Modernidade e virtualização da autoridade: discursos, sociedade e tipografia

• Autor(a) principal: Castro, Julio Cesar Lemes de
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_SP
• Texto Completo: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/5203
• topic: Modernidade; Saber; Tipografia; Lacan; Lacan, Jacques -- 1901-1981; Analise do discurso; Autoridade; Erudicao; Impressao; Modernismo; Modernity; Authority; Knowledge; Printing; Discourse; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::COMUNICACAO

This work shows that the advent of modernity corresponds to structural changes in the status of authority and in the status of knowledge, which draw on the fundamental support of the first big modern medium, printing. The theoretical axis is Lacan s matrix of four discourses (master, university, hysteric and analyst), understood as essential kinds of social bonds. Based on this matrix, the thesis defines the rise of modernity as a hegemony shift, from the master discourse to the university discourse. This implies a virtualization of authority: the retraction of the master-signifier (S1), as an authority figure (the feudal lord, God, the king, the father), in favour of the signifying chain (S2), as a function of authority (market, nature s laws, bureaucracy). This change, which can be expressed alternatively as a valorization of knowledge (another way to define S2), is examined in various areas. The ascension of the capitalist way of prodution emphasizes contractual relationships over explicit power relationships and market value over use value (Marx). Printing provides capitalism with the first example of mass product, the book; the first example of programmed obsolescence, the newspaper; and basic printed materials like currency paper and tools for accounting and bureaucratic control. The closed and hyerarchic Ptolemaic system gives way to the infinite and mathematized space of modern science (Koyré). The first corresponds to the paradigm of sphere, the second to the metaphor of the book of nature. The Reformation, whose onset constitutes, to a great degree, a media phenomenon, replaces the circular and repetitive time of medieval Christianism for the linear and cumulative time of Protestant Ethics (Weber). In the political realm, the passage occurs between the conception of the king s two bodies (Kantorowicz), which characterizes monarchical absolutism, and the conception of the empty place of power (Lefort), which characterizes bourgeois democracy. In order to formulate, to develop and to promote its triumphant ideology, the bourgeoisie needs free press. The emergence of the conjugal family (Durkheim) leads to the decline of the paternal figure and to the outsourcing of his function, involving institutions (such as school) and knowledge anchored by printed culture. Covering a period defined here as the first modernity (1500-1850), in connection with printing, this research will be followed, in the future, by analyses of the second modernity (1850-1970), in connection with photography, movies, radio and television, and the third modernity (from 1970 onward), in connection with the Internet, keeping the same theoretical axis