Notas sobre epistemologia em Análise de Discurso: a formação teórica de uma Semântica Materialista

Abstract

The epistemological reflection is a point of arrival, not a starting point for Michel Pêcheux's intellectual enterprise, the Discourse Analysis (DA). This is a curious difference with the texts he produced in the same period, but signed under the pseudonym Thomas Herbert. In these, the social division of scientific work and the conditions of production of scientific practices are key points, and the discursive instance bursts into the ends of analysis. Far from discarding this double condition, we mobilize it as a potential index of an absent undertaking, grasped only as a symptom and which puts in necessary relation (i) the specification of discourse theory and discourse analysis (ii) the methodical development of the DA, implying the theoretical delimitation of its field and its object, and (iii) an epistemological investiture of scientific practice in its inextricable relationship with the ideological and the political. Motivated by this symptom, our general objective is to analyze the functioning of epistemological reflection in the constitution of the DA, taking as a reference the theoretical formation in which it is situated; for this purpose, the work material of this thesis is the essay Reflections on the theoretical situation of the social sciences and especially of social psychology, published by Pêcheux in 1966 under the pseudonym of Thomas Herbert. This first written production put into play by the author on the French intellectual scene is above all a political intervention that intertwines his participation in Althusserian-based working groups and the development of his thesis in Epistemology/Social Psychology. The objective of this note(s), thus outlined, involves three theoretical principles and a suspicion. The first principle is that (1) there is an epistemological reflection, albeit in a practical state, which is consubstantial to the theoretical constitution of the DA. The second principle is that (2) this reflection is relationally shaped and thus articulated in the complexly-structurally-unequally-determined set of theoretical formations. The third principle is that, being relational, (3) the unity effect of the whole and its regionalizations is a process determined by the historicity of relations. The suspicion, finally, is that this epistemological reflection, produced by a materialist theoretical position, demands that the AD (be) put into play (as) a theoretical discourse that reflects on itself. The analyses carried out lead us to outline the first movements of a theoretical adventure. Herbert himself gives us his statute: any solitary figure is capable, at most, of an itinerary. To be an adventure, it must be shared. That is why it is not too premature to recognize the historicity of theoretical practice as a process without Subject or End(s), in which complex social relations, driven by the motor of class struggle, bring forth from "men" subjects, always provisional products. The Herbert-effect functions as a proper name in relation to the conceptual system of which it is the support. It is an index of a position that, as such, is not identical to itself, does not exist by itself and is not immutable, which is only apprehensible if we go back to its historical formation in the whole in which it is inserted and intervenes.