MEANING EFFECTS IN MULTISPECIES RELATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE ABOUT “SHARK ATTACK”

Abstract

This essay discusses the problem of objectivity and referentiality on language, taking as object the journalistic discourse about the animal-shark from the National Geographic Brasil’s report Praia do Medo (2014). As theoretical approach, we are based on the materialist discourse analysis of Michel Pêcheux (2014a, 2014b) and on the marxist theory of journalism proposed by Genro Filho (2012), therefore underlining the ideological operation along with discourse as central conceptions for the understanding of human-animal relations on discoursivity. We also take part from the animal studies and multispecies studies (Dooren, Kirsky, Münster, 2016), fields that offer perspectives that decentralize the human figure in order to look at the alterity, the nonhuman animal. From this framework, we formulated the following guiding question for the work: what effects of meaning does journalistic discourse produce in relation to the animal-shark through designation and agency? We interpret the production of meanings from the perspective of the animal–body relation, first highlighting the signifier chain that associates the animal’s mouth with danger to humans through a body of common-sense knowledge, which is contradicted by scientific knowledge insofar as the latter excludes any intentionality on the part of the animal to prey on the human species; secondly, it is the body-species relation that takes shape, through scientific knowledge, associating the shark with ecological balance.