Arte e agência (Gell 1998)

THOMAS, Nicholas. 1998. Foreword. In: Alfred Gell. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.vii-xiii.

FOREWORD (NICHOLAS THOMAS)
ART OBJECTS secure the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed (Thomas 1998:viii)
TECHNOLOGY & ENCHANTMENT (encantadora nos dois sentidos da palavra: ela é um encanto e ela encanta): Technology is enchanting because it is enchanted, because it is the outcome of some process of barely comprehensible virtuosity, that exemplifies an ideal of magical efficacy that people struggle to realize in other domains. (Thomas 1998:viii)
ART IS ABOUT DOING (not meaning or communicating): ‘Doing’ is theorized as agency, as a process involving indexes and effects; the anthropology of art is constructed as a theory of agency, or of the mediation of agency by indexes, understood simply as material entities which motivate inferences, responses or interpretations. (Thomas 1998:ix)
EFICÁCIA (o dentro e o fora): Efficacy is founded on a comprehensive internal model of the outside field. […] Internal mental process and external transactions in objectified personhood are (ideally) fused. Mind, therefore, can exist objectively as well as subjectively, as a pattern of transactable objects. (Thomas 1998:xii)

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GELL, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press

CRÍTICA À ESTÉTICA (etnocentrismo):
(Gell 1998:3-4)

ART IS NOT LANGUAGE (action, not communication):
In place of symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result, and transformation. I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. The ‘action’-centered approach to art is inherently more anthropological than the alternative semiotic approach because it is preoccupied with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather than with the interpretation of objects ‘as if’ they were texts. (Gell 1998:6)

ANTHROPOLOGY OF ART
can be roughly defined as the study of social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency: (Gell 1998:7)

ART OBJECTS ARE THE EQUIVALENT OF SOCIAL AGENTS (persons):
(Gell 1998:7)

MAUSS:
(Gell 1998:9)

PERSONS&THINGS:
explore a domain in which ‘objects’ merge with ‘people’ by virtue of the existence of social relations between persons and things, and persons and persons via things. (Gell 1998:12)

GELL EXCLUI VERBAL AND MUSICAL ART DE SUA ANÁLISE, APESAR DE RECONHECER QUE SÃO INSEPARÁVEIS DA VISUAL ART QUE ELE ESCOLHEU ANALISAR:
(Gell 1998:13)

ABDUÇÃO DE AGÊNCIA: I propose that ‘art-like situations’ can be discriminated as those in which the material ‘index’ (the visible, physical, ‘thing’) permits a particular cognitive operation which I identify as the abduction of agency. (Gell 1998:13)

ÍNDICE=ABDUÇÃO:
(Gell 1998:13-4)

ABDUCTION (Eco, Peirce):
Abduction covers the gray area where semiotic interference (of meanings from signs) merges with hypothetical inferences of a non-semiotic (or not conventionally semiotic) kind (Gell 1998:14)

ABDUÇÃO=RETROAÇÃO:
(Gell 1998:14)

SEMIOSE:
(Gell 1998:14)

KEPLER:
(Gell 1998:14)

ABDUÇÃO VAI ALÉM DA LINGUAGEM:
The usefulness of the concept of abduction is that it designates a class of semiotic inferences which are, by definition, wholly distinct from the semiotic inferences we bring to bear on the understanding of language (Gell 1998:14)

ABDUCTION:
Abduction, though a semiotic concept (actually, it belongs to logic rather than semiotics) is useful in that it functions to set bounds to linguistic models where they do not apply, while remaining free to posit inferences of a non-linguistic kind. (Gell 1998:15)

ABDUZINDO AGÊNCIA (nem subjetivo, nem objetivo; a natureza da cultura):
[T]he means we generally have to form a notion of the disposition and intentions of ‘social others’ is via a large number of abductions from indexes which are neither ‘semiotic conventions’ or ‘laws of nature’ but something in between. (Gell 1998:15)

OS ÍNDICES QUE NOS INTERESSAM SÃO AQUELES QUE PERMITEM A ABDUÇÃO DE AGÊNCIA SOCIAL:
[T]he index is itself seen as the outcome, and/or the instrument of, social agency. (Gell 1998:15; itálico no original)

FUMAÇA, índice de que ALGUÉM pôs fogo em algo.:
(Gell 1998:15)

AGENCY:
Agency is attributable to those persons (and things […]) who/which are seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or intention, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events. An agent is one who ‘causes events to happen’ in their vicinity. As a result of this exercise of agency, certain events transpire (not necessarily the specific events which were ‘intended’ by the agent). Whereas chains of physical/material cause-and-effect consist of ‘happenings’ which can be explained by physical laws which ultimately govern the universe as a whole, agents initiate ‘actions’ which are ‘caused’ by themselves, by their intentions, not by the physical laws of the cosmos. An agent is the source, the origin, of causal events, independently of the state of the physical universe. (Gell 1998:16)

ANTROPOLOGIA = FILOSOFIA COM PESSOAS DENTRO:
(Gell 1998:17)

AGENCY and CAUSALITY:
The idea of agency is a culturally prescribed framework for thinking about causation, when what happens is (in some vague sense) supposed to be intended in advance by some person-agent or thing-agent. Whenever an event is believed to happen because of an ‘intention’ lodged in the person or thing which initiates the causal sequence, that is an instance of ‘agency’. (Gell 1998:17)

PERSPECTIVISMO ANTROPOLÓGICO (toda mente é humana E social):
‘Action’ cannot be conceptualized in other than social terms. (Gell 1998:17)

SECONDARY AGENCY (o objeto sempre como mediador de uma ação que se iniciou fora dele):
Art objects are not ‘self-sufficient’ agents, but only ‘secondary’ agents in conjunction with certain specific (human) associates, whose identities I discuss below. The philosophical theory of ‘agents’ presupposes the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the human agent; but I am more concerned with the kind of second-class agency which artefacts acquire once they become enmeshed in a texture of social relationships, However, within this relational texture, artefacts can quite well be treated as agents in a variety of ways. (Gell 1998:17)

GIRL WITH DOLL (arquétipo da antropologia da arte):
(Gell 1998:18)

HUMANS and CARS (vehicular animism):
A car, just as a possession and a means of transport is not intrinsically a locus of agency […]. But it is in fact very difficult for a car owner not to regard a car as a body-part, a prosthesis, something invested with his (or her) own social agency vis-a-vis other social agents. […] Not only is the car a locus of the owner’s agency, and a conduit through which the agency of others (bad drivers, vandals) may affect him – it is also the locus of an ‘autonomous’ agency of its own. […] The car does not just reflect the owner’s personhood, it has personhood as a car. For example, I possess a Toyota […]. My Toyota is reliable and considerate; it only breaks down in relatively minor ways at times when it ‘knows’ that no great inconvenience will result. If, God forbid, my Toyota were to break down in the middle of the night, far from home, I should consider this an act of gross treachery for which I would hold the car personally and morally culpable, not myself or the garage mechanics who service it. (Gell 1998:18-9)

RELATIONAL AGENCY (car):
Thus, […] if my car breaks down in the middle of the night, I am in the ‘patient’ position and the car is in the ‘agent’. If I should respond to this emergency by shouting at, or maybe even punching or kicking my unfortunate vehicle, then I am the agent and the car is the patient, and so on. (Gell 1998:22)

CAUSAL MILIEU (mediação) (abdução de agência a partir da percepção de alterações nas sequencias causais no meio):
Whatever happens, human agency is exercised within the material world. […] We can accept that the causal chains which are initiated by intentional agents come into being as states of mind, and that they are orientated towards the states of mind of social ‘others’ […] – but unless there is some kind of physical mediation, which always does exploit the manifold causal properties of the ambient physical world (the environment, the human body, etc.), agent and patient will not interact. Therefore, ‘things’ with their thing-ly causal properties are as essential to the exercise of agency as states of mind. In fact, it is only because the causal milieu in the vicinity of an agent assumes a certain configuration, from which an intention may be abducted, that we recognize the presence of another agent. We recognize agency, ex post facto, in the anomalous configuration of the causal milieu – but we cannot detect it in advance, that is, we cannot tell that someone is an agent before they act as an agent, before they disturb the causal milieu in such a way as an only be attributed to their agency. Because the attibution of agency rests on the detection of the effects of agency in the causal milieu, rather than an unmediated intuition, it is not paradoxical to understand agency as a factor of the ambience as a whole, a global characteristic of the world of people and things in which we live, rather than as an attribute of the human psyche, exclusively. (Gell 1998:20)

INDEX=>CAUSAL MILIEU:
The pivot of the art nexus is always the index. The index, however, is never, or at least rarely, a ‘primary’ agent (or patient). The index is just the ‘disturbance’ in the causal milieu which reveals, and potentiates, agency exercised and patient-hood suffered on either side of it – by the primary agents, by recipients (patrons and spectators), by artists, and to a lesser extent, prototypes. The index is articulated in the causal milieu, whereas intentional agency and patient-hood somehow lie just outside it. (Gell 1998:37)
The region in the causal milieu in which the ‘sphere of action’ of the primary agent and the ‘sphere of vulnerability’ of the primary patient meet and overlap. (Gell 1998:37-8)

PRIMARY AGENTS:
intentional beings who are categorically distinguished from ‘mere’ things or artefacts (Gell 1998:20)
Entities endowed with the capacity to initiate actions/events through will or intention (Gell 1998:36)

NORMALMENTE ARTISTAS:
(Gell 1998:36)

RECIPIENTES TAMBÉM:
Recipients are just like artists; they are primary agents and/or primary patients, the sources, prime movers, or intended (social) targets of art-mediated agency. (Gell 1998:36)

INTENCIONALIDADE (os acrobatas da pirâmide chinesa):
(Gell 1998:44)

SECONDARY AGENTS:
artefacts, dolls, cars, works of art, etc. through which primary agents distribute their agency in the causal milieu, and thus render their agency effective. (Gell 1998:20)
Entities not endowed with will or intention by themselves but essential to the formation, appearance, or manifestation of intentional actions (Gell 1998:36)

NORMALMENTE ÍNDICES:
(Gell 1998:36)

SECONDARY AGENCY (distributed personhood):
In speaking of artefacts as ‘secondary agents’ I am referring to the fact that the origination and manifestation of agency takes place in a milieu which consists (in large part) of artefacts, and that agents thus, ‘are’ and not merely ‘use’ the arteacts which connect them to social others. Anti-personel mines are not (primary) agents who initiate happenings through acts of will for which they are morally responsible, granted, but they are objective embodiments of the power or capacity to will their use, and hence moral entities in themselves. I describe artefacts as ‘social agents’ not because I wish to promulgate a form of material-culture mysticism, but only in view of the fact that objectification in artefact-form is how social agency manifests and realizes itself, via the proliferation of fragments of ‘primary’ intentional agents in their ‘secondary’ artefactual forms. (Gell 1998:21)

CAUSALIDADE INTERNA AO ÍNDICE (os motivos de uma estampa):
Abstract patterns appear to show ‘cause and effect’ relations between motifs rather than ‘agent/patient’ relations between motifs, in that nothing makes us think that the motifs in the patterns are sentient in themselves, that they have intentions or desires etc. (Gell 1998:44)

MIXED AGENTS (PROTOTYPE):
[W]here the prototype is an object not normally thought capable of exercising primary agency ‘in the world’, then as the subject of representation, it will convey only secondary agency; but where the prototype of an index is an entity (such as a king, magician, divine being, etc.) endowed with the ability to intend its own appearance, then the prototype may be partly or wholly a primary agent as well as a secondary agent. (Gell 1998:37)

CYBORG (distributed personhood): SOLDIER=MAN+GUN:
A soldier is not just a man, but a man with a gun (Gell 1998:20)

CONCEITO RELACIONAL DE AGÊNCIA:
The concept of agency I employ is relational and context-dependent, not classificatory and context free. Thus, to revert to the ‘car’ example; […] [i]t is an agent only in so far as I am a patient, and it is a ‘patient’ (the counterpart of an agent) only in so far as I am an agent with respect to it. […] The concept of agency I employ here is exclusively relational: for any agent, there is a patient, and conversely, for any patient, there is an agent.. […] To be an ‘agent’ one must act with respect to the ‘patient’; the patient is the object which is causally affected by the agent’s action. (Gell 1998:22)

AGENCY and AFFECT:
Agency is not just ‘making’, but any modality through which something affects something else. (Gell 1998:42)

PATIENTS MAY RESIST:
(Gell 1998:23)

NESTED HIERARCHIES; ENCHAINMENT OF INTENTION:
[I]n the vicinity of art objects, struggles for control are played out in which ‘patients’ intervene in the enchainment of intention, instrument, and result, as ‘passive agents’, that is, intermediaries between ultimate agents and ultimate patients. Agent/patient relations form nested hierarchies whose characteristics will be described in due course. The concept of the ‘patient’ is not, therefore a simple one, in that being a ‘patient’ may be a form of (derivative) agency. (Gell 1998:23)

ARTEFATOS SÃO ÍNDICES DA AGÊNCIA DO ARTESÃO/ARTISTA:
(Gell 1998:23)

ARTEFATOS PODEM ESCONDER OU REVELAR A AGÊNCIA DO ARTESÃO/ARTISTA:
(Gell 1998:23)

O RECEPTOR:
[A] second abduction of agency […] is the abduction of its ‘destination’, its intended reception. Artists do not usually make art objects for no reason, they make them in order that they should be seen by a public, and/or acquired by a patron. Just as any art object indexes it origins in the activity of an artist, it also indexes its reception by a public, the public it was primarily made ‘for’. The public, or ‘recipients’ of a work of art (index) are, according to the anthropological theory of art, in a social relationship with the index, either as ‘patients’ (in that the index causally affects them in some way) or as ‘agents’ in that, but for them, this index would not have come into existence (they have caused it). (Gell 1998:24)

ANTI-GOODMAN:
(Gell 1998:25)

O QUE IMPORTA É A CAUSALIDADE SOCIAL:
The fact that ‘the picture that people have in their minds’ of the god’s appearance is actually derived from their memories of images which purport to represent his appearance does not matter. What matters to me is only that people believe that the causal arrow is orientated in the other way; they believe that the god, as agent, ‘caused’ the image (index), as patient, to assume a particular appearance. (Gell 1998:25)
For our purposes what is important are the beliefs that people hold, not whether these beliefs are justified. (Gell 1998:34)

DEF DE ANTROPOLOGIA DA ARTE:
a theory of the social relations that obtain in the neighbourhood of works of art, or indexes. (Gell 1998:26)

SOCIAL RELATIONS = ACTIONS:
(Gell 1998:26)

TEORIA SERVE PARA CLASSIFICAR MATERIAL EMPÍRICO:
(Gell 1998:28)

INDEX=>ARTIST: É A OBRA QUE DETERMINA COMO O ARTISTA A TRABALHARÁ (como numa escultura cuja forma final é determinada pela sua própria matéria ou por ações atribuídas ao objeto (como desejos de um espírito que a habita)):
(Gell 1998:28-31)

A EXISTÊNCIA DO ÍNDICE É CONDIÇÃO DA TEORIA:
A basic constraint on the theory being developed here is that unless there is an index, there can be no abductions of agency, and since the topic of this theoretical enterprise is precisely the abduction of agency from indexes, the index has to be presented for analysis to proceed. One can construct a formulae which lack the artist, or the recipient, or the prototype, but not ones which lack the index. It follows that a formula such as Artist-A=>Recipient-P is always implicitly [[Artist-A]=>Index-A]=>Recipient-P, or some variant thereof, including the index. (Gell 1998:36)

RELATIONS:
INDEX=>RECIPIENT: FÓRMULA ELEMENTAR DO ESPECTADOR PASSIVO:
Whoever allows his or her attention to be attracted to an index, and submits to its power, appeal, or fascination, is a patient, responding to the agency inherent in the index. […] [W]here the index is not seen primarily as the outcome of an external artist’s agency, and where it also has no prototype, its agency with respect to the recipient will be a pure case of Index-A=>Recipient-P. (Gell 1998:31-2)

INDEX=>PROTOTYPE: SORCERY:
where the injury done to a representation of the victim causes injury to the victim […]. However, [this relation] is more commonly encountered with recipients or artists or sorcerers in the ‘agent’ position as well, in a three- or four-place expression. (Gell 1998:32)

ARTIST=>INDEX:
This is the elementary formula for artistic agency. The index usually motivates the abduction of agency of the person who made it. The index is, in these instances, a congealed ‘trace’ of the artist’s creative performance. […] Among the very earliest examples of art of any kind are the famous hand-prints which occur beside the cave paintings of Lascaux, altamira, etc. These are particularly ‘pure’ cases of Artist-A=>Index-P. (Gell 1998:33)

RECIPIENT=>INDEX:
This is the elementary formula for ‘patronage’ and/or ‘the spectator as agent’.In so far as a recipient can abduct his/her own agency from an index, this formula is satisfied. […34] [T]here is almost always a sense in which the recipients of a work of art can see their own agency in the index. Even if one is not ‘the patron’ who caused the work of art to be made, any spectator may infer that, in a more general sense, the work of art was made for him or her. (Gell 1998:33-4)

PROTOTYPE=>INDEX:
The agency of the prototype can frequently be abducted from the index. […] Photography was, once upon a time, considered to be an ‘artist-less’ mode of image-production, and is still so seen by some. The image which forms itself out of light emanating from the prototype provides a model for the ‘pure’ case. (Gell 1998:35)

INDEX=>INDEX:
An index can be seen as the ‘cause’ of itself. […] [A]ll living things are agents with respect to themselves in that their growth and form may be attributed to their own agency. […42] We find it hard to see things which ‘grow by themselves’ as works of art because, for us, the activities of an ‘artist’ are intrinsic to the concept of art itself. But from the standpoint of the anthropology of art this is merely a relative matter, an axis of comparison between different art systems. (Gell 1998:41-2)

O CASO DA PIRÂMIDE CHINESA:
The forces in the structure, the agency exercised by one part (one acrobat) with respect to the others, are visually embodied in the structure as a whole […]. What we see is a complex network of agent/patient relationships between individual acrobats, pairs and triads of acrobats, etc. within the index. […] Innumerable relations […] can be extracted. (Gell 1998:42)

O CASO DA TENSÃO MUSICAL (???):
(Gell 1998:43)

ABSTRACT ART(index=>index)=/=REPRESENTATIONAL ART(prototype=>index + index=>index):
(Gell 1998:43)

ARTIST=>ARTIST:
Every artist is a patient with respect to the agency s/he exercises […]. Drawing, and most other artistic skills (carving, etc.) are what are known as ‘ballistic’ activities, muscular performances which take place at a rate such that cognitive processing of the ‘outcome’ of action only takes place after the act is complete, not while it is in progress. (Gell 1998:45)

TESTES, OEUVRE:
(Gell 1998:46-7)

RECIPIENT=>RECIPIENT:
The patron is primus inter pares among the general art public. Unless the patron is visibly and/or privately impressed by the index of which s/he is patron, the very act of patronage is a failure, and the resources which have been invested in the commission have been wasted. It follows that patronage has, intrinsically, a phase in which the patron/agent [Recipient-A] is a patient [Recipient-P]. (Gell 1998:48)

PROTOTYPE=>PROTOTYPE:
The prototype of an index can be a patient with respect to the index which, by representing him or her, incorporates his or her own agency. […] If we look into the mirror, and dislike what we see, or indeed approve of what we see, we are responding, as patients, to an index (the mirror image) of which we are the agents. […] However, mostly the effects of the index on the prototype are not primarily caused by the index, but simply mediated by the index, and agency lies with the artist or the recipient. (Gell 1998:48-50)

EXPRESSÕES “ILEGÍTIMAS” (pois o índice está implícito):

ARTIST=>PROTOTYPE (unicorn):
This is the general formula for ‘imaginary’ images made by the artist. (Gell 1998:38)

PROTOTYPE=>ARTIST:
the formula for ‘realist’ image-making (Gell 1998:39)

ARTIST=>RECIPIENT:
This formula expresses the power of the artist as a social agent over the recipient as a social patient. (Gell 1998:39)

RECIPIENT=>ARTIST:
formula for the ‘artist as artisan’, that is, a hired hand who does the recipient’s bidding. (Gell 1998:39)

PROTOTYPE=>RECIPIENT:
One might call this the ‘idol’ formula. (Gell 1998:40)

RECIPIENT=>PROTOTYPE:
This is the ‘volt sorcery’ formula. (Gell 1998:40)

A ANTROPOLOGIA DA ARTE SE INTERESSA POR
relations between ‘primary’ agents and patients (artists, recipients) who figure, so to speak, at the points of origin and termination of art-mediated chains of transactions. (Gell 1998:38)

CRIAÇÃO+SELEÇÃO=INVENÇÃO
FÓRMULAS INSTRUMENTAIS:
Our formulae are designed therefore to provide models which can be manipulated and transformed at will, so as to discriminate between all possible combinations of agent/patient relations between terms. (Gell 1998:53)
These formulae just provide a means of distinguishing between different distributions of agent/patient relations in the vicinity of works of art; they do not predict them or explain them. (Gell 1998:56)

A ESCOLHA DE QUEM É AGENTE E QUEM É PACIENTE É CENTRAL, MAS NÃO É OBJETIVA E DEPENDE DE JULGAMENTO SOCIOLÓGICO E PSICOLÓGICO QUANTO À ADEQUAÇÃO.:
(Gell 1998:57)

BASS POSITION:
[[[A]=>B]=>C] […] ‘A’ is in ‘base’ position, or we might even say, ‘bass’ position, since like the bass line in music, the one in this position exercises mediated agency over all ascending levels. (Gell 1998:58)

CRÍTICA À ESTÉTICA:
(Gell 1998:66)

CRÍTICA À SEMIÓTICA:
(Gell 1998:66)

TUDO AQUILO QUE UMA PESSOA PODE FAZER COM OUTRA, UMA OBRA DE ARTE TAMBÉM PODE FAZER:
(Gell 1998:66)

O ÍNDICE PODE SER UMA PESSOA (possessão, performance art):
(Gell 1998:67)

TODO ARTEFATO É UMA PERFORMANCE (como isto apareceu?; mitos de origem):
(Gell 1998:67)

PERSONHOOD:
[A]s a general rule, it is fair to say that indexes, from the spectators’ point of view, only mediate personhood rather than possess it intrinsically. However, the personhood of the artist, the prototype, or the recipient can fully invest the index in artefactual form, so that to all intents and purposes it becomes a person, or at least a partial person. It is a congealed residue of performance and agency in object-form, through which access to other persons can be attained, and via which their agency can be communicated. (Gell 1998:68)

CAPTIVATION=THE PRIMORDIAL KIND OF ARTISTIC AGENCY: a obra é objetivamente cogniscível mas seu processo de produção a coloca em contato com uma realidade outra que não a minha.
(Gell 1998:69)

A OBRA É ÍNDICE DE UMA AGÊNCIA SUPERIOR À MINHA CAPACIDADE DE CONCEPÇÃO:
(Gell 1998:71)

MAGIC:
(Gell 1998:71)

EFICÁCIA SOCIAL DERIVA DA DESIGUALDADE PRODUZIDA:
Artistic agency […] is socially efficacious because it establishes an inequality between the agency responsible for the production of the work of art, and the spectators (Gell 1998:71)

CAPTIVATION/FASCINATION:
Captivation or fascination – the demoralization produced by the spectacle of unimaginable virtuosity – ensues from the spectator becoming trapped within the index because the index embodies agency which is essentially indecipherable. Partly this comes from the spectator’s inability mentally to rehearse the origination of the index from the point of view of the originator, the artist. The ‘blockage’ in cognition arises at the point when the spectator cannot follow the sequence of steps in the artist’s ‘performance’ (the ‘performance’ which is objectively congealed in the finished work). (Gell 1998:71)

DECORAÇÃO como TECNOLOGIA SOCIAL:
Decorative patterns applied to artefacts attach people to things, and to the social projects those things entail. […] The decoration of objects is a component of a social technology [também “psychological technology”], which I have […] called the technology of enchantment. The world is filled with decorated objects because decoration is often essential to the psychological functionality of artefacts, which cannot be dissociated from the other types of functionality they possess, notably their practical, or social functionality. […] In other words, the distinction we make between ‘mere’ decoration and function is unwarranted; decoration is intrinsically functional, or else its presence would be inexplicable. (Gell 1998:74)

THE ATTACHMENT BETWEEN PERSONS AND THINGS MEDIATED BY SURFACE DECORATION:
(Gell 1998:74)

TECHNOLOGY OF ENCHANTMENT (theory of social efficacy) = PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ART:
(Gell 1998:74-5)

COGNITION=SOCIALITY:
(Gell 1998:75)

DECORATIVE PATTERNS (machines):
[T]he parts of the index exert causal influence over one another and testify to the agency of the index as a whole, in that it is in the disposition of the parts of the index that the artist’s agency is primarily made apparent. […] We need a formula which captures the inherent agency in decorative forms, forms which do not dimply refer to (represent) agency in the external world, but which produce agency in the physical body of the index itself, so that it becomes a ‘living thing’ without recourse to the imitation of any living thing. Decoration makes objects come alive in a non-representational way. […] The root of a pattern is the motif, which enters into relationships with neighbouring motifs, relations which animate the index as a whole. (Gell 1998:76)

AS QUATRO VARIAÇÕES DE PADRÕES: (1) reflection; (2) translation; (3) rotation, (4) glide reflection.
(Gell 1998:77)

MIND-TRAP:
we must resign ourselves to just not quite understanding […] We experience this as a kind of pleasurable frustration; we are drawn into the pattern and held inside it, impaled, as it were, on its bristling hooks and spines. (Gell 1998:80)

UNFINISHED BUSINESS (padrões e dádiva):
Patterns […] generate relationships over time between persons and things, […] always ‘unfinished business’. […] Anthropologists have long recognized that social relationships, to endure over time, have to be founded on ‘unfinished business’. The essence of exchange, as a binding social force, is the delay, or lag, between transactions which, if the exchange relation is to endure, should never result in perfect reciprocation, but always in some renewed, residual, imbalance. So it is with patterns; they slow perception down, or even halt it, so that the decorated object is never fully possessed at all, but is always in the process of becoming possessed. This, I argue, sets up a biographical relation – an unfinished exchange – between the decorated index and the recipient. (Gell 1998:81)

CRÍTICA À ESTÉTICA:
(Gell 1998:81)

A AUSÊNCIA DE DECORAÇÃO GERA A PERDA DE EFICÁCIA SOCIAL (Kant, Shakers):
(Gell 1998:82)

DECORATION and COGNITIVE VISCOSITY:
(Gell 1998:82-3)

DECORATION:
the creation of attachment between persons and things (Gell 1998:83)

APOTROPAIC (a prime instance of artistic agency, a topic of central concern in the anthropology of art):
The apotropaic use of patterns is as protective devices, defensive screens or obscacles impeding passage. (Gell 1998:83)

APOTROPAIC PATTERNS=DEMON-TRAPS:
Not just intricate pattern, but sheer mutiplicity can have this effect […]. The interminableness of large numbers and complicated patterns work in the same way; but patterns are more interesting and certainly more artistic. (Gell 1998:84)

KOLAM (topological games):
difficult to read; difficult to see how the design has been constructed (Gell 1998:85)

SABER-PODER:
[S]eeing the figure is quite distinct from being able to mentally intend the process of its construction. Yet we ‘write in’ the fact that it is possible to construct the figure, because here it is, it has been made by someone, and we might indeed have been lucky enough to have watched, entranced, the deft movements of the woman who made it […] we cannot reconstruct her skilled movements […] from the design which has resulted from them […]. So we end with a series of paradoxes. (Gell 1998:85-6)

TATOO:
(Gell 1998:86)

MAZE:
(Gell 1998:88)

CRETAN MAZE=ZENO:
(Gell 1998:88)

MAZES AND DEATH:
(Gell 1998:90)

EFFICACY=/=BEAUTY (Melanesian):
We are a long way, here, from the idea that patterns appeal to the eyes or give aesthetic pleasure. I do not think that the Malakulans thought of these patterns as independent visual objects at all, but as performances, like dances, in which men could reveal their capability. Melanesian aesthetics is about efficacy, the capacity to accomplish tasks, not ‘beauty’. (Gell 1998:94)

DRAWING=~=DANCING (Merleau-Ponty e Matisse):
(Gell 1998:95)

DRAWING MUSIC:
If we can see visual patterns as frozen traces of dances, so we can also see dances as being half-way to becoming music, which indeed normally accompanies them. What unites drawing, music and dancing is a certain cognitive indecipherability manifested in performance […]. Thus, […] we may observe that a four-part canon reveals its structure (because it is easy to hear the four successive entries of the theme) but also conceals it, in that it is near-impossible to hear all four parts simultaneously. So also the kolam reveals itself as constructed out of four superimposed figures, but just how, we cannot be certain. Drawing and music and dance tantalize our capacity to deal with wholes and parts, continuity and discontinuity, synchrony and succession. (Gell 1998:95)

ÊNFASE DE GELL É NA VIRTUOSIDADE, NO ARREBATAMENTO E NO DESCOMPASSO:
(Gell 1998:95)

IDOLATRIA:
(Gell 1998:96)

CRÍTICA À ESTÉTICA:
(Gell 1998:97)

ARTE e RELIGIÃO:
(Gell 1998:97)

ICONS (ICONIC and ANICONIC):
(Gell 1998:97)

MIMESIS and EPISTEMIC AWARENESS:
(Gell 1998:100)

O ERRO DE FRASER NÃO FOI A ÊNFASE NA CAUSALIDADE, MAS SIM A ÊNFASE EM APENAS UM TIPO DE CAUSALIDADE CIENTÍFICA:
Frazer’s mistake was to impose a pseudo-scientific notion of physical cause and effect (encompassing the entires universe) on practices which depend on intentionality and purpose, which is precisely what is missing from scientific determinism. Magic is possible because intentions cause events to happen in the vicinity of agents, but this is a different species of causation from the kind of causation involved in the rising and setting of the sun, or the falling of Newton’s apple etc. […] Frazer’s mistake was, so to speak, to imagine that magicians had some non-standard physical theory, whereas the truth is that ‘magic’ is what you have when you do without a physical theory on the grounds of its redundancy, relying on the idea, which is perfectly practicable, that the explanation of any given event (especially if socially salient) is that it is caused intentionally. (Gell 1998:101)

O EXEMPLO DO OVO COZIDO:
So, whatever the veredict of physics, the real causal explanation for why there are any boiled eggs is that I, and other breakfasters, intend that boiled eggs should exist. (Gell 1998:101)

CAUSALIDADE MÁGICA (DESEJO):
The causal arrow between desire and accomplishment reflects the practical fact that the more one desires something to happen, the more likely it is to happen (though it still may not). Magic registers and publicizes the strength of desire, increasing the (inductively supported) likelihood that the much-desired, emphatically expressed, outcome will transpire, as frequently happens with respect to those outcomes we loudly clamour for. ‘All events happen because they are intended’ – ‘I emphatically intend that X shall happen’ ergo ‘X shall come to pass’. This is not ‘confused’ physics, nor is it devoid of a basis in social experience (Gell 1998:101)

VOLT SORCERY (causalidade invertida, distributed person):
We suffer, as patients, from forms of agency mediated via images of ourselves, because, as social persons, we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attibutes, and our agency. Volt sorcery is not a more magical but just a more literal-minded exploration of the predicament of representability in image form. It does not take leave of the everyday world, in appealing to some occult force, some magical principle of causation; on the contrary, it unites cause and effect all too closely, so that the causal nexus linking the image to the person represented is made reversible – the image can exercise a causal effect, in the opposite direction, over the person. […] The victim is ultimately the victim of his own agency, by a circuitous causal pathway. Vulnerability stems from the bare possibility of representation, which cannot be avoided. Sorcery beliefs endure, and are highly explanatory, because vulnerability to sorcery is the unintended consequence of the diffusion of the person into the milieu, via a thousand causal influences and pathways, not all of which can be monitored and controlled. (Gell 1998:104)

EXUVIAE:
Exuviae sorcery works […] because of the intimate causal nexus between exuviae and the person responsible for them. These exuviae do not stand metonymically for the victim; they are physically detached fragments of the victim’s ‘distributed personhood’ – that is, personhood distributed in the milieu, beyond the body boundary. (Gell 1998:104)

INDEX AS DETACHED PART OF PROTOTYPE (metonímia):
Abduction from an index does characteristically involve positing a substantive part-whole (or part-part) relation. (Gell 1998:104)

EPICUREAN THEORY OF FLYING SIMULACRA:
(Gell 1998:104)

EXUVIAE=>GROWTH:
(Gell 1998:108)

CAMERA:
One does not even logically have to impute ‘life’ to an image to assert that an image can see; after all, people often speak of cameras as ‘seeing’ things, without implying that cameras have life. (Gell 1998:120)

ANIMISM, ANTHROPOMORPHISM:
(Gell 1998:121)

ANIMISM=/=BIOLOGICAL LIFE:
(Gell 1998:122)

SHAMAN:
(Gell 1998:122)

SOCIAL AGENTS (ANT):
‘[S]ocial agents’ can be drawn from categories which are as different as chalk and cheese (in fact, rather more different) because ‘social agency’ is not defined in terms of ‘basic’ biological attributes (such as inanimate thing v.s. incarnate person) but is relational – it does not matter, in ascribing ‘social agent’ status, what a thing (or a person) ‘is’ in itself; what matters is where it stands in a network of social relations. All that may be necessary for stocks and stones to become ‘social agents’ in the sene that we require, is that there should be actual human persons/agents ‘in the neighbourhood’ of these inert objects, not that they should be biologically human persons themselves. (Gell 1998:123)

WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE PERSONS AND THINGS:
(Gell 1998:124-5)

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL CONCEPTIONS OF AGENCY:
(Gell 1998:126…)

DOLL:
(Gell 1998:129)

HOMUNCULUS:
(Gell 1998:131, 133, 139, 147)

BATESON (PLAY):
(Gell 1998:134)

FRACTAL:
(Gell 1998:137)

NOTHING BUT LAYERS:
(Gell 1998:140)

STRATHERN:
(Gell 1998:140)

WAGNER:
(Gell 1998:140)

FRACTAL PERSONS:
(Gell 1998:140)

O DENTRO E O FORA:
What matters is only the reduplication of skins, outwards towards the macrocosm and inwards towards the microcosm, and the fact that all these skins are structurally homologous; there is no definitive ‘surface’, there is no definitive ‘inside’, but only a ceaseless passage in and out, and that it is here, in this traffic to and fro, that the mystery of animation is solved. (Gell 1998:148)

ANIMATING THE BUDDHA IMAGE:
(Gell 1998:149)

ECSTATIC TRANCE:
(Gell 1998:151)

HUMAN=NON-HUMAN:
From the point of view of the anthropology of art, as outlined in this work, there is an insensible transition between ‘works of art’ in artefact form and human beings: in terms of the positions they may occupy in the networks of human social agency, they may be regarded as almost entirely equivalent. (Gell 1998:153)

ARTWORKS AS COLLECTIVES:
(Gell 1998:153)

FUNCIONALISMO (arte=coletivo):
We may go to a dentist whom we consider to be a supreme and indeed original exponent of fillings, crownings, and bridgework. All the same, we do not prize his work because it expresses his individuality, but simply because it is the best of its kind available. It was the same with Maori tatoo artists, and artists in traditional art-production systems generally. Since in these systems there was no culturally recognized linkage between artistic excellence and the expression of artistic individuality, and since genres and motifs were subject to such stringent cannons of stylistic coherence, it is much more appropriate to treat ‘collectivities’ rather than individuals as units of style, when dealing with this kind of material, than it would be in discussions of Western art. (Gell 1998:158)

STYLE=SYNERGY:
Artworks do not do their cognitive work in isolation; they function because they co-operate synergically with one another, and the basis of their synergic action is style. This is the basis of the intuition we have that in some way stylistic affinity among works of art echoes the unity of thought which binds members of social groups together; style is to artworks what group-identification is to social agents. (Gell 1998:163)

STYLE=RELATIONS BETWEEN RELATIONS:
Style, I argue, is ‘relations between relations’ of forms. (Gell 1998:215)

STYLE IS UNITARY AND DYNAMIC:
a field of possible or legitimate motivic transformations (there are constraints governing the possibility of transforming a motif or form into related forms): (Gell 1998:215)

AXES OF COHERENCE:
This is the nearest one can get to an explicit description of ‘the Marquesan style’. It is reasonable to assume that no other art style, anywhere, would produce exactly the same list if analysed from the same point of view. Some items on the list might be included, but not all, and other transformational modes might be detected, which are not to be found in Marquesan art. (Gell 1998:217)

PLANE GEOMETRIC TRANSFORMATIN SOF WHOLE OR PART-MOTIFS
CUTTING-AND-PASTING OPERATIONS
COORDINATE TRANSFORMATIONS
HIERARCHIZATION
MOTIF-TRANSFORMATION
TRANSFORMATION BY FIGURE-GROUND REVERSAL
TRANSFORMATION FROM TWO TO THREE DIMENSIONS BY FRONT-TO-BACK REDUPLICATION
TRANSFORMATION FROM TWO TO THREE DIMENSIONS BY ‘CURVATURE’
RULE-GOVERNED TRANSFORMATIONS OF PROPORTIONS
SOLID-GEOMETRY TRANSFORMATIONS
FURMALIZATION
FUSION

CORPUS OF ARTWORKS=TEMPORALLY DISPERSED POPULATION=DISTRIBUTED OBJECT IN TIME AND SPACE:
(Gell 1998:221)

MARQUESAN ART=MARQUESAN MIND:
(Gell 1998:221)

ART-MIND ISOMORPHY:
The pith of my argument is that there is isomorphy of structure between the cognitive processes we know (from inside) as ‘consciousnes’ and the spatio-temporal structures of distributed objects in the artefactual realm such as the oeuvre of one particular artist […] or the historical corpus of types of artworks […]. In other words, the structures of art history demonstrate an externalized and collectivized cognitive process. […] These ideas, to reiterate, concern the structural isomorphy between something ‘internal’ (mind or consciousness) and something ‘external’ – aggregates of artworks as ‘distributed objects’ combining multiplicity and spatio-temporal dispersion with immanent coherence. (Gell 1998:222)

O DENTRO E O FORA:
(Gell 1998:222)

PERSONS=ALL OBJECTS/EVENTS FROM WHICH AGENCY/PERSONHOOD CAN BE ABDUCTED:
(Gell 1998:222)

PERSONAL AGENCY IS ABDUCTED FROM INDEXES OF DISTURBANCE IN THE CAUSAL MILIEU:
(Gell 1998:223)

MALANGAN:
(Gell 1998:224…)

MALANGAN COMO MEDIAÇÃO TEMPORAL (pensar no disco, gravação):
As a carving/container, the Malangan is a repository of past ‘social effectiveness’ accumulated and contained, while as a spectacle, an exterior, the Malangan projects the future that these past relationships will produce, as a result of the legitimization of certain anticipated relationships (between affines) that the Malangan ceremony enables. The Malangan, in other words, mediates and transmits agency between past and future. Though the carving itself exists only within certain (restricted) time-space coordinates, conceptually, it is a temporally dispersed object, an object at no specific time or place, but moving through time and place, like a thunderstorm. (Gell 1998:226)

MALANGAN=ACTIVE MEMORY:
[T]he supreme abduction of agency from the index, in that the other’s agency is not just suffered via the index; it is also thereby perpetuated and reproduced. Thus memory becomes a socially engineered medium for the transmission of the power to change the world and shape the course of events, rather than a mere passive registration of the past. (Gell 1998:227)

FIELDS OF FORCES (ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS) EXERTED BY INDEXES OF AGENCY:
(Gell 1998:229)

KNOWLEDGE+INTELLIGENCE+CALCULATION=EFFECTIVE INTERNAL MODEL OF THE EXTERNAL FIELD (SIMULATION DEVICE):
(Gell 1998:231)

KULA=COGNITION:
In his own person, the operator must reconstruct a working simulacrum – a dynamic space-time map of the maze of Kula transactions, so that, with somnambulistic dexterity, he knows which delicate strings to pull. Everything depends on he coherence of inner strategic intentions grounded in accumulated experience and memory, and the historically produced world ‘out there’- the real world in which minds, objectified in exchange objecs, expand, meet, and contend. The successful Kula operator controls the world of Kula because his mind has become coextensive with that world. He has internalized its causal texture as part of his being as a person and as an independent agent. ‘Internal’ (mental processes) and ‘outside’ (transactions in objectified personhood) have fused together; mind and reality are one, and – not to put too fine a point on it – something like godhead is achievable. This (relative) divinization through the fusing together of an expanded, objectified agency, and the myriad causal texture of the real world seems to me to be the ultimate objective of Kula. (Gell 1998:231)

OBJECTIVE MIND, OUT-OF-THE-BODY COGNITION:
(Gell 1998:232)

ARTIST’S OEUVRE:
(Gell 1998:232)

WITHOUT REPETITION, ART WOULD LOSE ITS MEMORY:
(Gell 1998:233)

CADA OBRA É A RECAPITULAÇÃO DAS ANTERIORES E A PREPARAÇÃO DAS SEGUINTES:
(Gell 1998:234)

RASCUNHO(strong relation)=/=PRECURSOR(weak relation):
(Gell 1998:234)

CÓPIA(strong relation)=/=ESTILO(weak relation):
(Gell 1998:234)

BERGSON (durée, memory):
(Gell 1998:236)

OEUVRE=OBJECTIFIED COGNITION:
The artist’s oeuvre is artistic consciousness (personhood in the cognitive, temporal sense) writ large and rendered public and accessible. (Gell 1998:236)

PERSPECTIVA, SISTEMA DE REFERÊNCIA, EPISTEMOLOGIA, IMANÊNCIA (só podemos ver a oeuvre como um objeto temporal escolhendo uma obra como ponto de referência; assim muitas perspectivas são possíveis, e não é possível reduzi-las a nenhuma em especial):
(Gell 1998:341-2)

JAMES-BERGSON-HUSSERL=>STREAM O CONSCIOUSNESS:
(Gell 1998:243)