“FAVELA DOES NOT SHUT UP”: COMMODIFICATION, MATERIALITY, AND IDEOLOGY OF LANGUAGE IN TRANS-PERIPHERAL COOPERATION

ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão, a group of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, this paper discusses the emergence of communicative resources in response to the commodification of rights, common goods and services, such as the right to the city, to housing and to public security. The paper delineates a transperipheral interaction - i.e., an event that gathered participants of social movements from the peripheries of South Africa and Rio de Janeiro - in which activists display an acute reflexivity about the commodification of communicative resources in capitalism. Even though they do not objectify language as an independent phenomenon, these activists portray the commodification of communicative resources as historically intertwined with the silencing of Blacks, the poor and other minorities. Language and materiality (of the body and of the struggle against the commodification of rights) surface as hybrid elements in the activists’ discourse - that is, language and materiality are part of a material whole, in Latour’s terms; activists strategically and situationally objectify or “purify” them in key moments of the debate. The evidences I bring in the analysis point to limits in the division that critics of the notion of language commodification and materiality (especially David Block, Marnie Holborow, William Simpson and John O’Regan) draw between discourse and reality, or between epistemology and ontology. For these critics, language can only be metaphorically, rather than literally, regarded as a (material) commodity in capitalism - which is contradicted by my data. The article finally claims that the separation between discourse and reality in their Marxist critique is the product of a Calvinist modernist semiotic ideology that the authors do not problematize.

摘要：基于对里约热内卢阿莱芒贫民窟群（Complexo do Alemão）的实地调研，本文探讨了为应对权利、公共物品与服务（如城市权利(right to the city)、住房权与公共安全权）的商品化(commodification)而出现的传播资源(communicative resources)。本文阐述了一场跨边缘互动(transperipheral interaction)——即一场汇聚了南非与里约热内卢边缘地区社会运动参与者的活动——其间活动家们对资本主义下传播资源的商品化展现出深刻的反思性。尽管这些活动家并未将语言作为独立现象加以客体化，但他们将传播资源的商品化，描绘为与黑人、贫困群体及其他少数群体的失声(silencing)问题在历史上相互交织的过程。在活动家的论述中，语言与（身体及反抗权利商品化斗争的）物质性(materiality)，作为混合性要素浮现——正如拉图尔(Latour)所言，语言与物质性同属一个物质整体；活动家们会在辩论的关键节点，基于策略与场景需要，对二者进行客体化或“纯化”处理。本文分析所援引的证据，揭示了语言商品化与物质性概念的批评者（尤其是戴维·布洛克(David Block)、玛妮·霍尔博罗(Marnie Holborow)、威廉·辛普森(William Simpson)与约翰·奥里根(John O’Regan)）所划分的话语与现实、认识论(epistemology)与本体论(ontology)之间的界限存在局限。在这些批评者看来，在资本主义语境下，语言仅能被隐喻性地而非字面意义上视作（物质）商品——这一观点与本文的数据相悖。本文最终指出，这些批评者的马克思主义批判中，话语与现实的二分，实则是一种加尔文主义现代主义符号学意识形态的产物，而这些作者并未对该意识形态加以问题化审视。