the elderly, the mentally ill, and the disabled in the most problematic of conditions (Ferreira de Mello 2001; Comissão de Direitos Humanos 2000).
That so many are regarded as superfluous testifies to the further dissolution of the country’s moral fabric. The Brazilian middle class, for instance, has historically acted as a buffer between the elite and the poor, as both guardian of morality and advocate for progressive politics. But in the wake of the country’s democratization and fast-paced neoliberalization, this vein of moral sensitivity and political responsibility has been largely replaced by sheer contempt, sociophobia, or sporadic acts of charity like the ones that sustain Vita (Freire Costa 1994, 2000; Kehl 2000; Ribeiro 2000; Caldeira 2002).
The abandoned in Vita know of death, and, when listened to, they offer insights into its fabrication. Their abandonment is part of a larger human life-context—it was realized in many domestic and public sites and through intricate medical transactions coexisting with already entrenched strategies of nonintervention. It is this apparently unknown relation of letting die to the constitution of private lives and public domains that an ethnography of Vita helps to illuminate.28
“A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt,” writes Gilles Deleuze as he elaborates his idea of the fate of anthropos within the development of late capitalism. Deleuze speaks of the erosion of disciplinary and welfare institutions and the concurrent emergence of new forms of control in affluent contexts—“controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (1995:178). Family, school, army, and factory are increasingly “transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators” (181). He explains: “Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of workers-schoolkids or bureaucratic-students” (174, 175). According to Deleuze, “we’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividuals’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (180).
The market, however, keeps generating both wealth and misery, movement and immobility. “One thing, it’s true, hasn’t changed—capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos” (Deleuze 1995:181). There are too many people to include them all in the market and its flows. The question of what to do with these surplus bodies, with no apparent value and no way to survive and prosper, is no longer at the core of sovereignty and its outmoded populist welfare rhetoric. Their destinies are now determined by a whole new array of networks, and, as formal institutions either vanish or face ruin and governmental distance is crystallized, the household is further politicized.
As I traveled throughout the country, I could see signs of Vita everywhere: death and dying in the midst of Brazil’s big cities, Vita as a social destiny. True, statistics were showing important improvements in areas such as infant mortality and literacy, and the Cardoso administration was experimenting with significant new forms of governmentality whereby patient groups could mobilize within the state and have their demands for life-extending treatments realized (AIDS programs are by far the most visible and successful story of the reforming state).29 But even though the poorest could now also access medication and basic medical care in local (and often poorly functioning) branches of the universal health care system, I found an immense distress among these individuals over lack of housing and jobs, safety, and growing police violence. People I interviewed conveyed an overall sense that they had failed their children and themselves.
José Duarte, his wife, and four little children lived in a hut made of plastic bags, on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Salvador. I met him at a breakfast meeting for the homeless that had been organized by a group of Catholic volunteers. José had come to get food for his family. They had been evicted from the city’s historic district, which was being remodeled as a tourist center.
“The government kicked us out. The little compensation they gave us was only enough to buy this little piece of land next to a swamp. I worked downtown, sold ice cream, but now it takes me two hours to get there by bus. Winter is tough. How can I make money? What will the children eat?” He began to weep.
“The kids are all sick; rain passes through the plastic. Who has health? Health nobody has. . . . Every day we are ill, all kinds of illnesses, it is never good. There is no medical aid. Only if one has money for the bus and gets in line early in the morning and waits till late at night. But then one loses the day of work. To waste time, that is all there is. At home, wasted, looking at the children, hungry, lacking sandals, clothing. . . . I am so enraged”—he had no words to account for his failed struggles as a worker and his desperation as a father.
“The government says it wants to help. But you end up talking to so many people in this and that office, signing forms—and they don’t get back to you. They don’t listen. They do nothing. They have made the life of the poor even more difficult. Only the president can solve the problem of Brazil. He is the only one who could do something. But people like me can’t talk to him, and he does not know what is happening in the city. The only way to reach the president’s ears is if I were to go to TV. But to be on TV, you must have resources, and we all have the same story that people don’t want to hear. To do what?”
José’s words echoed philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro’s strong critique of Brazil’s political-economic culture: “In Brazil it is actually possible to imagine a discourse that aims at the end of the social in order to emancipate society.” The categories social and society do not pertain to the same people and worlds of rights: “social refers to the needy, and society refers to the efficient ones” (2000:21). State and marketing discourses transmit the conviction that society is active as economy and passive as social life. “The objects of social action are assumed not to be able to become an integral and efficient member of society” (22). In sum, according to Ribeiro, dominant discourses “have privatized society” (24).
José’s troubled existence was caught in ceaseless contact with governmental services, but to no avail. He knew quite well that he and his family were part of a repetitive machine that spoke a language of accountability, while in practice the citizen faced indifference and his voice was lost. Meanwhile, José has learned to use his anguish and subjectivity to evoke moral sentiments in order to procure at least minimal objective help, which is so desperately needed.
This is an example of what people still outside Vita and similar institutions must do in order to survive as they are driven further into poverty and despair: some twenty homeless persons, including children, invaded an abandoned zoological garden in a city near Porto Alegre in the late 1990s. The squatters made their rooms in the cages. “Luiz Carlos Apio is one of the new residents of the Zoo,” wrote the newsletter Jornal da Ciência. “He is handicapped and an unemployed auto worker. Luiz made his house in the place formerly set aside for the rabbits. In order to enter, he has to go through a small door no more than half a meter high” (Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência 1998:24). For those who have no money, social life is the physiological struggle to survive. This plight is intrinsic to an economy thriving on an image of action, efficiency, and modernity, concludes Ribeiro—“we live a kind of schizophrenia” (2000:24).
In the bodies of the abandoned—such as those residents of Vita—political and social forms of life and thereby subjectivity have literally entered into a symbiosis with death without those bodies belonging to the world of the deceased.30
Consider Clifford Geertz’s chilling reflections on the technically and
