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OLIVEIRA Et Al Ordering Time PDF
OLIVEIRA Et Al Ordering Time PDF
Rebeca Gontijo
Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro
Fábio Franzini
Federal University of São Paulo
In 1879, the writer Machado de Assis referred to a “new generation” that had
emerged in the country, recognising in his poetic works the expression of
“something that is not yet the future, but no longer is the past”.10 Taken from one
of the author’s famous critical texts, this citation is noteworthy as it points to the
ambiguous situation of Brazil’s intellectual production in the final decades of the
nineteenth century. An opposite view to Machado de Assis can be identified in a
phrase of Sílvio Romero, which was bound to predominate as a watchword for
identifying the intellectual context of the 1870s: “a whole batch of new ideas”
6 were in motion in Brazil, marking the rupture with the Romantic past and the
dismantling of the imperial tradition in all instances. It is important to point out
that the profusion of works on themes that were at once literary, historical and
ethnographic was a sign of the incipient delimitations of disciplinary boundaries,
and that criticism, far from being a practice of specialists, represented an attitude
of reflexive openness for issues that were raised as “national issues”, which
would be rethought based on the scientificism of new European theoretical
references.11
As if the criticisms of the so-called 1870 generation were not enough, the war that
raged in Europe from 1914 became an additional element in the mind frame of
anxieties of Brazilian intellectuals. By presenting the ugly face of the belle
époque, the conflict would suggest the failure of the civilisation that hitherto had
been followed as a model. It imposed, as a result, the need to either deepen or
12 retake in different terms the reflection on the nation and its destiny. This, for
instance, was announced in the editorial of the first issue of Revista do Brasil in
January 1916: “We are not yet a nation that knows itself … we are a nation that
has not yet had the courage to break through onwards by itself, in a rigorous and
fiery projection of its personality.”20
This publication soon became a leading forum for debate on the national
question. It was crucial to evaluate and discuss the above-mentioned
13 “backwardness” of the country and to point out paths for building a suitable and
adequate future for the Brazilian nation – in other words, a future capable of fully
reflecting its singularities.21 As such, the future could only emanate from the
nation itself; it was urgent to reach back to the past in order to identify the
fundamental traces of the formation of a national identity, or, even
better, brasilidade (“Brazility”), as it was termed. The key to the future was to be
found in the past, and between the former and the latter a present had to be
overcome. Beyond establishing the continuity between distinct historical times, it
was important to record, and even to propose, the rupture between them: this was
the compass by which a large part – but not all – of Brazilian intellectuality
guided itself in the early twentieth century.
A few years later, the discomfort with the intellectual production was
expressed more vehemently. In the 1920s, the discussions on modernity and
modernism were presented as the starting point for “rediscovering” Brazil. In the
debate, Tristão de Athayde acknowledged in 1924 that there was a mismatch
15 between the country’s reality and its existing interpretations. Athayde accused the
previous generation of evading social and political action, and, further on,
expressed a hard-hitting view of Brazil that inserted the country in the Latin
American context. In his words:
Prado’s diagnosis would soon, in 1930, attain a prophetic mood due to the
conspiracy that toppled president Washington Luis, replacing him with Getúlio
Vargas. Even though the Revolution of 193029 was far from achieving the
substantial rupture so many intellectuals yearned for, it did put an end to a
republic, which was henceforth referred to as the “Old Republic”. By doing so, it
19
brought up the urgent need to build a new state and a new society within the
existing nation, as well as the need to establish – perhaps more than ever –
another history capable of corresponding to the newly inaugurated temporal
order.
There was also no doubt in relation to the author responsible for it – a proof
of this fact was that the above-mentioned article in Revista do Brasil nominally
quoted him. In 1933, with the first edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala: formação
da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarchal (translated as The
masters and the slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization),
Gilberto Freyre offered some answers to the “national question” that stood out
more sharply in the agenda of Brazilian intellectuals in the early decades of the
twentieth century, through the debate marked by the race mixture issue. It is
important to highlight the proximity of the book with the hypothesis of the
“mixture of the three races” presented by Martius in his 1844 dissertation. For the
generation of Brazilian intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, the
contact among the distinct ethnic groups – indigenous, white and black – was
seen as the problem that crippled national progress and Brazil’s access to the
values of modern western civilisation. The originality of Freyre’s work resides in
21 the substantive change in this evaluation of the “national problem” and in his
emphasis on the particular value of indigenous and African influences, and of the
hybrid character of Portuguese colonisation.31 His linkage with the North
American anthropology of Franz Boas allowed him to set the notions of race and
culture apart, while ascribing to the latter an absolute primacy in the analysis of
social life. Based on this perspective, the race-mixture notion does not mean a
mystifying idea of the colonial past: it was applied by Freyre, who already in the
first pages of the work loses the aura of his identity as a “pure” European white,
to deconstruct the aura of the identity of the Portuguese colonisers as “pure”
white European. Thus, in Casa-grande & senzala, the formation of Brazil – and
this is the central argument of the work – is defined as a balancing of countless
antagonisms, starting from the deepest of all: the antagonism between the
landowner and the slave. In this process, the African element plays a
preponderant role of mediation between the European and indigenous cultures. 32
Therefore, for Prado Júnior, the historical time of the Brazilian nation not
only had an order, but also a meaning. The first chapter of Formação do Brasil
contemporâneo clearly makes this point both in its title – “Meaning of
colonisation” – and its opening words, which assert that “seen from the distance,
24 every people has a certain ‘meaning’ in its evolution”. The historian’s task, thus,
consists in delimiting the “set of essential facts”, demonstrating the unity that
converges around “an uninterrupted main line of events that follow on each other
in rigorous order and always aimed at a particular orientation”. 38
Residual time
Roberto Vecchi has pointed that in the temporal structure of Raízes do Brasil, the
past acts as a residue capable of determining the contemporary condition of the
country. According to him, the axis at the heart of this work consists in the
combination of two antagonistic times: a regressive time associated with the past;
and a progressive time related to the future and to a sluggish revolution. The
present, then, appears as a “residual time” or as a “time in between” forged by
this bent and simultaneously inscribed in both temporalities. In other words, the
present is “a remnant of the clash between the regressive time of the leather-like
cordial past in its existing ruins … and the other, antagonistic and progressive
temporal directive of modernity”. There are, therefore, two antagonistic times: the
time of the past, which remains, and the time of the “revolution” in progress –
both seen from the vantage-point of the present.40 For Tristão de Athayde in the
27
1920s, such a present had “a multiplicity of times of growth”, capable of making
it “anarchic in its appearance”.41 The prospect of overcoming the colonial roots in
the future sustained itself by a denaturalisation of the past as a contingency (what
did happen could have otherwise not happened), and this was precisely what
provided legitimacy to action in the present, according to another commentator of
the work, Thiago Lima Nicodemo.42 In other words, Buarque de Holanda sought
to break up a nationalist perspective that projected a “meaning” onto the history
of Portuguese America as if this history were a sufficient and necessary clue to
the formation of Brazilian nationality. Thus, he turned the assumption of
nineteenth-century nationalist historiography into a historiographical problem, by
challenging its anachronism.
For Nicodemo, this work describes Brazil’s formation process as a “not yet”
that seeks to annul the nation as a teleological assumption of the historical
narrative, since only by overcoming the archaic, Iberian-rooted past would it be
possible for the country to establish itself as a culture and a society on its own. It
is a matter of understanding the nation as a historical construct and not as a
teleological assumption. The central element in Buarque de Holanda’s conception
of history is, therefore, the interaction of two distinct temporal dimensions. One
28 of them is found in the dialectics involving Iberian elements and native elements
in the colonisation process. The other is the analysis of how these elements, while
carrying their own logic, were reused in the formation of the Brazilian state and
nation in a process that had unfolded from the nineteenth century to the present,
that is, the 1930s, when the work was published.43 In this sense, for Buarque de
Holanda, the coexistence of distinct times was made possible by considering the
past as residue in the present. At the same time, the break with the past is seen as
possible and the first condition for attaining this break would be to know the
“roots” of such a past – a metaphor that allows a more complex look at the
formation process, with its manifold aspects and directions.
The idea of modernity gained new contours during the 1940s and 1950s. The
decadence of coffee farming in the 1930s and the increasing strength of industry
precipitated an economic transformation, while the crisis of liberalism and the
reflections on the role of the state as a regulator – with the issues of poverty and
underdevelopment, as their consequences – became internationally debated
themes. If up to the end of the Second World War, modernisation prescriptions
for Brazil indicated the organisation of the state as a priority, after 1945 such
modernisation should be guided by the implementation of development policies
for the country, which could accelerate its economic growth towards
industrialisation and urbanisation, thus enabling the idea of a transition moment,
29
or even of a rupture with the heritage of the colonial past. The evolution of
capitalism, understood as a one-sided process that all countries could adapt under
free-market rules, and theories of change44 dominated the discussions and
provided a basis for the political uses of time. And, if “time can shape the
relations of power and inequality, under the conditions of capitalist industrial
production”,45 then the 1940s and 1950s can be seen as crucial periods in the
consolidation of a particular use of time as a way of defining an object named
Brazil, by building on the conceptual distinction between development and
underdevelopment.46
In the debate on developmentalism, one may observe the effort to annul the
national telos constructed in the nineteenth century and to substitute it by a
linkage between the past, present and future, while employing a conceptual and
rhetorical mind frame that is supportive of demonstrating the acceleration of the
process described, as well as the coevalness of distinct times in the same territory.
For many analysts of the period, both the past and the present coexisted in
30
contemporary Brazil, as had been already been pointed since the beginning of the
century. This can be observed in works such as Jacques Lambert’s Os dois
Brasis (The two Brazils) (French edition, 1953; Brazilian edition, 1959) and
Raymundo Faoro’s 1958 Os donos do poder: formação do patronato político
brasileiro (The owners of power: the formation of Brazilian political patronage).
The history of the historiography produced in Brazil since the 1940s and 1950s
must consider the changes introduced by new ways of conceiving and practicing
intellectual work, along with convergences and rifts between history and social
sciences, resulting from the creation of the first university courses in the 1930s. It
33 is also necessary to bear in mind the flow of interpretations about the country
through an essay-writing tradition that persisted into the first half of the twentieth
century, which included authors with several intellectual backgrounds, who
sometimes bypassed the university environment.
In the specific case of history as a discipline, it must be pointed out that the
schools of philosophy and of language/literature became places that aimed above
all to prepare teachers for basic education. Thus, while an academic stance based
on theories, scientific methods and field studies was sought in the domain of
social sciences and literary criticism, historians, on the other hand, continued with
“a bookish and academic training, surrounded by erudition, engulfed by a mass of
facts lacking the indispensable theoretical basis”. 51 The learning of rudimentary
34 historical research was sluggish and slow to yield results. Meanwhile, the
“institutionalisation discourse”52 asserted that the university was (or should be) the
setting par excellence for developing ways to explain the reality and intervene in
it. As these explanatory forms had to be historically and scientifically based,
sociologists and economists – as well as others, from outside the universities –
gained a strong legitimacy as agents capable of linking science to public life
while producing studies that had great repercussions. 53
Carlos Guilherme Mota defines the formation works by their most usual
connotation, that is, as works aimed at the “construction process of the nation, of
the national element, of our collective identity”.54 As a counterpoint, Abel Barros
Baptista points to a displacement of the definition of nationality as an implicit
assumption behind the idea of formation, in which “the final form” would
establish the grounds for pinpointing the origins in a line of continuity, thus
accentuating the teleological connotation of the term. Here, the use of the term
was bound to strengthen the efficacy of lines of reasoning that offered an answer
to the nationality problem, demarcating the necessary and inevitable character of
its construction.55 But as Berthold Zilly noted, the use of the formation concept
also suggests the idea that Brazil has not yet reached full maturity and is
developing towards a more well-finished form, aiming, therefore, at a telos, that
36
is, a more complete and superior reality. Thus, the concept could simultaneously
suggest both the process and its aim, both the dynamic and its result, even though
the works on the national formation may seem to emphasise the former
perspective in these pairs.56 Furthermore, both in the ancient sense (of the
Greek paideia) and in the modern sense (of the German Bildung), the concept
points to an ideal yet to be attained, in other words, to something that can be
indefinitely procrastinated. Beyond certainties, it evokes expectations, as the
process (in the sense of progression, but also of imitation or return to a previously
existing ideal) is continuous and infinite. This allows us to assume that formation
is a process marked by the anguish of improvement and change, because of its
inconclusiveness.57
NOTES