Reading previous interviews, I saw that your interest in philosophy comes from adolescence. Is that true? It’s true. I must have been 12 years old and I discovered in my father’s library, while on vacation in Blumenau, without much to do, and really bored – I used to read a lot, I’ve always read –, a history of philosophy book by Will Durant, which is sort of my talisman. Later I lost it, and someone gave it to me again as a gift. I still have it. And then I fell in love – irremediably – with philosophy, but with a bias for history, the history of philosophy. Philosophy itself, which is technical, hard, leaves me cold, but the history of philosophy has been a delight for me – ever since then. The first book I bought with my own money, out of my pocket – I was 13 years old, was, in Minas Gerais, The Republic, by Plato.
When you were only 13 years old? Thirteen years old. That was sort of a moment of promotion, I promoted myself to an adult when I bought The Republic. And from then on, I always wanted to be a professor. Even when I had other vocations, I wanted to be a priest and such, but a professor.
Did you seriously want to be a priest? Seriously, seriously. A priest – even, if possible, a saint also. But a professor. So, when I went to take my university entrance exam, I thought I would be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer. I’ve liked law until today. I don’t like the profession, the laws, but law in itself I like a lot.
Philosophy of Law. Yes, I thought I would be a professor of that. So I went to take the law entrance exam, to have this profession. And I also thought of doing the philosophy exam. Later I arrived at the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to do well in both courses. Law is a regulated profession, it requires university, philosophy does not. And so I continued studying like I did since I was 12, 13 years old: on my own, as an enthusiast. It was not as an enthusiast, because I took it very seriously, but without the guidance of a professor, of a teacher. I had one philosophy professor, just one, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, a theorist of psychoanalysis. I had one year of Philosophy, that was all in terms of formal education. I went to do law, and there, very evidently, my interest went to Introduction to the Science of Law, as it was called, which was an epistemology, and Philosophy of Law. I took the other subjects, I always liked the more philosophical parts, much more than the dogmatic legal parts, the actual laws. That didn’t interest me much.
Were you able to finish the course? I finished the course, I graduated alright, escaping from the police at the time. I was in the resistance movement against the dictatorship, I was in the Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – Palmares, and with the Army after me. One year there, I failed the entire year. I was able to pass somehow, in order to be able to graduate the following year. But I graduated, and I went to look for the dean.
At what university? At PUC. Next I went to look for the dean of the Center for Social Sciences, to which the College of Law belonged, who was Carlos Alberto, who later became a minister of the Supreme Federal Court (STF). I was well-liked at the College of Law, where he was a professor. He was my professor for a while. And I said: “I want to be a professor here, it’s my vocation in life. I want to be the professor of Introduction to the Science of Law, Philosophy of Law” and such. He said: “You can’t, because you would have to have a master’s at Harvard.” I said: “But that’s not possible, there are professors here who don’t have a master’s.”
Was it only a justification? Yes, because it was entirely false. I think not even he had a master’s at Harvard. A bunch of professors there didn’t have a master’s. There was even the position of teaching assistant, a person who wasn’t even an actual professor: he or she would join as a professor after getting a master’s, but would begin by teaching classes. I had been an academic assistant, which was almost a professor, while still a student. So I knew what was going on. We had a great friend, my wife and I, I met him through her: José Simeão Leal, who was the cofounder of ECO, the second director. I looked for him and said: “Simeão, I want to be a Philosophy professor.” “At ECO there are sociologists, there are anthropologists, philosophers. Emmanuel Carneiro Leão is there. But I won’t nominate you. You’ll go do an interview. If they like you... Because it’ll look bad for me, I’m your friend.” I did it, I joined, and that was it.
In what year did you join? In September of 1971. What I always taught there was history of philosophy, and philosophy of language. In March of 1972 Carneiro Leão created the master’s program. He was the first and, for a long time, the only coordinator of the postgraduate program – at the time, he was called the “adjunct-director of the postgraduate program.” Afterwards it was Muniz Sodré, then it was me, then it was Emmanuel, then it was me, then it was Muniz, until the program matured and we were able to pass it on. And today it is the only postgraduate course with a grade of 6 at CAPES. It only goes to 7, but 7 is for the courses with a large international presence. In the area of communication, that’s difficult. It happens in history, philosophy, sociology, the social sciences in general, but in communication it’s difficult. But we’re going to work hard to get there. After around five months of ECO, I began doing the master’s. I was in the first group, with Muniz as well.
You’re a cofounder as well, then. As a student, I’m a founder. At the school, I’m not, because it was created two, three years earlier. When I joined, José Carlos Lisboa, who was the first director, was no longer. The director was already Simeão. So I was always considered one of the founders of the school. The three of us, Carneiro Leão, Muniz, and I, carried the school from the point of view of its implantation and of the strategy of taking communication from the level of journalism – which is the Latin American way of considering communication – and going more toward the theoretical, European, French dimension, which later fed our master’s program… Anyway, Carneiro Leão was without a doubt the leader of this process; and Muniz, who is five years older than me – at the time, this made a difference –, had more experience and such; and me, right afterwards. Later, to the extent that we were getting older also, the age difference disappeared. So, the three of us were responsible, looking back, for implanting the school itself and the postgraduate program. And we ended up, in part, concentrating more on the postgraduate program. I taught in the undergraduate program from 1971 to 1975. Afterwards, I was only in the postgraduate program, until 2006. Carneiro Leão, only in the postgraduate program. Muniz still taught a subject from time to time in the undergraduate program. For a while, he only taught in the postgraduate program, also. So, we concentrated a lot on making the postgraduate program at ECO be an experiment, an adventure in thinking.
You weren’t anchored in a theory. No. That was the beauty of it. Since the school was very new, and therefore we didn’t have a tradition to respect, we created our tradition. From nothing, from scratch. There was a divorce between the postgraduate and undergraduate programs for a certain time. In the postgraduate program, the idea was to encompass the human communication phenomenon in all of its dimensions, not restricted to the practice of communication professions, such as journalism, advertising, public relations, editing. To study the human communication phenomenon, embrace it with all of the possibilities of having access to it. So philosophy was, without a doubt, an access to it, through the philosophy of language; sociology, obviously, without any doubt. Through philosophy, Carneiro Leão joined, I joined; Muniz joined through sociology, and through anthropology as well. Heloisa arrived there through letters, but also her direction more towards cultural studies, later, had already begun. So, the implantation of our postgraduate program was done, almost spontaneously, in a transdisciplinary manner. We did not decide: “Let’s do a transdisciplinary master’s program.” We decided that the communication phenomenon would be looked at through all possible angles, edges, and circumferences.
There was a psychoanalytic bias as well, wasn’t there? There was. MD Magno, Maria Helena Junqueira and Fabio Lacombe were there, Maria and Fabio have been there until today. They are no longer teaching in the postgraduate program, but they are at the school. So, there were the philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychoanalytical, legal, economic, linguistic, semiological biases. Anyway, the social sciences are there. And others: a mathematical bias, because of cybernetics and informatics, which in the beginning was very interesting to us. People came from the Ilha do Fundão campus, from Engineering, to give us classes on this. Later, it ended, because it wasn’t exactly our path.
But you tried it? We tried it. And information theory as such, without the mathematical, computational part, remained. There was a great professor of ours, Francisco Antonio Doria, who was a mathematician, a professor at the Physics Institute. He was a founder of the school. He left and later came back. He was responsible for this, let’s call it numeric, part of communication phenomena. So, these were the golden years of the implantation of the master’s program, from 1972 to 1983. In 1983, we created the doctorate. In the meantime, the research experiment in the postgraduate program was becoming clear to us. In this sense, there was no project before the master’s program, Emmanuel skipped a stage. The school had only recently been created, three, four years earlier, so there was no critical mass to do a postgraduate program. He sped up the process and created the postgraduate program in order to create a school, a strong college out of it. And, in the process, we went on reflecting, then, on what that transdisciplinarity in action – what we were seeing produced there – had of a project, which was our own, what was being taken from it, how, reflecting on this experiment of research and of transdisciplinary teaching, interfaces were designed there, what the characteristic, the DNA of the school was. All of the subjects had compound names: it was Communication and Law, Communication and Philosophy, Communication and Anthropology. So, from this multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary richness, what we could take as characteristic: this here is ECO, it’s only ECO. When the master’s program at ECO began, USP’s ECA began also.
They are contemporary, but very different, right? Contemporaries and rivals. The folks at USP, very devoted to professional practices – master’s in Journalism, master’s in Advertising, master’s in Radio –, for media languages, therefore. The master’s at UNICAMP was developed later, which was devoted to communication technologies. And ours, which they considered philosophical and European, French, discursive – it was what the folks in São Paulo criticized us for. And, since they had power at CAPES, at CNPq, this was, over time, a struggle. Ours, then, was characterized as a postgraduate course in which one asks about the basics of communication. If you look at the structure of ECO, today, there are three departments. One is called the Department of Communication Basics. This is the trademark, the fingerprint of the postgraduate program. And all of the programs’ subjects are in this department, in addition to others that are in the undergraduate program, but they are all there. So, this idea of a search for basics, more about comprehending than describing and more about thinking than doing, was our trademark. It was also our problem, because the folks in the undergraduate program called for practice. Our reflection in the undergraduate program were the basic theoretical subjects. So there was a hiatus between the basic theoretical courses and the professional practical courses. The school was weak from the technical point of view. There were no labs. Typical of a public university. You need the government: if the government doesn’t provide any, there are none. Today we are well equipped, but at the time we weren’t. For you to have an idea, the Photography course was given, theoretically, by Heloisa.
She told us, in her interview. She would bring her own camera. The practical part consisted in taking photographs with the professor’s camera. That was the lab there was. And three typewriters – first typewriters, there were no computers. That was the Journalism lab. So there was this gap. It was so manifest, so gaping that, among the professional habilitations at ECO at the time – Journalism, Advertising and Propaganda, Public Relations – there was one in Communication. A student got a bachelor’s in Communication, with an habilitation in Communication, which was a totally theoretical course, where Journalism wasn’t studied, nor anything else. Only the communicator profession doesn’t exist. The student will be a journalist. He would arrive there, and have to register the diploma: “No, you don’t have the minimum number of Journalism subjects.” So he had to go back to the school, ask to re-enroll and take the Journalism subjects.
When was IDEA created? Before 1981, when the master’s program wasn’t even ten years old, I tried to create a seminar, I think it was called “Communication and Transdiciplinarity Seminar,” something like that, of which all of the postgraduate program’s professors were members. And every week we would do seminars, each one presenting, from his or her perspective, a certain topic in the area of communication. It worked very little. People weren’t mobilized to do this. But right afterwards, already in 1981, I created what at the time was called the Interdisciplinary Program for Graduate Studies – “graduate studies” in the American sense, that is to say, postgraduate studies –, which, later, was soon transformed into the Interdisciplinary Program for Humanistic Studies, the Transdisciplinary Program for Humanistic Studies, and finally, the Transdisciplinary Program for Advanced Studies – later “transdisciplinary” was dropped –, which is IDEA. IDEA, which is the abbreviation for Instituto de Estudos Avançados (“Institute for Advanced Studies”), was supposed to be a structure that was parallel to the structure of courses. It would be only for research. Later, it couldn’t be an institute for legal-administrative issues. It couldn’t have that characteristic of institute, but the abbreviation had already stuck, because it’s good. IDEA. And so it became the Program for Advanced Studies. And the experiment I did there, between 1981 and 1983, was to organize our activities into research groups, each with its own characteristic, its autonomy, and interfaces. The issue of interfaces is difficult and ended up not being done. But the constitution of the groups, of lines of research, wasn’t there before.
Until 1981, then, this didn’t happen? No. There were areas of concentration, because it was necessary. So there were Communication Systems, Signification Systems – that is very broad –, Cybernetics and Informatics, which soon started. In Communication Systems everything fit; in Signification Systems everything that was more from the area of linguistics and semiology also fit. But anthropology fit in one or the other, sociology fit in one or the other. So lines of research that were more centered either in objects, or in research strategies, or in methodologies and such began to appear, in 1981, when I created IDEA, and right afterwards, Heloisa created CIEC, Interdisciplinary Center for Contemporary Studies. The idea was the same. She turned more to cultural studies, and I more toward studies of communication basics, much more in the direction of philosophy actually. In this two-year experiment, with research groups meeting every week, thinking together, interesting methodologies were developed. In my group, for example, we would get a topic that was dear to us. But, then, who were “we?” There was me, who was a philosopher, there was a historian, a psychoanalyst, a linguist, an anthropologist, and a doctor. So we had discussions. Whoever stood out more in a certain day’s discussion would write a text, which was passed around to everyone and was the object of discussion in the following meeting. Whoever stood out more in that meeting – stood out more in the sense of presenting the most original, interesting ideas – wrote the following text, in a way that, in the end, we had a collective, running, continuous text, but with really clear changes in focus, which was the result, then, of a semester’s work, for example, by that research group.
So, in 1938, the creation of the doctorate matured. In 1983, I thought we had the conditions to create the doctorate. With that model. What I had in mind was the model of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. People go to work with someone in a lab, or in a theoretical research group. There were no courses, there was almost no difference between professors and students, because they were all senior and junior researchers. That was the idea for the doctorate, which obviously didn’t work.
It wasn’t well absorbed by the students? In the beginning, yes, very much. Because the students had been our undergraduate students, who were about to become professors at the school – without a master’s yet, teaching assistants – and they needed a master’s. So their cultural soup was that of the school. Later this opened up more, and many people from outside began to come. But quickly we realized that what we knew how to do was teach. And the formal requirements to have a master’s program were that there had to be disciplines. So I said: “Well, let’s transform our research groups into disciplines, without losing the characteristic of research groups.” It ended up being impossible, due to curricular issues related to the organization of curricula and syllabi, things like these. But the doctorate arose, then, imbued with this spirit in which a professor enters the classroom and will not reproduce books, he will formulate questions for which he does not have the answer. And he or she has this right, because he’s a researcher, he’s investing in that research, and his students come with him. It took a long time until this was refined, to the point that today we can recognize: “This person studies with Ana Paula. That one studies with Muniz.” By what he or she says, by the things, one knows who he or she studies with. So this relation was refined, between the line of research of the master’s, the doctorate, the line of research of someone within it, the subjects that this someone offers connected to his or her lines of research. The production of students’ theses and dissertations has to do with the courses that have to do with a line of research of a certain professor, which fit in the line of research of the group from that area of concentration. All of this today is in a very advanced structural stage, but it was not easily conquered over the years. And, throughout all of these years, we have been struggling with São Paulo, because São Paulo had CAPES. CAPES’ area of Communication was directed by professors either from USP, or from PUC in São Paulo. PUC was still nicer and had a broader vision that was more humanistic, and less technical. Not USP. But USP was hegemonic. So we had to struggle to go to CAPES, to direct CAPES’ area of Communication, so that programs like ours, that of Brasília – which was being born at that moment –, that of Rio Grande do Sul, which had more or less similar characteristics, which were more theoretical – I just said “humanistic,” I think maybe the word fits –, had a space and a voice. It was difficult to attack us, because we were at the vanguard in historical terms, we started together with USP. USP could not look down on us. They didn’t like us, but we were their age. We were another perspective, this was negotiable. But the others, which were being born there, were born very weak. So, I was president of CAPES’ area of Communication for two terms. I think Muniz was too, now I’m not sure. Either it was Muniz or someone from Brasília who was very tied to us. We stayed eight years. Therefore, we were able to breathe, let our courses appear, be accredited in the Federal Council on Education, which is a required path, without being torpedoed by USP, by the folks with another mindset. It wasn’t for worse, it was for another mindset. And, of course, it’s a power struggle, for hegemony in the area, such a new area.
When they went to CAPES did you already have this strategic vision? Yes, without a doubt. That it was not only necessary for the survival of these courses, but we were convinced that communication was not actually an object of knowledge, but was a field. A science of communication didn’t exist and would never exist. There was no epistemology typical of communication. It belonged to social sciences, it came from anthropology, or from sociology, or also had a scientific paradigm that came from linguistics, from semiology, from information theory, from the information sciences, etc. It had a paradigm more of basics, which belonged to philosophy, to history. And all of this was valid for communication. For the folks from São Paulo, it wasn’t. And what we were doing was something very interesting, very intelligent, admirable. They recognized the quality of our faculty, our mass of publications. But it belonged to human sciences, it didn’t belong to communication in the strict sense. So this struggle was not a dry power struggle, it was an academic power struggle, to define an area of studies that was ten years old, which means, it was nothing, it didn’t have a history, it didn’t have a tradition. What is communication? Everyone there had an answer according to his perspective. What is methodology?
This struggle for space occurred until when, the beginning of the 1990s? Yes, until the beginning of the 1990s or so. Let’s say in the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1990, we had a good fight, it was a heroic moment of affirmation from our transdisciplinary perspective, and we occupied positions both at CAPES and at CNPq. It was curious, because while CAPES came to be more at length under the hegemony of São Paulo – they said we didn’t belong to communication –, at CNPq, which gave grants for researchers – it wasn’t for the course, it was for the researcher –, our projects were top of the line. We at ECO had the highest researcher title and the greatest number of support for projects at CNPq, but at CAPES our course was contested as not belonging really to communication. Every time they would do the course evaluation – now it’s every three years, I don’t remember if at the time it was every two years, – there was the same conversation: that I didn’t belong to communication, that Heloisa didn’t belong to communication… Well, we fought. From the 1990s onwards, another period began, because various small courses appeared, which were very limited, very well structured, entirely devoted to the technological dimension of communication. So, communication is media, new technologies, and reception, with technologies providing the logic. It was the moment of the great explosion of new communication technologies. And these courses, having as a reference, a backdrop, the tension between São Paulo and Rio, took over. Then it was a hard period, because they hit us hard.
At CAPES? Yes. That was in the 1990s. And then we decided to cut down, to adjust. Muniz, let’s say, was the last coordinator from the period of humanism – Emmanuel Carneiro Leão, him, and me. And Raquel Paiva was his immediate successor. I say “immediate” because I think he wasn’t able to finish is mandate, Raquel took over, already in this spirit of “let’s adjust,” by defining very strictly lines of research that CAPES could recognize as belonging to communication. So the folks at CAPES came here, we exposed, they said: “No, it’s still very generic.” We tightened, and tightened. This meant, when I said “cut down,” that there were a significant number of professors, our colleagues, who were in there since the beginning, who belonged to the first group as students and who afterwards were professors there, who had to leave, because, ultimately, CAPES didn’t consider them. I didn’t leave, I think, because I was a long time administrator of the postgraduate program, of the school itself, for them to put me out. Because CAPES wanted me to leave. Raquel Paiva and Ivana Bentes, who later was the director of the school for eight years, secured me, and said: “No, Marcio is a reference in the postgraduate program. He can’t not be in ECO’s postgraduate program.” What CAPES proposed, ostensibly, was not something insinuated: “No, you have to remove this professor.”
By name? Yes. “His publications are in philosophy.” It was already by name. For me and for Heloisa. And others. But there it was about me: “His publications are in philosophy. He isn’t a researcher in communication.” Although at CNPq I was a 1A researcher, which is the top of the top. They held firm, years later they told me. And things narrowed down. We kept two lines of research: Media and Sociocultural Mediations; and Aesthetics and Communication Technologies. Within these lines, with very clear definitions for each of them: the subjects very bound in the definition of the line; the courses that each professor teaches within that subject very bound to the subject’s syllabus; the very hard selection, in the sense that the project of the master’s or doctoral student candidate can be excellent, but the first question is: “Is it in communication?”, in the strictest possible sense, that it not be that very narrow-minded thing which we used to think – with our characteristics –, but: “Is it in communication? Does it fit in a line of research of the program? Is there a professor to direct in the strict sense? If not, I’m sorry, but he or she doesn’t get in.”
Do you think this modified the characteristics of the original project? No, because we had enough time for this not to happen. If we were, let’s say, ten years younger, if instead of being 20 we were ten years old, I think it would have killed the spirit of ECO, which would be a shame, because until today it is at the vanguard, in the sense that the more cutting-edge things are being thought there. And then, after these restrictions, it was possible to begin to give in a little, in the sense that, for example, we made the norm pass, which CAPES accepted, that up to one third of the subjects don’t have to be, in the strict sense, communication, understanding that this amounts to qualification in the field of communication. So my subject, “Communication and History of Thought,” is not in communication in the strict sense. But I am convinced that, when I’m studying the things I study, I’m leaving a substratum for theories of communication – for theory, of course, not for practices –, a substratum that I make explicit. I say: “Here we are discussing the passage from a culture of communication to a culture of information, from a culture of truth to a culture of the virtual and of simulation.” This is a substratum that I’m leaving for researchers of communication in the strict sense. I’m doing this in my courses, in my studies in history of philosophy, but within a school of communication. So, necessarily, almost contagiously, my history of philosophy studies do not look like the history of philosophy studies at IFCS, they are related to communication. But, anyway, CAPES didn’t want to see this at that time. So we tightened, and tightened, then we relaxed a bit, we softened up, and today we are the only 6 course. It worked out. We cut down but didn’t cut anything out. Were other postgraduate courses inspired by ECO’s model? In the beginning, Brasília and Porto Alegre. But, to the extent that our experiment was expanding, theirs retracted a little, because it felt the weight. They were younger than us. And later, when these new postgraduate programs appeared that were, let’s say, technological, for lack of characterization, of a better distinction – they were technological, we were humanistic –, this became the standard. This has been a dispute until today. From a personal perspective, because it’s a person who’s talking, I extended my studies of systems of thought and communication to include religion, not religion as faith, but religion as a discursive system in which, in my evaluation, communication was at its center, because to put in common, communion, to commune, community is the essence of religious practices and of religious discourse, and, in this sense, it would have an advantage over scientific discourse, philosophical discourse, in terms of comprehension of what is formally – not in contents, but formally, because my work is about paradigms. When I did this, CNPq withdrew my grant. I was a CNPq fellow for 30 years. I was a 1A researcher for ten, 15 years. They withdrew my grant. I tried to find out why: “I’m not going to appeal. I just want to know why.” Then the answer was that which they give to novices: “We are sorry to inform you that your project, though good in quality, does not match the lines of this institute, but we hope we can count on…”, things like that. Carlos Alberto Direito was more creative... Yes, at least he invented a little story. But later I was able to get them to give me an actual report and it was this: “It is not in the epistemological field of communication.” And later I made just one attempt, thus, to clear any doubt: I sent an article to a congress sponsored by COMPÓS, which is the National Association of Postgraduate Programs in Communication and Culture, in whose definition my work fit, I was not pushing it in this sense. I sent my project. It was considered very good and all, but it wouldn’t do. So I had a presentation rejected at a congress in the area of communication, at the postgraduate level, which I founded. This was last year, or two years ago. The way I see it, it means that our experiment, even though it had to be tightened at a certain moment, is not hegemonic, but our quality is first-rate. And this is an interesting contradiction, because since the beginning it had been like this. CAPES would say: “It’s not communication,” and CNPq would give us grants. And, now, the same thing. Until today we fight there. A lot less already, because we adjusted. But until today we still have to fight with CAPES, CNPq to make our projects pass. When my grant was cut, it’s because the folks at CAPES with whom we had had this long struggle also went to CNPq. Today, not anymore, because we went there and disputed our position again. So now it’s divided again: CAPES and CNPq. We are close to CNPq. But, anyway, it’s a political thing, a power thing. Small power, actually, because it’s not an area of technology where fortunes are being disputed. It’s such a small thing: there are a few grants and scholarships, there’s money to buy books… But power is power.
Thinking of the contribution that the postgraduate program gave to the field of communication in Brazil, without the issue of formal recognition, would you say that this bias of yours is effectively specific to ECO? Yes. It’s good that you asked the question this way, because one thing that needs to be clear is that we never thought that the only path for the comprehension of the human communication phenomenon is ours. What we never accepted is that ours was not a path. This exclusion has always been present, therefore we’ve always had to fight for this, but with the reservation that there is room for everybody, because it’s a new field, it isn’t defined. I understand that the set of work, of production by the postgraduate program at ECO – the master’s and doctorate, by its professors and by its students –, the volume of theses, of dissertations that ECO has already produced at this point is very large. I unfortunately don’t have the number anymore, because, ever since I retired, I left this field of commissions, of coordination. That’s why I retired. But it’s very large. And these people are reproducers, these people are professors. They’re from Porto Alegre to Belém. There are professors in Belo Horizonte, in Vitória, in Recife, in Brasília, in the interior of São Paulo...
The option for ECO’s postgraduate program occurs because of its profile, naturally. If we are to have an education more of basics, we’ll go to ECO; if not we’ll go to USP, or we’ll go, I don’t know, to Bahia, which is a good technological course. It’s not technological in the sense of labs, but of the mind, within what communication is, media, what new technologies are. So, we have many foreign students, let’s call them. When they go back home, they go back taking our strategies, our ideas even, but mostly our strategy, our way of looking at communication as a human phenomenon, not as an object of technique or as a scientific object of a science like physics, for example. And we see this perspective throughout Brazil. So one of our students, one of our doctoral students who has come, let’s say, from Manaus, he goes back there with our ideas, with our strategies incarnated in his dissertation. That is what he’ll teach. That dissertation has our features, and he has our features. And we come to have his features there, where he’s a professor and where they don’t know us yet. But we are present through him. One day it would be interesting to invite all of these folks again and do something alive with this history – alive and operational, working throughout all of Brazil in a network. This network exists, and in this sense there’s no doubt that we’ve had an important impact, as the others have had as well. The question is only to exclude or not exclude. It’s not necessary to exclude, there’s space for everybody.
Especially in this area. A totally new area. Philosophy has existed since the 6th century B.C. So we know more or less what it is. A course that appears with the name of Philosophy Course to teach Hindu meditation techniques can be very interesting, but we know it’s not philosophy. But not communication. If you think about it, how old is it? Forty years old, more or less. It’s 40 years old. Forty years old is very new, it’s less than half a century. When we think of mathematics, physics, biology, even law, medicine, they are very, very old. Go back to Roman law, before Christ. So we know what a college of law is, we know what legal science is, there’s no question. But, communication, it’s good to have questions, because it’s a very new thing.
You all constituted the communication course and the postgraduate program at a terrible moment in our history. Were you able to structure them in the way you imagined, in spite of this? Yes. For example: not that this was my topic, but I taught courses about Marxism. So I was thinking about the question of utopias, languages of the future and such. I taught Lenin, Marcuse. Every once in a while, I was called to the rectory, because there was a Security and Information Division, something like that from the National Intelligence Service (SNI) within the autarchies, the ministries. I went to explain myself, because I was teaching Marx and such. But, fortunately, the guy there was very nice, and I was very young too. So, he had a certain generosity, he knew there wasn’t any mischief in it. He did his job, I explained myself: “It’s nothing like that, it’s nothing subversive.” And that was it. We had some misunderstandings, but nothing that kept us from assembling our course right. The student movement was already in decline at that moment, because it had been a general overthrow. I was, for a long time, the interlocutor with the student movement inside ECO. It was already nothing national. Because I was young, but the adjunct-director, so I could be an interlocutor with them. They trusted me. So that also didn’t generate friction, it helped not to generate big friction in the undergraduate program, where the younger folks were. In the postgraduate program nothing happened of the sort, we only had to keep it protected from the rectory, or military incidents.
Do you remember any cases that involved repression inside the school? I remember a case in which a military officer – Simeão Leal was still the director, a very courageous man, of much personal bravery – said he would investigate this snd that. And Simeão parodied a little what they say that Pedro Calmon also did when he was the university rector. He said: “But come now: did you take the entrance exam? Because to get in here you have to take the entrance exam. You’re not a professor, so you must be a student. Did you take the entrance exam to get in? If not, you won’t get in here.” And the guy left. There were instances like these.
Simeão was a personality, wasn’t he? Ah, yes, He was extraordinary, it was a privilege. Because he let us be. He was the director, he had chosen those people to assemble the structure, therefore those people were his own: nobody messed with them, and they run the school.
About your education, who directed you? In the master’s – then I finally came to have a formal education –, it was Carneiro Leão. When I went to do the doctorate, there wasn’t a doctorate at ECO yet. So I went wherever Emmanuel was, and he was at the College of Letters, where I did my doctorate. I went there to do philosophy: philosophy of art, of literature, of who knows what. But it was history of philosophy. My dissertation was called “Art and Society: A Historical-Philosophical Vision.” The subtitle is the thesis. Later I kept studying with him. We kept studying. There was a group of colleagues, all of us had been Carneiro Leão’s students, and we were studying with him, then. He had a fantastic method. He would get... Hegel: “Let’s study The Phenomenology of Spirit.” Ok, we bought our translations and he would come with the original in German, open it and begin to read. Naturally, he was translating; in translating, he was interpreting; and, when he found it necessary, he would stop. And then it could be a half hour, one hour, he would be explaining a single word. Well, it was an extraordinary thing. A postgraduate course lasted 15 weeks; if Emmanuel appeared three times, it was extraordinary. He didn’t have to teach the 15 weeks. So, I kept studying with him is this manner, and he directing, with a lot of levity and liberty, without any heavy hand, my personal studies. I say “a lot of levity” and all because it became very evident, at a given moment, that I was moving away from my Heideggerian direction.
His direction... Which is his, and moving toward Foucault – to look around there, I only found this out later. For ten, 15 years I looked at Foucault, in order to come back to Heidegger from another side. I had fled Heidegger because of something that to me seemed to be a somewhat absolutist, unfathomable thinking. I went through Foucault, I came back to Heidegger and I communicated this to Emmanuel. One day, I said: “Look, I’m coming back to Heidegger.” He had followed me all of these years and never said to me: “No, you’re going down the wrong path. Don’t go that way. This Foucault, what does he have to offer you?” I was going to do my post-doctorate with Foucault.
It wasn’t possible, did he die beforehand? That’s right, it ended up being with Baudrillard. Because I met Foucault here, we talked, traded ideas and such. I was going to do the doctorate with him. Then, later, I thought: “No, the doctorate is four years. I’m still new here at this. So, if I stay four years away from the school, when I come back many things will have happened in which I will not have participated, I’ll lose my place in history. I’ll stay and do it here. I’ll do a post-doctorate, which is one year, two years. I’ll be older.” So when I went to do the post-doctorate, CNPq gave me the scholarship in July of 1984. He had died in June. I became very good friends with Baudrillard. I love Jean, as we say here at home. But I would have profited a lot if I had done my post-doctorate with Foucault. Although, perhaps, today, I was, then, a Foucaultian…
You spoke of Emmanuel Carneiro Leão’s importance in your education. Thinking as an educator, whom would you highlight among the students who passed through the postgraduate program? I can even say, using a criteria in which those who are excluded will have been so for a good reason, which is the following: some of the best students I’ve had, the most creative, inventive, most thoughtful, ended up applying to be professors at ECO, to work for me at IDEA. So, I have a criteria to say. São Paulo Vaz, Henrique Antoun, Mauricio Lissovsky, Fernanda Bruno, Fernando Fragoso. Ricardo Henriques and André Lázaro could’ve gone there, but didn’t because they were already professors at other places. Ricardo Henriques was a professor at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), in Economy. André Lázaro was from Communication actually, at UERJ. Both ended up going to MEC. But besides these there were so many people of good quality… To speak of more recently: Priscila Vieira. She came from the interior of Paraná for the adventure of doing the postgraduate program at ECO. It’s what she wanted: to do the postgraduate program at ECO. She entered the master’s program with a project that interested me, because if not she wouldn’t have entered. Not because of the project’s quality, but for its originality. It was called “Between the Cloister and the Gate,” a study about how the most conservative communities – in this case, the Benedictine monks – dealt with the most cutting-edge dynamics of the internet. Because they have websites. So she did an extremely interesting study.
Someone who was almost a priest became interested. So I became very interested. And she ended up opening up this area at ECO, of religious communication, as it is sometimes called. But it’s more than that. Now (2015) she’s doing a post-doctorate in London. I really hope that, when she comes back, she doesn’t go back to Paraná, I hope she applies to ECO and comes to work at IDEA with me.
Would this be the most recent reference? This one is very recent. She defended her dissertation this year, in the first semester. Just to get, therefore, both extremes. Because, of those I mentioned, perhaps the first one was André Lázaro. That was around 1989. Afterwards, Paulo and Henrique came around 1990. In 1991, Ricardo Henriques and Fernanda Bruno were coming for the master’s – all of the others, for the doctorate. So, I’m talking about people from the end of the 1980s or beginning of the 1990s. And now I responded with a more recent one.
How many books have you written? I’ve published 22 books until now. Now I’ll begin to actually publish for real.
Will you have more time? My postgraduate students have always pressured me, because it’s there that I invent. I say: “You’re my guinea pigs. This here’s my lab.” All of my postgraduate courses have always been recorded, because there I have ideas that I never had before and that I’ll forget. So, the things I used to say there, I’d been developing for a long time, but especially from 2002 up until now: a history of philosophical paradigms, not a history of the contents of philosophy. And so the students pressured me: “Only we know this, nobody else knows. If we want to pass it on, there are no references. What will we say: ‘Professor Marcio’s Course?’ There is nothing written. You owe us a book.” So I said: “You’re right, I’ll write this book: a history of philosophical paradigms.” So I got the material, and it was enough for eight books. Then I’ll write eight books. What I owe them is not one book, but eight books. And so I established this project: I’m going to write – if I can, around one book a year – eight books, from the pre-Socratics to the to the post-moderns. Actually, I’m going to stop at Nietzsche, but looking ahead. The 20th century is my century. I was born before the second half of it, it’s not possible to tell the history yet. And I’ve begun to write. The first is at the publisher. I’m going to launch it at the beginning of next year. The second is at the publisher also, they’re beginning to work on it. And I’m writing the third one now. I want to see if I finish by the end of the year, to keep the pattern of one per year.
A self-imposed timetable. It’s necessary to have a lot of self-discipline, no one is going to pressure me, just myself. This will be my work, because I’m going to finish at around 75 years old. I’ll continue writing, I’ll continue publishing my things. I hope. But I will never again do something with this vitality. So, deep down, I understand that my previous books – in philosophy, because there are novels, poetry – were preparation for this work. My last book is from 2004, so it has been ten years already. And, after that, I didn’t publish any more books. I’ve published collective books, with my folks at IDEA.
Among the already written books, what would you highlight? Comunicação e Diferença is my favorite. Another is O Homem sem Fundamentos, my thesis to become a full professor. I think I was part of the last group that had to present an original thesis and take a written exam, a teaching exam, a who knows what exam. Now it’s lighter, more intelligent, it seems to me. But, then, this book, O Homem sem Fundamentos, was written as a dialogue, a Socratic dialogue. There’s an introduction that is not dialogue, it’s discursive, and then is the dialogue – about the subject, language, and time, which were my three questions. They were always my three questions.
Did you write fiction, too? I wrote two novels. One is called O Acontecimento, which is a metaphysical novel. That’s my favorite. The other, which I like a lot, because it’s happy, is called O Dia do AI-5.
And it’s happy? It’s happy, because it recounts the day in which Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) was published but it’s a story with real references: I’m there, with friends from the time. A day in the life of students and militants from clandestine organizations who lived, from the time in which they woke up until the time in which, fleeing from the Army invasion at PUC, they fell who knows where. And everything told very lightly, because it was a time in which we were young, we were practically kids. They came down on us with sticks as if we were grown-ups. But, putting things into perspective, that was moving, because there was a generosity in what we were doing that went far beyond the seriousness with which we did it. We did it seriously, but, overall, we did it with great generosity. This as told much later, remembering the people who did this and whom I knew. One of them was me, the other was my wife, the others two colleagues from the college of law who looked after me, they were my body-guards. I like this book a lot also, but when I wrote O Acontecimento – I had never written a novel –, maybe, at that time, I needed to discuss two themes: time, which has always been a topic of mine – full of fear, I mean: “Now I’m going to talk about time, attention please. Turn it on, put on the 9th Symphony” –; and evil. Eternity and evil – it was what I called it – in the novel. So, since I did not at that time dispose of philosophical language to talk about these topics without repeating what philosophy said about this, about time, eternity, and evil, I wrote a conceptual novel in a certain way. It has the Faustian bargain as a clear, explicit reference – Faust and Mephistopheles. Some characters are repeated, others meet others. So, I wrote that thinking a lot and feeling a lot – very passionately. I scratched a record there. I must have spent a year writing that book – it was a time in which I was working 16 hours a day –, listening to that Adagietto from Mahler’s “5th Symphony,” which is the soundtrack to Death in Venice. It was a vinyl record, I would put it on, and write, write, write.
Did you write by hand? Now I write directly on the computer. But I used to write by hand. I type with just one finger, but today I write directly on the computer. Even poetry. What I haven’t been writing anymore is poetry, for a long time. But I have five books of poetry. And biographies. Editora Três asked my father-in-law, who was a very important journalist and – I don’t know if he was at the time – a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Odylo Costa Jr., to organize a collection of 20 great characters in Brazilian history. At the time I was very interested in studying Brazilian history, then I arrived at the conclusion that Brazil doesn’t actually have a history, it has anecdotes. But at the time I wanted to study mostly the Second Reign and First Republic. So he organized, and I wrote four biographies: Rui Barbosa, the Baron of Rio Branco, Rodrigues Alves, and Deodoro. It was sold at newsstands. Rui Barbosa, which was the first, the thing was a novelty, sold 40 thousand copies. I’m talking about 1973, 1974.
Did it continue to sell that much? The last one, the twentieth, sold 18 thousand. So, I wrote these four. They were the first things I wrote, in a certain way. Then came, in the middle of them, my first book of poetry. The first novel was only in 1989, something like that. Anyway, so I have the five books of poetry, the two novels, and the rest is philosophy, history of philosophy, communication theory, Filosofia da Comunicação e da Linguagem, which is the title of my first book of theory. And, now, the prospect of these eight, my delight.
A lot of work before and a lot ahead. But I retired for this reason. I retired very young, I was 53 years old, at the time of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It was the minimum date for retirement of a state employee. And I was very tired of administration, councils, of: “Ah, you, who are from the founding group, you, who are the memory of ECO,” who knows what, “I didn’t want to bother you,” so I had already stopped writing what I was writing or studying what I was studying. And the university in general was very unionized as well.
Corporate issues... Extremely corporate. And that was beginning to get on my nerves. So I said: “I’m going to make a slightly risky move. I’m a full professor. Full professors, when they retire, if the university wishes, it can give the title of professor emeritus. It’s honorary.” It’s the only diploma that I have, of professor emeritus. It’s strictly honorary, but it gives you the right to do what you want. “I’m 53 years old. I’m well-seen, well-liked. I doubt the university won’t want to give me the title of emeritus. If it does, the next day I’m back in the classroom. I’ll only do what I want.” It’s the ideal, because I’m retired. I don’t earn a penny more, but my salary is the same as when I worked. My brother says I’m a sucker because I work for free. Now, I teach every day. I’ve never taught so much. As I said: I went from 1975-2006 teaching only in the postgraduate program. This means two courses per week, and then only one, when we combined master’s and doctoral classes. Now I teach in the first semester, I teach History of Philosophy in the first period; an elective about globalization and technological societies – postmodern issues – in the fourth semester; then I get undergraduate research students; I direct end-of-course monographs; plus theses and dissertations; I have IDEA, which I don’t manage anymore. I don’t manage anything anymore.
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