In Cannibal Metaphysics, de Castro writes, “Every becoming is an alliance. Which does not mean, once again, that every alliance is a becoming” (de Castro, 162). I am fascinated by this sentence because it reminds me of the idea of the “pact,” which I am writing about for my group’s final project. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “pact” as a transitive verb means, “to enter into a pact with (a person).” I like to think of the concept of a pact as a verb rather than a noun, as a process that each party must always re-decide to enter into, and as a continual recommitment to each other party so that a pact is something one performs “with” rather than “to” another. Of course, pacts have historically been used as formal tools of brutal colonization by the U.S. against Native American populations, and this history cannot be obfuscated in an attempt to idealize the idea of the pact. As I go forward in my thinking about what it means to enter into a pact, I want to explore the relationship between “pact” and “becoming” as de Castro has above. When is a pact like a becoming, and when is a pact a tool of colonization, and where do these lines blur?
Oswald de Andrade writes in “The Cannibalist Manifesto,” “Migrations. The flight from states of boredom. Against urban scleroses” (de Andrade, 94). I wondered what de Andrade meant by “urban scleroses” until I read Diana Taylor’s “Dead Capital,” which explores a Teatro da Vertigem walking performance through a “vital materialist” reading. According to Taylor, “The performance highlights the danger of giving ourselves up to the scopic frenzy produced by capitalist society, but asks us to look better, get closer, touch, listen and look at our environment so that we can decipher the many layers of interconnectivity” (Taylor, 20). If sclerosis is a resistance to change, here, Taylor proposes a type of “becoming” or “becoming different” that would negotiate a new pact between the human body and its senses and the materiality of an urban environment, a pact that both the material environment and the human body would have to enter in together, recognizing the agency of the material environment. De Castro writes, “a becoming is a movement that deterritorializes the two terms of the relation it creates, by extracting them from the relations defining them in order to link them via a new ‘partial connection’” (de Castro, 160). The connection between “becoming” and “urban scleroses” is clear: urban scleroses resist becoming. De Andrade calls for migrations, de Castro for the “movement” that is “becoming,” which “deterritorializes” the relationship between the human body and its material environment, creating a “partial connection,” or perhaps a pact, between the two.
de Andrade, Oswald. "The Cannibalist Manifesto." Third Text 13. 1999. 92-95. Taylor, Diana. "Dead Capital: Teatro da Vertigem, Bom Retiro" . . : , 2018. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014. Print.