The Origin, a methodological window

Benjamin's Origin as dialectical image: the fractal, the eddy, and history's emergency brake.

The five preceding essays describe different faces of the First Republic, seen through Benjamin's category of Origin. The approach is necessarily incomplete; other perspectives could be used. For Benjamin, Origin is neither the beginning of something nor its genesis, but the historical appearance of an extremely dynamic phenomenon in which several threads of the past tangle and crystallise, reaching the present time and unfolding into the future. Origin is always mobile and always incomplete: a whirlpool, as Benjamin says. In that whirlpool remains and projects, conflicts and solidarities, ruin and redemption are all mixed together.

Benjamin's concept of Origin arises in direct opposition to the notion of a linear time leading inevitably to progress. Origin is a historical process of appearance in time, the critical place where a complex phenomenon presents itself, defined by a diversity of aspects, where becoming and perishing are mixed, forming a constellation. Distant fragments are gathered, producing a new unity of sense. The constellation of the Origin is a dialectical image. Benjamin writes: "It is not that the past casts its light on the present, or the present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation."

6.1 The constellation of the Origin as dialectical image

To examine the physiognomy of that constellation is what constitutes the approach to the First Republic through the Origin. Origin is not merely an inaugural point on a homogeneous chronological line. In naming the Origin a dialectical image, Benjamin defines its hybrid and complex character, revealing a diversity of historical forces that interlace and strain against one another in constant movement. The historian examines the dialectical image formed by the Origin as the snapshot of a particular configuration seized in a flash; it is necessary to stop the movement of the original whirlpool in order to take it up as dialectic suspended. The dialectical image, Benjamin says, is the tiger's leap, in which the relation between past and present is extracted from temporal continuity.

The Origin is a historical and temporal cluster, not merely the result of separate linear processes — the economic cause, social causes, cultural causes and so on — which constitute the traditional historicist perspective. Historicist multicausality treats a separable bundle of individualised and uniform causes, leading to a fixed event that emerges ready-made in the chronology. It is as though those bundles were defined by a Euclidean geometry whose dimensions are whole numbers. Such causal bundles certainly exist, but in the perspective of the Origin they are articulated otherwise.

As Origin, the resulting phenomenon is multiple and not uniform. There are no uniform causal bundles; the condition is that of a whirlpool. What is at issue is a mixture of temporalities, of voices hidden by official history, of fragments that flash up irreversibly at the moment they are recognised, forming the drawing of a constellation. The Origin is always unfinished because it is in constant movement, taking on new aspects and shedding others. The different causes are mixed and shattered in the physiognomy of the historical phenomenon, colliding and flowing dynamically, advancing toward the future, creating heterogeneous temporal knots, stagnating some circuits, ruining others, resurrecting what had been concealed. Historical phenomena under the optic of the Benjaminian Origin constitute a fractal physiognomy, in the sense of Mandelbrot's fractal geometry.

6.2 Origin and the self-similarity of the fractal

Their unfolding in time reveals aspects of self-similarity, such that, in spite of complex patterns in constant movement, an underlying order is revealed. Fractal geometry works with fractions. The same element that in the historicist approach is a uniform bundle of whole numbers may, in the complex system of fractals, have a dimension of nought point seven five, or any other fraction, raising the degree of sensitivity to the complexity of the image presented in the constellation of the Origin. Small variations in structure, details almost imperceptible, can generate important transformations in the general system. In fractal geometry the knots — the points of meeting and bifurcation among the multiple elements that constitute the emergence of a historical phenomenon — repeat at different scales, producing a web of infinite complexity that unfolds in time.

6.3

The Origin will never be a single event. The stars may be fixed, as the facts that actually occurred are fixed: the abandonment of the Port of Torres project in the First Republic, the fiscal manipulation, and the rest. And yet the drawing of the constellation is mobile, depending on the configuration of the present that looks at the stars. The final drawing may be altered at any moment, depending on which fixed points are gathered in and which left out in configuring a particular constellation of the Origin. Since the coordinates of the present are variable, the image becomes highly dynamic, for it depends on its knowability in the present. And it will always be incomplete, because it would be impossible to summon all the stars — that is, all the facts that occurred — into the drawing of one original constellation.

As a cluster of fractals, the different fixed elements — each generated fractal — always keep a relation of self-similarity with the totality of the image formed, and with all the other elements taking part in the constellation. That relation of self-similarity is maintained across different scales, dimensions and spheres, as in the examples above: ports, education, architecture, armed conflict — all refer back to a self-similar totality that recognises them and accommodates them in their fractal diversity.

6.4 The emergency brake of history

The points are linked by connections, forming knots. Some can be undone; others require that the threads leading to the connection be cut. The way of cutting a knot, or of interrupting some element of the original physiognomy of the phenomenon in its historical unfolding, is what Benjamin calls pulling the emergency brake of history. Sometimes stopping the train of history is positive and opens the possibility that an alternative path may be taken; at other times the train may derail, and the disaster be greater still.

In the case of the First Republic, its proclamation corresponds to such a pull of the brake in relation to the preceding regime. It was not an organic process but something forced and artificial. It involved conspiracy, betrayal, concealment, personal rancour, ambition, a lack of understanding, and contempt for national identity. The motives for pulling the brake can themselves be approached through the category of Origin and, in a certain way, contribute to the formation of the original image of the First Republic. This is one of the reasons Benjamin says that the category of Origin is always unfinished. An infinity of original dialectical images of the First Republic can be generated, depending on the present that collides with that past, and on the particular fragments that meet the present.

6.5 A pull of the brake: the revolution of 1930

The revolution of 1930 was an attempt to break with the Origin. Vargas not only interrupted the coffee-and-milk pairing; he restored the presence of Rio Grande do Sul in national politics. President Washington Luís, a paulista, tried to override the mineiros by interrupting the alternation of power and named another paulista, Júlio Prestes, for the presidency. Prestes was elected, but the Liberal Alliance found electoral fraud — one of the fixed stars in the constellation of the Origin. Vargas allied himself with the mineiros and, on 24 October, Washington Luís was deposed by a military junta, preventing the paulista from taking office. There were military movements across the country. On 3 November 1930 the provisional governing junta formally transmitted power to Getúlio Vargas.

The First Republic ended, but the Origin remained active in its unfoldings. Above all because the Origin of Vargas's own political career was bound to the Origin of the First Republic. His father, Manuel do Nascimento Vargas, had been one of the closest collaborators of Castilhos, taking part in conspiracies in Uruguay for his seizure of power, and afterwards fighting ferociously to preserve him, side by side with the florianista troops. Getúlio presented himself as a conciliator of the differences between maragatos and castilhistas. His mother was the sister of Dinarte Dornelles, a maragato leader who fought bravely against the castilhistas. And yet the affinity with the paternal dynamic prevailed. Getúlio could hardly escape his political Origin. Coups, dictatorship, the fascist cast of the 1930s, were in full accord with his castilhista origin.

There is even an ironic coincidence of dates in that pulling of the emergency brake. He himself was encapsulated in that Origin, and only partly managed to travel alternative paths. The State wanted to be New, and ended by replicating original forms. This is not determinism but a matter of choices, of discernment and of circumstance: the whole man is called upon to awaken the weak messianic force that the past claims and needs in order to redeem what might have been. The Origin replicates itself in the symmetry of its fractals. The rules may be simple or complex, but they are rational.

The twenty-fourth of October, the day of the deposition of Washington Luís — who had betrayed his commitment to Minas Gerais, and thereby opened the door to the alliance between Vargas and the mineiros — was also the day of the death of Castilhos, the Origin of the political power of the Vargas family. Castilhos betrayed several companions and commitments in his struggle for power. Gradually Vargas would draw away from his mineiro allies, indispensable to his seizure of power on 3 November. That date is one more signature of the Origin with which he would not break: a fractal. It was on a third of November that Deodoro closed Congress, arrested political leaders and decreed a state of siege. Vargas would govern without a congress for twelve years, in two distinct periods. He governed according to the state constitution of Castilhos, concentrating the functions of the legislature and the executive. The paulistas revolted; the abandoned mineiros signed an open letter asking for the extinction of the New State. Incapable of breaking with his personal Origin, Vargas succumbed to the original dictatorship.

Every history has its pre-history, and its post-history, for the Origin is at once restoration and incompleteness. In trying to originate a new path for the Brazilian Republic, Vargas enacted a fractal of the First Republic itself and of the castilhista post-history, while Castilhos was part of Vargas's pre-history. Though it is not determinism, the Origin defines a conditioning, a constellation that unfolds in time, moving in a temporal whirlpool, provoking the collision of pasts, presents and futures that fractalise one another. The corruption that invaded the Vargas government casts a glance back at the corruption that finally brought down Deodoro. To break with the fractals of the Origin in their historical unfolding is, in Benjamin's language, a practically messianic feat. Vargas's suicide is one of the most dramatic pulls of the emergency brake, ending his attempt to interrupt the original train of the First Republic.

6.6

To use the concept of Origin as a methodological window for approaching complex phenomena — the First Republic, the New State, or any other — does not replace the specific analysis of historical phenomena. Its fundamental sense is to show how fragments of past events unfold in time, collide with the present, advance upon the future, and generate recognisable patterns of self-similarity that escape any fixed causality. The mutability and incompleteness of the Origin make it possible to alter those fractal patterns, transforming them into new original whirlpools of alternative paths, restoring pasts that had fallen asleep. That possibility lies in the weak messianic force that each of us receives on hearing a call from the past. Benjamin writes: "There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply."

A note on symmetry. In symmetry, forms remain identical through transformations that follow determined rules. By reversing the rules applied — which are mathematically precise — to figures that appear diverse, the original identity between them presents itself. The geometrical metaphor suits the phenomena of the Origin, generating fractalisation as historical variants. Symmetry is discussed at greater length elsewhere.