On the contemporary subjectivity in the (re)signification of public space: political affects in perspective

• Grant number: 21/14377-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2022
• Effective date (End): May 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Manoel Antonio Lopes Rodrigues Alves
• Grantee: Beatriz Fernanda Carvalho
• Host Institution: Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Carlos (IAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Public space in the contemporary city, understood in its dimensional multiplicity (physical, social, political), when incorporated by neoliberal processes of flexible accumulation in the reproduction of financial capital, manifests another experience of space-time beyond the commodification of its immediate materiality: urban subjects, precisely, submitted to the living conditions and transformations in the ways of life oriented by the political-economic interests of the present capitalism, start to inhabit and to practice a commodity-city as component elements (in themselves), more than just reproducers (from themselves) of the same logic. A social and subjective body emerges, conditioned to a psychic life and to a mobilization of specific desires, which star in the relationships in the public space in line with the general dynamics of homogenization, emptying it of meaning as they deny the exercise of otherness, of expression of dissensions, of exposure to what is not the self by the very way in which they are affected and create, determine, sustain social bonds. In this sense, the work proposes to understand certain aspects of the manifestations of neoliberal rationality in the subjectivity of the individual from the social affects by which he assigns (or not) political meaning to contemporary public spaces. It is to seek a better understanding of the contemporary dynamics of (re)signification of the public space, as a space of otherness and public life, recognizing the importance of considering the implications of the logic of these same dynamics in the constitution of the political subject - who, on a daily basis, builds, inhabit, practice the city.