Breadcrumb trails

It’s difficult to parse asemic horizon without going over the whole thing; but the following previously-unpublished fragment cuts directly to the soaring strings.

My last text introduced (not accidentally) a non-concept, the scenario. The scenario is a framing device. It sets up some patch of the Situation for some human drama, which is surely contrary to theory’s constitutive apraxia. What it frames is diegesis (two drunk girls making out for/at an objectifying gaze). What the frame is made of, that’s interesting.

If this appears to you as a repetition of the idea of the seduction of theory, you get a prize. But in a perverse way the seduction of theory is in the diegesis, it’s a fourth-wall-breaker that reminds you of the frame. It reminds you that vatic discourse is ludic discourse. Even as someone is getting handsy with your brain it reminds you to push them away gently and reassess the ongoing scenario.

You were told that there would be something something Bolsonaro here. We knew this was a huge structural story to be told. What we didn’t realize at first is that Jair is nondiegetic. He’s not the college girls kissing, he’s a technique of musical mood overlay or camera movement or some such movie magic. Bolsonaro is a lens by which the constitutional crisis gets told.

No, no, not just that. Bolsonaro is the only lens by which the constitutional crisis gets told. You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free. (April 2019)

What happens now is that the story of the “Brazil opera” (by comparison to our previously-vaunted “space opera”) can no longer be told.

The rhubarb to the effect that history is written by the winners holds only within certain proportions: past a certain scale, the “losers” cease to even register and Whig history dissolves into perennial philosophy. Traces of such a dissolution can be found here and there — in puzzling historical controversies (bimetallism in the United States; or the Religious Question that dogged Peter II of Brazil) that are in effect unintelligible to our present time. Indeed it’s easier to deeply recognize what Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar went through than to feign superficial understanding of Comtean religion in turn-of-the-20th century Brazil.

Winners do often write losers into history as they see fit. But history is pregnant with countless revisionisms. They might now topple the government and arrest the man and his ravaged guts.  Present and future countercurrents may in turn try to retell this story, to put everything in such a context that the downfall seems to never have happened anyway, like a soccer goal by offside rules. But Bolsonaro’s politics can never be whole without the Truth (like left politics can never be whole without the People).

I don’t think Bolsonaro knows this. I don’t think he knows how much his actual political project (as opposed to whatever he might morph into now, courting parliamentary support in the so-called Centrão and getting dragged by swampy quid pro quo presidentialism) depended on it. Robbed of his truth-rain, Bolsonaro’s story is probably going to be up-serted into a generic macunaímic narrative of fruitless challenges “from the right” (or even some further signifier yet to be pro/duced).

The constitutional crisis vanishes. Journalists applaud the very Supreme Court-led inquisition that no more than  a year ago had censored them. A victor’s history  without losers emerges: nothing of any importance has happened! This is what Moro’s Brutus-like stab is supposed to say — should anything happen, good or bad, the show (the continuity of the diegesis) must be aborted; the very theater must be “deconstructed” starting immediately, even if so gradually that it doesn’t really show.