Perspectivist Semiotics essay: The protests of June 2013 and the politics of signification

Abstract

Intense events such as the protests of June 2013 in Brazil pose a problem for media theorists and semioticians: the politics of signification. The multitude of perceptions and meanings detours a fundamental semiotic paradigm: the relashionship between fact and representation, object of statement and subject of enunciation. The riot is not an amorphous fact upon which a variety of meanings and representations would apply, but it is an expression of an absolute multiplicity of agencies in constant dispute. Subjects and objects of enunciation are rather the effect of a politics of meaning than the condition of possibility of any statements accounting the riots. How do we craft a diagnosis with such unstable points of view, escaping from prescriptive dichotomies? This essay starts from this problem in order to elaborate a perspectivist semiotics that interlaces the anthropology of de Castro with the radical process initiated by the protests of June.