In the underground of a network: on the political at the heart of the technical

Author(s)

Vitor Pequeno

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2015-02-19

Examining board members

Cristiane Pereira Dias; Rafael de Almeida Evangelista; Verli Fátima Petri da Silveira

• Advisor: Cristiane Pereira Dias

Abstract

This research centered its investigation on social networks as technological devices for communication and the establishment of social relations. By means of the appropriation and application of several theoretical dispositifs from discursive theory and historical materialism, this paper sought to analyze technical aspects of these networks as ideologically structured, deconstructing the implied formulations for subjects, social relations, and the circulation of meaning imbedded in this structuring. This research also heavily relied on the philosophical methods of Jean Baudrillard in order to rethink certain notional operations of duality, especially in the case of online/off-line, and their relevance, both epistemic and social, for the present. This research appropriates itself of the notion of Archive as an ideological principal for the circulation of all meaning, and develops the idea of subterranean cleavages, which Pêcheux suggests in Lir L¿archive Aujourd¿hui (1982). In spite of intensely heterogeneous material possibilities intrinsic of the online environment, what we have predominantly found in the technical structure of social networks is the historic-form of contemporary capitalism, structuring social relations, and even the constitution of subjects, through what we have come to categorize as relationships of consumption (AU)