State, science and society: through languages and theories

Abstract

In this paper we discuss, from the theoretical-methodological perspective of discourse analysis, the work of the contradictions that govern and affect language practices in Brazilian society, from the second half of the twentieth century, presenting them in a more or less unified and unifying scientific manner, characterized by a movement between taking language as a formal and abstract system of rules, and negotiating with variety as a way of socially attacking the problem of inequality. To us, such movement reveals a confrontation-alliance of theory with politics. We endeavor, therefore, to understand how the spatial distribution of theories occurs through the different (or the same?) modes of inscription of a type of knowledge related to language in the relationship between State, Science and Society.