which inhabit art and sensible experience.
For this reason, it is essential to unfold the possibilities of different cartographies of film and audiovisual media, from the “atlas of world cinema” (Andrew 2004; 2010; 2013) to “filmic constellations” (Souto 2020), passing through the “atlas of emotions” (Bruno 2002), and experiences of montage as a method of knowledge (Didi-Huberman 2018; Reinaldo and Dos Reis Filho 2019). At the same time, we propose experiments with figural analysis (Brenez 1998; 2023) and the theoretical and methodological possibilities of nebulae (Garofalo 2021) and spectrality (Derrida 1993; Romandini 2018), to which we have been getting closer.
The aesthetic experience which is at stake in the blocs of sensations of art inscribes itself within the medium of sensible experience, within that which Emanuele Coccia (Coccia 2016) calls “medial space”, defined by the “hidden, supplementary power between things, the receptive faculty” (2016, 28) that makes it possible for anything, anybody, any body and any entity to become a “medium for another form that exists outside of it” (2016, 29). So, the sensible is defined by its belonging to the “medial space” of images, generally speaking (in which artistic images intervene as blocs of sensation), while, on the other hand, “we can understand language as the archimedium, a space of absolute mediality where forms can exist as images that are completely autonomous from speaking subjects, as well as from the objects whose form and aspect they are supposed to represent.” (Coccia 2016, 45) The receptive faculty or potentiality that defines the medial space of sensible experience unfolds, in every that lives, into the capacity to emit and produce the sensible, which reaches, among human beings, according to Coccia (2016, 43), “a greater degree of complexity”.
Figurative art, literature, music, and a significant portion of political rituals and the totality of religious liturgy consist, first of all, in the production of forms of sensible. All of our customs and habits become incarnate in a sensible that is disembodied from our anatomical body. And, vice versa, any object of material culture (technical, industrial, artisanal) is nothing more than a sensible embodiment, a “sensification” [sensificazione] of will, subjectivity, and spirituality. Man, first and foremost, does nothing but transform the spirit and his rationality into the sensible. We are not human only because we are capable of abstraction, of distilling rationality from the empirical, of sublimating our experience. Above all, writing, speaking, even thinking, means moving in reverse: finding the right image, the right sense that permits us to realize, and withdraw from, what one thinks and feels. Above all, living means giving sense, sensifying [sensificare] the rational. It is transforming the psychic into an external image and giving body and experience to the spiritual. (Coccia 2016, 43–44)
To consider the relationship between aesthetic experience and sensible experience, therefore, requires crossing the passages between the aesthetic acts of composing blocs of sensations, which define the sphere of artistic images, and the acts of reception, emission, and production of sensible forms in general, which define the sphere of images in a broad sense, as the sphere of what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible, in order to think of aesthetics and politics together.
I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Rancière 2013, 7)
The expanded empirical horizon that is at stake in the concept of the sensible is thus defined in the rhythm of a movement between art and the common world that no dialectic is capable of resolving, since no synthesis can dilute the polarization that delimits its undecidable game: there is no opposition or dichotomy between art and the world, between aesthetics and politics, between the activity of composing blocs of sensations and the sensible life that houses it, but a relationship that can take on variable configurations, in space and time, but goes back, in general, to what could be called, drifting through and extrapolating Aby Warburg’s argument (2017), a “mint that coins […] expressive values”. The glimpse of this matrices, which crosses the differences of space and time between the variable configurations of art and the world, depends on recognizing two fundamental characteristics of the sensible, of images, of forms: their “absolute transmissibility” and their “infinite appropriability”, as Coccia writes (2016, 61), arguing: “This coincidence of the image’s appropriability and alienability is what defines the statute of our experience.” (2016, 71).
If the sensible is defined by its transmissibility and appropriability, it is possible, as suggested by Jacques Rancière (2013, 3), to think of “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.” In this sense, politics and aesthetics must be defined in relation to the sensible, its distribution (which invents and produces the common of any community), and its reconfiguration (which displaces the terms of the commons and disturbs the conventional ideas of community through dissent). “Only in this sending out of the sensible can the spirit and ‘culture’ of a people produce itself”, writes Coccia (2016, 44), and this activity is at the same time productive and receptive. The distribution of the sensible, as a configuration of the common, emerges from the historical processes of transmission of the sensible.
Expressive matrices of excess and platforms
In the wake of the discussion on the sensible, it is important to point out how modern and contemporary discourse, in general, is crossed by what can be understood as expressive matrices of excess. Here, we are interested in highlighting how this occurs on platforms. Regarding the idea of the “platformization” of the internet, the notion was systematized by Poell et al (2019) as
the penetration of the infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life. And in the tradition of cultural studies, we conceive of this process as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms. (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck 2019, 5–6)
In this sense, the authors’ discussion points to how the metaphor of the explorer sailing across a vast ocean discovering small islands has been supplanted by a scenario in which huge continents formed by large transnational technology and media conglomerates dominate the experience of users in the digital space. As a result, much if not all of the world’s online life is conditioned by the rules, logics and organization of a handful of institutions. In this context, the following discussion takes place with an emphasis on the discourse and experience with audiovisual media on the platforms.
It may be possible to point to a link, a thematic and formal continuity throughout history, between different forms of showing and narrating, and their expression in audiovisual products. Melodrama and sensationalism have in common the excessive and spectacular character that permeates them. Martín-Barbero pointed out that these forms are derived from common cultural matrices.
One must continually pose anew the question of the cultural matrices of melodrama, for only with an analysis of the cultural conditions can we explain how melodrama mediates between the folkloric culture of the country fairs and the urban-popular culture of the spectacle, the emerging mass culture. This is a mediation which, on the level of narrative forms, moves ahead through serial novels in newspapers, to the shows of the music hall and to cinema. (Martín-Barbero 1993, 119)
According to the author, cultural matrices are the remains of previous and undetermined forms of expression and narrative traditions as a residual element in the media (R. Williams 1983). In the case of cinema, Gunning’s proposal (2006) about the cinema of attractions accounts for the remains of country and urban fairs, music hall spectacles, and vaudeville and circus presentations within the new medium and the filmic tissue itself, entailing emotional and sensorial engagement from the spectator (Elsaesser 1991).
According to Hansen (1995), early cinema has a disjunctive programming nature, presenting a variable and fragmented format. This aspect is also demonstrated in particular forms of mediation between audience and work, such as the interaction constructed by extra-filmic elements, facets that seem to be reappearing in the spectatorship of audiovisual platforms. Therefore, it is important to reiterate the specific relationship between melodrama and the body. Singer (2001, 48) says that “Crucial to a great deal of popular melodrama was sensationalism, defined as an emphasis on action, violence, thrills, awesome sights, and spectacles of physical peril.” This emphasis is linked to an “essential element perhaps most often associated with melodrama [which] is a certain ‘overwrought’ or ‘exaggerated’ quality summed up by the term excess.” (Singer 2001, 38–39).
More recently, Linda Williams (2018) made a strong case for melodrama as a totalizing metanarrative of modernity, present in various forms of art, communication, and expression since the end of the 18th century. According to the author, what is essential in melodrama is the dramatic recognition of good and evil, which precisely leads to the realization of justice, whatever it may be. In a social context in which screens are everywhere, it is essential to think about the extent to which audiovisual platforms operate as an integral part of everyday life and present themselves as a way of building links based on mediation through the videos themselves (Burgess 2014); for Bruns (2009), they are more important in their use value – in the author’s sense, a combination of production and usability, “produsage” – than in the intrinsic production value of each audiovisual work or product.
In this sense, and in line with the approaches of new cinema history (Elsaesser 2016), this approximation between audiovisual platforms and early cinema points to the sharing of the same discursive basis but also to a very similar spectatorial logic. This logic is based on fragmentation and the multiplicity of formats, but primarily on a shared frame of reference between users/spectators, an aspect emphasized by Burgess (2014), who argued that the value of each video on YouTube, for example, is placed as a link within a network of content creation and value within the platform.
Audiovisual analysis on a massive scale: a methodological problem
“From a single image that represents the ‘cultural unit’ […]”, writes Lev Manovich, in his book The language of new media,
[…] we move to a database of images. Thus if the hero of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) was looking for truth within a single photographic image, the equivalent of this operation in a computer age is to work with a whole database of many images, searching and comparing them with each other. (Manovich 2001, 291)
Here the author is highlighting what he understands as the logics of operation of “new media” objects (digital media), which implies a displacement of the traditional analytical approach of media studies, in general, and of film studies, in particular.
Years later, Manovich (2017) developed the concept of “Cultural Analytics,” which consists of a quantitative study of cultural patterns on different scales, using automated content collection techniques on the internet and large-scale visualization. He believes that the research of unique artifacts and close reading were appropriate approaches for the 20th century context, but these methodologies are not well suited to the environment of digital platforms, since a visual object is never in isolation, but rather inserted into an extensive series that seems infinite. The author argues that cultural analysis should therefore focus on identifying cultural patterns, rather than trying to discover “laws,” and the study of visual cultural data on a massive scale refers to the creation of tools that make it possible to visualize this data in the first place. Manovich points out that this analysis aims to identify recurring patterns, but it is important to remember that these patterns represent only a part of the aspects of artifacts and their reception. Certain conclusions reached when studying large corpora of media data cannot be reached by speculative theories alone; however, the statistical approach has its limitations, as it does not apply to all aspects of a corpus. You cannot explain everything using a mathematical model or categorize everything that is left out as deviation or noise.
The work of automated image analysis is not new and has already been carried out by Manovich (2013; 2017), with a focus on creating tools for categorizing and summarizing digital video data, such as the distribution of color tone and contrast information in massive collections of photographs and spatial changes in the frame and duration of shots in audiovisual works. More recently, Pearce et al. (2020) looked at the imagery phenomenon from a cross-platform perspective, mobilizing similar methods to reveal broad patterns in the collected corpus and proposing other ways of engaging with the material, using the visual medium itself. In this vein, Burgess et al. (2021) developed a “digital hybrid method” called “critical simulation”, which consists of using a computer vision tool coded by the group on social media platforms such as Instagram. The analysis is then carried out in two stages: one carried out by the computer vision model that comes into contact with an unknown imagery corpus without human supervision and categorizes it according to the “latent” characteristics of the images themselves, and the other carried out by the researchers, who perform a qualitative textual analysis of the clusters generated by the model. The authors suggest that this approach of mixing methods allows us to speculate in the context of platforms on how “[…] computer vision logics, once applied to algorithmic content curation, for example, can play a role in shaping the aesthetics of the Instagram platform […]” (Burgess et al. 2023, 4).
This discussion lays bare a fundamental tension in analytical work centered on audiovisual media in the context of platforms, which refers to the dichotomy between the unique and the massive. Each video is understood as a work with its own analytical value; however, at the same time, it is part of a large-scale collection whose aesthetic development occurs dynamically from the mediation between the videos, their creators, and the algorithmic instances in “an act of iterative vernacular creativity” (Burgess 2014, 93). Thus, an approach that combines automated digital methods of analysis and data collection with qualitative analytical traditions typical of the field of film studies can become an appropriate methodological arrangement for studying this particular type of audiovisual object, whose formats are presented and hybridized in a dynamic and emergent manner in the context of the participatory and fragmentary dimensions of each platform.
The concept of (an)archaeologies
The (an)archaeologies of the sensible therefore aspire to an understanding of experience in general, and aesthetic experience in particular, which does justice to its fundamental, and fundamentally contingent, imagistic status: transferable, transmissible, and appropriable. To unfold this understanding, each time, it will be necessary to think aesthetics and politics, art and the world, “blocks of sensations” and “distributions of the sensible,” without reducing the relationship between the terms to oppositions and dichotomies, insofar as we seek to recognize and investigate the variable configurations of the relationship of polarity and intensification that defines them. The notions of “polarity” and “intensification” correspond to the two “laws” that, according to Johann Volfgang von Goethe, govern both nature and art. Izabela Kestler (2006, 49) explains that the “laws of polarity (Polarität) and intensification (Steigerung)” constitute “fundamental concepts” of “[Goethe’s] worldview as a whole, of nature, human life, and art. The concept of polarity belongs to matter, and that of intensification to spirit, thought of together.” In fact, the perspective of the (an)archaeology of the sensible is based on a joint thinking of “matter” and “spirit” (rather than their opposition in a dichotomy) and has on its horizon the “rediscovery of Goethe’s notion of polarity for a global comprehension of culture,” which, in the words of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 2007, 287, note 28), is among “Warburg’s greatest contributions to the science of culture.”
The radical methodological openness that defines the (an)archaeologies of the sensible articulates the legacies of Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (2002); Siegfried Zielinski’s media (an)archaeology (2006), as well as Friedrich Kittler’s approach (1999; 2010) or Thomas Elsaesser’s mobilization of these contributions in film history (2016); and also of Aby Warburg’s nameless science and of his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, as it has been taken up and reconfigured, in an archaeology of culture, by Georges Didi-Huberman (2000; 2003; 2017b). If method is, etymologically, a path, a way, a crossing, what the notion of (an)archaeologies of the sensible aspires to insinuate is the open movement of exploring a drift, as opposed to the demarcation of a univocal way of producing knowledge; the rigorous practice of deviation and digression, of misplacement and indirect access, as opposed to the usual claim to a direct path and the clarity of the trail; “a spiral that continually broadens its turns,” according to a “passage from the part to the whole and back again [which] never returns to the same point” (Agamben 2007, 96), as opposed to the circle as a figure of closure – be it hermeneutic, analytical or empirical.
Among the legacies associated with the concept of archaeology is the claim of a perspective on the history (and historicity) of images. Studying the history of images – that is, of the sensible, its configuration in an aesthetic-political sharing and its possible reconfigurations in cinema, the arts, etc. – from an (an)archaeological perspective implies methodologically assimilating the contingency of images and the irreducible openness to multiple temporalities that derives from their transmissibility and appropriability between contexts, between times, and historical situations. Thinking of images in their movement between contexts implies articulating perspectives of historical contextualization and an acknowledgement of the decontextualization that is constitutive of all historical writing, as Walter Benjamin argues:
The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however; that the historical object in each case is torn from its context. [N11, 3] (Benjamin 2002, 476)
To acknowledge the decontextualization of the historical object that constitutes all writing of history means to acknowledge an irreducible anachronism, which must be thought, as Georges Didi-Huberman (2003, 31–44) suggests, “as a moment, as a rhythmic pulse of the method.” The (an)archaeologies of the sensible take the “risk of opening the method” (Didi-Huberman 2000, 22),2Our translation. The French text reads: “risque pour ouvrir la méthode”. so that it is possible to understand in an articulated, albeit disjunctive, way, in the history of images, what Benjamin describes as “citations that occur in a manner legible to all” – the existing images, the images that remain and that survive events and the passage of time – and what remains conceivable, in his terms, as “a text written in invisible ink” – the images that are missing, either because they didn’t survive their disappearance in any way, or because they didn’t emerge at all. “To look at things from an archaeological point of view is to compare what we see in the present, which has survived, with what we know to have disappeared,” writes Didi-Huberman (Didi-Huberman 2017a, 66). Just as history is haunted by the counterfactual imagination of what might have been, archaeology is inseparable from some form of anarchaeology, as Bensusan proposes:
Anarchaeology is the reverse of arché, in the sense of origin or foundation, of beginning and command, but also in the sense of necessity, that necessity that the past narrated as unique carries. Anarchaeology is an attempt to settle accounts with what has not happened, and thus seek the abyss behind the foundation, an iteration behind the origin, and a contingency behind the supposedly constitutive history of thought. […] Anarchaeology explores the counterfactual past by investigating how things could have been told, since there is more memory than any chosen account. In other words, the space of anarchaeology is one in which the consecrated past is upheaved, not because imagination attacks memory, but because it is a way of excavating memory along a longer path. […] Anarchaeology is intimately linked with spectrality. The other story surrounds the story that is told. We live in the shadows of specters – of heritages, traditions, established institutions, of official history. If a piece of fiction can present another way things could be now, an exercise in anarchaeology presents another way things could have been once – and thus acts on ghosts. (Bensusan 2024, 79–80)3Our translation. The Portuguese text reads: “A anarqueologia é o avesso da arché, no sentido de origem ou de fundamento, de começo e de comando, mas também no sentido de necessidade, aquela necessidade que o passado narrado como único carrega. A anarqueologia é uma tentativa de ajustar contas com o que deixou de acontecer e assim de buscar o abismo por trás do fundamento, uma iteração por trás da origem e uma contingência por trás da história supostamente constitutiva do pensamento. […] A anarqueologia explora o contrafactual passado investigando como as coisas poderiam ter sido contadas já que há mais memória do que qualquer relato escolhido. Ou seja, o espaço da anarqueologia é aquele em que o passado consagrado é sublevado, não porque a imaginação atenta contra a memória, mas porque ela é um jeito de escavar a memória por um caminho mais longo. […] A anarqueologia tem um elo íntimo com a espectralidade. A outra história ronda a história que se conta. Nós vivemos às sombras dos espectros – das heranças, tradições, instituições estabelecidas, da história oficial. Se uma peça de ficção pode apresentar um outro modo como poderiam ser as coisas agora, um exercício de anarqueologia apresenta um outro modo como poderiam ter sido as coisas outrora – e assim atua sobre fantasmas.”
Between the remaining images and the missing images, the (an)archaeologies of the sensible seek to catch glimpses of history as a process of transformation in the distribution of the sensible that defines every form of political community, insisting on the possibility of (re)imagining the worlds we inhabit, the worlds in which we pass, and the world which we are in other ways.
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Notas
- 1To quote this text: LEPRI, Adil; RIBEIRO, Marcelo R. S. History and conceptual frameworks of the group (an)archaeologies of the sensible. GAS – group (an)archaeologies of the sensible, 2024. Available at: https://gas.ufba.br/en/about/history-and-conceptual-frameworks/.
- 2Our translation. The French text reads: “risque pour ouvrir la méthode”.
- 3Our translation. The Portuguese text reads: “A anarqueologia é o avesso da arché, no sentido de origem ou de fundamento, de começo e de comando, mas também no sentido de necessidade, aquela necessidade que o passado narrado como único carrega. A anarqueologia é uma tentativa de ajustar contas com o que deixou de acontecer e assim de buscar o abismo por trás do fundamento, uma iteração por trás da origem e uma contingência por trás da história supostamente constitutiva do pensamento. […] A anarqueologia explora o contrafactual passado investigando como as coisas poderiam ter sido contadas já que há mais memória do que qualquer relato escolhido. Ou seja, o espaço da anarqueologia é aquele em que o passado consagrado é sublevado, não porque a imaginação atenta contra a memória, mas porque ela é um jeito de escavar a memória por um caminho mais longo. […] A anarqueologia tem um elo íntimo com a espectralidade. A outra história ronda a história que se conta. Nós vivemos às sombras dos espectros – das heranças, tradições, instituições estabelecidas, da história oficial. Se uma peça de ficção pode apresentar um outro modo como poderiam ser as coisas agora, um exercício de anarqueologia apresenta um outro modo como poderiam ter sido as coisas outrora – e assim atua sobre fantasmas.”