Comunicação e biopotência da multidão: empoderamento entre estratégias de biopoder e práticas de biopolítica

Abstract

This work is oriented by the communitarian perspective of communication, comprising the relevance of the critical and active participation of the people in the communicative process. Under this bias, people and collectivities are perceived in the foreground, being responsible for the desired and sometimes necessary social and cultural transformations. For this purpose, they must be aware of who they are and of their reality, empowered and conscious, that is, capable of reflecting and acting towards change, as Paulo Freire proposes. Following this line of thought, we theoretically articulate community communication and empowerment. We present the studies on biopower and crowd, proposed by the authors Peter Pelbart, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. We complete the study of bibliographical revision with the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, coined by Michel Foucault. Through the study and the apprehension about the theoretical and practical context exposed, we seek to reflect and analyze the following problem: how does a community media environment, amid biopower strategies and biopolitical practices, allow the empowerment of the people involved? Therefore, the research investigates the issue through the observation of the Viva Favela (VF) project, in Rio de Janeiro – RJ, an initiative that seeks the active and continuous participation of the residents of the places in which it operates, as a way of showing them the place where they inhabit, and also pass on to the society and to the press a real vision of these spaces. The analysis begins with the verification of the presence of biopower devices and biopolitical practices on the VF project site, with the study of the pages and the portal links. Following, there is analyzed the discursive strategies in the texts of the community correspondents, guided by the theoretical-methodological approach of the Critical Discourse Analysis proposed by Norman Fairclough. Discursive marks are verified to infer how biopower and biopolitics present themselves in the way the people participating in the project act. From this analysis, there is observed that the case studied is strongly involved in systems that overlap biopower devices, but biopolitical practices are also perceived through the sharing of knowledge, amplifying the realities, experiences, achievements, and difficulties experienced by Brazilians living in the communities and peripheries of the country. We glimpse the force that we understand mandatory to the practice of communitarian communication, that is, the people that perpetuate the project there, their biopower. We conclude by understanding that a community media environment, in the midst of biopower strategies and biopolitical practices, allows empowerment when its performance is based on a biopower, on the life power of the subjects, causing this life force to transform and reinvent its way of acting, recreating paths, and ways of enunciating. Thus, relations of force and tensions of power do not prevail, because acting supported in the common action, people allow their performance, empower themselves and become "biopotent".