The entangled city

Crime as urban fabric in São Paulo

Gabriel Feltran

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526138248
• eBook ISBN: 9781526138255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book understands the increasing violence seen in cities as a product of the emergence of transnational illegal markets since the 1970's, followed by the suppression of unskilled workers, in many places racialised young men from poor neighbourhoods. The book gives flesh and blood to these transformations through a careful study of Sao Paulo's case in Brazil. The first part of the book is based on the trajectories of three families, featuring young men affiliated with illegal markets such as drug dealing and car theft, although in very different situations. The clash between the everyday life patterns of these black families, compared to Sao Paulo's white middle classes, gives plausibility to the city's social conflict, most violent after the 80's, when transnational markets arrive and incarceration grows. Sao Paulo's case offers more: this conflict is 70% less lethal in 2017 than it was in the 2000, mostly due to the actions of the PCC (the main criminal group in Brazil, a transnational one) discussed in the second part of the book. The "world of crime" is stronger, yet at the same time homicide rates are falling. The final argument demonstrates that informality, illegality and criminal violence are produced entangling legal and illegal markets and formal/informal institutions, not only in Sao Paulo.

1

Boundaries of difference: on essence and deconstruction

An eighty-six-year-old white woman watched television footage of São Paulo’s traditional New Year’s Eve road race dedicated to Saint Silvester and reflected on her past – another habit traditional at the year’s close – and on her stage in life. For Vitória, it was family gatherings like the one held that day that proved her efforts had been worth it. Widowed for a few years now, Vitória had just told me how much her life had improved over the years. The daughter of poor Italian immigrants who had arrived in Brazil a century ago, she had grown up as one of many children in the strictly Catholic environment of her foster mother’s rural home. Now, here she was in the living-room of her sizeable house, with her days of hunger behind her. She congratulated herself on the ‘standard of living’ the family enjoyed. ‘Life is good,’ she repeated to me.¹ While we spoke, images of the Kenyan athlete Robert Cheruyot lingered on the television screen for a few minutes, a strong black figure with a shaved head, his long strides carrying him into the lead.

Vitória’s four daughters were also present that day. Two of them were doctors, married to a doctor and an entrepreneur, while the other two had studied engineering and dentistry and married men in the same professions, one of Japanese heritage. With two children each, their generation was one of urban nuclear families. Surrounded by all of the close members of her family, including sons and daughters-in-law and family friends, Vitória exclaimed:

Thank God life is good! Thank God there are no negroes in my family, nobody married a negro, nobody’s kids are negro … Life is good for all of us … thank God for that! (Personal notes, São Carlos, 31 December 2007)

Her family’s reaction came as something of a surprise to Vitória, two of her granddaughters exclaiming: ‘Granny, what a terrible thing to say!’. Another two turned to me, one of them apologising on behalf of her grandmother, embarrassed by her overt racism. Disapproving looks were exchanged across the sofa and then gave way to pronouncements of ‘leave it …’, ‘it’s her age speaking’ and ‘how embarrassing’.

Anyone who knows Vitória knows that the aesthetics of ‘white’, ‘Japanese’ or ‘black’ were not all the same to her, each carrying very different evaluative meanings in terms of marriage, family, national identity, work and religion. However, the boundary demarcating those for whom ‘life is good’ included white and Japanese people, and left black people in the shade. Categories are not words, concepts or expressions that are learnt by listening to explanations, regardless of whether they are ‘native’ or not.² Categories are intervals of meaning delineated by the boundaries of what is plausible in each lived context. It is in everyday life that the relations between experiences and language produce the use and thus the categorical meaning, serving as practical normative parameters, activating an order for action and its matrices of valuation in the world as we experience it.³ In this experience of living, and therefore the sequence of interactions, whether routine or disruptive as in the case at hand,⁴ that meaning is produced in the light of a continuum of possibilities within the category boundaries.

This chapter introduces the book’s theoretical framework while reflecting in depth on three situations of interaction. Detailed description and analysis break with the immediate and sensory everyday order of understanding that offers an almost instant location and value for each subject or interaction. This immediate order produces essences, which give birth to fixed meanings and labels which, for the good and bad, guide us through life. In the living room, it was about racism. But having the time to reflect on an interaction is very different from experiencing it. I argue here that the everyday plays a decisive role in the objectification of the categories of difference, including conflictive ones, consequently conceived of as analytical categories (Brah, 2006; Piscitelli, 2008).⁵ Such a reflection paves the way for a wider interpretation of the categorical assumptions of the recent authoritarian reaction in Brazil, based on the mutual construction (within the sphere of the categorical assumptions) of everyday ideas of ‘gender’ and ‘state’, as well as those of ‘race’, ‘religion’, ‘family’, ‘class’, ‘sexuality’, ‘crime’, ‘nation’ and ‘violence’. Obviously, this chapter can not be expected to provide a discussion of each of the categories, but aims to consider the regimes of their simultaneous production in contemporary urban life, and therefore how the aesthetic of their emergence in everyday life relates to the urban conflict.

Misunderstandings

As we have seen, Vitória’s words did not have the expected effect on those around her. There were no congratulations for her family’s achievement of a better standard of living, nor for her grandmother’s struggles on behalf of the women of the household. Vitória fell silent, the Kenyan athlete went on to win the race and the family gathering continued to ritualise the bonds present. Nothing was said about race, gender, family or religion. Nor about politics, for that matter. I will have to do so instead, seeking to identify the meaning that the categories formulated in such a disruptive situation and, going a bit further, the regime that structured Vitória’s speech.

Vitória’s words would readily be identified as racist, both in form and in content.⁶ The category of ‘negro’ (preto in Portuguese), which has recently been reclaimed by a significant section of the hip-hop movement for purposes of self-identification in São Paulo, is strongly naturalised as a marker of inferiority in the racial puzzle in which Vitória was socialised, also denoting filth, ignorance and poverty. With her words, this ancient, specific racial diagram emerged, proving itself to be alive. The contemporary dominant racial puzzle is different, leading to the misunderstanding in its clash with the racial framework of her granddaughters. The categories that Vitória employed have no defence against any of the critical elements brought about by the Black Movement which has gained ground in Brazilian urban peripheries since the 1960s, emerging in political debate after the dictatorship. Vitória’s socialisation in race relations dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century and, remaining as she did within the white social pole, there was no need to revisit it.

If racism is explicit and voiced readily, such as in Vitória’s case, we do not, however, learn much about the form by which gender, family and religiosity is simultaneously constructed. Lateral social markers of difference in Victoria’s racial discourse are also found in precise content which is hardly noticeable at the moment of speaking. The expression ‘thank God’ is repeated and used to evaluate Vitória’s own course through life: sacrifices in life that lead to a final redemption in the Christian sense informed by God and his designs. To be on God’s sacred side and far from the ‘negroes’ is a cause for contentment: ‘Life is good.’ Religiosity thus has evident racial content, and vice versa. God is not black.

The marks of gender and class are also less explicit; however, they emerge upon later analysis. Narrating the end of a journey, Vitória offers another three elements justifying her contentment, all of them reflecting her construction of gender in the light of a social mobility project based around family, but also on class. (i) ‘there are no negroes in my family’: the family was strengthened by its shunning of black people; the frame of reference possibly dates back to before the 1930s, when the national ideology of ‘racial democracy’ emerged for construction in the decades to come; (ii) her daughters’ marriages: ‘nobody married a negro’: for Vitória, as the mother of four daughters born in the 1950s and 1960s, when women were a minority in the Brazilian labour market, the possibilities for improving quality of life were derived from marriage. Education was undoubtedly a definitive route to finding a spouse, as universities were distant from the black social pole, which, according to Vitória’s perspective, was fated to occupy the base of the social pyramid; (iii) children: ‘nobody’s kids are negroes’, reflects the fundamental hallmarks of the female role identified with marriage and reproduction and, as a consequence, the distance from black people as a family ideal. The situated ideal found in Vitória’s representation of mobility therefore serves as a matrix of references for concrete experience as considered in this book. As in classical theory of action, categories of difference or labelling are both theoretically and empirically located, routinised by hegemonic practices of interpretation or otherwise subordinated. It is what Bourdieu calls a naturalisation effect of the ‘mental structures’ which define social positions:

The great social oppositions objectified in physical space (as with the capital versus the provinces) tend to be reproduced in thought and in language as oppositions constitutive of a principle of vision and division, as categories of perception and evaluation or of mental structures. (Bourdieu et al., 1999, p. 125)

Stepping a bit further, we can see that their everyday construction as a coherent composite, by means of these pairs of opposed values in different teleological series (different formal courses of action, for Simmel, with content related to gender, class, race and mobility in Vitória’s case), is therefore aesthetically recognisable. The recognisable, a relational product, is nevertheless understood as a self-reifying and self-embodying feature, in body shapes, but also in forms of social performance and orality. If Vitória’s white daughter were to have a child with a black phenotype, this would constitute a defeat in the complex family-gender-class-race-religion project that emerges from the collective experience in which Vitória was socialised. Throughout the flux of everyday life, the construction of this ‘intersectionality’ is not evident at first glance, except in terms of its sensory dimension: the politics of the composition of the social markers of difference is reflected through a set of signs and boundaries coherent to anyone who shares their meanings, effectively serving as an aesthetic of difference.

There is thus an ‘aesthetic’ at the base of politics that has nothing to do with the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ belonging to the ‘age of the masses’ of which Benjamin speaks. This aesthetic should not be understood as a perverse capturing of politics by an artistic will, by the viewing of people as a work of art. Extending the analogy reveals it may be conceived of in a Kantian sense – eventually touched on by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what one feels. (Rancière, 2005, p. 16, emphasis added)⁷

This sense of a priori forms, opening up to make way for the interpositioning of the most diverse of contents – sexuality and madness, for example – that Jacques Rancière identifies in Michel Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ [apparatus] (1976), is in close dialogue with the formal sociology as suggested by Georg Simmel (2010a [1918], p1):

Man’s position in the world is defined by the fact he constantly finds himself between two boundaries in every dimension of his being and behaviour. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled as it always is with different contents in life’s diverse provinces, activities and destinies. We feel that the content and the value of every hour lies somewhere between a higher and a lower value; every thought between a wiser and a foolish value; every possession between a more extended and a more limited value; and every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy and morality. We are constantly orienting ourselves, even when we do not employ abstract concepts, to an ‘over us’ and an ‘under us’, to a right or a left, to a more or less, a tighter or looser, a better or a worse. The boundary, above and below, is our means of finding direction in the infinite space of our worlds. Along with the fact that boundaries are both constant and pervasive, we are boundaries ourselves. For insofar as every content in life – every feeling, experience, deed, or thought – possesses a specific intensity, a specific hue, a specific quantity and a specific position in some order of things, each content produces a continuum in two directions, toward its two poles; participating contentedly in each of these two continua, which both collide in it and are delimited by it.

Categorical regimes are difficult to study and particularly difficult to compare, because the meanings expressed invariably refer to situated series of interactions that are therefore always distinct from one another. The categorical systems used by each group are also theirs for a variable period of time. Catholics ritualising their beliefs on a weekly basis tend to remain Catholic for longer than Catholics who never participate in such rituals. Categories can also serve as causal elements or consequences of series of action: ‘gender’ in one example both constructs the marriages of Vitória’s daughters and is constructed by them. In light of this reflection, I believe it is possible to affirm that categories always simultaneously constitute:

1 a situated position in an interval of values naturalised by routine, a regime, therefore serving as a classification according to parameters of valuation supported by a situated ideal for a given group in a given space and time. Our lives see us evaluating and valuing all of the situations we find ourselves in, involving actions as diverse as other drivers’ manoeuvres or our children’s drawings, with the way things are said and Instagram posts being a basis for the ideal parameters in each situation (‘you can’t expect any better from a five-year-old …’), in each era (you wouldn’t have imagined it possible to rate a Skype call as ‘poor’ thirty years ago) and in each aesthetic specific to our situated experiences (amateur photographs are evaluated differently to those taken by professionals). We both express and withhold these judgements based on categories or categorical silences. The category of ‘negro’, for example, occupies a position in terms of an evaluative series of races and ethnicities in different contexts, and Vitória employed it in a significant scale of values learnt by socialisation, in order to evaluate her life story. The problem with categories – and categorical silences – is in this sense that of value judgements (Simmel, 1990 [1900], particularly part 1);

2 an interval itself among many others that could potentially be applied and an interval socially elected by a given group as suitable for evaluating a given situation, in its historical construction and according to the agency of its subjects; one which, between an infinite number of other passive intervals or scales, potentially offers pragmatic parameters for the action or daily performance, from the most intimate to the most public. Vitória chose race to place in the centre of the evaluation of her social mobility. Subjects are often used from completely distinct criteria (different categorical intervals, different series of meanings) in order to evaluate the same situation. In one example, homo-affective love may be read as the categorical scale of carnal love or of romantic love, or of Christian sin, or of citizens’ rights, depending on the group and situation at hand. Categorisation therefore implies a choice on the scale of values, a choice which is made while simultaneously issuing its value judgement – which, however, constitutes a formal choice and not one of content. A choice of the interval of contents therefore belongs to the classification to be employed in accordingly each situation;

3 a practical definition of appropriateness to a situation, even if it ru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Boundaries of difference: on essence and deconstruction
• 2 Legitimacy in dispute: the boundaries of the ‘world of crime’ in São Paulo
• 3 Coexistence
• 4 Crime and punishment in the city: repertories of justice and homicides in São Paulo
• 5 Violence and its management
• 6 Government produces crime, crime produces government: São Paulo’s apparatus for homicide management
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index