The Patriarcal Anthropophagy of Television

THE PATRIARCAL ANTHROPOPHAGY OF TELEVISION ________________________EUGENIO BUCCI_______________________ Jornalista e Crítico de Televisáo Secretario Editorial da Editora Abril First of all, the banquet. I devour, in a permanent anthropophagous ritual, the chunks of the foreign discourse which I make mine. There is no other way of survival in the jungle: if we cannot pass through the content, the content has to pass through us. Chewing is walking. We walk on our teeth and are walked on through our teeth. We do not tread on the floor of culture with our feet, but the feet of culture is what treads on our gums, palate, esophagus and guts; strange speech (or alienated speech) crosses us while it is being recycled and no longer recognizes itself. And in this way, deglutinating, we discover ourselves deglutinated. "Anthropophagy within the Reach of All", the preface of Benedito Nunes to The Anthropophagous Utopia, explores the kinship between the writings-manifestos of Oswald de Andrade and the avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th century. The search for the primitive whether it is through intense emotion, spontaneous feeling, the provocation of the subconscious , which leads to psychic automatism and catharsis which had become a common feature for Dadaists and Surrealists, can easily be extended to the modern Brazilian anthropophagy. Quoting Tristan Tzara's Manifeste Dada, from 1918, Nunes emphasizes the textual similarities with which the words dada and anthropophagy entered avant-garde ideas: "Like Dada, Anthropophagy' was born through a need for independence, suspicion of the community; like Dada, it is a guiding word which leads thought to the search for ideas". Let us follow more closely Nunes' analysis: In our reading of the Manifesto antropófago, we need to consider the simultaneous occurrence of multiple meanings, and keep in our minds that the use of the word 'anthropophagous,' which is at times emotional, at times exhortative and at times referential, is developed in these three forms of language and in two semantic fields, one ethnographic, which takes us back to primitive societies,©1999 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XII No. 23/24, Enero a Diciembre 1999 358______________________________________________________________EUGENIO BUCCI especially that of the Tupis before the discovery of Brazil. The other is historical, that of Brazilian society, to which one can extrapolate the anthropophagous rite of the former, in the form of a practice of individual rebelliousness directed against its prohibitions and taboos. When crossing ethnographic and historical fields, we can see the Oswaldian utopia as a rebellion which makes what is repressed by civilization flourish. "Beneath the parliamentarianism of the Empire, the real power of the Indian club could be found; beneath the varnish of the imported institutions , primitive politics and economics could be found, and beneath the tinsel of literature and art, the non-logical imagination of the indian, surrealism avant la lettre could be found." Surrealism avant la lettre, which emanates from the primitive, an inner expression against the symbolical and the orderly , subverts that the domain of the patriarchy in favor of the fullness of the matriarchy. And everything is decided by festive criteria. "Joy is the proof by nines. In Pindorama's matriarchy."4 And everything is decided by the criteria of freedom and revolution. "Against social reality, clothed and oppressive, registered by Freud reality without complexities, without madness, without prostitution and without the prisons of the matriarchy of Pindorama." I am reading the book by Hal Foster on surrealism, 77te Compulsive Beauty. A convulsive beauty, crazy love, rebellions. Foster has probably never even heard of Oswald de Andrade, which does not make the least difference. I like the book. He puts forwards the idea of the incorporation of the Freudian concept of the uncanny (in the German original unheimliche) as a key to understanding surrealism. It convinces me. I chew on it. Freud's original text, "The Uncanny", 1919, is about the return of the repressed, but a dislocated return, or rather, disfigured, which makes more sense for the vision of the surrealist repertoire. This specific return thus produces the effect of estrangement, breaking, in Foster's words, "aesthetic norms and the social order". Much to the anthropophagous taste. But Foster is not dealing with an insurrection which has in...