“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.