Symbolic representations in dispute: The hate speech in Brazilian political advertising

Abstract

This study aims to examine the authoritarian discourse embodied in political advertisements, focusing on the dissemination of hatred and attacks on opponents. We aim to understand the use of advertising as a resource that provides a space for the clash of imaginary formations and the effects of meaning that these clashes promote. This research is anchored in the theoretical proposal of materialist discourse analysis, focusing on the notions of imaginary formation (Pêcheux, 2014a and 2014b); (Orlandi, 2015) and authoritarian discourse (Orlandi, 2011), in addition to the concepts of culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1985), imaginary superindustry (Bucci, 2021) and excited society (Türcke, 2010). The adopted methodology is qualitative and part of an interpretive and reflective process in which the corpus of analysis consists of discourses that circulate on social media through advertisements that construct controlled symbolic representations. The analyses reveal that a dispute scenario that undermines mediations has arisen in Brazil, establishing a process of the interdiction of the other in the constitution of subjectivities and resulting in symbolic violence of the order of the imaginary.