Democracia impedida: imprensa, memória e impeachment no Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the journalistic discourse when it mobilizes the meanings of “impeachment” in the process which removed Collor and Dilma from the Brazilian Presidency, emphasizing the latter. Using the theoretical-methodological framework of the Discourse Analysis, we tried to understand how what is said about impeachment show the historical materiality printed into the linguistic and imagetic ones. For this purpose, we first observed the conditions of production of the journalistic discourse regarding the impeachment, examining which way it processes in the historical context, thus analyzing the type of society such discourse takes form – a society that is organized under the aegis of the capitalist social formation. Using the clipping of the corpus as a starting point, constituted by discursive materialities taken from hegemonic press vehicles, we follow the discourse of newspapers and magazines on impeachment, as well as what can be extracted from them when it comes to the social and political organizations that bring forth such discourse. It is known that Brazilian society underwent two different moments of the neoliberal experience, being accompanied by the impeachment both in the beginning and in the deepening of such project. The events studied here, separated from one another by over two decades, keep a memory link with each other, recovering already consolidated meanings about impeachment set in 1992 while also inaugurating new ones, having as its basis the social-political arrangement of the progressive and the conservative wings in the 2016 Brazilian conjuncture. The statement “impeachment” is taken as the discursive sequence of reference (DSR), in accordance to Courtine (2016), because this particular statement about the impeachment process organizes other pre-existing sentences on the subject, either reformulating or resignifying them. We make an interpretative gesture in order to not only indicate the paraphrastic and polysemic possibilities of “impeachment”, but also consider the perspective that indicates that this materiality, once updated in conjunction with the memory associated with it, generates an event which discursivizes the impeachment as an instrument of the political class conflict.