A casa de Minerva: entre a ilha e o palácio - os discursos sobre os lugares como metáfora da identidade institucional

Abstract

Examines the structuring process of the university education in Brazil, inserted in a nationality construction project, drawing on theoretical frameworks from the fields of History of Education, Social Sciences, Social Memory and Language. We start out from the principle that the construction of a piece of research is done by expanding the concept of what documents are, insofar as these are also monuments and are, thus, susceptible to subjectivities and intentionalities which are sometimes not verbally and clearly expressed in their production, conservation, perpetuation and dissemination, especially when one is dealing with official documents from institutions. We also believe that institutional discourse or legal provisions sometimes fail to explain clashing discrepancies and contradictions, and evoke, if not perpetuate, the memory of certain groups in a specific social-historical context. We conceive discourse, expressed in its materiality, as “words in movement” and thus it is also crucial to understand the way it produces different meanings. Words bear an ideological meaning depending on the socio-historical context in which they are uttered and they are directly linked to the life experiences of individuals or groups. In turn, all discourse expresses and produces meanings and, over and above expressing a “pure thought”, it appears as a consequence and a source of ideological relations. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that, in all research, one correctly identifies the subjects as well as the context in which the discoursive formations appear. When we examine documents, comparing them in the light of contemporary investigation, building new meanings and new networks of meaning for past events, we hope to relate the fields of history and meaning from a transdiciplinary perspective. Through French Discourse Analysis as well as the theoretical framework of Mikhail Bakthtin's and his Circle, we intend to pose new questions about the document archives, since the ways of expression and recording are not innocent or devoid of the subjects' ideologies. Beyond their apparent neutrality, words reveal mental structures, ways of perceiving and organizing reality, through memory networks produced from specific memories – and lapses of memory – and attributions of meanings. Using associations between the State’s official discourse, subjects’ utterances and institutional documents, we try to understand the University of Brazil as a specific model of university institution which coincides with the national developmental project, typical of Vargas's policy of political centralization. Its existence, in this sense, implied the obliteration of alternative models from other universities, which were fuelled by ideological affiliations that conflicted with Vargas's New State model. In this way, there was constant interference with its so-called institutional autonomy and it showed constant internal struggles by groups which were historically opposed to its objectives and its identity construction. In this sense, we start off from the principle that the discourse employed to discuss the possible locations of the university can be seen as a metaphor within a specific discourse pattern which presented a more serious conflict: the university’s pedagogical project, which would ultimately give it an institutional identity. Metaphor is here understood not only as a figure of speech but also as a transfer process that establishes new meanings for discourse.