A antropomorfização do mercado: análise de um fenômeno discursivo

Abstract

The lexical item “market” when lifted to the condition of a human being does not comprise a recent phenomenon. In the 18th century, Adam Smith, one of the classic authors of modern economic theory had already provided the market with an “invisible hand”. Currently, given the characteristics of Neoliberalism with the shrinking of the public space and the dissemination of the private space, the market has been playing a big role and the economy has been turned into a fetish taken as the hope of salvation for all problems; thus, the politics, as a republican and democratic activity is drained. Facing such disruption, the objective of this dissertation is to apprehend the anthropomorphism of the market phenomenon (assignation of typically human actions, attitudes or feelings to the market) through the concept of discursive formula, considered as a particular category of discursive position, according to Alice Krieg-Planque. To do so, some data were collected from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo related to an extremely emblematic period of time from the social historical point of view, marked by an intense public opinion debate: the impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff. It was assumed as a hypothesis that the anthropomorphism of the market – labeled so in this assignment - characterizes a discursive phenomenon. Based on the theoretical-methodological approach developed by Alice Krieg-Planque, lexical-syntactic structures that displayed signs of an anthropomorphized market through/in the discourse were analyzed, which resulted in a combination of theory and corpus that has led to an expansion of the discussions about the historical and social aspects, the background that enabled the outset and the occurrence of this discursive phenomenon. Over and above its possible label as a formula, the functioning of the study object as a social referent as well as the recognition of a certain discursive position were observed