Statues or Ballerinas?

Gaiarsa’s Contributions to an Embodied Multimodality in the Analysis of the Language of the Brazilians Anti-Democratic Demonstrators

Abstract

This article has a social semiotic and proprioceptive assumption. From the social semiotic point of view, people’s communication practice consists of resignifying languages, rather than creating them originally. At the same time, there is a maldistribution of language resources motivated by unequal power relations between people and social classes. Therefore, groups with scarce resources tend to reproduce communicational practices with the most available resources and which are shared by more people. The resignification and reproduction of resources make communicational practices become habits. From the proprioceptive point of view, habits come from attitudes formed by muscles, caused by power relations between people and the world. Therefore, this article presents as a thesis that a communicational practice of reframing, when becoming a habit, can itself become a language. This is a theoretical development article, based on bibliographical research, which seeks a synthesis between two theories. The objective is to propose a method to analyze the embodied multimodality. The article systematizes how communicational practices become habits and proposes a method for analyzing these practices. Based on this method, it presents an analysis of the language of anti-democratic demonstrators after the Brazilian elections in 2022. The result points to a language of denial of the body, the world and life, which emerges from the habits of resignification incorporated by the demonstrators, whose discourse is based on religious idealism, and militarism is a consequence of it. The conclusion is that the very choices of the demonstrators’ communicational practices are a language because it’s possible produce meaning.