WHY THEY STILL FIGHT LIKE THIS? ARCHEOLOGICAL NOTES ABOUT
"MILITANTES" AND THEIR SUBJECTIVITIES
André Sales
1
, Flávio Fontes
2
, & Silvio Yasui
1
1
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia, Universidade Estadual Paulista (Brazil)
2
Faculdade de Ciências da Saúde do Trairi, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil)
Abstract
Using Michel Foucault's archaeological and genealogical tools, we reviewed texts, discourses, and
practices developed under the planning and execution of the Russian Revolution. The main point is to
explicit how this event plays a crucial role in the current subjectivation process of some protestors and
social movement participants in Brazil. The analyzed data stress three anchor points to the understanding
of militant subjectification process: a) Government democratic centralism; b) economic Stakhanovism e
c) cultural Zhdanovism. We concluded that it is possible to establish a relation between soviet
dictatorship practices at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the rigid ways of feeling, thinking and
acting of many contemporary subjects while they militate to change social norms.
Keywords: Psychology in politics, subjectivity, militancy, social movements.
1. Introduction
Since June 2013, some crucial changes have happened in the way Brazilian collective action to
contest social norms presents itself. Scrutinizing the meanings of the words "militância" and "ativismo,"
this research explores the hypothesis that militancy and activism are different methodologies to gather
people engaged in collective action, and that they can be related to socialist and anarchist political
traditions respectively. In this paper, we are going to talk about "militância" by pointing out some events
occurred that took place in Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). By doing this, we intend to
explicit how these events still work as anchor points to the rigid ways of feeling, thinking and acting of
many contemporary subjects who militate to change social norms.
2. Methodological framework and procedures
This is a theoretical research which analyzes and interprets results achieved by a range of
significant studies about collective action in Brazil from 1980 to 2015 and also examines documents,
papers and historical facts that took place in the USSR from 1914 to 1957. Brazilian studies about social
movements and collective action provide the basis to characterize the "militante". Data from the Soviet
Union provided insight about experiences underpinning "militante" identity. The framework used to build
the analytical model was Brazilian Social Institutionalist Psychology (BSIP) (Rossi & Passos, 2014).
Schizoanalysis was proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and it stands for an
ethic-aesthetic-politic paradigm whose aim is to elucidate the fundamental relations between the capitalist
system of production, the production of desire, and the regimes of power exercises. In close connection
with the Schyzoanalytical framework, BSIP is concerned with the public, shared and collective dimension
of subjectivity. BSIP approach has developed analytical tools that challenge the dualism between
conceptions of the subject either as a self-centered and fully autonomous being, or as entirely governed
and determined by structures such as language, culture, historical process and social norms. This field of
Brazilian Social Institutionalist Psychology has been querying the essentialist conceptions of subject and
claiming that the subjectification process is a phenomenon which happens between the bodies.
From Michel Foucault studies, BSIP employs the notions of archeology and genealogy to
investigate the historical and path-dependent condition of human subjectivity. Archaeological
investigations analyze the unconscious rules involved in the emergence of regulation discourses in human
sciences. Genealogical studies explicit the necessary relationship between a regime of truth production
and a particular technology of power embodied in social practices. "Archeology proceeds along the truth
ISSN: 2184-2205 ISBN: 978-989-99864-5-9 © 2018
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