PhD | Performing theory: Radical creative machines for post-capitalist politics in Chile’s Multitude

PhD-Candidate | Nicolás Muñoz Saldaña | University of Amsterdam | Performing theory: Radical creative machines for post-capitalist politics in Chile’s Multitude | Supervisors: Kati Röttger & Joost de Bloois 

In this research, the focus will not be on a delimited “object” -in the canonical cultural analysis sense- but in the study of an atmosphere, a chaosmos or more precisely radical agencements machiniques (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which existed before, but gained potential after the emergence of the 2011 student movement protests against neoliberal education and society in Chile. After these events, there has been a revival of democratic and radical ideas and practices which conform what today is popularly called “The Social Movement”, a multiplicity of expressions -among which the students are still main actors- which function as a counter-culture/politics against the heritage of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) and the post-dictatorial neoliberal administration (1990-Today).

My research question will be, how new materialist -in a broad sense- perspectives could be radicalized, subverted, experienced and enhanced beyond academic limits through performing as a militant-researcher among “The Social Movement” in Chile. At the same time I will ask how theoretical-practical tools contribute to the post-capitalist politics machinery. I will base my research on the analysis of the counter-culture/politics of “The Social Movement” as a set of entanglements/agencements which transit between human and non-human expressions, giving place to repetitions, situations and specific and contingent events. In a Latin American context of precarious resources, I will seek to reveal and exercise diverse social aesthetical actions -some prefigurative (Graeber, 2002), others more neotraditional- and their articulations within “The Social Movement”, which promote post-capitalist (Gibson-Graham, 2006) transformations of the Chilean society.