A G A I N S T t he D A Y

Hugo Albuquerque
Becoming-Brazil:
The Savage Rise of the Class without Name
Brazilians currently live under the impact of social advances that have
taken place since the end of dictatorship and the countrys redemocratiza-
tion, primarily in the last ten years, during the governments of Luiz Incio
Lula da Silva and his successor Dilma Rousseff, when the pace of these
advances increased considerably. To get a sense of just how much it increased,
consider that between 2002 and 2012, the life expectancy of Brazilians went
from 70.72 (World Bank 2013) years to 74.6 years;
1
infant mortality fell from
25.3 of every 1000 live births to 12.9;
2
the Gini coefcient, which measures
social inequality, fell from 0.59 to 0.52;
3
unemployment fell from 12.9 per-
cent to 4.9 percent (cf. Haider 2012); and the wage gain set a record again in
2012 (EcoFinanas 2012). And these are just some of the impressive results.
Despite such social gains, 2013 was a year of intense protests traversing the
whole country: a multitudinous movement of thousands of people occupied
the streets, questioning the political system and general living conditions in
Brazil. What would explain this apparent contradiction between the world of
statistics and the radical desiring investment (Cava 2013a) recently seen in
the Brazilian equivalent of May 1968?
I hypothesize that the intensive dimension of these radical transforma-
tions explains the recent unrest. The central issue is less that people objectively
improved their lives, as the economists, sociologists, and statisticiansthe
whole complex of Brazilian royal science (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)
4

would have us believe, but rather that they feel authorized to desire and,
therefore, now desire without authorization. They are not, for now, primarily
objects, nor will they be subjected to anything. A new class composition,
The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014
doi 10.1215/00382876-2804201 2014 Duke University Press
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The Savage Rise of the Class without Name 857

marked by the rise of Brazils dispossessed minorities, brought the situation
to a boiling point, putting the unequal historical equilibrium of local society
and political consensus in check. That is what we refer to as the savage rise of
the class without name (Albuquerque 2012: 3946). It is savage because
such a process opposes the civilizing pact as it is manifested in Brazil (which
we will come back to), and it is a class without name in a sense similar to that
of Deleuze and Guattaris (1983, 1987) Body without Organs. This class has
no name because it does not need one; it is the very expression of many
minoritiesthe poor, blacks, women, etc.that are sufcient in themselves,
that go beyond labels and labeling and simply live. Without a name, this
class is in some sense not orderable, since only a subject that has a name,
and is thus subject to a regime, is capable of receiving orders.
As such, royal scientists strive to and have invented various names
for this sector, none of which have been successful thus far: the new mid-
dle class (Nri et al. 2010), the C class, the new working class (Chau
2013), and others. All of these concepts are much more prescriptive than
descriptive, and, to the extent that they do not represent anything relevant
among the sectors seeking to create identity, end up not imposing a regime,
which would only be possible through the mechanism of the Name. The
sublime movement of the class without name describes an unconditional
ow that manifests in many phenomena of contemporary Brazilian society
(Cava 2013b),
5
disturbing the state machine, whose dominion is fundamen-
tally structured on the creation and management of the identities it assigns
(Pelbart 2013).
6
It is a radical problem for the theological-political state
machine, which, just like the biblical God, assigns identities but resides in
the unnamed and unnameable backgroundas suggested by the formula of
the Kelsenian hypothetical basic norm (Kelsen 1967). While being a class, the
class without name still marks a rupture, an outcry against the homogeneity
of the agreement between unequals that is the social contractwhose his-
torical materialization takes the form of the constitution.
Understanding the Brazilian disorder is, however, an extremely com-
plex task. Those minorities that today tout the informal form of the class with-
out name are, in turn, the product of resistance against the process of coloni-
zation of land and bodies running through Brazilian history: a society made
from a prolonged slave regime, sexism, environmental and social exploita-
tion, among many other things. This long, increasing colonization did not
end with formal independence from the European colonizer (1822), the end of
slavery (1888), the proclamation of the republic (1889), the rst democratic
experience (194664) or even the current democracy (starting in 1988).
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Much modernist Brazilian discourse, both from the Left and the Right,
involves the idea of minorities incapacity for civilizational development.
Whereas the right wing defends the maintenance of a patriarchal, racist, and
oppressive order as a way of guiding these minorities toward civilizationor
simply taking them out of progresss waysome leftists cannot see beyond
the myth of the education of these minorities as the necessary means for
enabling social inclusiona priori impossibleand therefore nding a
way out of the Brazilian problematic. It is rare that these sectors are seen as
important in and of themselves. Even on the Left, this only happened, par-
tially and slowly, starting at the end of the 1970s with the sectors reconstruc-
tion around the movements of urban and rural workers themselves.
The republic that began in 1889 only stabilized in 1891 with its rst
constitution and was not much different from its Latin American neighbors
in an unfortunate succession of institutional crises and authoritarian set-
backs. However, what interests me here in such a phenomenon is to note
that between all its comings and goings, Brazilian republican thought has
always consisted of a combination of French positivist ideology, which inu-
enced the relevant part of the elite, and an inclination to explore people and
things that has been present since the arrival of the rst Portuguese ship on
its coast. The saying Order and Progress, stamped on Brazils national ag,
inaugurating the republic and maintained until today, illustrates this recur-
ring idea. This put an end to the archaic cordialismo of the colonial and impe-
rial periods, marked by an almost circular conception of time. A totally ruth-
less evolutionist and civilizing linearity entered in its place. From that point
on, Brazil became a machine increasingly interconnected with the global
machine, racing against time to undo a supposed decit of civilization.
Although numerous and recurrent revolts against the empire were
harshly repressed, it was only with the beginning of the republic that state
violence, beyond being ruthless, became part of a great and absolute future
project. Resistance to oppression during the republic, much of which took the
form of movements with a strong mystical and millenarian componentas
seen in the war of Canudos in the Brazilian northeast (189697) and the
revolt of Contestado in the South (191216)was violently swept away
because it was considered to obstruct civilizations progress.
7
This was about
more than the states self-defense or the countrys integrity; this ruthless-
ness was about something that transcended the state and to which it was in
service.
Even the leftist government of the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabal-
hadores; PT) (beginning in 2003) has repeated this logic regarding the con-
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The Savage Rise of the Class without Name 859

struction of the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon (Avelar 2011, 2012)
8
and
other major projects and so-called mega-events,
9
which have gradually
become points of honor and need to be built at any cost. This tendency, which
appeared to have been mitigated during Lulas government (200210), reap-
pears in full force in the hands of his successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011pres-
ent). The often innovative socioeconomic policies of Lulas government were
accompanied by the old Brazilian positivism, which now seems to resume its
absolutely central role under Rousseff. This takes place precisely in the PT
government, constituted in the struggles against the military dictatorship of
the 1980s as the rst leftist organization, and perhaps the rst Brazilian
political party, to be born among the common people.
The combined picture of changes over the last ten years, which directly
and indirectly shook the foundations of traditional Brazilian society, coupled
with the resumption of the positivist order brings us back to the question at
the heart of Mary Shelleys famous 1818 novel, Frankenstein (Albuquerque
2012: 43). The Brazilian question today, however, is not the objective problem
of creator (of life) versus creature (living); rather, we are talking about the cre-
ator of desiring life and life that desires. If Dr. Frankenstein is the modern
Prometheus, the PT is a postmodern version. The fertile changes of the last
decade resulted in permanent desire, not a vegetative life whose functions
could be described through statistics and the usual arithmetic. The class
without name is desiring and therefore is mobile and rhythmic; it is not a
photographic image, it is cinema. It is no coincidence that no public opinion
poll or statistic predicted the Brazilian protests.
The present government, therefore, has an absolutely baroque rela-
tionship to the state of permanent exception
10
against minorities. Even the
federal government has publicly assumed a guilty character in its coordina-
tion of direct repression of the protests triggered by the June Days. The PT
authorities are undeniably embarrassed, but there is a consensus that such
actions are a necessary evil in the service of progress. Perhaps the Brazilian
Right assumes that same task without so much embarrassment, as seen by
the actions of some conservative state governments at the beginning of the
protestsallies of or opponents to the PT governmentbut if both sectors
do the same thing in practice, it certainly is based on the consensus around
our peculiar republican values.
The proof of this consensus was demonstrated when, at the height of
the protests, the political forces of the Left and the Right united. There are
salutary differences that, however, nd a limit in the historically and cultur-
ally determined modernist consensus, which does not tolerate the existence
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of an absolutely free and untamed class without name. In any case, there is
continuity throughout the variations of this discourse: any change to or con-
servation of the Brazilian way of life needs to be approved by the established
power, and even the greatest political justications must be conscious of the
enormous effort that everyone must expend in order to civilize the country,
that is, achieve Brazils dislocated inclusion in global Empire (Hardt and
Negri 2000). The problem then is not a social movements practice or lack of
direct action; it is that these movements need to have an identity, a face
through which they are, or somehow could be, linked to orderso that, above
all, they could be subjected to compromise, an innite debt, with the diagram
of progress.
11
This is despair of the class that has no name, whichrather
than lacking oneexceeds all names, in relation to the Black Blocs, defen-
sive counter militias, and the faceless protesters of the 2013 demonstrations.
The tragedy of the indigenous populations is where the civilizing Bra-
zilian discourse leads. Although in Brazil there is no policy to eliminate its
indigenous populations, indigenous people are now dying at rates unprece-
dented in the countrys recent history as a collateral effect of the idea of devel-
opmentalism and the civilizing race of the twenty-rst century, which have
produced large-scale projects in the Amazonlike the previously mentioned
Belo Monte power plantand political deals with rural agribusiness oligar-
chies (Galhardo 2013). The indigenous simultaneously represent an imme-
diate economic threat to large rural producers and a living paradigm of sub-
stantial contestation to the system (Tible 2013). The lords of agribusiness
chose the indigenous peoples as their enemies because, by virtue of the 1988
constitution, the indigenous reserves are state property, which in turn con-
stitutes an inalienable property and thus increases the price of land, some-
what slowing the advance of deforestation in the Amazon and Midwest
region of the country. However, the possibility that living collectivities exist
despite imperial capitalism is in itself frightening for those in power: the
empirical critique of political economy made by indigenous peoples is a
potent apparatus (dispositif ) of contestation, which is increasingly being per-
ceived by protest movements and academia itself.
Therefore, there is an inconsistency regarding the contradictions of
this alliance, between progress and the multitude. The passage from the mar-
ket organism to the state mechanism observed in Brazil from the 1990s to
the present day has not marked the evanescence of this conception of civili-
zation. From now on, the vibrant and innovative experiences that were seen
under Lulas regime seem, unfortunately, to take on increasingly cooler colors.
Between the urgent need for progress and sustainabilityenvironmental,
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The Savage Rise of the Class without Name 861

democratic, cultural, and morewhat is to be done? The hegemonic Lefts
way out seems to be that of a gradual conversion of all differences into the
universal subject of the middle class, a social exit for the Brazilian civilizing
project. Everyone would be exchangeable and could then live in great frater-
nity. However, what interests us most is, on one hand, the difculty of con-
verting the class without name into a global petite bourgeoisie (Agamben 1993:
6263) and, on the other hand, the particular crisis that the middle-class
subject experiences, not only across the world but also in Brazil itself.
This process is manifested in the efforts of Greater Brazil, or Brazil of
the Majority, to become something like the rst world in a moment when
the rst world, in crisis, increasingly seems like Brazil. In contrast, there
would be a becoming-world of Brazil and a becoming-Brazil of the world,
which would be itself the virtuous encounter between Brazilianess and the
world (Cocco 2009). The interpenetration between world and Brazil will
always vary depending on the tone adopted: as Deleuze observes in Spinoza,
everything varies in intensities, which determine affects and so on; more
closure or more openness will always go through a strong intensity (the
defense of the singularity of Brazilian culture confronted with global mas-
sication) or a weak intensity (nationalism with increasingly fascist tones)
or, from the point of view of openness, the weak intensity would be an open-
ing to international capitalism and the strong intensity a permanent cultural
osmosis toward the world. The question is not, therefore, to choose between
the (id)entity Brazil or the world, in an extramoral sense, but to produce a
virtuous encounter between the two.
12
This virtuous Brazilian encounter with the world, and with itself,
depends on positively embracing its own internal plenitude and differences.
Carnival, with its masks and its lawlessness, not the normalization of bureau-
cratic seriousnessand the burden of guilt, remorse and innite debt that
its mission universally requireswill allow a future for these lands. The race
behind the phantasmagorical decit of civilization and its high cost cannot
justify all of this insanity. In any case, no repressive formula is capable of
containing the intense investment of desireat least not for long.
Translated by Liz Mason-Deese
Notes
1 According to the most recent data released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics (G1 2013).
2 According to UNICEF data, with broad repercussion in the Brazilian media (see Nri
2013).
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3 According to a study of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE; see
Instituto de Pesquisa Econmica Aplicada 2012).
4 I use royal science in a sense similar to how it is employed by Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus, that is, major science, belonging to the apparatus of power.
5 As seen in the recent phenomenon called the rolezinho (little walk), described by Bruno
Cava, poor, almost always black and mestizo youth, segregated in the peripheries of
large Brazilian cities, used social media networks to come together for massive walks
in shopping centers, attracting the attention of the habitual customers and of the
authorities. Such actions do not imply crime or violence; even so, they have been met
with police repression.
6 In the June protests, the resistant strategy of afrming anonymity was common and
increasing, which left the police apparatus in a fury.
7 This is how the Brazilian army explains such actions to present-day audiences: it suf-
ces to look at the legends of the battles in the Army Museum of Rio de Janeiro.
8 A hydroelectric power plant whose construction was designed by the military dictator-
ship (196485), it encountered strong resistance from environmentalists and indige-
nous peoples, many of whom were among the rst supporters of the nascent PT. With
the impasse, the project never came to fruition. Ironically, it was then restarted by Lula
and ultimately became the fetishized goal of Dilma Rousseffs government even
though its construction was criticized by Rousseffs social and political base while par-
adoxically being defended by the same conservative media that it combats daily.
9 Such as hosting the mens soccer World Cup and the summer Olympics, according to
an interview of activist Talita Tibola by the Italian press (Tibola 2013).
10 As in Walter Benjamins eighth thesis over the concept of history:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the emergency situation in which
we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this.
Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of
emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.
[Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name
of progress, greet it as a historical norm. The astonishment that the things we are
experiencing in the 20th century are still possible is by no means philosophical.
It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the con-
ception of history on which it rests is untenable]. (2005: 226)
11 This is similar to a movement observed by Guattari (1974) 2004 in relation to the for-
mer socialist countries: the reason for their failures was precisely that they pursued a
paradigm imposed by the very capitalist countries that they were supposedly ghting.
12 This observation is literal and expressed in the course taught by Deleuze in Vincennes
(1978):
Everything I am saying and all these commentaries on the idea and the affect refer
to books two and three of the Ethics. In books two and three, he makes for us a kind
of geometrical portrait of our life which, it seems to me, is very very convincing. This
geometrical portrait consists largely in telling us that our ideas succeed each other
constantly: one idea chases another, one idea replaces another idea for example, in an
instant. A perception is a certain type of idea, we will see why shortly. Just now I had
my head turned there, I saw that corner of the room, I turn . . . its another idea;
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The Savage Rise of the Class without Name 863

I walk down a street where I know people, I say Hello Pierre and then I turn and
say Hello Paul. Or else things change: I look at the sun, and the sun little by little
disappears and I nd myself in the dark of night; it is thus a series of successions, of
coexistences of ideas, successions of ideas. But what also happens? Our everyday life
is not made up solely of ideas which succeed each other. Spinoza employs the term
automaton: we are, he says, spiritual automata, that is to say it is less we who have
the ideas than the ideas which are afrmed in us. What also happens, apart from
this succession of ideas? There is something else, that is, something in me never
ceases to vary. There is a regime of variation which is not the same thing as the suc-
cession of ideas themselves. Variations must serve us for what we want to do, the
trouble is that he doesnt employ the word. . . . What is this variation? I take up my
example again: in the street I run into Pierre, for whom I feel hostility, I pass by and
say hello to Pierre, or perhaps I am afraid of him, and then I suddenly see Paul who
is very very charming, and I say hello to Paul reassuredly and contentedly. Well.
What is it? In part, succession of two ideas, the idea of Pierre and the idea of Paul; but
there is something else: a variation also operates in meon this point, Spinozas
words are very precise and I cite them: (variation) of my force of existing, or another
word he employs as a synonym: vis existendi, the force of existing, or potentia
agendi, the power [puissance] of acting, and these variations are perpetual.
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