people, multitudes, and developmentalist hegemony in the brazilian street-libre
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Schwarz was wrong: American‐style consumerism has taken such total control of Brazilian culture that it is no longer even identifiable as “American”; it has become normalized as Brazilian. And meanwhile the military has been thoroughly depoliticized, at least in the sense that its political actions against Brazilian citizens are now authorized by a civilian leadership.1Justin Read 2 Things have changed, but what I would like ask now is this: How much have things changed? In the era of globalization, is Brazil no longer an “underdeveloped” or “dependent” nation? My answers to these questions may here seem topical, but current events are only a means to arrive somewhere else: the streetTRANSCRIPT
Justin Read 1
Justin Read University at Buffalo LASA 2014 May 23, 2014
People, Multitudes and Developmentalist Hegemony in the Brazilian Street Scholarship tends to error when overly preoccupied with the topical news of
the day; “let the boys bring flowers wrapped in last month’s newspapers,” as
Wallace Stevens once wrote. Scholarship is yet worse when it draws upon the news
of the day either to contrive grand historical shifts or to prognosticate immediate
future. Using a soccer metaphor – everything in life can be expressed in terms of
soccer, of course – it would be as if the Brazilian national squad employed a 4‐2‐3‐1
formation one day, instead of a more traditional 3‐4‐3 formation. Bad scholarship
would see this as a wholesale alteration of the rules of the game, one that would
fundamentally change the sport forever more, rather than what it really is: a mere
tactic based the particular opponent, let’s say Croatia, Brazil was facing that day.
So if you will allow me this indulgence, I would like to take this opportunity
to be terrible scholar, if for no other reason that by doing so I should place myself in
such excellent company. Roberto Schwarz, a far greater scholar than I will ever be,
begins his seminal study of the Brazilian military dictatorship, “Culture and Politics
in Brazil, 1964‐1969,” with an apologetic nota bene added in 1978: “The following
pages were written between 1969 and 1970. It will be readily observed that their
prognosis was incorrect, which hardly argues in their favour” (Schwarz 126). I
suppose Schwarz refers to the final section of the essay in which he forecasts that
the violently repressive military crackdown, begun in late 1968 in reaction to mass
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protests earlier that year, would result in a kind of militarization of intellectual life
in the country; as pro‐American as the military government was at the time,
Schwarz in 1970 believed that American‐style consumerism would never take hold
in an “underdeveloped” country like Brazil, such that a reactionary nationalism
against American domination would manifest itself both within military ranks and
within cultural institutions like the university now controlled militarily. He was
wrong on all accounts in such renderings of the future, but as he writes in his 1978
note, “Nevertheless, I believe that there is something to be gained from reading the
rest of the material [in this essay] until someone convinces me otherwise… So when
I say now, the observations, mistakes and judgments of the period in question must
be allowed to speak for themselves. The reader will see that things have changed,
but not that much” (Schwarz 126).
Schwarz was wrong: American‐style consumerism has taken such total
control of Brazilian culture that it is no longer even identifiable as “American”; it has
become normalized as Brazilian. And meanwhile the military has been thoroughly
depoliticized, at least in the sense that its political actions against Brazilian citizens
are now authorized by a civilian leadership.1 Things have changed, but what I
would like ask now is this: How much have things changed? In the era of
globalization, is Brazil no longer an “underdeveloped” or “dependent” nation? My
answers to these questions may here seem topical, but current events are only a
means to arrive somewhere else: the street. My game here is not to analyze the
1 http://alj.am/1dH97Q1.
Justin Read 3
news, but to gauge any relative amount of socio‐cultural transformation in Brazil by
walking across the street.
These terms, dependency and development, hold a special place in the history
of Brazilian modernity. As critical concepts, they are closely associated with the
dependency theory of the 1960s developed by the sociologist Fernando Henrique
Cardoso (in his seminal work with Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en
América Latina). Of course FHC would evidently go on to lead Brazil out of the era of
development and dependency in the 1990s, first as one of the architects of the Plano
Real when he served as Minister of Finance, and then as President of the Republic
1995‐2003. With just enough historical perspective now, it appears that the Plano
Real2 broke Brazil out of the cycle of hyperinflation that began with the debt crisis of
1982 (the same crisis that ultimately felled the military dictatorship in 1985); with a
stable currency and ample currency reserves, the FHC presidency was thus able to
guide Brazil into the age of globalization, creating a nation with a technological
2 The Plano Real was a multi‐tiered set of monetary policies undertaken in the early 1990s to stifle inflation. Under the plan, a non‐monetary currency unit was introduced – the Unidade Real de Valor – that was pegged to the US dollar (1 URV = US$1). The URV first ran in parallel to the effective currency, the cruzeiro (and later the new cruzeiro real, only briefly used). Although cruzeiros were still used for purchases and payments, all prices were listed in both cruzeiros and URVs, so that while prices in cruzeiros continued to fluctuate on a daily basis, prices in URVs would not. This created the psychological conditions for a stable monetary exchange, such that the cruzeiro could be replaced outright with the new real (now considered more “permanent” in value by the general public) in 1994. For the rest of the 1990s the government focused almost exclusively on encouraging foreign direct investment in Brazil by keeping the value of reais artificially pegged to the US dollar and offering high interest rates for currency bonds. This served to reverse the balance of payments such that the massive net‐outflow of capital in the 1980s (a root cause of hyperinflation) changed to a net‐inflow by the late 1990s. This influx of capital helps explain Brazil’s robust re‐entry into the global economy and its spectacular rates of national economic expansion through the first decade of the 21st century.
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capacity equal to its former developmentalist hegemons. That is to say, the
Brazilian economy could not only withstand competition from North America and
Europe, but was restructured in such a way as to allow integration into
multinational flows of industrial production, transportation, finance, information
and culture.
In short, the figure of FHC appears to be pivotal in the recent history of the
nation, signaling a definitive historical break between one era and the next: First as
a sharp critic of Brazil’s structural domination by foreign capital; and then as a
champion for a new sort of structural domination by foreign capital that appeared to
be more favorable to Brazil’s national interests. Yet if such a historical break did in
fact occur in the 1990s, it should still be available for the same modes of “historical
structural” critique proposed by Cardoso and Faletto in the 1960s. We tend to think
of dependency theory as a historical relic, a way of thinking that was in vogue
among Latin Americanist and Africanist historical and sociological scholars in US
universities in the 1970s, before falling into general discredit by the 1980s.
Dependency theory then seems to have morphed into the World Systems theory of
Immanuel Wallerstein, which in turn shaped the “decoloniality” theories of Aníbal
Quijano and Walter Mignolo. Whether or not this epistemological history is actually
correct – I think Wallerstein, Quijano and Mignolo might beg to differ on the details
– the image we hold today of dependency is that of an after‐thought, a theoretical
field that at best ceded to other fields, or at worst proved to be a theoretical cul‐de‐
sac. The evacuation of perceived value in dependency theory seems to have
stemmed from its overemphasis on external causes for “third‐world” deficiencies.
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That is, dependencistas of the 1970s tended to reduce complex political‐economic
phenomena to a simple binary of “us/them,” in which all the ingrained social
problems of poor nations could be blamed on the foreign hegemonic monsters in
New York, Washington, Paris and London. Decoloniality is indebted to this
reductionism in the following regard: it seeks to “cleanse” the Global South (“us”)
from any residual colonial constrictions of “them” in the North, in order to open a
space where “we” can finally speak for ourselves.
Ironically, such over‐simplification is precisely what was not proposed by
Cardoso and Faletto in 1971. In Dependencia y desarrollo the authors define
dependency as emerging from the breach between a nation’s position in the
international economy, and national political decisions and actions that a nation’s
people view as their “sovereign right.” The specific form of dependency Cardoso
and Faletto targeted was not that of colonial domination or enclave economy, but of
modern development:
“National underdevelopment” is a situation of objective economic
subordination to outside nations and enterprises and, at the same time, of
partial political attempts to cope with “national interests” through the state
and social movements that try to preserve political autonomy. Ideological
components play some role in the perception of what “national interest”
means, as well as in the rationalization about the possibility of the existence
of nation‐states that have submitted to foreign interests and pressures. //
One of the aims of comprehensive analyses of the national development
process is to determine the links between social groups that in their behavior
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actually tie together the economic and political spheres (Cardoso and Faletto
21).
Ultimately what draws the interest of the authors is not the world system of capital
writ large, but of political movements within a given society that are compelled to
respond to the pressures of submitting (subsumption) to international capital.
Dependency theory is a way to critique social movements within the space of the
nation‐state. As they surmise, “Dependence should no longer be considered an
‘external variable’: its analysis should be based on the relations between the
different social classes with the dependent nations themselves” (Cardoso and
Faletto, 22).”
As I open up today’s newspaper, then, allow me to make this bold prediction
and let the rollers of cigars with their concupiscent curds prove me wrong later:
Three weeks from today the FIFA World Cup will begin in the newly built Arena
Corinthians in São Paulo. The opening match of the tournament between Brazil and
Croatia will not only be won by the host country (the Croats, let’s face it, will never
have the quality of a Neymar), but it will also be occasioned by massive protests
across São Paulo and the rest of the nation – the size and effect of which I am not
willing to speculate. Nevertheless, I am convinced that this will happen because I
have seen it all before, in the news of June 2013. What are now known as the
“Manifestações de 2013” were set off by the convergence of two seemingly
unrelated developments: Just as (1) the FIFA Confederations Cup3 was about to
begin, (2) the city of São Paulo decided to raise bus and subway fares. These two
3 The Confederations Cup tournament always serves as a facilities test for the following year’s World Cup.
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developments have nothing to do with one another on a strictly local level. São
Paulo did host matches during the Confederations Cup, and I presume that people
did take public transport to get to them; but this local coincidence provides little
explanation for what ensued starting after June 6, 2013. The real explanation is
global: Brazil bid for, and won the right to host, the World Cup (and the 2016 Rio
Olympics as well) in order to portray an image of itself to the rest of the globe, that
the country had finally emerged as a developed nation, a political and economic
powerhouse as member the so‐called BRIC group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India,
China). These sporting events – and more precisely, broadcast images of these
events – would portray Brazil as having “arrived” as a developed post‐modern
nation, rather than an underdeveloped nation perpetually trapped in the pitfalls of
modernization.
The manifestações were initially organized by the Movimento Passe Livre to
protest the hike in bus fares, but they quickly encompassed a broad spectrum of
discontent against the Brazilian government. The country had invested billions of
dollars on sporting infrastructure, largely for propagandistic purposes. The rapid
expansion of the economy had certainly filled the pockets of politicians, principally
those nominally elected to represent the citizenry in Congress. Although the
government claims to have lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty as a result
of globalization, spectacular economic growth has not been distributed equitably in
the slightest, such that even a paltry a R$0.20 centavo raise in bus fares would have
adversely impacted millions of workers across São Paulo. By contrast, whereas the
original infrastructure costs for the World Cup were proposed in the neighborhood
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of US$1 billion (most all of it privately financed), the real costs are estimated to
wind up being over US$4 billion, most all of it publically financed with little
convincing explanation for where the extra US$3 billion actually ended up.4
The fare hike was just flashpoint, therefore, for the expression of disgust and
dissatisfaction with the current political and economic systems of the nation.
Thousands joined the Movimento Passe Livre in a march down Avenida Paulista on
June 6, but the peaceful protest quickly devolved into violence. Windows were
indiscriminately shattered, in turn causing an overreaction of rubber bullets and
teargas on the part of the military police charged with keep watch over the protests.
As images of police brutality filled social media and television, millions more
disaffected Brazilians joined the protests over the next three weeks, shutting down
traffic not only on Avenida Paulista, but also throughout most other large cities
across Brazil. And all this occurred just as similar protests had broken out in
Turkey, the Taksim Gezi Park manifestations in Istanbul which bore striking
resemblance in terms of media imagery to those in São Paulo.
Beyond these superficial descriptions, however, it is difficult to characterize
what the protests were and what they may have accomplished. They certainly
attracted the attention of President Dilma Rousseff, who canceled a trip to Japan and
subsequently entered into communication with some entity related to the
manifestações, which then led to a patchwork quilt of legislation designed to
4 “The overall price of the 12 stadiums, four of which critics say will become white elephants after the tournament because they are in cities that cannot support them, has jumped to $4.2bn in nominal terms, nearly four times the estimate in a 2007 FIFA document published just days before Brazil was awarded the tournament” (Al Jazeera America).
Justin Read 9
appease their “demands.” But it is not at all clear that the manifestações had any
demands in the first place. They were not carried out in the name of anyone, any
political party, or even the “movimento” that initiated them. In this sense we can
justifiably characterize them as “post‐hegemonic” as that concept has been deployed
by our friend Jon Beasley‐Murray: The manifestações were never brought under any
hegemonic sign that could articulate their demands before a state apparatus, not
even an empty signifier as the type our sorely missed Ernesto Laclau had theorized
over the course of his illustrious career. “Manifestações” is just a term for
something that happened, but doesn’t quite name a movement or an apocalyptic
Event ushering in a new messianic Historical Subject – so let us dispatch with
Badiou as well. Rather, the protests emerged among a unrepresentable multitude
by means of subjective affect and habit. Tens of thousands of disaffected Brazilians
traverse Avenida Paulista on a daily basis, but their disaffection is usually not
sufficient for them to decide to disrupt their routines and form a multitudinous
barricade. In June 2013, however, mass disaffection was spiked by the
dissemination of media images of protest, which in turn served to lower emotional
disincentives for other individuals to join the protests. In short, even though
affective‐participatory linkages via social media are fairly weak, it is much easier to
decide to join a mass protest when one sees images of one’s friends doing the same
on Facebook or Orkut. And the impact of social networking cannot be dismissed
here, given that Brazil has perhaps the highest rates of social networking and
internet usage worldwide: social networking transformed electronic images into
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affective actions of political solidarity, even though this did not constitute a political
action per se.
Yet at the same time, pace Jon Beasley‐Murray, the 2013 manifestações were
neither hegemonic nor post‐hegemonic, in the sense that they were not entirely
borne by subjective affect or habit. Rather, the protests formed what I will here
term political object, rather than “sovereign subject,” a manifestation of non‐
subjectivity. And to understand what I mean by this, a certain geography of the
street is necessary. Urban planners typically image streets as voids, as opposed to
the solids of architectural structures that flank the voids. In this sense, a typical
picture of Avenida Paulista would be that of an empty space, the canyon formed
between the 20‐ to 30‐story high‐rise buildings flanking either side of the avenue.
There are lower‐level buildings like the Museu de Arte São Paulo, of course, as well
as places like Parque Trianon. But for the most part we tend to think of Avenida
Paulista as a thin layer of concrete and ashphalt poured just above the crust of the
earth (under which runs subterranean architectures like plumbing, electrical and
telecommunications systems); and above this thin layer is just empty space defined
by the outlines of skyscrapers.
As I have indicated elsewhere (Read 2010), this particular geography of the
street no longer holds true (if indeed it ever did previously). The space of
globalization, I have argued, is one of network saturation that moves to ever‐
increasing “unicity.” The street in this view is part of a traffic network, that is itself
comprised of mutually embedded traffic networks of all sorts: automobile traffic, of
course, which moves up and down Avenida Paulista at a painfully slow pace, and
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pedestrian traffic, individual human bodies bandying about on their extremities; but
it is also a confluence of other traffic networks: water networks, electrical
networks, communication and media networks, informatic networks, across which
flow financial and banking networks, consumer networks, industrial manufacturing
networks. Let us remember that Brazil’s main financial institutions such as Itaú
have their headquarters on the Avenida Paulista, such that much of the economy of
South America flows through the avenue; but it is also the site of one of São Paulo’s
main shopping malls, Shopping Paulista, where one can only imagine the quantity of
credit card transactions that occur there at any given moment. Even from this
relatively scant description of Paulista, we can readily see that the “void” is nothing
of a void at all. The Avenida Paulista is a site of network saturation, in which even
organic bodies found there articulate themselves informatically: the information
metabolisms within the cell. Within this line of saturation, there are architectures
that can be seen and touched (buildings for instance), and there are architectures
which cannot be seen and touched (wireless networks for instance). But the entire
space is “solid,” completely filled‐in by design.
Within this solid, “movement” would be defined as a “leap” or “skipping‐
point” of information from one network to another. (This definition would alter our
usual notion of “political movement,” but more on this later.) The leap might also be
though of as an “interface,” as when the articulations of a human body (one kind of
informational assemblage) touch the screen of a smart‐phone (another sort of
assemblage of mechanical components) in order to post an image on Facebook (yet
another kind of informational networking). As Vilém Flusser theorized in the 1980s,
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if enough of these informatic movements concentrate in a specific area, they may
form a “wave‐trough” in space to be filled by dense “knots” of information that we
typically call “cities.” I would extend Flusser’s notions to address the quality of
information that knots together. Global capitalism, for instance, thrives where flows
of information are readily translatable in a meaningful way; I have termed any
densities of such translatable network traffic as exones. By contrast, there are also
knots of untranslatable network traffic that appear as noise to powers‐that‐be in the
exone, and I call these untranslatable knots intrones.5
Utilizing these terms, we can image the Manifestações de 2013 as a
particularly large and dense instantiation of an introne. As such, furthermore, we
could say that this introne grew to such large scale so rapidly that it became an
object that could be readily viewed – considered or contemplated – from the
vantage of the exone. This exonic gaze did not make the “Supermassive São Paulo
Introne of 2013” any less untranslatable (nor was the untranslatability of the
Supermassive Gezi Park Introne of 2013 or the Supermassive São Paulo‐Gezi
Introne of 2013 diminished) for the mere fact of becoming objectively visible or
imaged. It merely meant that an introne formed as a large knot – an assemblage of
human bodies, machines, and flows of information – that lodged itself in the middle
of Avenida Paulista and other spots across the city and the Brazilian nation. This
intronic knot made traffic flows through the avenue extremely difficult, such that
the only recourse left to powers in the exone to remove the blockage was physical
5 I derive the terms exone and introne from the exons and introns of DNA, genetic sequences that either metabolize into proteins or do not express. My derivations are intended to spatialize the genetic reference outside of organic bodies as such, providing as sense of “zoning.”
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force, utilizing military police as if a sort of crowbar or toothpick to dislodge a piece
of debris stuck in one’s teeth.
The object I am now characterizing was political in that its entanglement of
the street created problems for Brazil’s political system, which at that moment in
June 2013 had been focused on translating an image of fun and development to the
rest of the globe. But in terms of political “expression,” the political object as such is
apolitical, or even anti‐political. It is a spatial entity, not a historical subject. That is,
the only response to the emergence of a political object like a supermassive introne
could only be physical force, because as a political form, the modern or
“constitutional” nation‐state only recognizes subjects. The nation‐state furthermore
only recognizes subjects based on shared or common history. The political object
here characterized, however, is non‐subjective: it was an assemblage that includes
individual subjects but not quite reducible to their individual decisions or actions
because it was also composed of non‐organic machine and ephemeral flows of
information, something more than a mere grouping of human bodies. Accordingly
the objectified introne cannot be named as a subject capable of expressing demands
to the state. A political object is un‐hegemonic, shall we say, rather than post‐
hegemonic; in terms of hegemony, “it would prefer not to.” As such, it can only be
misrecognized by a political‐economic system: as an object it is clearly there, but no
one seems to know what to do with it. The first response is to push this object
somewhere else (há uma pedra no meio do caminho), to try to get rid of it. But
notably, the next response of the Brazilian state was to transform the “Supermassive
Introne of 2013” into a set of subjective demands, re‐make the political object into a
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political subject, and then have Congress pass a slate of legislation designed to meet
subjective demands, even though it is still not at all clear who was represented by
the negotiation of these demands.
Nevertheless, my purpose here is not to criticize Dilma Rousseff or Brazilian
soccer, which, let’s face it, despite its clear dominance over Croatian soccer is far too
oriented to the expression of individual beauty – joga bonito – than to the strategic
collective flows – tiki taka – required for success in today’s game. My
characterization of the Manifestações de 2013 as an introne is intended to push us
beyond a division of social movements based on “inside/outside” dimensions, “us
Brazilians” versus “global capitalism”; there is only one side to a unicity, after all,
within which there are only differential flows of translatability or untranslatability.
Thus, the political movement of a political object does not seem to operate in the
same way we typically define “political movement.” We need no longer associate
“movement” with historical unfolding, in other words, in order to see “movement”
as physical translation across space. Does this therefore prove a decisive historical
shift in world order, from, say, the modernity of development and dependency, to
the liquid post‐modernity of globalization?
We could readily compare the Brazilian protests of 2013 to Brazilian protests
45 years earlier, almost to the day, which led the military dictatorship to issue Ato
Institucional Número 5 (AI‐5) in December 1968. As social tensions mounted that
year, there were numerous strikes and protests that were often met with repressive
police violence. Among these, several are worth noting here: the metalworkers
strike in Osasco (São Paulo state) that was quelled by force; and the police raid on
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the Calabouço restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, a central meeting point for organizers of
the student movement, that resulted in the slaying of Edson Luis de Lima Souto, now
often considered the “first” victim of Brazil’s own guerra suja. Edson Luis’ death
sparked a wave of student‐movement protests in the days that followed,
culminating in one of the largest, if not the single largest, protests during the
dictatorship era. The Passeata dos Cem Mil traversed a roughly one‐mile stretch of
the Centro do Rio de Janeiro, from Cinelândia (Praça Floriano) to the Praça da
Candelária at the eastern terminus of Avenida Presidente Vargas, and then turning
back southward to the Assambléia Legislativa. The Passeata dos Cem Mil is notable
not only for its size – it really did seem to include 100,000 people – but also for its
participants, who included Clarice Lispector, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Nara
Leão, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil.
Beyond these details, however, there is not much else to report about it.
Perhaps given the presence of Brazil’s cultural elite, but almost certainly because
the sheer popularity of the protest, the military state did not immediately react to
the Passeata with violence or repression. In fact, it barely reacted at all – and this
lack of reaction is what should draw our attention here. President Costa e Silva
arranged a meeting with the organizers of the Passeata dos Cem Mil, who presented
all the typical demands, of course: release of political prisoners, end to censorship,
guarantees of freedom of expression. And to these demands the regime responded
with precisely nothing. If anything, the Passeata identified the student movement as
a threat to state order. The lack of official response combined with increased
repression of student protests led many student‐movement leaders to join militant
Justin Read 16
movements (Krüger, 143‐144). The military regime responded in turn with AI‐5,
suspending habeas corpus and thus effectively authorizing political torture and
violence. At the start of 1968, the political left in Brazil would have been moved to
action by the murder of one student; they could not have imagined that by the end
of the next year there might be hundreds of murders committed by the state.
The utter failure of the student movement – and the left generally – can be
attributed to its misunderstanding of its spatio‐temporal situation. This
misunderstanding was well documented, in fact, by Roberto Schwarz in the same
article with which I began this essay. One of the curious, idiosyncratic aspects of
Brazil’s military dictatorship was that the political left was left more or less intact
throughout, other than the relatively brief interregnum of brutality from 1968‐1973.
More precisely stated, the left was excluded from the political sphere, but allowed to
continue its “cultural hegemony” so long it did not become overly politicized. As
Schwarz notes, this was because after 1960 the cultural left was still a small and
concentrated population: “The only truly radical material produced by this group is
for its own consumption – which is in itself a substantial market” (Schwarz 127).
Moreover, at the time of the military golpe de estado in 1964, the class interests of
the cultural left focused on historical modes of dependency and national
underdevelopment, or what Schwarz terms the “archaic aspects of Brazilian
society”: the latifúndio system of agrarian production, and the need to express
Brazil’s political autonomy in the face of pressures from the nation’s creditors in
North America and Europe. Schwarz addresses this situation as:
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On an economic and political level… a fundamentally bourgeois problematic
[that] arose concerning modernization and democratization. To be more
precise, it had to do with the expansion of the internal market by means of
agrarian reform, within the framework of an independent foreign policy. On
an ideological level, we were introduced to an apologetic and
sentimentalizable notion of “the people,” which embraced (and without
distinction) the working masses, the lumpenproletariat, the intelligentsia, the
financial barons and the army (Schwarz 130).
The 1964 coup therefore adjusted this predicament rather than really changing it.
The left could no longer voice demands for agrarian reform or foreign policy; but it
continued to speak for the povo brasileiro as a historical‐cultural subject‐position.
The somewhat radical nihilism of tropicália was a negative reaction against
the “cultural” left’s hegemonic appropriation of povo – the fact that its use of electric
guitars was perceived by the cultural left as a sign of “Americanization,” and an
abandonment of “Brazilian” modes of performance. The tropicalistas thus seemed
to embrace Brazil’s dependency rather than fight it. Nonetheless, tropicália proved
to be a rather toothless popular culture movement once the Costa e Silva regime
used AI‐5 to arrest Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and exile them to London. The
participation of Caetano and Gilberto among other cultural elites in the Passeata dos
Cem Mil was an expression of political solidarity with the popular left, and the
Passeata culminated in a leftist expression of political demands voiced in the name
of the people. The problem, however, was that the conditions of dependency and
development were different than what the left perceived them to be. The agrarian
Justin Read 18
reforms and industrial modernization of the 20th century had indeed created new
internal markets, new social classes, and a new sense that Brazil had “arrived” to
modernity – all perfectly encapsulated in the construction of Brasília as an
expression of the “new Brazil.” But Brasília was a public works project that was
largely financed by massive international loans from the IMF that Brazil proved
incapable of repaying, such that default created the economic instability that
brought the pro‐developmentalist military to seize control.
The Brazilian left wished to represent the povo brasileiro as a historical
subject, but it did not realize to whom it was really representing this voice. It
imagined its politics as a conversation, however turbulent, between subjects. And in
this regard, it is part of the general, global problematic of leftism addressed by
Fredric Jameson in “Periodizing the 60s.” Jameson writes:
Meanwhile, something similar can be said of the conceptions of collective
identity and in particular of the poststructuralist slogan of the conquest of
speech, of the right to speak in your own voice, for yourself: but to articulate
new demands, in your own voice, is not necessarily to satisfy them, and to
speak is not necessarily to achieve a Hegelian recognition from the Other (or
at least then only in the more somber and baleful sense that the Other now
has to take you into consideration in a new way and to invent new methods
for dealing with that new presence you have achieved) (Jameson 184).
The Brazilian cultural left in June 1968 sought “Hegelian recognition” from a
dictatorial state that it imagined as a subjective Other. It could not imagine that it
was dealing with an increasingly mechanized object that operated to increase the
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penetration of global finance capital into Brazil, “something like the replacement,”
Jameson writes, “of the British Empire by the International Monetary Fund”
(Jameson 184). Under this view of history, agrarian reforms under the regimes of
Vargas, Kubitschek and Quadros/Goulart did in fact manage to initiate the
liquidation of the old latifúndio system, but only so as to allow for a mechanized
industrial agriculture dominated by global multinational corporations. This in turn
set the stage for the proletarianization of agricultural work, and the
lumpenproletarianization of new megalopolitan centers like São Paulo and Rio that
grew from the migration of displaced agrarian workers (and a massive pool of
underemployed industrial workers). National development, even in its “third‐
world” manifestation as national underdevelopment, did indeed “liberate” Brazilian
society from the shackles of tradition; but this only meant an ambiguous “liberation”
of the mechanized capitalism that would come to be known as globalization.
Such ambiguous liberation is best imaged in the modernist construction of
the street, exemplified in the construction of Brasília. In his classic study of Brasília,
The Modernist City, James Holston describes the Plano Piloto as a “modernist
inversion” of solid and void. In “traditional” or “Baroque” Brazilian cities such as
Ouro Prêto, solid buildings form the perceptual ground through which one can
recognize shape or figure in the void of a street or plaza. In other words, we see a
plaza as a “square” because the buildings surrounding that plaza cut the shape of a
square in space. Whereas the solid contains private space, the figure cut into the
void poetically opens a space for public discourse. Holston sees Brasília as a
reversal of the “traditional” solid‐void relationship (Holston 127‐136). Open space
Justin Read 20
on the Plano Piloto provides the ground for Oscar Niemeyers starkly geometrical
solids to be carved, rather than those buildings creating figures in open space.
Niemeyer’s buildings are notable for their melding of poetic and mathematical
figures in their reinforced concrete: straight lines juxtaposed against curving
parabolas and hyperbolas. Consequently, the space for public discourse in Brasília
is almost entirely monumentalized; public discourse is to be contained within solid
structures under the constant vigilance of state‐owned real estate. Public discourse
feels uncomfortable – defamilarized or strange – out in the street, which in Brasília
only seems fit for automobile traffic.6
Modernization, shall we say, is operationalized by the monumentalization
and objectification of space. What I earlier discussed as “unicity” therefore
represents an intensification of such objectification, in which the reversal of the
solid‐void relationship is “re‐reversed” back out into the street. I will try to explain
this better: Modernization, such as exemplified by Brasília’s “elimination of the
street,” resulted in public space being subsumed into the solid building; this same
solid building is composed of various kinds of networked relationships: the web of
gravitational forces balanced between concrete, glass, and steel; electrical networks;
plumbing networks; communication networks, both organic (word of mouth) and
inorganic (telephones and computers). Most importantly, the subsumption of public
discourse into the solid interior space of the concrete structure provides the
grounds for direct surveillance of political movement within that space. But now,
over half a century after the heyday of Brazilian modernism, the increased network‐
6 Streets, furthermore, are entirely eliminated within the space of Brasília’s residential superquadras.
Justin Read 21
mechanization of the solid building has come to saturate the “void” surrounding the
building as well, such that networks that used to be confined to the interior of the
building (wired telephones and security cameras) are now just as likely to be
present outside the building however invisibly (wireless information networks,
surveillance drones, satellites).
The failure of the 1968 student movement in Brazil was also a failure to
recognize the spaces in which students moved. The Passeata dos Cem Mil moved
across what it considered to be “voids,” starting in one plaza, moving down a street,
occupying another plaza, moving down another street, filling up another plaza. It
mistook these plazas for classical agorae in which citizens could meet to negotiate
social demands. The movement’s subjective demands were pointless on several key
accounts: 1) They tended to ignore relations of international economic dependency
as “external variables” as opposed to the “internal” political demands they wished to
achieve; or better stated, they viewed their own political position as an “interior”
that if given sufficient reinforcement would be able to withstand the pressures of an
“exterior” structure of dependency. A proper reading of dependency theory quickly
shows that the putatively “internal” political dynamics of the bourgeois cultural left
were part‐and‐parcel of structural dependency all along. 2) The type of global
capitalist development intensified by the military dictatorship had already managed
to objectify streets and plazas throughout Brazil, such a politics of subjective
expression and recognition had already been neutralized, liquidated.
By comparison, the 2013 manifestações cannot be said to have been any
more or less effective than 1968. But what they did manage to do was “liberate” the
Justin Read 22
networks and architectures through which space has become utterly objectified by
capitalism. “Liberation” here does not at all mean that the protest succeeded in
freeing Brazil from its continued dependency on global capitalism. But the
formation of the political object does demonstrate that the mechanics of
“mechanized” capitalism can be liberated in order disrupt and negate capitalism’s
domination of space. The untranslatability of the political object should not
therefore be confused with political failure. Quite the contrary, untranslatability
may be deployed strategically by utilizing the very networks though which
capitalism flows in order to dislodge these networks, alter their course. At the same
time, however, the occupation of the street – whether by objectified networks of
capitalist control or by political objects of assemblage and rejection – also exists in
proximity to other voids within Brazilian urban space. Whereas Brazilian
dependency used to imply military domination of civilians, Brazilian dependency
now implies that civilian political leaders mobilize the military to invade the favela,
where there are no streets laid out by urban planners. Beginning with the invasion
of Complexo do Alemão in 2011, the Brazilian state – ruled by leftists! – sought to
keep the structural deficiencies of Brazilian poverty out of view from Maracanã
Stadium in downtown Rio de Janeiro. And they used tactics like “clear and hold”
developed for warfare in places like Baghdad and Kabul to do so – another sort of
global networking altogether. The “liberation” of the political object is thus
ambiguous at best: Can a political object only emerge within the formal
architectures already utilized by global capital, or can it also form through the
informal architectures created by the purposeful neglect of global capital?
Justin Read 23
In any case – whether a street like Avenida Paulista or the non‐streets of the
favela – my analysis here suggests that we are not now living after a historical break
from the era of dependency and development. We are only living the intensification
within modes of dependency, intensifications of capitalist objectifications of space
and place, that emerged after 1950. This also suggests that dependency theory
should not be discarded so quickly or summarily. But then again, any student of the
game know that historical‐structural analysis is never perfect, especially based on
topical evidence, because the pitch is always wide enough to permit complex
permutations of space that cannot be predicted. Consequently, the Croatia’s of the
world occasionally steal a match. After all, look what Uruguay did to Maracanã the
first time they played a World Cup final there.
WORKS
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Justin Read 24
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