SEMIOTIC-DISCURSIVE CONFRONTATION IN BOLSONARIST DIGITAL NETWORKS: POPULISM, NEGATIONISM AND DICTATORSHIP

ABSTRACT

This article aims to discuss discursive practices related to online Bolsonarism, as a manifestation of extreme right-wing digital populism. For this purpose, semiotic-discursive clashes focused on textual trajectories mobilized to signify the historical processes related to the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) are focused. The analyzed interactions were triggered from a post on the official account of President Jair Bolsonaro on Twitter, on March 27, 2019, on the eve of the fifty-five years of the 1964 Coup. Starting from a theoretical and methodological perspective based on textual tracking in digital networks and in pragmatic and semiotic conceptions of the processes of signification, we propose some contingent interpretations about the problems investigated here. They are: the co-optation of significant gaps typical of populist rationality for the establishment of strategic historical negations; the insistent (re) updating of authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-human rights indexical meanings in the textual trajectories of the online bolsonarist (bolsonarista) discourse; the semiotic-discursive friction in disputes over metapragmatic frameworks between bolsonarist (bolsonarista) discursive agents and their opponents on virtual public spaces.

Keywords:
digital populism; bolsonarism; textual trajectories; indexicality; metapragmatics