Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Jairo Ferreira 270 tions, indexing, programming, and content) and, through this mediation, among themselves (between actors located in differ- ent institutional positions). This perspective is present, for ex- ample, in Ethnographie de l’exposition (VERÓN and LEVASSEUR, 1989), which we analyzed in a recent article (FERREIRA, 2020). The second postulate, in this conceptual-methodolog- ical proposal, is the communication paradox: individuals can- not, in the position of social actors, not communicate; but, when communicating, they face the challenges of the symptom that manifests in the interactions. Our proposal here adopts this per- spective, but with a shift. It is not a matter of analyzing the pa- thology analyzed by Palo Alto’s social psychology (hysteria, pho- bia, and obsession – VERÓN, 2005), but the double interactional bond that can be indicated in the interactions. The interactions can be analyzed, therefore, as poten- tially revealing the paradox on several levels: the impossibility of not communicating with the use of digital networked means and the challenge of manifesting the symptom in the public space; the exercise of power and demand for autonomy from the other; what unites also hierarchizes and generates power relations (BOURDIEU, 1989); authorized and unauthorized voices; etcetera . This diversity of singular objects is not pre - defined, but it is a discovery according to research cases under construction. The complex of this analysis of interactions in groups and collectives interposed by different means, with actors lo- cated in different institutional positions, is that it is not about stimuli, responses, and reinforcements of A and B, mutually conditioning. Because, firstly, we consider that the behavioral theory, in its various versions based on the stimulus-response- reinforcement triad, is insufficient to account for the behavior of the species. The contribution of the Palo Alto School (analyzing this triad in interactions, as a way to capture the impulses of the unconscious – as problematized by the unconscious, in the form of hysterias, obsessions, phobias, and schizophrenic situations) is also not enough. In our perspective, it is necessary to aggregate the pro- cess of building the social beyond what we have inherited (the unconscious, the imaginary, and the symbolic order) and what