Fora do Eixo: Solidarity and the Positioning of Power within Alternative Cultural Economies in Brazil

• In Event: Arte, participación y politica

Abstract

Fora do Eixo (FDE) is a network of cultural producers and activists in Brazil with origins in cities outside the São Paulo—Rio de Janeiro axis that dominates Brazilian cultural production. FDE seeks to redefine economic relationships within the culture industries by producing independent music festivals that use a barter and trade system of cultural services. Central to the network’s operations is an internal “solidarity economy” organized around an alternative currency, Card. Based on ethnographic research, this paper argues that Card is a discursive formation that produces particular forms of economic subjectivities and emotional attachments to the solidarity discourse that serve FDE in building consensus, which it then parlays into high levels of economic and political capital. The case of FDE elucidates how in the contemporary Brazilian cultural economy, the positioning of power over the management of alternative cultural processes involves delivering the multitudes to politicians and funding entities, with great benefits for those who know how to do so. On the one hand, FDE demonstrates that local cultural networks can experiment with extra-institutional ways to manage economic relations as a means of group empowerment, and expand the social field in which alternative values and organizational forms prevail. On the other hand, while rooted in solidarity principles, FDE does not escape the relations of power that Foucault theorized were part and parcel to the deployment of discourse; FDE’s particular discursive practices risk transforming the network into yet another node of power within the field of Brazilian cultural production.

Author

• Andrew C Whitworth-Smith, UC San Diego