Photo: “Manifestação em frente ao Congresso Nacional“, by Senado Federal licensed under CC BY 2.0. Hue modified from the original
Cesarino, Letícia. “PUTTING IDEAS BACK IN PLACE? non-linear temporalities in Brazil’s authoritarian neoliberalism and its digital infrastructure.” Caderno CRH 34 (2021).
Abstract
The article approaches how the populist-authoritarian inflection of global neoliberalism has gained traction in Brazil through friction with its post-colonial historical condition, marked by a disjunction between egalitarian, universalist liberal ideals and an unequal, particularistic social reality. I will pay special attention to infrastructural convergences between neoliberalization and platformization, which, by creating a paradoxical temporality of permanent crisis, resonate with “forces and powers” that also operate non-linearly according to a metaphysics of disorder, such as the various forms of nostalgia, millenarianism, and traditionalism that follow the rise of the radical right throughout the world. I developed this argument focusing on two moments of Bolsonarism: the populist messianism during the 2018 elections, and its paradoxical routinization as a parasitic government operating in a temporality of exception, during the Covid-19 pandemic. This article suggests that, in the face of the illiberal drift of contemporary neoliberalism, Bolsonarism propels Brazil into an avant-garde, putting ideas “back in place”.
