Time, media and socio-political processes in XXI century Brazil: socio-semiotic perspectives

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to tackle the links between the mediatic and socio-political time of the process that led from the 2013 protests to the impeachment of the former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. In order to do that, a review of Landowski’s concept of accident and Lotman’s notion of explosion is done. Our hypotheses are: (i) June of 2013 is an accidental/explosive event that projects Brazil into an amorphous and unpredictable atemporal present, which extends, at least, to the former president’s impeachment; (ii) this temporal regime is defined by a high degree of semantic indetermination and by a high degree of aesthetic load, that is, of sensitive tensions and forces that spread quickly in the social body; (iii) social media displays, in this process, a catalytic role, generating both the indetermination and the aesthetic load that feature the new temporal regime. It is hoped, therefore, to contribute to the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of accounting for the semiotic nature of time in the field of communication studies.