No rastro das presenças imaginárias

Abstract

This thesis comes from inquietudes concerning the ways of building knowledge through communicative processes either mediative or interactive, as well as the imaginary beings’ visual configuration. An example is the deformation of witchcraft into sorcery by the Christian inquisitors’ speeches, and the meaning variations the word “Sabbath” assumes in its etymological biography. During the research, we have observed that imaginary beings come up as communicative ambivalences or double binds that give rise transcontextual leaps towards abductive inferences, the birth of novel ideas. However, the instrumental epistemology of today’s communicologies, predominantly deductivist and transmissive, does not allow us approaching such ambivalences without the risk of amputating them. That is why we have sought another epistemological experimentation, which we call oblique. The core problem is to understand how the oblique sight of communication epistemology gets constituted since the articulation of concepts and ideas, and the resonance between ideas and traces. Our hypotheses suggest: the imaginary operates as a propagation of concepts and a provocation of ideas; ideas and concepts cooperate for the continuity of their semiotic configurations and the making of imaginaries; the oblique epistemology gets constituted since synchrodiachronic tracking to give rise events among ideas and concepts. Our epistemological object is the flows of resonance present in ambivalences. We pick up as empirical object: how the media show the monsters in their synchrodiachronic variations (corpus: cyborgs, aliens, witches, vampires, werewolves, dragons and feng-shuis). The overall objective is to contribute to another epistemology to the scientific field of communication and the definition of its scientific object, assuming as specific targets: to examine the dynamic concept-trace-idea and the proposal of an oblique epistemology; to detect underlying meaning bonds in ambivalences; to infer political consequences of synchrodiachronic resonances. The theoretical foundation comes from the dialogism between the notions of abduction and synechism, by Charles Peirce, and double bind and deuterolearning, by Gregory Bateson. Our methodological strategy follows the semiotic archeology of tracking to reconstruct the potential bonds of meaning among ambivalences. This experiment takes part in the discussions on communication epistemology and new communicologies. It also offers in contribution an epistemological proposal as renewal disposition to know cross discursive territories as if we were drones in swirls, by considering different phenomena in their controversies and witnessing those heterogeneous moments in which we invent and discard inventions. Eventually, knowing how to interweave us in speeches already constituted by the feasibility of new constitutions of understanding