Micropráticas de poder e a arte da resistência: uma abordagem semiótica material sobre a constituição de organizações em luta

Abstract

The current study sought to investigate the formation and continuity of non-conventional political organizations: organizations in struggle. Inspired by worldwide events of insurgency fighting against a certain prevailing order, such as the Occupy movements, the Arab Spring, the Brazilian Spring, the Free Pass Movement, the Popular Brigades, the urban occupations of housing and culture; we were interested in understanding how, through which practices, and the mobilization and composition of which human, non-human, discursive and non-discursive elements, these collectives are constituted and sustained. The chosen object of this research was an organization that we accompanied during its existence of nearly a year (January 2018 to February 2019), in which, to some extent, we took part observing and participating. We complemented the methodology with documentary analysis and in-depth interviews. It was the Ocupação Vicentão, an occupation of an abandoned building in Belo Horizonte downtown. Street vendors, along with homeless people, as well as four coordinating organizations and a good number of elements in a joint action, entered the building claiming for the right to the city and decent housing. By adopting the perspective of organization as process, we paid special attention to the practices through which the organization emerges and sustains itself. To make our proposal feasible, we start from Foucault's concepts and reflections, mainly from studies regarding the techniques and procedures of “conducting of conduct”; and from the reflections in which he deals with the relationship between the most general forms of power such as “governmentality”. Then, we tried to articulate them with the phenomenon of the organizing practices from Material Semiotics discussed by Barbara Czarniawska, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. During the research, we examined the discursive and non-discursive practices used by the actors to constitute and maintain the occupation through the relationships that they transformed and sought to maintain between objects, speeches, people and other elements. We noticed, at the end of the investigation, among other things, that this proposal format in which we made a simultaneous use of Foucault and Material Semiotics provided us, at the same time, with the possibility to focus in the practices that constitute the organization in everyday life, without being trapped in these more immediate relationships. This allowed us, therefore, to relate them to other more general forms of power, and to understand how they relate to each other. Another contribution to Organizational Studies, also from the dialogue between Foucault and Semiotics Material, and arising from the extrapolation of the organization, is the historicization of the elements that constitute the hybrid collective that gives life and form to the organization. Because of this, we noticed that the power relations that form organizations are based on elements historically constituted, mostly, in dispute. The knowledge of the historical processes that produced the current conditions of possibility, for the present forms of exercise of power, and of resistance, is fundamental for engaging in strategic disputes. On that account, analyses that relinquish historical consideration take the risk of being naive and short-sighted in reference to the potential possibilities of a dispute and, therefore, producing ineffective struggles.