Theatre of operations : aesthetic battles throughout the city

For Lipovetsky and Serroy (2013), we have entered an era of artist capitalism. Manufacturing, selling and consumption are all the way through penetrated by operations of aesthetic nature, carrying affects, sensitivities and sensorial universes. The aim is to make everyone live experiences, moments of pleasure and sensorial rapture, to manufacture styles and emotions. "Everywhere the real gets constructed as an image by integrating an aesthetic-emotional dimension that has become central within the competition of firms." (ibid, p.12). This aesthetization of economic activity is paralleled by an aesthetization of lifestyles and city organization. In their economic and touristic competition, in order to attract those consumers greedy for fun and experiences, cities develop similar aesthetic strategies. Urban centers gentrifications go along with the burgeoning of cafés, restaurants, art galleries, fashion shops, all activities that require styles and a trendy, thrilling atmosphere. Cities are dramatizing and performing to create emotions and sensations. Everything becomes theatrical. Yet does such an aesthetization produce as much diversity and mixing as advocated? Is not it the imposition of a particular aesthetics, excluding every other? Does not this capitalist aesthetics impose a definite order, chasing other aesthetics, all the other spectacles? And if it is indeed managing a theatre, this is a theatre from which all real event is excluded, from which is controlled and banned all that may jeopardize the always-more of consumption and capitalism? Our point is that this all encompassing artist capitalism's theatricality is a theatre that excludes all real movement, all becomings different from this imposed aesthetic order and that it controls other voices and modes of subjectification. However, other critical theatricalities take place and shape, making a minor usage of these major aesthetic strategies, in which the aesthetical is a theatre of political struggles. Our presentation will start with images and performative vignettes that will endeavor to recreate our aesthetic experience while wandering inside the city of Belo Horizonte (Brazil). Experience of an aesthetized place, thrilling but hygienic, fun but déjà-vu, where consumption is king; and experience of a disaffected place, taken over some nights by MC battles, thrilling and wild, where all becoming and events could arise. We will then oppose, using deleuzian concepts, a theatre of representation and a theatre of repetition, to make sense of the disparity between those two aesthetic experiences. We will position ourselves inside the turn-to-affect, finding a model in Lingis or Stewart, to account from within this theatre of operation, because this guerilla is not only opposing two forms of aesthetics, but is raging inside both groups, as well as in the research community, in our own subjectivities and between the sensitive and conceptual reflection. As Lipovetsky and Serroy argue, it is not only businesses and cities that get managed through this aesthetization, it is also our lives. Hence, at stake are also our subjectivities and researches on management.