Agronegócio: lógicas e limites de uma articulação discursiva

Abstract

This thesis seeks to investigate the political, economic and ideological articulations that have constituted agribusiness as an identity since the 1990s, which means understanding the ways in which the interests of agrarian elites have been constituted based on discursive articulations. In this sense, we first sought to demonstrate, through a bibliographical base and historical interpretation, the relationship between economics and politics as differences that are intertwined in the representation of agrarian elites as a class over the course of three discursive historical periods: ruralism, integration into the industrializing ideology and conservative modernization. As the second stage of the research process, we dedicated ourselves to relating the shifts in the discursive structure between what is conventionally called "conservative modernization" and agribusiness as a process of growing openness to the transformation of the identity of agrarian elites from an ethical-political dimension, in which we employed three research logics: a social logic, which must account for exploring the logical relationships that constitute the social as a regularity of differential positions in a discursive structure in favor of agribusiness; political logics, in the relationship between the logic of equivalence and difference, as ways of constructing a hegemonic relationship and forming an agribusiness identity and, finally, phantasmagorical logics, which demonstrate the interpellation capacity of the agribusiness discourse (s). As we have pointed out, the logic behind the formation of what we understand as agribusiness is a continuous attempt to stop the flow of differences that make up a discursive field. At first, this hegemonic attempt takes place through a logic of differences, in a context of the disarticulation of chains of equivalence of peasant family farming and the exclusion of the agrarian question from the field of symbolic representation and, at a second moment, the identification of agribusiness is displaced by a limit to this process of signification by an institutionalist totality. In order to carry out the research, we relied on a literature review, analysis of economic, political and ideological data on the discursive conditions of the emergence of agribusiness from the epistemological and ontological framework of discourse theory.