Abstract
We discuss the way the early quarantine period during the coronavirus crisis illuminated some aspects of previous daily life in downtown São Paulo. Changes in our surroundings and withdrawal into confinement elicited a new relationship to the senses and to imagination. With that, it became apparent the degree to which the free use of these faculties is repressed by violence and inequality, as they are usually manifest in the city center. We explore the idea that some of the changes in social interaction, as they became widespread during the pandemic, were already prefigured in the relationship between social classes in this part of town. We then discuss the dependency this has on the spacialization of social inequalities in the urban fabric.
This text was written when quarantining against coronavirus was still a fresh and unknown experience. It captures a few fleeting insights as they were present for us when those conditions of life were still extraordinary. Quarantine had its own opportunity to undergo routinization afterwards. With that came eventually also a weakening of the sensibilities we talk about here. They had their best and only life at the moment of their birth. From their memory we take some of the lessons below, but also a vivid intuition of how distant they are again from the present. For this reason, we opted for not changing or complementing what is written profoundly, with only one exception: verb tenses are now in the past. We leave this text for what it is: a portrait and a postcard from a moment in our experience that now recedes in time, but survives in our memories for the uniqueness of its feeling and the importance of the questions it raised.
In 2020, Brazil faced the pandemic as a political issue. Acceptance of the fact that the virus was spreading, and had potentially lethal effects, became an artifact of disagreement between political adversaries. The federal government, represented by ex-president Bolsonaro and his followers, took measures that downplayed – or straightforward rejected – both the existence of the virus, and the state’s responsibility in providing conditions for care. Those admitting that something needed to be done were far from forming a homogeneous group. At the federative level, arguing in favor of strict prophylactic measures became an instrument in the opposition between different fractions of the right. This was the case with João Doria, then governor of the state of São Paulo. Doria was as much involved with the election of Bolsonaro as he would then try to detach his position from that of the ex-president. They seemed to disagree on how many people were worth killing in the name of economic and cultural recovery.
Common sense was then increasingly tending to center between conservative and reactionary alternatives. Left groups were undergoing a process of suppression, but were not impotent in struggling against the most outrageous measures. There were relevant street demonstrations during the quarantine period. The conflicts between the directives coming from Brasília and the relative autonomy of local instances shaped much of the rhythm in which daily life was altered across the country. Urban and rural areas were differently affected, according to the functioning of public services and government in each place.
We could not speak for the totality of the country, the state or the city; but we can count on having witnessed a part of the life changes in one of the epicenters of the pandemics: downtown São Paulo. The very fact that quarantine required staying at home restricted our field of observation. On the other hand, the fact that it was actually possible for us to stay safe for the most part, without losing our jobs, tells something about the social position from which this is being written. The pandemic has not been, for us, anywhere near as dramatic as for those actually facing high risk and lack of care. Research agreed time and again that class and race were strongly determinant of who got to die in the end. In this respect, we were not among those facing the worst.
On the other hand, the region we were living in was among the ones most affected by the virus. In downtown São Paulo, class, race and gender inequality blow up in every corner. It is a place of rich cultural and anthropological diversity, but also of violence, misery and fear. Taking a step back from all that offered an opportunity to highlight the way daily life falsifies consciousness. It allowed us to reflect on the most immediate, sensory and psychic dimensions of routine, as they are affected by local conditions of life.
Downtown São Paulo breeds an emphatically private way of living. Lack of interest, and sometimes aggressiveness toward others, are ubiquitous. Squeezed bodies in buses and train wagons avoid eye contact, pushing each other to get to work on time. This, combined with the imperative for urban safety, means that São Paulo had its eyes turned to the inside long before the pandemic started.
This somewhat general trait must be considered against a more concrete description of who is interacting. We cannot here present a rigorous social stratification. We would rather emphasize one aspect of it: the abundance of miserable people on the streets. An intricate network of drug dealers, prostitutes, alcoholics and the homeless are as much a part of the routine scenario as local commerce, businessmen and women, students, informal workers. The strong presence of the police and other representatives of the state makes for the other side of the polarity.
Testimonying the miserable is unavoidable for anyone living in this area. One of the first palpable effects of the pandemic, however, was that many of them vanished from the surroundings. The streets went empty. Perhaps the police enjoyed the lack of witnesses to arrest or disperse more of the poor. Perhaps coronavirus itself made some of its victims among them. Perhaps they reorganized their routes, as some of them are dependent on the circulation of people to make a living.
Informal economic and crime networks strongly determine local life. They act as a set of social relations juxtaposed to, sometimes transitioning into formal commerce. The pandemic did not only affect production and legal exchange. It made life conditions even harsher for those depending on these marginalized circuits of exchange. This affected much of the day-to-day sociability in the area, as central aspects of local psychic life are determined by avoidance of, negotiation with and violence against the miserable.
A common response to the suffering on the streets in São Paulo is to develop a splitting: both knowing and not knowing what is going on around. Absolute suppression of the evidence of poverty would be perhaps too costly, but lesser degrees of denial of reality are commonly achieved. Fear, guilt and compassion are substituted for a hardening of the heart and the senses. The room left for sensing ourselves and others shrinks. This is certainly one of the sources for the typical downtown ‘rush’ attitude. Nobody will walk relaxedly on the streets, as there is always something (or someone) to fear and avoid. As regards the tempo of life, in downtown São Paulo, space commands time.
Quarantine thus brought to its realization what is usually the latent tendency in the class relations in the area: to suppress the experience of difference. Those actually staying home initially faced a generalized hypoesthesia. The world of perception was suddenly restrained to what can be experienced within the house or apartment. The main exception was perhaps the experience of gazing through the window. Psychic values were redistributed across the urban space, as desire roamed through the visible portions of the city, searching for what went missing with the suspension of interaction. Fractions of buildings and streets suddenly gained in detail and interest. Fantasy filled the emptied streets with the ghosts of our lost pleasures.
With the compression of experience into a very definite inward space, outside life was inflated in its imaginary significance. Perception of distance and the effort in locomotion adjusted itself to that. Space, which once figured as the background for daily practical activities, was now brought to consciousness as the protagonist it always was. This was reduplicated in the life of dreams, where – at least for one of us – fractions of buildings and locations from earlier times started condensing more of what the dream text had to say. A new economy of sensory life sketched itself for some time.
That it was possible to dream in more depth is related to how much more silent the city became. This is not only an effect of the absence of people on the streets, but also of changes in the mobility system, which for some time had fewer buses, and generally fewer cars around. Downtown São Paulo is an enemy of dream life. People will usually be heard talking, screaming, fighting, all through the night. The noise of automobiles is not lessened either. Sleeping in depth is hard, and so is achieving an experience of intimacy with oneself. But waking life is not better. Rotten food, garbage and urine are common remnants of the night activities in the city. If noise was not there, then the smell on the streets would be a reminder of how social relations go in the region. Inequality leaves its trace in the nose and the ears as well.
With quarantine, it became possible to release some of the energy previously being spent in not knowing what went on around. Freed from the effort to avoid everyday violence, we reactivated our senses. What was previously a private attitude, lived out in public space, now turned to public space as the silent promise of a better life. Isolation made a curious paradox out of that. The lack of human presence on the streets appeared as the condition for reimagining what a more deeply human experience of urban space could look like. However, suppression of the daily evidence of inequality does not do away with it. The illusion of a more humane city in isolation is already the illusion we cultivate every day, in order to live through the intolerable. There would be no retrieval of interaction without facing everything that damages interaction so much in daily life.
Inequality and spatial segregation are not new features in São Paulo. ‘Neighborhoodist’ culture – a way of expressing class and status positions by tying them to geographic locations – is a lot more related to the abyss in income and educational levels between classes than to the size of our urban area. Each neighborhood has its own possibilities for living, trading and leisure, associated with land price. It is not a coincidence that research back then showed that the epicenters of contagion lay mainly in the periphery of the city, while the number of hospitalizations was bigger in central areas.
Class, ethnicity and other aspects participate in determining which islands in the archipelago of urban space will be familiar to each person. Mobility restricted to the neighborhood enhances this insular quality of urban experience. It makes it look like the world is actually reducible to a few quarters. Just how many quarters was, again, a matter of who was actually allowed to stay home, and how well distributed supermarkets, drug stores and other facilities were in each part of town. Class regulated risk. The pandemic highlighted the usually invisible connections tying people together. All our actions happen in a common, albeit stratified, space, and hence impact others. The routes of infection were a negative reminder of that.
In São Paulo, public transport is usually taken by need, not by choice. The rich tend to opt for private means, as they can afford them. The stigma on our mobility systems does not help develop a sustainable way of life either. The obligation of staying home thus had a presumably lesser effect on those who could not (or did not want to) follow the sanitary recommendations. This applies both to workers in so-called essential services; to those whose bosses did not, or could not let them stay home; and to a segment of citizens that, regardless of their working conditions, invested the prophylactic measures with a political meaning, refusing to obey them.
Fear of contagion forced us to look around closely, and amplified the possibilities of perception buried in our earlier routine. It brought attention to the details in everyday spaces, usually swallowed by the needs of work and survival. The tactics for avoiding contact with other people on the streets were, however, already prefigured by the middle- and upper-class handling of the presence of the poor. Avoidance of every bypasser as dangerous was only a more explicit enactment of a trend already latent in downtown São Paulo, as it spread from interaction with the miserable to interaction with everybody else. In this and in other respects, the early stages of the quarantine threw a vanishing light over local daily life and its ideological presuppositions. They gave us the opportunity to recover a freshness in experience that is usually removed from everyday consciousness in São Paulo. They also made transparent the degree to which this removal is a condition for social relations remaining as they are.