Memes war

The political use of pictures in Brazil 2019

Abstract

In order to analyse pictures shared in WhatsApp groups of Jair Bolsonaro supporters, I will explore the idea that the act of sending someone a picture through social media performs a speech act. Thus we can separate the utterance act (of sending the picture to the receiver in a certain context), the locutionary act (what is said through the pictorial content), the illocutionary act (what is done by uttering that pictorial content), and the perlocutionary act (of affecting the receiver). The pictures analysed were collected from January to September 2019, using the WhatsApp Monitor. My main philosophical argument will be in section 3, in which I develop the idea of pictorial speech acts and its conceptual bases. To understand the communicational role of pictures it is necessary to supplement picture theories (visual semantics) with a communicative act theory based on speech act (visual pragmatics). The development of the general outline of visual pragmatics is the main philosophical contribution envisaged in this paper. My last step it to argue that there are at least three forms of naivety that render the receivers prone to the uptake of the illocutionary act performed: aesthetic naivety, communicational naivety, and epistemic naivety.