THE PRAGMATICS OF CHAOS: PARSING BOLSONARO’S UNDEMOCRATIC LANGUAGE
ABSTRACT This paper unpacks different layers of Jair Bolsonaro’s pragmatics of chaos - the name I give to a reflexive, ordered and laminated method of producing a permanent sentiment of agitation, murk, and discontent in political audiences while a conservative and free market agenda is radicalized in Brazil. The communicative layers are: history, exemplified by Bolsonaro’s early career in the military: from his union-like activity, to his imprisonment and to evidences of a terrorist plot; persona, indexed by the jocular, non-serious performances that made him famous as a federal representative and that have been mediatized in his executive action as president; text and talk, characterized by a general texture of incendiary framing, smoke screens, backtracking, and avoidance of debate; audiences, seen from the perspective of the digital, pedagogic and performative populism that accrued from his campaign, almost entirely designed for being engendered on the non-public space of WhatsApp groups and in public, algorithmic social media platforms.
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| Format: | Digital revista |
| Language: | English |
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UNICAMP. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística Aplicada do Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL)
2020
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| Online Access: | http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132020000100507 |
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