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  • Alternative Functions:Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity
  • Justin Read (bio)

In August 2003, a group of protesters stormed the Praça dos Três Poderes ("Plaza of the Three Powers") in the center of Brasília.1 All three branches of Brazil's federal government have their main palaces around this great plaza at the southern tip of the capital's "Monumental Axis;" the particular target on this day being the Congresso Nacional. At one point a small group among the hundreds of protesters around the Congress armed themselves with office chairs and whatever else they could find, and began to smash the large plate glass windows that form a wall along the northern flank of the structure. This violence was, of course, primarily political in nature, although it is doubtful that many of the protesters realized just how profoundly political it was. The immediate cause of their outrage was a severe diminution of state pension benefits proposed by the government of President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores ("Worker's Party"). The protesters were current and retired state bureaucrats, a class of workers who have traditionally been promised rather exorbitant retirement benefits by every political regime (democratic and autocratic alike) since Getúlio Vargas's modernizing Estado Novo (1937–46). Although Lula had been elected to the presidency as the representative of this bureaucratic class, immediately upon assuming his post he was faced with an impossible fiscal choice brought on by a pension system the nation could no longer afford: either betray his own constituency, or plunge Brazil into bankruptcy, destabilizing international finance markets in the process.2

The protesters in Brasília that day were making as much of a poetic statement as they were making a political one. My [End Page 253] purpose in the present essay is to show how the aesthetics of modernism come to bear upon these sorts of political actions which are themselves the result of impossible economic choices. Modernist poetics has traditionally been theorized in terms of detachment; as Peter Bürger would have it, for instance, the avant-garde work of art refuses to provide coherent meaning, and only through extreme semantic difficulty does the work purport to initiate a radical change in the reader's life praxis.3 When viewed in relation to Brazilian modernism and its architecture, however, this sort of negatively-charged, deferred engagement with political praxis is not quite relevant. More to the point, the modernist architects who designed Brasília—most notably Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of the city's principle monumental structures—were directly commissioned by the nation-state to create their works. Brazilian modernism is thus inconceivable without reference to the international political economics of Brazil's development; in short, we will find that modernism always depends upon modernization. Yet the surfaces of Brasília—precisely those surfaces first imagined by Niemeyer and later fractured by the protesting bureaucrats—exhibit a form of lyricism that is also highly critical of developmentalist modernization. Ironically, in order to properly comprehend the link between modernism and modernization, it is necessary to link modernism to modernism, to enjoin architecture and poetry in a truly structural form of poetic close reading.

By smashing the plate glass of the Congresso Nacional, in other words, the protesting bureaucrats were "closing" a rather dizzying historical circuit between modernism and modernization. "Modernization" here may be understood as not just the development of an industrial economy, but also the consolidation of a national state under a forceful, centralized government, which itself facilitates economic development.4 Since the Estado Novo, such consolidation has been sought through state patronage of national aesthetic projects and state co-optation/incorporation of entire social classes such as industrial labor. In essence, a large state bureaucracy was created after 1930 as Brazil sought to modernize its political infrastructure. Members of this bureaucracy, in turn, have been incorporated into the state as a formal constituency—one that has been satisfied through the promise of a generous social security net. With this political base of the population (along with heavy borrowing from international development banks), the populist president, Juscelino Kubitschek, embarked on an aggressive...

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