In July 2004 a crisis arose in public transit system in the Porto Alegre Metropolitan Region (RMPA), buses were burned in protests against rising fares. This paper aims to analyze the exercise of symbolic power in the discourses of the studies of fares readjustment, i.e. the use of the power of language as "the power to constitute data through enunciation, to make see and make believe, to confirm or to transform the vision of the world" (BOURDIEU, 2004a:14-15). In order to strength the symbolic power analysis, concepts of critical discourse analysis (CDA) were used. According to the definition of Fairclough (2001:90), speech is "the use of language as a form of social practice". For Fairclough et al. (2000), the mathematical language is also used to serve ideological goals, based on claims of Lemke (1995). The paper concludes that the discourses used the thematic condensation to include only those social actors who have enough power resources from the knowledge about transit services production and about operating costs calculations, which uses mathematical formalization.
public policy; power relations; symbolic power (Bourdieu); critical discourse analysis
