Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Tiago Quiroga 56 free-trade economy, they could be continually improved, as they are complemented by an intensified communication. The passage would imply recognizing both the pragmatism of the new episte- mological practices, without any externality to the subject’s self- construction, and the imaginary of communication as a principle of free economic exchange. In the first case, the ideal of informa- tion is synonymous with a type of knowledge that individuals can no longer prescind for life in society. Of a practical nature, it would not only organize the institutions but, since desire is an important turning point, it would make the self-conduct of individuals one of its favorite targets. Knowledge, there, would be that “directly usable in the market, related to the circumstances of time and space - which [...] refers not to why, but how much [...] an individ- ual can acquire in his practice and whose value only he can evalu- ate” (ibid., p. 144). In the second case, being the basis of an entire economy of choice, the imaginary of intensified (unlimited) com- munication points to the improvement of the very functioning of the market, in which dominance, accumulation, and the free ex- change of knowledge (information), strictly speaking, would con- stitute a modus operandi for the multiplication of financial capital. In one way or another, in its different facets, in which it seeks to intensify a particular type of state interference in the market economy, which would no longer subsist naturally but artificially, neoliberalism finds in the communication bias of knowledge an important ally. When knowledge is transferred to the condition of direct agent for the accumulation of so-called post-industrial economies, they become inseparable. According to Marilena Chaui (2014, p. 92), at least since the 1970s, such economies start to be fundamentally determined by replacing the “logic of production by circulation [...] the logic of work by that of communication.” In both, the novelty would be in the market society defined as an information transmission system (OUELLET; MARTIN, 2018 2 ). It is about conceiving it as “a cy- 2 According to Ouellet and Martin (2018), the neoliberal epistemological revolution, which involves the idea of the market understood as a “cybernetic information trans - mission system,” has as a landmark Hayeck’s work, in particular, the article “The use of knowledge in society ”(HAYEK, 1945). According to those authors, the text was the theoretical basis that supported a series of public policy financing, mostly in industrialized countries, from 1970.