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Part of
The Pragmatics of Adaptability
Edited by Daniel N. Silva and Jacob L. Mey
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 319] 2021
► pp. 171–188

Chapter 8
The adaptability of becoming

Karina Buhr’s becoming-junglehood

| Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brasil
| Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brasil
This chapter draws upon Karina Buhr’s image of becoming-junglehood in order to contribute to a discussion of the pragmatics of adaptability. Buhr is a Brazilian feminist singer who is interested in recontextualizing terms of a male-dominated tradition on more affirmative grounds. She thus adapts semiotic forms – verbal language and her bodily performance – as disruptive forms, and thereby looks for more liberating grounds of language use. Theoretically, the chapter nuances Buhr’s rationalizations by engaging with Walter Benjamin’s formulations about art and its mechanical reproducibility; with Derrida’s iterability of language; and with Deleuze and Guattari’s articulations of assemblage, subjectivation, and becoming. The paper finally critiques a metaphysics of unity by identifying processes of rupture and adaptability in Buhr’s discursive practices of becoming-junglehood.
Keywords: reproducibility, resignification, iterability, différance, assemblage
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Connection, dissemination and intervention
  • 3. Art and reproducibility
  • 4.Language and iterability
  • 5.Subjectivation and assemblage
  • 6.Adaptability of a becoming
    • 6.1 The ‘Junglehood’ inscription
    • 6.2‘Junglehood’ and Facebook
    • 6.3“We are not naked. We are just not wearing a shirt”
  • 7. Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.319.08fer
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