Letícia Cesarino – Putting Ideas Back in Place? Non-linear Temporalities in Brazil’s Authoritarian Neoliberalism and its Digital Infrastructure

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”.