Excess, lack and strangeness in the self-regulation discourse by CONAR

Abstract

The Advertising Self-Regulation Council (Conselho de Autorregulamentação Publicitária - CONAR) released, in 2014, an advertising campaign which drew criticism. Amid the materiality that expressed this discontentment there was a letter addressed to CONAR, which was signed by the Consumer Protection Institute (Instituto de Defesa do Consumidor - IDEC) and thirty more organizations. This letter requested the campaign discontinuation in which CONAR had allegedly assigned itself an excessive power in evaluating ethics in Brazilian advertisement. Moreover, according to the letter, CONAR had also mocked social groups’ struggles. Based on this event, this research proposes, based on Michel Pêcheux’s Discourse Analysis theories, a reflection on how the advertising self-regulation works. The discursive corpus is composed by scenes from two audiovisual advertisements called “Clown” and “Bean Stew”, and by excerpts of the aforementioned letter. This paper uses, as a theoretical and methodological approach, the concepts of saturated and gap memory (COURTINE, 1999) and connects them to the analytical procedures proposed by Ernst (2009), concerning excess, lack and strangeness.

Keywords

• Discurso
• Autorregulamentação publicitária
• CONAR