Resistances to the aestheticization of the world: scenes and performances[Résistances à l'esthétisation du monde : scènes et performances]

Lipovetski and Serroy documents an artist capitalism and an aestheticization of the world, where competitiveness is played out in the realm of the sensitive, affects and an exacerbated creativity. The management of aesthetic experiences in organizations imposes a distribution of the sensible, limiting the possibilities of other experiences, voices and styles of existence; it is eminently political in this respect. However, is there not also the appearance of forms of resistance, forming scenes of contestation and subversion of this management? Using an affects-oriented approach, we study the case of the aestheticization imposed in the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and the battles of MCs who divert a disused space and re-populate it with mobilizing and contesting affects. These duels construct an aesthetic experience that challenges the one dramatized by the city, where the staging of the space promotes calm, luxury and voluptuousness in the centre, which is conducive to consumption. The contrast makes it possible to grasp the extent to which aestheticization imposes a glance, the selective listening of certain voices, an occupation of space, a repositioning of the public and the common, an order in which each person remains in his or her place. If aestheticization promotes a theatricalisation, it is a theatre of representation and not of repetition, which fights against scenes that propose a different distribution of the sensible. A theatre as opposed to performances, where the bodies of those who feel they have no voice play their own role and place. In a perspective quite different from that of an exchange of rational arguments in the public space, the case uncover a guerrilla warfare of the sensible, where bodies, affects, territories and performances are at the heart of what is played out in cities and organizations.