Your secretary invited me to speak, on the basis of a text read to the Society for Women's Aid, about "the profession of the writer today." I do not know if it was a joke.
What would I have to say of "Professions for Women," this Virginia Woolf´s text of 1931?
I was born at the end of the 20th century, I am a man, I have never felt particularly "excluded" (perhaps by absolute distraction). I am a half-breed in the (penal?) colony - with access to some education, and this makes me an unclassified traveler. It did not work to form me as an "European in exile". The place we natives occupy is that of the consumer of television, of repeater of metropolitan theses, of audience for an approved intellectual noble circle.
The place of the woman (the "angel of the home"), introjected as hesitation and fear, limited the simple magnification of his intelligence by study - as well as constant economic panic, disconnected information, the inoculated desire for amusement limits us.
A woman, in her day, expressed herself through written words - before she could find other professions - because of the "low price of paper." That's exactly why I, always wishing for other things, ended up writing early. A piano was too expensive.
I just realized how much I needed the courage to accept that I had a voice after being harshly criticized. Competition society hates talent. I also had "excellent" ancestors, but not the noble circle to secure publications, jobs and scholarships.
Another point that she comments on is the need the woman had introjected to "agree with the opinion and the will of others." But in a society that lives frightened by the fear of not being "the best", therefore not being "chosen", nothing good can come from dissension. Flattery is ascension. The new generation seems to have swallowed, with the economic ascent, the diseases of the middle class: competition, individualism and aggressive ambition.
I, on the other hand, have heard: "For an artist, it does not take well to be critical." If institutions, selections, in other words, budgets and choices, are in the hands of a family-like elite, how can an artist position himself politically and survive? The more recent cut in funding, made the spaces select even more "the best." On the horizon, only companies competing for incentives. None of this is a theme for art.
Alongside the repression of corporate censorship and banks creating austerity, we now have a presidential candidate who allows all who have lived cognitive poverty to show their prejudice with indignation. In a lecture on feminism, I see an architect criticizing feminism.
"Do not let anyone realize that you have your own opinion" - I could translate as "from the sad fate of being a native." For heirs, knowing is a weapon of control: you should feel ashamed for not mastering these concepts, what I have to say is always much more important. While knowledge, in fact, does not mean accumulation, but good questions. Education is a way of forming a point of view about the world, escaping from centralized power.
Today, it is not only expensive to have - buying in the multiplicity of experiences - own opinion, but it is the culture as a whole that seems censored, because it is the unclassifiable, rupture, synthesis, utopia, mirror: politics.
A version of the culture in which politics does not exist is currently on sale. It's as if people appropriated icons from the past to nurture a cultural fetish and status. Some of the more conventional and authoritative people I know have a boundless "love for art."
To sort priorities, overcome lies, imagine justice, and demand responsibility, we must overcome the confusion of the collective mind, reverse certainties, and take risks. Because we can do aesthetic things without proposing new values. My ghost said, "Use all your effort to distance yourself from your people, from reality."
All over the world, but with special danger in Brazil, land of the absolutism in communication, the first human right, the right to a decent life - with a living wage, houses, schools, health - is put aside: in public awareness created by comercial information the debate has been banned, there can be no plurality, because this can generate demands. Open fascism that hates "human rights" (usually the feminist agenda, LGBT, anti-racist, respect for prisoners, etc.) is only the most cruel face of it.
We may think that, in a money-obsessed culture, theaters are an obstacle to new towers and a bright, dead city. The post-80/2000 generation grew up getting the idea that money is everything and worth everything for money. The poor are what prevents them from getting up, taxes, fat wages (that hurt the companies) or domestic workers with labor rights. Art is a profession without a goal.
Today, we are all thought not to have our own opinions - unless we use them to mark hierarchy and status. Unless our imagination is a production in structure. The "free wandering imagination" simply seems a crime against progress.
Woolf also comments on writers who can not "speak the truth" and "get blocked by the extreme conventionality of the other sex." Repression, therefore, by the structure designed for you and by guilt and internalized shame.
For having devoted myself a little to Philosophy, it always surprises me when I see a young person, equipped with titles and authors, impose himself on the audience with a pretentious speech; I seem to be someone who is drawn from the free flow of imagination by a rock of prejudice. I am a receiving observer, only, as if to her it was said: "You are not a writer, it is a woman!" Who do you think you are to having ideas?"One speaker even quotes that a famous "wise" psychoanalyst from her city had the courage to say: "Feminism, crazy woman thing!"
In addition, let us think of conceptual colonialism that generates the glamor of the intellectual celebrity of the "civilized world." Since you did not read Judith Butler, you are a subspecies.
Another thing, of course, is to use Aristotle as raw material, to dig into it an alternative thinking system, generating questions that move the knowing. Form communities of utopia. But in general, our scholars have become accustomed to using a vocabulary that marks a class hierarchy (who doubts this hidden sense of the Lacanian?)
Removed the external obstacles, Woolf says, there are those inside.
You are busy trying to buy your life that you can not think of alternatives and therefore you will not imagine utopias.
I am not a woman, but writing does not seem to be a profession for me as well. And creativity is not for you.
In spite of this, I hope that my doubts will be of use to the ladies and gentlemen.
Afonso Lima
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