Argumentar para conformar: o livro didático como mecanismo de domesticação de sentidos e de sujeitos

Abstract

In a world where, according to the dominant discourses, everything must be sellable, arguing has become something widely valued and learning how to do it something increasingly fetishized. In view of this, the aim of this work is to analyze, from the theoretical methodological framework of Discourse Analysis of pecheutian affiliation, how the approach to argumentation in high school Portuguese language textbooks can affect the process of subjectivation of students and, consequently, their reading and writing education. To do this, we established an archive of four textbooks approved by the 2021 PNLD, from which we cut out chapters and units focused on the teaching of argumentation and sought to restore the discursivities that underlie their formulations, in order to make explicit the power relations in which they are inscribed and their relationship with the consolidation of ways of thinking that legitimize and continue the prevailing power structures. Thereby, it was possible to see in the textbooks the presence of a discursive process in which the rhetorical discursive formation, allied to a conception of transparent language, is aligned with the discursiveness of training the subject-student for the job market, inscribing him in the discourse of individualization, that is, self-responsibility. Thus, based on the analyses carried out, we understand that textbooks – as political-symbolic objects – function as an important domestication device in the process of constituting the subject-student, silencing the socio-historical and political-ideological character of the processes of production of meaning and conforming him to ideological formations that maintain the discursivities of neoliberalism in dominance in society, in such a way to (de)limit their possibilities of rethinking them and thus sustain, via naturalization effect, the power structures that underpin the neoliberal rationality.