Fantasmas de Foucault : poéticas de indicialidade

Abstract

Since the end of the 19th century, a rationality based on intuitive knowledge introduced, with remarkable power, new possibilities of perception. The visible and enunciable, present at the founding moments of the human sciences, provided the figure of the expert with an asymmetrical look, able to detect the invisible in the indicial transpiration of things and people. According to the same logic, contemporaneously with it, police photography was to be used for the purpose of cataloging people, dividing them into "types" and even isolate physiognomic features that denounce the photographed. In this context, the intentional loses precedence over the involuntary. Psychoanalysis connects with the unconscious through the Freudian slip and detectives search in minimal vestiges, the solution of a crime. The index, as an empty sign, allows the grafting of meanings at the same time as it places the observer in almost physical contact with the referent. The power effects of these logics are quite clear, and yet a poetic of gesture and intuition, does not fail to produce an ambiguous semiotics, in which the sign of annihilation is also a vestige of resistance. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, artists such as Miguel Rio Branco and Rosângela Rennó used the indexical aspects of photography and the archive in their production. Each record marks, paradoxically, a memory and effacement. The consignment generated by the inclusion of a person in the police file creates a kind of effacement of the referent, which in this work will be treated as "infamy". The disappearance, however, is permanent in its intermittency, giving rise to small archive "uprisings" which, like the life of the infamous men to which Foucault referred, connect us with a history that is constructed as an experience.