Modernism, repurification and the memory of the present

Abstract

Virno claims that the society of the spectacle is no more than a potentialized "modernariat", in which modern collectionist fury transforms the present into a permanent universal exhibit. 1922 marks the year of the Modern Art Week, but it is also the year of the Centennial exhibit, in which Brazilian modernism attempted to put on display a specific universal exhibit where East and West would be contiguous and contemporaneous. However, the subject resulting from this unificatory operation ended up splitting in two: a subject who offers himself to the exhibit and a subject who is anesthetized before the spectacle. This modernist will to power leads to the conclusion that there is no potency that is not primitive, but also that there is no primitivism that is not potent.