MEDIA, POLITICS, AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY IN BERNARDO CARVALHO'S REPRODUÇÃO (2013)

Abstract

This essay analyzes the way Bernardo Carvalho's novel, Reprodução, intervenes in an essential contemporary debate: What are the political possibilities of today's globalized mass media? Can we still imagine an alliance between progressive political projects based on equality, diversity, and tolerance on the one hand, and global communications, on the other? These questions gain special relevance in the context of recent historical developments. Several political developments around the world-Great Britain's exit from the European Union, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Colombia's refusal to uphold the peace dialogues with the FARC guerrillas, and the election of Donald Trump-suggest that the relationship between a postmodern politics (based, among other theoretical foundations, on a recognition of all forms of otherness) and mass media has entered a period of crisis. These events were widely understood as a global refusal by the general population to endorse key postmodern discourses like multiculturalism, political correctness, gender and racial equality, free immigration, gay rights, etc. They were also linked to a particularly weaponized use of the media against these ideas: Instead of portraying a diversity of points of view in historical context, news sources with ties to specific political interests (like Breitbart and Fox News in the U.S., The Sun in Great Britain, Globo in Brazil, and RCN in Colombia, not to mention a variety of "independent" internet media outlets and personalities) broadcast partisan and willfully decontextualized messages that, in the end, had a significant influence on the public's views. Such outlets have always existed, but they seem to have gained new levels of visibility and impact today.

This essay analyzes the way Bernardo Carvalho's novel, Reprodução, intervenes in an essential contemporary debate: What are the political possibilities of today's globalized mass media? Can we still imagine an alliance between progressive political projects based on equality, diversity, and tolerance on the one hand, and global communications, on the other? These questions gain special relevance in the context of recent historical developments. Several political developments around the world-Great Britain's exit from the European Union, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Colombia's refusal to uphold the peace dialogues with the FARC guerrillas, and the election of Donald Trump-suggest that the relationship between a postmodern politics (based, among other theoretical foundations, on a recognition of all forms of otherness) and mass media has entered a period of crisis. These events were widely understood as a global refusal by the general population to endorse key postmodern discourses like multiculturalism, political correctness, gender and racial equality, free immigration, gay rights, etc. They were also linked to a particularly weaponized use of the media against these ideas: Instead of portraying a diversity of points of view in historical context, news sources with ties to specific political interests (like Breitbart and Fox News in the U.S., The Sun in Great Britain, Globo in Brazil, and RCN in Colombia, not to mention a variety of "independent" internet media outlets and personalities) broadcast partisan and willfully decontextualized messages that, in the end, had a significant influence on the public's views. Such outlets have always existed, but they seem to have gained new levels of visibility and impact today.

The growing influence of such outlets has been facilitated by, and is perhaps a consequence of, radical technological transformations in the media landscape. The internet has united most forms of traditional mass media (newspapers, books, films, audio recordings, and radio and television shows) in one single channel. That, combined with the widening use of personal digital devices (like laptops and smart phones) among global middle classes have made the web a pervasive part of their everyday life and a perfect venue for the dissemination of political messages. The emergence of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, has also turned users into active participants in current communications markets. Today, they not only consume content but now produce and disseminate it on a global scale. These changes have profoundly impacted how most of us represent and understand reality, communicate with other human beings, and imagine our political interventions in our societies. As we will see, Reprodução focuses on some of the challenges that a politics of diversity, based on a complex understanding of otherness in historical context, finds within these recent developments in contemporary media.

Bernardo Carvalho is one of the most important Brazilian authors of his generation. Born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1960, he has worked as a foreign correspondent and cultural critic for the newspaper Folha de Såo Paulo. To date, he has also published eleven novels and a collection of short stories, making him one of the most established and highly regarded literary voices of his country. One of the main objectives of his work is to provide complex representations of otherness in terms that are both cosmopolitan and deeply national. His work has dealt with the difficult encounters between Western anthropologists and Brazilian natives (Nove noites, 2002), with a Brazilian photographer's experiences in Mongolia, (Mongolia, 2003), and with the Brazilian sons of Japanese immigrants who return to their homeland (O sol se poe em Sao Paulo, 2007). The literary critic Karl Eric Schøllhammer has noted: "[...] a fıcção [de Carvalho] tem agido como construção de uma relação com o outro até o limite da sua possibilidade, na forma de urna procura além dos limites da cultura ocidental" (121). Within Brazil then, Carvalho is one of the most important thinkers about the concepts (and the politics) of difference and alterity.

Reprodução, the novel that I will analyze here, won the prestigious Premio Jabuti for best Brazilian novel in 2014. Despite this initial recognition, it has not received the same critical attention, nor the same general readership as Carvalho's other works. Its formal complexity, its satirical language, and its dislikeable protagonist-known simply as "o estudante de chines"-can make it a difficult, even unpalatable, text. Nevertheless, the way the novel demands time and effort from its readers serves an interesting purpose: it attempts to work with a logic that is radically different from the easy consumption of many media-based cultural products. Furthermore, it represents an important development of some of Carvalho's main topics in new directions. In this case, instead of making his characters travel to other countries to experience alterity (as in Mongolia or O sol se pőe em Sao Paulo), Carvalho considers how contemporary subjects use the media to represent other peoples and cultures. This perception of diversity, created through the mediation of today's communication technologies, is one of the novel's main topics.

In order to understand Carvalho's representation of contemporary media, we must address his novel's form because it is, in my opinion, an integral part of his critique of current forms of communication. First, its language could be defined as a mimesis of Brazilian orality: it includes a constant use of informal expressions, improper grammar, slang, and even swear words that copy the way many Brazilians speak.1 Simultaneously, it combines this representation of everyday speech with a complex narrative structure. For the most part, the novel has no narrator, although a third-person voice does appear throughout the text (especially in its final pages) to make important contextual clarifications. Instead, Reprodução proceeds in a series of dialogues set in an airport. It features three main characters: the protagonist-hereafter referred to as the "Student"-who is being interrogated for possible drug trafficking, and two Deputies (one male, one female) who work on his case.2 There is, however, an important complication: in every dialogue, the voice of one interlocutor, the Male Deputy, is missing. The following is a representative passage of Carvalho's main formal strategy:

Por que? Ora, por qué! Porque fui estudar chinés. Não fui estudar inglés ou espanhol. Chinés é a lingua do demonio. Entäo, é normal que eu não entenda nada, mesmo tendo estudado seis anos. É normal. Até grego, em comparação, é bolinho. É claro que nâo podia falar em chinés com ela. E como é que o senhor quer que eu şaiba o que ela disse? (14)

Here, the Student is clearly answering a series of questions. However, we have to imagine what the police officer is asking him: Why are you traveling to China? What was the woman saying in Chinese? Why don't you understand her if you say you have studied the language? This one-sided structure seems to question the notion of meaningful and reciprocal exchange between the text's characters. Like the readers, they only seem to listen to one voice, their own, while the voice of the other has suddenly become silent and illegible. As we will see, the novel will thematically develop this radical silence of the other that is inscribed, from the start, in its form.3

Finally, the novel includes a more general structure that we discover as we advance in our reading: Each of its three chapters includes a title that links language to a specific timeframe (future, past, present) and to several problems related to communication in our times. The first chapter, titled "The Language of the Future," deals explicitly with the way contemporary subjects use the media to create an image of other peoples and cultures. The next section, "The Language of the Past," shows us how human memory, a meaningful recovery of past experiences, is affected by the speed, immediacy, and fragmentation of contemporary communications. The novel's third and final chapter, "The Language of the Present," tries to imagine other ways to describe and share our personal and collective realities. Throughout the text, the central concept of reproduction defined, for now, as a constant repetition of actions and signs by the main characters, affects the way they understand their circumstances and how they communicate with each other. By simply repeating what others say or do, especially within the ever-changing context of contemporary media, these characters have great difficulties in conveying their messages to their interlocutors. The final chapter, however, points to the possibility of imagining new and creative uses of current day communications to represent our world and to connect with other human beings.

With this general introduction, we can now proceed to an analysis of these fragmented dialogues, where otherness is represented in the form of a silence, a void that can only be filled in partial and fragmentaiy ways. As I mentioned, each of the novel's chapters deals with a specific problem pertaining to today's media. The first chapter will focus, specifically, on how current communications have created new and problematic ways to represent other human beings.

The Language of the Future: Media and the Simulacrum of Otherness

The novel's first chapter is titled "A lingua do futuroand it begins when the Student is about to board a plane from an unnamed Brazilian city to China. Near the boarding-gate, he sees his previous Chinese instructor, accompanied by a five-year-old girl. As he begins to talk to her, police officers enter the room and arrest her, because an anonymous caller had accused her of transporting narcotics. The Student, who is suspected of being her accomplice, is pulled aside for interrogation. This situation sets up the exchange that he will have with a police officer known simply as the Male Deputy (o delegado). Through their dialogue, we learn the Student's backstory: he is a divorced and unemployed bank investor who spends most of his time reading online news and blogs, and writing comments on internet websites: "Desde que a professora desaparecerá, o estudante de chines transformara os comentarios anónimos na internet, e em especial os hediondos, em sua principal atividade diaria [...]" (Carvalho 10). In short, his entire identity and his main social interactions are based on a permanent use of the internet. Given his unemployment, he becomes a unique character of our times: one that, lacking financial means to consume goods, becomes a voracious consumer of data and information.

One of the main media "products" that the Student begins to consume is the Chinese culture. Although he studied Chinese with an instructor, and has even decided to travel there, we soon realize that his vision of the country is shaped by little more than speculations, biases, and outrageous claims. In fact, the chapter's titular "language of the future" is not really Chinese-it is the Student's own incoherent blabbering, defined by the speed and fragmentation of contemporary media. When he tries to explain his interest in China, for example, he simply reproduces the flow of decontextualized data that he gets from different sources. For example:

O senhor sabe que daqui a uns anos, se for para seguir as previsöes dos economistas, o "cenário" (ele faz o gesto de aspas com as mäos), näo é assim que se fala, o "cenário" vai ser a China maior economia do mundo? O senhor näo leu que eles estäo até pensando em instalar uma célula do PCC na estação espacial chinesa, com membros que vão ter no espaço as mesmas atribuições que eles tém aquí na terra? E! Pode se preparar, sim! Burócratas. E! PCC mesmo. Näo leu? Na rede. Näo, burócratas! Nada a ver com traficante, nada a ver. Partido Comunista Chines. Outro PCC. Burocracia no espaço. Quando eles invadirem o Brasil, quero dar as boas-vindas em chinés, cantando. (Carvalho 15-16)

Here we find the novels' first example of reproduction as a permanent repetition of actions and signs by contemporary subjects.4 In the case of the Student, it implies a reiteration of media-based information that completely shapes his image of reality and, especially, of other peoples: in the last quote, the Chinese culture becomes a collage of half-truths and baseless myths. The Deputy also participates in this reproductive logic. Even though we cannot hear him, we can piece together some of his answers, and they include a combination of media stereotypes, alleged knowledge, and fullblown ignorance. (In this exchange, for example, he seems to confuse the Brazilian PCC, Primeiro Comando da Capital, a criminal organization based in the state of Säo Paulo, with the Chinese Communist Party or Partido Comunista Chinés, creating the amusing image of a band of Brazilian outlaws operating in space.) Every character combines data found in different media outlets with stereotypical depictions of other human beings to create a crude and simplistic image of who they are. Among many outrageous statements, the Student claims that the world drug trade is directed by Jewish Zionists (29), that the Turkish use their schoolbooks to promote lies about Western figures like Einstein, Darwin, and Santa Claus (42), and that global warming is an invention of the U.S. to stop Chinese economic growth (45). In the midst of these misrepresentations, the other remains silent, unable to utter a response. Carvalho, then, poses an important question: How does a permanent contact with mass media and information lead to this crude misapprehension of our world?

In order to answer this question, we can begin by stating that these erratic and one-sided dialogues, and their resulting images of reality and otherness, converse with a number of theories about the political possibilities of the media-theories that were mostly developed in the 1980's and 90's, at the height of a postmodern thought that is still influential today. There are, in my opinion, two main views on the subject. On the one hand, thinkers like Gianni Vattimo contended that the growing variety of available media would be a perfect conduit for a postmodern politics and its general respect for different cultures, identities, and worldviews. This was because, as he argued in "The Postmodern: A Transparent Society?": "[...]-newspapers, radio, television, what is now called telematics-have been decisive in bringing about the dissolution of centralized perspectives, of what the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard calls the grand narratives" (Vattimo 5). Vattimo certainly knew that there were staunch critics of this image of mass media. Among them, he mentions Theodor W. Adorno, who saw all forms of media as expressions of the main contradictions of all capitalist societies (5). He argues that, contrary to Adorno's expectations, an alliance between media and capitalism would almost inevitably lead to more open and diverse societies, precisely because of the expansive nature of capitalist markets: "But the fact remains that the very logic of the information "market" requires its continual expansion, and consequently demands that "everything" somehow become an object of communication. This giddy proliferation of communication as more and more subcultures "have their say" is the most obvious effect of contemporary mass media" (6).

On the other hand, thinkers like Jean Baudrillard presented a much more pessimistic view of the same phenomena. For him, the contemporary alliance between capital and media could produce something very different than what Vattimo describes. Instead of being perfect channels for the representation of plural realities, new communication technologies have the power to create what Baudrillard calls simulacra, images and symbols that do not refer to any form of factual reality. Here is how he describes these proliferating signs in Simulacra and Simulation: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say, of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes" (2).

For Baudrillard, this proliferation of simulacra has important political consequences. He does not take issue with the possibility of having multiple and competing versions of the real. More specifically, he questions the idea that any combination of signs could replace reality itself, even those that deliberately distort or simplify it. He then tries to imagine what kind of political intervention might correspond to a world saturated with simulacra. This is his example:

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scene to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. (2)

Baudrillard's point here is not that everything that appears in the media is false. Rather, he wants to show that current communication systems allow for the circulation of any and every kind of simulacrum (like the contradictory interpretations in the previous quote) in powerful and convincing ways. Importantly, most of these simulacra are not meant to represent complex and plural images of our world, like Vattimo expected; they are designed to create simplified versions of reality for partisan consumers. The objective of these representations is not to create political debate, but to confirm preexisting biases without any significant exchange with other points of view. In other words, political simulacra have the power to isolate individuals and to prevent them from any real contact with the other. Finally, if Baudrillard's assessment is accurate, then we should see contemporary politics as a struggle to control the meaning and dissemination of these signs. At the core of these battles is, of course, the media. Those who understand communications better, or who have more financial or symbolic power over them, will determine their societies' main political trends.

A brief review of the fate of these theoretical approaches shows us that, for a long time, Vattimo's views have been prevalent in Western liberal democracies. In this context, the expectation has generally been that the media would be an ideal channel for diversity, debate, and tolerance. Both Vattimo and Baudrillard wrote their works before the internet was available on a global scale, so their theories are based on the specific technologies of the 1980s and 90s. As seen from today, it is clear that the technological developments related to the web have confirmed Vattimo's ideas of a communications market that would be open to every possible culture, worldview, and identity. The recent events described at the beginning of this text, however, suggest that the relationship between his postmodern political views and communication technologies is in the midst of a substantial crisis.5 In our world, where the proliferation of simulacra is always a possibility, postmodern concepts like diversity and tolerance could be easily coopted by any model of interpretation: They could be related to a richness of human experiences or they could, just as well, be portrayed as the origin of all global evils, including terrorism, job loss, and failing economies. In this sense, there is no guarantee that our sophisticated communication technologies are especially suited to circulate the message of a diverse and tolerant world. In fact, their structures and languages seem very vulnerable to the propagation of misleading ideological simulacra.

Within the context of these theoretical discussions, Reprodução seems to reaffirm Baudrillard's more skeptical stance. In the Student's particular use of language, for example, we can see a new example of contemporary simulacra, symbols and interpretive models that lack any relation to the real. In the novel, the Student firmly believes that Chinese will become a global language in the years to come, so he refers to it as the "language of the future." When he begins to describe it, however, we can see that he is not talking about a regular language: For him, it is a machine for the creation of simulacra. When he tries to define its advantages, he states: "Na lingua do futuro, o senhor vai poder dizer o que quiser, sem consequéncia, nem responsabilidade, nem contradição" (52). This futuristic language promises to solve all political tensions and contradictions in the symbolic realm, without any relation with the real-exactly like Baudrillard's simulacra. More worryingly, it is designed to justify its users' political views, no matter how untenable or heinous: "Uma palavra pela outra, na lingua do futuro. O assassino vai clamar por justięa, na lingua do futuro. O racista vai exigir seus direitos, na lingua do futuro. O fascista será o porta-voz da democracia, na lingua do futuro. [...] A lingua do futuro dá ao homem o que ele quer ouvir. Sem contradição nem hipocrisia" (52-53). Through a strategic use of signs, the Student's language of the future inaugurates new political "realities" that, like Baudrillard predicted, completely short-circuit the main complexities of our world. In the process, contemporary media, which originally seemed like an ideal venue for diverse and tolerant speech, has allowed for something different: Forms of communication that mimic democracy, knowledge, and debate but in fact have the ability to replace them with simplified simulacra.

In several interviews, Carvalho has openly criticized the notion that contemporary mass media, especially after they become widely available on the internet, provide an ideal venue for nuanced representations of a diverse and complex world. In fact, he suggests that the web itself is defined by a number of solipsistic structures that prevent any real encounter with otherness. This is Carvalho, in an interview with Alexandre Lucchese:

Acredito que há ai um mecanismo que propicia um hedonismo narcisista como se fosse democracia. Voce só vai rumo ao desconhecido se é forçado. É por isso que existem escolas. Se eu nao entendo nada de matemática ou de física, jamais aprenderei nada pela internet, porque nao irei em busca de algo que nâo conheço. [...] Algo complicado em relaçao á internet é a ilusäo de que vocē adquire conhecimento ali porque é algo livre. Como a rede é algo que o usuario determina o uso, a lógica é a do prazer, e näo a de buscar algo que o contradiz. Näo é á toa que o sexo é täo presente na internet, desde o inicio. (Lucchese)

These observations help us understand how the novel represents a general breakdown in contemporary communications, as well as a radical suppression of the voice of the other. Starting with his text's form. Carvalho seems to suggest that many of the dialogues that we create through (or under the influence of) contemporary media are not dialogues at all. In many cases, they are solipsistic repetitions of ideas that, moved by the logic of pleasure, avoid anything that contradicts our preexisting opinions. In the process, they give us a simulacrum of alterity instead of a real encounter with otherness. The novel's first chapter, then, introduces us to a language of the future that claims to provide an image of a diverse world, but in fact, only allows the main characters to produce incomplete and simplified versions of the other. Its next section will focus on another aspect that defines contemporary media and its structures: its tense relationship with historical memory and with the past in general.

The Language of the Past: Media and the Obliteration of Individual and Collective Memory

The novel's second chapter, "The Language of the Past," introduces us to new characters and to a new one-sided dialogue. The Male Deputy leaves the Student and begins a conversation, in another room, with a Female Deputy (a delegada). The Student, who we remain with, can only overhear what the Female Deputy says through the wall that separates them; once again, the Male Deputy's voice remains artificially silenced. In what follows, we learn about her attempts to make sense of a deeply troubled life. First, she is under investigation because she let a corrupt Evangelical pastor go free after making a critical legal mistake. Most tragically, she killed her addicted son as he entered her house, probably to steal from her. The Female Deputy copes with these situations by partaking in two diametrically opposed group activities: she joins the corrupt pastor's church, where she participates in different religious rituals and events, and she begins to frequent different swingers' clubs. The constant repetition of the activities that define these communities becomes, for her, a mechanism of survival and a way to heal the wounds of her past.6

Indeed, this is the chapter's defining topic: the different ways in which contemporary subjects try to make sense of their past. In principle, the Female Deputy participates in these group activities to overcome the pain of her son's death, and their repeated rituals offer her a form of distraction from her suffering. This is a new version of the logic of reproduction in the text. In her own words: "Ritual, para mim, é isso: sobreviver em sociedade. Tem que se igualar, compartilhar, reproduzir. Näo? Agora näo é tudo coletivo? Todo mundo näo faz a mesma coisa?" (70). However, it is clear that this repetition of communal actions is not a complete success. If anything, the obsessive and painful way in which she discusses her past shows that they offer her a temporary diversion, but they do not help her understand it any better. Her conversation with the Male Deputy is another attempt to make sense of the traumas that define her life but, as we will see, this effort also seems to fail. In this chapter, then, the idea of achieving a meaningful understanding of the past has become impossible for the novel's characters, especially for the Female Deputy.

In several essays written in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin reflected on the fragile state of memory in the modern world. Though composed in very different circumstances-Benjamin was responding to the First World War, the 1929 economic crisis, and the emergence of fascism-his work is relevant to the novel at hand. At the time, the idea of using memory to understand the past seemed to fail catastrophically: Europe was unable to learn anything from past mistakes as it was headed towards a new global conflict. Simultaneously, Benjamin noticed that individual subjects were undergoing similar problems. In "The Storyteller," he cites the example of First World War veterans who seemed unable to put into words what they had lived in the trenches: "Wasn't it noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield had grown silent -not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" (Selected Writings 3:143-44). Benjamin, then, began a series of theoretical reflections that tried to explain why both memory and language seemed to be failing so drastically at this historical moment.

First, it is important to emphasize that, for Benjamin, memory and experience were strongly connected: You can only recover through memory events that you experienced in a deep and meaningful way. Also, for him, memory was a profoundly social activity: To be truly effective as a tool for self-knowledge, historical recollection and political transformation, memory had to be shared with others and to be connected to the more collective aspects of the human experience. These are his words in his seminal essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire": "Where there is experience [...] in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [... ] with material from the collective past" (Vol. 4: 316).

In this same text, Benjamin describes Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past as one of the most profound depictions of the difficulties that modern subjects experience in terms of memory, experience, and communication. The monumental nature of Proust's work and the fact that his text defines true memory as involuntary and completely out of his protagonist's control-in the famous scene where Marcel's ability to remember is awakened, haphazardly, by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea-were testaments to this difficulty. For Benjamin, this problematic relationship between individuals and their past was a consequence of several modern developments that completely transformed the way human beings experienced their reality:

According to Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself, whether he can take hold of his experience. But there is nothing inevitable about the dependence on chance in this matter. A person's inner concerns are not by nature of an inescapably private character. They attain this character only after the likelihood decreases that one's external concerns will be assimilated to one's own experience. (315)

Benjamin insists that Proust's attempt to use memory to create an image of himself had become a private and difficult task, not for natural, but for historical reasons. Following the work of thinkers like Freud and Bergson, and authors like Poe, Baudelaire, and Proust, he argues that some key modern developments had contributed to the creation of subjects that could not transform the overwhelming data of their everyday life (the "external concerns" in the previous quote) into significant experiences and memories. Among them, he includes modern cities, filled with startling events that human minds cannot process properly, and new forms of industrial labor in which workers mechanically repeat insignificant tasks that could never become a meaningful part of their lives. Most importantly, for our purposes, Benjamin suggests that the media was also responsible for the difficulties that modern subjects experience in transforming daily events into significant memories. For example, he argues that newspapers, one of the most powerful forms of mass media at the time, prevented everyday events from becoming a part of modern subjects' understanding of their reality and their history:

If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is the opposite, and it is achieved: To isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and the style of writing. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the extent to which the linguistic habitus of newspapers paralyzes the imagination of their readers.) (315-16)

For Benjamin, one of the elements that led to a diminished ability of modern subjects to properly understand their past was their constant interaction with information, a typical product of the speed and fragmentation of the modern world. Subjects who are continually exposed to the media have great difficulties in transforming the information they consume into a meaningful part of their lives: they do not have time to make it truly their own or to link it to complex historical narratives. More radically, as the mention of Kraus's ideas suggests, Benjamin argues that the pervasive influence of information, with its specific speeds and formats, ends up affecting both human language and imagination. In the end, he claims that the media deeply affect how modern subjects understand their world and how they process and share their personal and collective pasts with others. I believe that Carvalho grapples with contemporary variants of the same phenomena. The 21st century's communication technologies have produced their own simulacra of experience and memory, and they affect contemporary subjects in similar, or even more radical ways. Benjamin's prophesy of a world that, by privileging the manic rhythms of information, would produce human beings with a diminished ability to make sense of their past finds a radical confirmation in his novel.

Reproduçao clearly resonates with many of Benjamin's ideas. It also shows us how mediabased information influences all the main characters in drastic ways. This is evident in the way they talk about their daily experiences, their work, and their lives in general. For example, information constantly distracts the Female Deputy from the most important matters at hand. As the Male Deputy interrogates her, she always gives insightful interpretations of the events that are taking place. She, however, often interrupts her train of thought with news and current events that have no relation to the conversation that she is having with her colleague. A good example of this occurs when she discusses an extremely important development in the case: After she is captured, the Chinese Teacher is kidnapped at the airport by a member of the Police force who, in a surprising twist of events, is also the Male Deputy's son. At a critical moment, when we are trying to understand both deputies' lives and a crucial aspect of their investigation, she completely loses track of her story because she mentions that the fugitives are in a traffic jam caused by a popular Brazilian singer. She then proceeds to explain, in excruciating detail, how his daughter got pregnant and how she is giving birth while he is being followed by a mob of adoring fans (79-80). Throughout this chapter, she often wastes precious moments repeating some of the typical information that inundates newspapers, TV shows, and social media: Gossip, the personal lives of the rich and famous, and other useless data that entertains us but, at the same time, distracts us from living and understanding our own lives.

Reproduçao, then, represents the disorganized movement of contemporary minds under the constant influence of information. The result is a new example of the logic of reproduction: All the novel's characters talk to each other by repeating fragmentary and fleeting information, rather than dealing with the most complex aspects of their lives. This, then, is the ironic implication of the chapter's title, "The Language of the Past." The Female Deputy fails to put into words-let alone come to terms with-her painful individual memories. Instead, she focuses on activities and stories that distract her, but that never lead to any real comprehension or acceptance of her past. As she mentions, after she tries to kill time by telling the Male Deputy several disjointed stories about rain in the region, birds that scream in the night, and garbage that ends up in the sea: "E näo é melhor ter do que falar enquanto isso? Näo é melhor passar o tempo com informação?" (99).

Carvalho never explicitly defines reproduction in his novel. However, having addressed the Student's regurgitation of media contents and the Female Deputy's failed attempts to make sense of her difficult life, it is now possible to propose a more detailed characterization of the concept. In my view, it encompasses a tendency by contemporary subjects to repeat, in an unreflective fashion, a number of actions that should make their lives happier, more efficient, and better connected to others. These activities include the constant use of communication technologies, the permanent consumption of information, an uncritical participation in different kinds of real and virtual communities, and a desire to feel informed, distracted, or amused at all times. In the novel, however, the constant repetition of these actions ends up producing the exact opposite: isolated subjects who are unable to communicate with each other, who lack a real understanding of the local and global realities they are constantly consuming, and who seem unable to escape the burden of their own pasts. In an interview with Carlos André Moreira, Carvalho explains the paradoxical nature of his concept:

Tem uma ideia trágica de reprodução, de que toda ação acaba sendo uma reprodução, enfim, de que, quando voce quer fazer o bem, voce faz o mal. [...] E isso está meio embutido nessa ideia de reprodução de que falei, que é essa ideia de que, na verdade, para sobreviver, vocé se mata, que é uma coisa que é meio lugar-comum hoje na cabeça de todo mundo com o ecológico e ambientalista, de que o ser humano é autodestrutivo. Quanto mais tenta sobreviver, viver e procriar, menos condições de possibilidade para sua sobrevivencia mantém. (Moreira)

In his novel, then, Carvalho considers the tragic and self-destructive consequences that may result from the unreflective repetition of any activity that should lead, in principle, to the improvement of human life. Both the Student and the Female Deputy base their existence on a constant reproduction of these real and virtual actions, and the result is the opposite of what they want: an impoverished understanding of themselves and their reality. In this chapter, even though we cannot hear him, we also learn a great deal about the Male Deputy. Not surprisingly, his life resembles that of the other characters, another example of how the repetition of a number of well-intentioned actions does not necessarily lead to any form of human fulfillment. In fact, in the previous quote, Carvalho briefly mentions a topic that is essential to understand this character: human procreation. The importance of parenthood and the way it is linked to the novel's main concept of reproduction becomes evident in the Male Deputy's relationship with his alleged son, known simply as "the Agent."

From his dialogue with the Female Deputy, we discover that the Male Deputy also has a troubled and complex past. In their discussions, we learn about a brief affair he once had with an older woman. She becomes pregnant, and he assumes it is his son, although he has no evidence to prove it. When the boy grows up, the Deputy finds him a job as a policeman in a distant region of the Amazon. There, in a series of well-intentioned errors, the Agent becomes involved in the death of an important indigenous leader. After these events, the Male Deputy decides to bring him to his own precinct. As a parent, he always tries to help the Agent, but they never discuss their past or their conflicted personal and professional relationship. Moreover, it seems that the Agent is not particularly well-suited for this line of work. However, the Deputy repeatedly makes decisions on his behalf that lead him, once and again, to the police force. This new example of the logic of reproduction, and the silence between them, another version of the text's one-sided dialogues, leads the Agent to a new tragic situation. When he learns that the Teacher is being arrested for possible drug trafficking, he decides (for reasons that are only disclosed later in the novel) to help her at all costs. Here he chooses a very radical solution: he kidnaps the Teacher and the girl in a desperate attempt to set them free.

Up to this point, Reprodução has shown us how contemporary communications have helped produce convincing, yet inaccurate, simulacra of reality and otherness, as well as disjointed images of the past. In its third and final chapter, we encounter several unexpected twists that destabilize our main ideas about the novel, and that imply new views on the political possibilities of today's media. We also find other forms of representation that might allow for a more nuanced image of reality. These final pages focus, more precisely, on the need for new ways to talk about our world: new languages of the present.

The Language of the Present: Rethinking Media, Language, and Politics in the Contemporary World

The novel's third and final chapter, titled "A lingua do presente," returns to the original dialogue between the Student and the Male Deputy, with the same formal structure: We can only "hear" the Student's voice. At first, the Deputy creates several theories to blame the Student for everything that has happened. When the Student replies that he has incriminating information about him because he overheard his conversation in the other room, the Deputy simply answers that there was no such dialogue and that the Female Deputy does not exist. In other words, he claims that everything we read in the previous chapter was a product of the Student's imagination.

At this point, a third-person narrator interrupts-and ostensibly clarifies-the narrative. First, we learn some details about the relationship between the Agent and the Chinese Teacher. Two months before her arrest, she visited the police station to discuss the girl's desperate situation: A local mafia killed her family, so she wants to take her to live with her own parents in China. We also learn that later, in the airport, the Agent overhears the anonymous call that accuses a Chinese woman of transporting drugs with the help of a young girl. He immediately realizes that it is the same woman that he met before and decides to help her. The narrator then states that no drugs were found in the Teacher's luggage. No drugs are found in the Student's bags either.

In this final chapter, the text adds a final turn of the screw to its narrative complexity. Once we discover that the Teacher was not carrying any drugs, many elements in the novel stop making sense. We no longer know if the Female Deputy really exists; by extension, we cannot be certain about anything we learned through her, including the Male Deputy's entire life story and his relationship with the Agent. More generally, we do not know if the crime that instigates the entire novel is real or not. Everything we have read becomes doubtful, inconsistent, fragile: All these stories are transformed into mere simulacra, signs that have a convincing appearance of reality but have nothing behind them.

This is an essential strategy of Carvalho's text. As we have seen, he wants us to consider that, today, the most credible stories can be inaccurate or simplified versions of reality. In other words, he tries to make us reflect on some of the problems that we all face in our interactions with contemporary media. As Heitor Ferraz Mello puts it in an insightful review of the novel:

No entanto, no terceiro e último capítulo, tudo o que foi narrado é colocado em dúvida, criando uma instabilidade dentro do romance. O estudante de chinés continua seu depoimento ensurdecedor, para nao dizer irritante, e fala sobre o que ouviu pela divisória, mas, pelo visto, o delegado nega a existencia da tal delegada e da conversa. Entäo, a delegada existe ou nao existe? Tudo é fruto da imaginaçao doentia do estudante de chinés? Ou do leitor? Essa dúvida encaixa-se perfeitamente na materia do capítulo anterior, com historias tecidas e rasgadas na sequéncia. E mais: na própria materia do livro, se é que podemos dizer que Reprodução fala sobre a proliferação maníaca da informação-que se afirma e desafirma a cada minuto. (Mello)

Following Mello's argument, we might say that Carvalho's strategy of making us doubt about every event in the novel is, precisely, an invitation to think critically about the information that we consume on a regular basis. Most importantly, he challenges us to deal with his text in a completely different way: Slowly, creating relationships between voices and fragments and, ultimately, considering the possibility that what we have read is not an accurate depiction of a specific event at all. These are some of the demands that make reading his novel a challenging, even frustrating, experience. In my view, however, this difficulty is one of the text's main virtues: By making us doubt about every aspect of its plot, Reproduçao forces us to work with a logic that is completely different from today's hasty consumption of information. In the process, it helps us understand how the media has been employed to create fragmented, ahistorical, and simplified versions of our world.

Since no drugs are found in anyone's luggage, the Student is set free. The police officers help him take his flight, on one condition: Since there is no future for the girl in Brazil, they ask him to take her to China to live with the Teacher's parents. In the novel's final pages, the Student, already back in Brazil, tries to contact his previous Chinese instructor. He eventually seems to find her in a tiny mall, selling cheap electronics. He calls her by her name, Liuli, but she does not seem to recognize him. Still, he insists on telling her the end of his story, as the third-person narrator of the final pages informs us:

Ele diz que, apesar de tudo o que possa ter dito sobre nāo querer reproduzir esse mundo do qual eles dois fazėm parte, cumpriu a tarefa que lhe foi atribuida, contrariando a sua natureza, os seus principios e as suas convicções: entregou a menina sä e salva aos país adotivos da professora de chinés, que se chama Liuli, Lazurita, e que, para ser franco, era idéntica a ela, a chinesa â qual agora ele se dirige, nesse mundo de horrores e carnificinas. (Carvalho 165)

In this exchange, we see a new example of the Student's unwillingness to listen to others. For him, accepting an order is a form of undignified reproduction: it means giving continuity to a world that does not revolve around his own principles and beliefs. Here, however, he does something completely out of character, something that defies our expectations and breaks with the unchanging repetition of actions that defines the novel's characters: he accepts a task given by others and helps a person in need. This is one of the most human and generous deeds in the entire text.

Reproduçao ends with an enigmatic allusion to this chapter's title, "The Language of the Present." According to the Student, the young girl cries inconsolably throughout the entire trip to China. When he leaves her with her adoptive parents, however, she is even more desperate and afraid: She knows nothing about them and her future in this new home is completely uncertain. We also understand how difficult the Student's good deed was. Since the girl was constantly crying, he imagines that others saw him as a kidnapper or a pedophile. In his view, the entire situation:

[...] poderia ter desencadeado, sim, as piores fantasias e criado uma série de contratempos se este, apesar de infestado de pedófilos, de lobos em pele de ovelha, proferindo sermðes na lingua insinuante do presente com a voz maviosa dos santos, dos pastores e dos padres, e dominado por justiceiros assassinos prontos a acudir com diligencia ao primeiro clamor virtuoso das massas, näo fosse também, graęas a deus, um mundo de crentes. (167)

Throughout the novel, Carvalho maintains a mostly colloquial language, one that captures Brazilians' oral expression. In these final pages, this depiction of everyday speech becomes a highly elaborate, almost lyrical language. At the same time, he uses religious terms to portray our relationship with the media. Instead of describing our new tools as paradigms of progress and freedom, he suggests that they have created an opportunity for many to become self-righteous inquisitors, ready to destroy anyone who deviates from the norm of the masses.7 This is a final example of the silence of the other that Carvalho finds in many contemporary forms of communication. He reminds us, however, that the same people who adopt these radical positions are, in fact, men and women who need to believe in something: crentes. Some, like the Female Deputy, repeat a set of collective rituals to try to overcome their sorrow. Others, like the Student, reiterate the performance of a fierce individuality just to feel that they matter in a world that has forsaken them. This desire to believe, and to be part of a shared humanity, has been exploited by many for political gain. The novel seems to emphasize, however, that it could also be the beginning of something different. The "language of the present" is currently in the hands of false pastors and priests, but Carvalho suggests that there must be other words to talk about our times, and other ways to respond to these people's deeply human needs. The Student's unexpected actions and the flowing poetry of the novel's final sentences seem to imply that there must be other ways to discuss our present, to understand our past, and to imagine our future. Our realities are more complex than the mere reproduction of stereotypes and simplifications that abound on many media platforms, and they require a similarly complex language. In this sense, one of the main challenges for a contemporary progressive politics is to find new "languages of the present" that will not fall prey to the simplifying and ahistorical logic that has become so influential in much of today's media.

We must create other languages to describe our world. At times, they should be complex, nuanced, even demanding, just like our societies. Reprodução, with its conceptual games and difficult passages, is an example of other ways of discussing alterity, memory, and the representation of reality today. In his novel, Carvalho seems to suggest that a contemporary alliance between progressive political views and new communication technologies is possible, but it will depend on the collective creation of other "languages of the present," other uses of the powerful communication tools we have created, and other forms of representation that demystify the simulacra that have completely transformed and impoverished our experience of the real. With Reprodução, Carvalho has produced a unique text, one that invites us to imagine other political interactions between ourselves, the media that we consume on a daily basis, and the intricate realities of our times.

Footnote

1 Carvalho has been criticized for his use of a "standard" Portuguese in his writing, one that lacks connections with a properly Brazilian expression. For Lidia Santos, this is an attempt to create readily translatable texts that cater to transnational tastes and markets (158). With this novel, Carvalho is clearly showing his readers that he can write in a variety of registers and styles. For Santos's views, see: "El cosmopolitismo de mercado: del fin de las literaturas nacionales a la cultura de las celebridades (Brasil, México y Chile)."

2 Most of the novel's characters lack proper names, and are known simply by their professions or activities (the Student, the Male Deputy, the Agent, the Female Deputy, etc.). This already shows us that they seem to lack a strong identity. By repeating certain contemporary activities, like discussing news and current events, they become "human types" that copy the ideas of millions. As we will see, this is related to the novel's general concept of reproduction, which I will discuss in the following pages. In the novel, we only know one character's name: a woman called Liuli, although the text refers to her, for the most part, as the Chinese Teacher.

Footnote

3 It is important to point out that this formal structure is not new in Brazilian letters. It is, in fact, the defining strategy of one of Brazil's most important authors: Joāo Guimarāes Rosa. Two of his quintessential texts, his novel Grande sertäo: veredas (1956) and the novella "Meu tío о iauareté" (published in the 1969 posthumous collection Estas estórias) include the same format: A conversation that lacks one of the participants' voices. Carvalho, then, is following a deeply Brazilian literary tradition. He employs it, however, to portray specifically contemporary encounters, marked by current communication technologies and their structures. The first person, to my knowledge, to note the parallel between Carvalho's formal strategies and Rosa's texts was Beatriz Resende in her 2013 review of the novel, "Resenha de Reprodução, de Bernardo Carvalho" for O Globo. In it, she mentions that both authors attempt to erase the image of an all-powerful author by transferring the creative and "authorial" energy to the text's main characters (Resende).

Footnote

4 As a concept, reproduction has an extremely heterogeneous history that would be impossible to summarize in these pages. Here, I simply want to mention a few disciplinary approaches that could be loosely linked to Carvalho's use of this idea. First, there is the biological definition of reproduction as a distinctive property that differentiates organic lifeforms from physical, inorganic, processes; the Marxist view that capitalist societies require several actions that must be repeated continuously to guarantee the general functioning of their economy, i.e. the constant availability of raw materials, machinery, and labor. For Marx, capitalists constantly seek to expand these reproductive actions in order to accumulate more surplus value with time. Fie defines these processes as simple and expanded reproduction, respectively. (See Capital Vol. 2, Chapters 20-21); Bourdieu's notion of "cultural reproduction," or the way certain symbolic aspects are passed on to human groups through education in ways that tend to preserve most of society's power structures intact. (See his essay "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction"); and finally, Walter Benjamin's concept of mechanical reproduction, as a procedure that transforms the way human beings experience the world. He focuses on its impact on the arts, where the general availability of copies of artworks (through photography, film, or sound recordings) destroys their uniqueness or "aura," revolutionizing the field of aesthetics (See Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproductibility"). As we will see, Carvalho takes from these approaches the idea that, in contemporary societies, there are several physical, cultural, and technological processes that depend on a constant repetition of actions and symbols that deeply influence our understanding of the world. For him, however, this concept needs to be expanded to include the relationship between human beings and contemporary communication technologies, which implies new and complex "reproductive" practices.

Footnote

5 There are many critics of the idea that politics should focus exclusively on postmod-em concepts like diversity, muiticulturalism, and tolerance. One of the most visible opponents to this position is Slavoj Žižek, who sees in muiticulturalism a veiled expression of contemporary capitalist ideologies. For a synthetic version of his critique, see his 1997 essay "Muiticulturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism." I tend to agree with Santiago Castro-Gomez's excellent introduction to Žižek's work, Revoluciones sin sujeto. Slavoj Žižek y la crítica del historicisme posmoderno (2015). In his book, he states that, even though Žižek has produced a poignant critique of postmodern muiticulturalism, it would be unfair to deny that it has changed deeply entrenched hegemonic discourses and transformed the lives of millions (including women, the LGBTIQ community, and racial and ethnic minorities) in Western societies. According to Castro-Gomez, it is important to recognize these (still partial) political gains, while understanding that they are vulnerable to being coopted by the logic of contemporary capital. Most importantly, it would be essential to imagine possible alliances and solid theoretical dialogues between these postmodern views and other forms of political resistance, especially those linked to key Marxist concepts like class struggle, labor, the proletariat, etc.

Footnote

6 Paula das Chagas insightfully reads her role in the novel as another example of the constant repetition of actions that defines all the novel's characters. In her case, these activities are related to contemporary forms of community: "A delegada representa uma outra forma de repetição de ideias. [...] [Ejsta personagern sente necessidade de se integrar a um grupo, aínda que, para isso, precise reproduzir conceitos e teorías nos quais nao acredita ou sobre os quais nao refletiu adequadamente" (Chagas 62). Through this character, then, Carvalho expands his concept of reproduction by linking it to the creation of new, more restricted, "imagined communities"-Benedict Anderson's famous phrase-in a contemporary world where many collectivities, like the nation and the family, seem to have fallen apart.

Footnote

7 Baudrillard also finds strong connections between religion and contemporary media. In fact, his concept of simulacra has its origins in the religious dispute between iconoclasts and iconophiles (Baudrillard 4). For him, iconoclasts, those who prohibited any image of God, fully realized that simulacra have no reality behind them; divine images could potentially replace God or, more radically, be used to prove that He does not exist. In the end, he suggests that contemporary simulacra have in fact taken the place of God (like iconoclasts predicted) and that millions consume them as a new form of religion. This discussion appears in a section titled "The Divine Irreference of Images" (3-7) in Simulacra and Simulation.

References

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