Herd affection and rampage-going. A case on Argentine Culture

GÓMEZ PONCE, ARIEL

Bucarest

Congreso; International Conference Semiosis in Communication: Culture, Communication and Social Change; 2021

National University of Political Studies and Public Administration

This presentation will recover the late hypothesis of Yuri Lotman (2013) about how the study of social affects, during moments of great crisis, reveals a “normal” invariant in cultures. It is a productive premise to analyze the aftermath of COVID-19 and the way in which this pandemic brings to the surface social conflicts, as well as in relation to violence in Latin America. To do this, I proposed to study a recent phenomenon in Argentine culture: the explosive affects and the collective rampage, especially linked to sports communities such as rugby. Recovering the modeling offered by the mass media, this work will seek to demonstrate that these semiotic tendencies of a “herd mentality”, which are read as a “suppression of natural tendencies in man” (Lotman, 2013), respond to structural forms of violence that are strongly inscribed in cultural memory and linked to expressions of race, class and gender.