Samba-enredo carioca e outras “coisas nossas”: A percepção discursiva das contradições sociais pelo samba e pelo direito

Abstract

The research aims to investigate how samba-enredo from Rio discursively apprehends, from 1980 to 2023, the procedural device of promise or normative expectation of the legal narrative. I start from the hypothesis that samba understands this phenomenon in temporalities and processivities that are different from those of legal discourse. While law is anchored on the pretension of containing social contradictions, from the discursive neutralization of conflicts and the launching of a kind of “normative solution” for the future, the creative process of carnival bases the very foundations of its narrative enunciation in the contradictions of the present. I do not intend to proceed to a dichotomous analysis, but rather to pay attention to the plural social materiality involved. Another important precaution concerns the effort of not subordinating art or taking it as a kind of escape from reality, or even as an instrument to the so-called legal analysis. In this sense, the introduction is dedicated to a methodological approach that covers both the precautions that guide the study in the approximation between law and art, and the aspects more directly linked to the organization of the research: problem, hypothesis, concepts, delimitations, sources, and structuring of the text. The first chapter focuses on the relations between law (in its expanded connotation), the disputes in the formulation of meanings about social phenomena, and the key element of contradiction. It is divided into two parts: (i) the apprehensions of the construction of legal meanings and social discourses from the perspective of dialectical historical materialism; (ii) the fundamentals and developments of the conception of contradiction, whether in its condition of presupposition of thought, in its understanding in Gramsci’s work, or in the relations between social contradiction and law. The second chapter deepens the debate on discourse, culture and samba-enredo. It goes through an investigation on the notion of discourse in Bakhtin and Volóchinov, the imbrications between culture and political action in Gramsci, the historical and social trajectory of samba schools (permeated by social contradictions), and an approximation between law and samba discourse. The third and fourth chapters start from the more direct contribution of the empirical material, which consists in the sources related to the carnival enunciation (such as samba lyrics and photographic, audiovisual, and phonographic records of carnivals), as well as in the so-called legal documents about related historical processes (such as justifications to bills, pronouncements of public agents, among others). The fifth and last chapter intends to recover the connections between the previous ones, by proposing to reflect on the relations between the discourses of samba-enredo and the law from a non-dichotomous perspective. This chapter proposes a dialogue with the multiple meanings of contradiction that were unveiled throughout the dissertation (and that even surpass the meaning outlined in the initial delimitation of the research hypothesis): (i) contradiction as the condition of creative process; (ii) apprehensions of contradiction by samba and legal discourse; (iii) contradiction in its relations with the problematic of social inequality and capitalist sociability.