The collapse of peripheral modernization: the Brazilian fracture of world capitalism

Abstract

Since the genesis of Brazilian social formation, social theory and national aesthetic experience have assumed varied forms in an attempt to adapt classical-European concepts and theoretical categories to the unique characteristics of Brazil. This essay intends to reconstruct some elements of the dialectic between our singularities and the universal and unequal rhythm of capitalist accumulation, as well as to highlight some of the ways in which our intellectual and aesthetic experience responded to it. It also seeks to provide some preliminary notes on the importance and meaning of these issues in today's world, when the process of modernization itself, in its classical sense (which determined much of our best theoretical tradition), seems to be exhausting itself, to the point that the uneven and dualistic rhythm of our modernity, filled with large pockets of poverty, has finally become one of the most symptomatic expressions of the social fracture of contemporary capitalism.