How was your hybrid education in Letters and in Communication important for your intellectual development and for your research? I earned my master’s in Linguistics from PUC-Rio and did my doctorate in Communication. Just before the master’s, I was already working at the School of Communication and I ended up preferring Communication studies, the relation to the text that was being done there, to what was being done in Linguistics, which was very formal. Thus, I ended up staying in Communication. I left PUC-Rio and stayed only at ECO. But, in fact, the distance between Linguistics and Communication is not long, or, at least, it is not in the way that I work. For me, this distance was not very long, but it is also not very short. Communication requires linguistic, sociological, philosophical, and anthropological knowledge in order to be configured as a field of knowledge and to able to produce its analyses. In this manner, then, it was not a very long path and it was even very pleasant to do. But it was also a matter of the time, of the history in which we were living. Communication, in Brazil, still did not have – or was beginning to have –, in the 1970s, its masters and PhDs. The professors of that time had a hybrid education, they came from different areas. Communication made itself out of all this hybridity When I became permanent faculty at ECO, I was already aware of this situation and it fascinated me. To teach there, in an environment that sought to produce professionals, researchers, hybrid citizens, and critics seemed very interesting and valid to me.
You have just commented that there is not a long path between Communication and Linguistics, but also that there is not a short path. Could you explain with more details how to cover this distance? This depends a lot on the Linguistics that you do and the Communication that you do. The Linguistics that linguists do, normally, is very formal, very tied to description and to prescription. It is that more pragmatic Linguistics of speech segmentation analysis, from a North-American tradition. Since I was educated in the French tradition of language studies, I used Linguistics as an instrument to work with text analysis. So, it was not a very long path. In my migration to Communication, I ended up opting to study more Sociology, Anthropology, the Social Sciences in general, in order to do a discourses analysis that was consistent and not merely descriptive, something that always seemed extremely unproductive to me. One does not do a mere description of contents in Discourses Analysis. Discourses Analysis that is well-done is very different, it goes much further than Content Analysis, or than a well-informed and systematized description.
What has also marked your trajectory is the distinction between Discourse Analysis and Discourses Analysis, which is what you do. Talk about this difference? Discourse Analysis makes it seem that there is only one discourse, that discourse is always the same in all situations. Actually, this name was given by the French School of Discourse Analysis, based also on some formal analysis, but always privileging a Marxist textual framework. Discourses Analysis does not privilege this or that framework, but depends on the situation, on the type of communication involved, on the imponderable, on the type of thing that cannot have a pre-defined answer before research. Discourses Analysis is linked to research, is done in research and is only possible in this manner. Discourse analyses with an orthodox Marxist bias tend to, as any other orthodoxy, already have the research answers before the actual research. Research is not necessary, for it already knows what it will find beforehand. The gravest problem with this is that of reproducing the model, of framing, and also pruning, any object of research through the application of a model that has already worked, that has already been approved. Thus, the answers found were already expected. It always seemed necessary to me to overcome this easier analysis, of saying always the same things, which have already been known for a long time.
Since you said that you were educated in the French School of Discourse Analysis, I can presume that your education was more semiological…
Yes, it is. I was educated more in the French Discourse Analysis, despite divergences. What interested me was that not only a formal analysis was done, but an analysis that sought to show the conditions of possibility of the statements and of the enunciations. Why was a particular form chosen in a particular context and not in another? And thus it was, always keeping this question in mind, that I began to develop my work.
And this work earned the name of “Semiology of Social Discourses.” Could you comment on the principles that guide it? Yes, it earned this name. But I do not know if I was the one who gave it this name, when I was writing my works, or if I found it interesting in the reading of another work. In fact, this was not important to me. I wanted to do a study of discourses, of texts, that were not tied to the text. I called this work Semiology of Social Discourses. There are many people who do discourse analysis and do not even want to hear about this name, it is prohibited, cursed, because of Saussure’s structuralism. They still think it is a bad word. But I work with semiology in the following way: while structuralist semiology seeks meaning in linguistic expressions, the Semiology of Social Discourses seeks the forms responsible for a given linguistic expression, conditioned by the time, by the situation, within several levels of contextualization (e.g. situational, institutional, historical).
How do you evaluate today your contribution to language studies in the field of Communication in Brazil? I was not a pioneer in Linguistics in Brazil. When I began doing Linguistics, there were already many people working with Linguistics, but it was the folks at the National Museum of Brazil, who were concerned with cataloguing, classifying, and mapping indigenous languages. They wanted to know how the language of a certain tribe was formed, its vocabulary and its grammar, mainly. This was their concern. I began to relate the meaning to the text, mostly to the form of the text: what meaning can be obtained with a form of communication? In a way, there are many forms of communication, and what I wanted to know was why one was chosen in detriment of others. To analyze what in one situation made a certain form be chosen was what interested me. This seemed most important to me: why a particular way and not some other way to enunciate? Or in other words, why one particular way among so many other possible ways? There are various reasons, and it is up to Discourses Analysis to explain them. In your work and in your classes, you often insist that comparison is fundamental for Discourses Analysis. Is comparison the method of Discourses Analysis? In order to do Discourses Analysis it is not possible to consider an isolated text. You will not likely be able to do the analysis without comparison, because you should find in the text elements that were not foreseen by your hypotheses. And this novelty that is proper to doing research becomes more evident in comparison. The French analysts of discourses were severely accused of proving in their research what they had already indicated in their hypotheses. And this was a big problem. In order to get around this, it is necessary to do a comparative analysis, by analyzing the different ways of saying, of seducing, and of interacting used by texts about a given topic at different or at the same time periods, for example. And it must be clear that the perceived changes in the texts are contextual. It is this observation that concerns discourses analysis. Certainly, it is an observation that is comparative in time, in space, and in forms of expression.
Discourses Analysis has been suffering from two accusations. It has been criticized for not being able to go beyond commentary on the obvious, of what would already be deemed as evident, or for being too formalist and immanent, despite being critical. What is your position on this? Discourses Analysis has always suffered this type of critique, especially of explanations of a more sociological sort. They thought that we could not limit ourselves to discourse in order to understand society, or communication. I still do not know who has won this war. I was part of it, but, after I retired, I ended up staying out of it. But I think that Semiology is what most fit these accusations, not Discourses Analysis. Semiology is a description of the text’s content based on its forms of expression. It is not an analysis of content, because it is concerned with the production of meanings, even if only within the text. Discourses Analysis goes further, it seeks to show how and why certain meanings are produced in a text. It only works within given, historical contexts. One does not do a discourses analysis of an isolated text, which is possible in semiological analyses. It is necessary to relate to other texts, to the time period, to other authors, sometimes. A complete analysis of discourses requires a vast historical knowledge of the moment in which the discourse is produced. This historical awareness is not very present in semiological analyses, especially in the formalist ones. The production of meanings depends on a theory of the production of meanings. There are sociological theories, psychological theories, and many others. And Discourses Analysis takes an approach that is at the same time linguistic (overall, tending toward a broader linguistics, a historical linguistics, concerned with the history of forms) and sociological. Why, in certain social contexts, are some forms chosen and not others? What makes a linguistic form be one thing and not another? You do not use anything at any moment. The usage is limited socially, to what you should and can use, say, do at that moment. For example, when you are in a foreign country and do not know the language well, you can find yourself in extremely embarrassing situations due to not knowing what expression to use in certain situations. Anyway, what interests Discourses Analysis is the historical, social, and cultural moment of communication. Semiology is immanentist really, but Discourses Analysis is not, much to the contrary. In Discourses Analysis you have to analyze elements that come from the context. This is the big difference. At the end of Roland Barthes’ work, for example, it begins to speak well of context, to dimension in a more organic way the work of context in text production. But no semiologist’s work has surpassed that which Mikhail Bakhtin did. Bakhtin’s contribution, as well as that of Michel Foucault, from another angle, was decisive for the Semiology of Social Discourses, for the Discourses Analysis that I do. Bakhtin brought context to the study of the text in an exquisite manner. However, if this happened, the development of an “Automatic Discourse Analysis” also occurred, of which Michel Pêcheux was a leader and mentor. At this time, Pêcheux was concerned with transforming language into a code in such a way that language could be put into a computer and its meaning could come out as a result. His option was to do a computerized analysis of discourse, transforming the text into data, codes, ciphers. But this ended up being a failure, because the text is much more than what can be computed. Fortunately, it was an option that did not become valid. There are many other much more interesting ways of analyzing discourses. Reception scholars, for example, also accused analysts of discourses of disregarding reception and privileging production. But reception studies end up being split from production. These studies appeared a little late for me. That is, in my trajectory I witnessed the appearance of these studies, but I did not come to see them wholly consolidated. I saw a lot of good work being done, but only here and there. Just as there are many analyses of discourses, there are many studies of reception. I remember that in the field of Communication in Brazil the work of the Constance School, in Germany, was very influential. In Literature, Luiz Costa Lima perfected himself in these studies. Only much later did the English tradition, of Cultural Studies, come to be explored, but, even so, in a timid and particular way. In a way, I incorporated something from reception studies. But what interested me was to make the study more complete, so that it would not be tied to a “stage” of the communicative process, but be taken as a whole. It is not possible to analyze a discourse without considering production and reception, and especially, the possibilities of production and reception within a series of complex, specific, and crossed contextualizations. I was not interested in seeing only strategies of production, but also hypotheses of reception. It is not a reception in the precise sense, as, for example, Costa Lima was doing. I know professor Costa Lima’s work well, and he was doing a reception tied to literature. So, essentially, it was a study of influences, of crossings of information. And that was not exactly what I was doing. I wanted to know about reception in the moment: why did a given text work as communication or not in a given historical situation? That is what interested me more.
Another of your important contributions to Discourses Analysis was rhetoric. For a long time – and even today – rhetoric has been pejoratively valued as an adornment of language, and when it is not, as committed with the production of deception, of the suspicious persuasion that manipulates truth. Contrary to this, you, following French theorists of language, like Roland Barthes, came to take rhetoric as a theoretical framework of language investigation. How was this experiment? I have always been interested in rhetoric. Since the beginning of my university studies, I have sought to deepen my study of rhetoric. When I began to dedicate myself more to Discourses Analysis, I realized that much of what was being studied by analysts – taken as great innovations – had already been systematized by rhetoric much earlier. That really instigated me to do a reflection on discourse based on the rhetorical tradition, especially from Aristotle and the Greeks. I understood that the analysis of text production was in rhetoric. It was rhetoric that could bring innovations, present new horizons and research possibilities. Rhetoric was forgotten, or rather was partially forgotten, because what was used from rhetoric were the figures of rhetoric, of those more traditional analyses of literary studies. They were ignoring the political and social dimension of rhetoric, and thus, of language. To rediscover rhetoric was also, for me, a form of reevaluating the Discourses Analysis that we were doing. In this way, much of what the Semiology of Social Discourses created was based on rhetoric. That was what we needed to recognize. For this reason, it was worth approaching rhetoric in my texts, telling how it worked, why it was, in a way, the first study of the statement and of the enunciation. From it arises the fundamental question of any Discourses Analysis: why such a statement for such an enunciation? Although it restricted itself a little to prescriptive rules in order to produce certain types of communication, it was concerned, basically, with identifying the adequate forms of each communication to the receiver, or receivers. In addition, there is an important difference: the primordial objective of rhetoric has always been to persuade the other of something, in a debate or in a discussion. Discourses Analysis is not very concerned with this. Persuasion is one of the guiding forms of communication, but it cannot be the only one. Although persuasion is very important in daily communication in general, since it is rare that someone talks to someone without trying to persuade. And the mechanisms and forms for persuasion are, in part, the same that ancient Greek rhetoric had already identified and delimited. There have not been many changes in this area.
What are the possibilities for Discourses Analysis of media? All of the analyses of discourses that I have done were of communication media. In media, the delimitation of the communication situation is much easier and less generic, even historically speaking. That was why I worked with communication media, to the point of almost agreeing that Discourses Analysis is only useful for Communication. Although it began in Literature, many people believe that it belongs to Communication studies, and for this reason, Discourses Analysis can only be done of media. In another important aspect, I was also able to contribute with my work: in the study of the image. Discourses Analysis were centered on studies of written texts. But I was also interested in the study of the image, of the relations between text and image. There were few studies about the image. There was more work, in this sense, in the United States than in France. In France, the textual was predominant over the imagetic. And that is why I sought to unite the best of those countries’ traditions in Discourses Analysis. When you do a press analysis, for example, you cannot separate the text from the image, the formatting, the editing, and the layout have to be analyzed together. This is, certainly, a more arduous but absolutely necessary task. At the moment in which I began to work with this, this was a very complex and recent study. Who knows if this is still not the challenge for new analysts of discourses. |
