Urban discourse : textualities and materialities

The constitution of the urban discourse is herein understood taking into account the central ideas of the place of memory and the foundational discourses. The discussion is focused on the two notions related to the maintenance effect, which is the product of the memory and the return of the discourses that sustain the present discourses. The relation between places of memory and foundational discourses is demonstrated by the analysis of two texts that comprise the discourse concerning Erico Verissimo in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil.


Introduction
The theoretical bases for current essay on the textualization of urban discourses may be found in Pêcheux, Orlandi and Foucault.The function of the urban discourse is investigated according to the French Discourse Analysis developed by Pêcheux in the 1960s and by Orlandi, who reinterprets the former's works and goes beyond his theory through displacements and transformations, particularly with regard to the urban space.Anchorage is sought in Foucault (2004) so that visibility to the relationships between discourse, power and knowledge, based on the discourse order, may be provided.
According to the author, so that the discourse would be included in this order, it should be held as legitimate and, above all, as true.Consequently, it may fit within the coercion procedures restricted to its external and internal order.The discursive formation is derived from the idea provided by Pêcheux (1997) and Foucault (2004) as the locus that materialize coercions.According to these authors, in which the current discussion is based, it may be said that the effects of the meaning of the discourse are constituted through the relationships among discursive formations (with all possible, but reciprocally limited meanings).The above effects make visible the function of language in History.The discourse acquires the status of truth (external coercion) and, according to Foucault, constructs knowledge and power that form the social body, or rather, the urban space.
With regard to the order of its external coercions, the will to acquire the status of truth is going to be focused and displaced into the Discourse Analysis.In fact, the latter is a field of study that deals with the will to acquire the status of truth as an effect of meaning.It is defined by Orlandi (2004) as the presence of ideology in the constitution of meanings and subjects.Foucault (2004) furnishes the internal control procedures (the return of discourses in new discourses, the author and the disciplinarization) so that the functioning of these procedures within the textualization of the urban discourses will be investigated.

Urban discourses: definition and limitations
From the discourse point of view, the city is a symbolical place that produces its own meaning and has its own materiality (ORLANDI, 1999, p. 8).The city constitutes a set of acts with specific interpretations particular to the urban milieu whose discourse is undertaken within the struggle between the symbolic and the politic forces and it is subordinated to the urban imaginary.Such distinction is based on the way the city-dweller speaks of the city as from categories of urbanism.According to Orlandi (1999, p. 9), "[…] the city is not narrated in its reality and in its specific materiality".The author, therefore, proposes to " […] pinpoint this reality wherever it escapes and fails to be captured by the urban discourse".In another text, Orlandi (2004) defines the city as a social event situated within modernity and functions as an imaginary space without exteriority, or rather, everything which is not the city, the non-urban (the countryside), is meaningful too.
Following this thought, it may be said that the discourse on the city and on its own materiality lies in the urban imaginary.Orlandi (1999Orlandi ( , 2004) ) characterizes the city and the urban milieu by notions of organization and order.The urban milieu is linked to organization from the directive and administrative point of view, and to the imaginary as an arrangement of units.The order belongs to the symbolic domain, or rather, […] the relationship between the history reality (systemization of the subject and its relationship with equivocality), required and contradictory articulation between structure and event (ORLANDI, 2001b, p. 13).
The urban discourse is constructed by the organization of the city in discourse and by the silencing of the reality in the same space.The urban discourse is [...] a discourse constructed by the overlaying of urban knowledge on the city's own reality.In such a non-distinction, what would be the urban reality is replaced by categories of urban knowledge either in a sophisticated form (the discourse of the citydweller) or in the common-sense way in which the discourse is incorporated by politics, by the administration, by the 'community', with a conversion of meaning within the urban imaginary (ORLANDI, 2004, p. 68, grifos do autor).
The same author insists that the urban discourse and the subject positions of the city dweller are related to the imaginary projections or the anticipatory ones.The subjects situate themselves in the place of the other.They 'listen' to their words from this place and anticipate the meaning they produce.According to Pêcheux (1997), imaginary projections do not occur without transformations and displacements.The passage of the speaking subject's position to the position represented in the discourse by the interlocutor occurs through its reversibility.The city is, thus, an agglomeration of institutions that forms 'its tissue' in proportion to their work on what is legitimated and on what is not in the urban space, within the context of the coercion place.
Investigating the urban discourse, Venturini (2009) defines the city as a reading text; frequently as a blank page and sometimes as filled-in pages, without margins, without any space for inclusions, without any gaps: a saturated memory.They are empirical impressions of the person who arrives at an urban space and tries to interpret it and perceive its order.Orlandi (2004, p. 11) follows the same line and writes that, "[…] within the urban territory, the body of subjects and the body of the city are one, with the subject's body tied to that of the city".Therefore, the subject-citizen and the urban space, within their meaning and existence, may not be separated in any (social, material, cultural, economical and historical) dimension, which constitutes the city.The city is, thus, a body formed by the resulting symbiosis of the articulation between time, space and the body of subjectscitizens who require knowledge on its order, history and habits, and delimit its moving frontiers, its gaps and excesses.
In such a discourse, the relationships between ideology and interpretation, between fault and excess, between saturation and fullness are produced, according to Orlandi, by evidences that stabilize the meanings and interpret the textualization of the urban discourses that are materialized by the texts (discourse samples) through which the city reads, narrates and gives itself meaning in and by language in history.Names or events, which are remembered and commemorated within the urban space, limit the interpretation.Since, according to Pêcheux (1997, p. 301), "[…] there is no faultless ritual", meaning in the urban discourse, although overdetermined by the institutional order, subvert the paraphrase chain and introduce polysemy and thus the possibility of other meanings.
As a discourse 'of' 1 , remembering sustains the discourses 'on', within the formulation axis, as memory and returning discourse.Remembering and commemoration together are constituted by the discursive memory, defined by Pêcheux (1999) as the functioning of pre-constructed knowledge within the universality order that legitimates wording.The institutions make visible this side of the city but fail to erase what lies on the other side.Consequently, the urban discourse is textualized by 1 Discourse of and discourse on area concepts by Venturini (2009)  several coercions, passing through knowledge and power (FOUCAULT, 2004), and by ideology which, according to Pêcheux (1997), interpellates the individual in the subject of its wording.Through the interdiscourse (the region of meetings and conflicts of meaning), the wording of the city is textualized in discourses, sustaining itself in foundational texts and in the place of memory.
Coercion of the external order: the value of the truth and the discursive functions Within the context of the textuality of urban discourses, the will to acquire the status of truth is focused.It is an external coercion procedure, derived from the social body that legitimates and allies itself to the discursive perspective by the interdiscourse and by the pre-constituted functioning.It brings to the intradiscourse the already said, which materializes knowledge in the text.The latter limit, re-order and control what may be said/written so that they could be provided with the conditions to enter the discourse order.With regard to the effects of truth, the constitution of discourses and procedures that make the text an entrance to the discourse are verified.
The desire for truth as a factor of textuality is based on knowledge related to memory/commemoration, which becomes visible when it enters the order of the discourse, through the desire of the subject to perpetuate relevant values to the community, precisely to the social body of the urban space.Discourses' textuality is sustained by the legitimation of the subjects and by their link with history -it's not a dated temporal space -by the historicity, and by the functioning of the 'place of memory' that warrants the permanence of some representation of the reality through clues that make the values and the faces present and endeared by the community.Further, each textuality factor linked to the value of truth is focused.Its productivity constitutes identification clues through the updating of memory.Through the identification process, the urban subjects/citizens accept the discourse as true and, thus, the texts enter the discourse order.The discourse subject comes first and the concepts of textuality and author follow it.
The acceptance and legitimating of the subject who says 'I' in the text that goes around the city is an important textualization factor.It is made up of knowledge that speaks from another place and in other times.In order to be attributed the author position, subjects should function as spokespersons of the community they represent.They place themselves in the locus between citizens (the body of the city) and history that forms the city's historical memory.It is the subject position of the enunciator and the discursive place occupied by them that authorize them to speak 'in or from the place of' by giving them the right to enter the discourse order as an author and someone responsible for saying.Paraphrasing theoreticians of the textual linguistics, the discourse textuality derives from the manner dispersion and unity is formed in the text.
Unity in dispersion should be here taken into account: from the one hand, the dispersion of texts and the dispersion of the subject; from the other hand, the unity of the discourse and the identity of the author.The dichotomies are text/discourse, subject/author (ORLANDI, 1993, p. 57).
The discourse textuality is a product of the author's unity and identity that materializes themselves within the discourse through the manner the subject is trespassed by several discursive formations.Textuality into the intradiscourse is highlighted by the organization of the relationship between the DF (Discursive Formation) and the several positions the subjects may undertake in the same text.According to Orlandi (1993), these positions represent very different relationships that may imply conflict, mutual bearing, exclusion, apparent neutrality, and gradation.Textuality is, therefore, relevant for the truth of the text and is linked to the subject and the position the subject occupies within the social and urban body.The subject's activity is, thus, legitimated and the power to 'speak and' speak 'in the name of' is provided.
Another important textuality factor bound to the truth-value is determined by the link between discourse and history.The circulation of discourses is largely proper to institutions and they are undertaken by the repetition of enunciations, "[…] They produce the subject under the form of a juridical subject" (PÊCHEUX, 1997, p. 159), that confer him with the power and the duty to say what they say, crossed by discursive and ideological formations to which they are subjected.
This means that, besides presenting themselves as true, institutional discourses seek legitimation and adhesion by controlling knowledge and power.They convey diversely the discourses they produce, having as their target certain social groups which legitimate themselves as those who enter within 'the discourse order' (FOUCAULT, 2004).Pêcheux (1997, p. 191) refers to the unequal distribution of power and knowledge as social goods.The contradictions shape the "[…] ideological conditions of reproduction/transformation of production relationships" which produce repercussions with slides and displacements in the discourse.According to Orlandi (1990, p. 14), the history that structures the discourses of the city derived from institutions "[…] is not defined by chronology or by events; it is not an evolution but the production of meanings".Meanings materialize under the shape of discourses and under the author's responsibility.The author gathers the urban citizen around this position and they, in turn, identify themselves with what is said and warrant part of their textualization to the discourse-text.
Within the context of truth-value, 'the place of memory' is underscored.It is a concept, developed by Nora (1983), to function together with the commemoration, as a place of critique, which in the long run becomes the very tool of commemoration.According to Nora (1983), material places maintain clues of memory appropriated by history and relate themselves to the proliferation of identity movements (social and political) that contribute towards new subjectivities and new citizenships.The identifying movements provide visibility not merely to that which is legitimated but to underground memories too.They represent 'the other side of the city', a term invented by Pesavento (2007).'The place of memory' within the discursive function is a visibility procedure in which the already-said updates the texts in another place and allows the reading, interpreting and comprehending of sayings and knowledge that embody the urban discourse.By means of such functioning, the subjects of discourse syntagmatize names and events within the formulation axes or interdiscourse.They are linked to commemoration days, especially centennial ones.Nora (1983) states that the 'place of memory' is the unspoken link that binds names or events of the past to those of the present.Within the discursive perspective, the link is the effect of meaning, which is the product of language in history, and the names and events, the objects of the urban discourse, form the place of textuality that legitimizes discourses.Legitimizing derives from the 'realities' that constitute the effects of truth and authority.The visibility of these names and events and their contribution for the textualization of the urban discourse derive from the traces left in the collective memory by past facts, names and emblems.The 'place of memory' is not merely a base for the enunciations within the formulation axis but helps the institutions, through discourse, so that they would satisfy the subjects' desire to identify themselves through certain shapes.The city is also able to represent itself within and outside its limits through names or events that are introduced within the order of discourse and, thus, 'may or should' constitute themselves as a heritage of social formation.
A deepening on the textuality of urban discourses brings the discussions to the procedures of internal control, naming, foundational discourse, author and disciplinarization.The term foundational discourse is a theoretical concept developed by Orlandi (1990) who also theorizes the issue of the author.Whereas the first concept is derived from the theoretical bases of Michel Pêcheux, the second concept has been proposed by Michel Foucault.The foundational discourse deals with the return of discourses in other discourses, which Venturini (2009) denominates as discourse 'of'as a constituent of memory.
Foucault ( 2004) tackles this issue and refers to the enunciations that return and bring to the order of the discourse the already-said, which legitimizes and updates the speech.It is the return of the same discourses in others that have their origin in social practices.Such returning preserves the grand narratives that are narrated, repeated and variegated.What returns is originated from formulae, texts and ritualized sets of discourses that repeat themselves in specific circumstances since they are bearers of secrets and important truths for the social formation and since they act for the maintenance of religious, social and political values.
Another element of the internal order dealt with by Foucault, Orlandi and Pêcheux is the author function, which is materialized during discourse through signature or other linguistic markers.It functions as the determiner of authorship of what is said.Therefore, no discourse may materialize itself without a subject that bears the authorship of the speech.Authorship has the support of the institutions that provide the subjects with power that enable them to say what they say.Orlandi (1993, p. 55-56) states that [...] at the origin of every discourse there exists the totalizing project of the subject.This project converts oneself into an author.The role of the project warrants coherence and completeness of a representation.
With regard to the issue of the author, one should underscore that institutional discourses seem to belong to the pre-constructed order, or rather, knowledge known to all, belonging to the universal order, providing effects that the speech is not the responsibility of one author, but represents the institutional position and, consequently, lacking individualizing judgments.According to Foucault (2004, p. 26), the author [...] is not acknowledged as a speaking individual, who has narrated or written a text, but the start of a discourse complex, as a unit and origin of meanings and as a focus of coherence.
According to Orlandi (1993), the subject becomes an author at the enunciation act when one says 'I' and textualizes the speech, or rather, when one inscribes the speech in paraphrase networks.In the discursive perspective, the author-function is the locus where the unity of the subject is formed, or rather, the totaling project that warrants the permanence of representation.The subject's unity and the transparency of meaning are the effects of evidences formed by ideology and by forgetfulness inherent to the subject, described by Pêcheux (1997) as belonging to the enunciation and to memory.Through forgetfulness, the subjects have the illusion that the speech may be only one and that meaning is given by it, as the source of speech.Forgetfulness is based on the relationship of the subject with the text and on the relationship of the text with the discourse.The latter affiliates itself to a determined discursive formation that produces an illusion of unity and transparency.According to Orlandi (1993, p. 57), ideology.
[...] produces the subject as a juridical subject, which historically corresponds to the subject form of capitalism: an autonomous subject (and thus responsible) and, at the same time, determined by external conditions.
Although the subject is not the origin or the centre of speech, he occupies a subject-position and inscribes himself in a discursive formation that signalizes towards an identifying norm by which he knows himself (with regard to himself and to the other subjects) 'as if' such an identification was complete.In other words, an illusory unit.The acknowledgment of the other and the identification with the other put the subject within otherness and authorize him to speak from institutional loci.He takes the role of a spokesperson, or rather, 'the place of the collective agent', according to Conein (1980), invested with the power of speech by and in the name of his peers.Following Orlandi (1993), the fecundity of the authorprinciple as classification, ordination and distribution of event to be productive should be displaced by the authorship-principle in which the subject functions within an enunciation role, as a locator, enunciator, who says 'I', but not as the origin of speech.Authorship is, therefore, a principle of textuality, a constitutive requirement of the discourse.
Foucault ( 2004) deals with the disciplinarization issue and says that such procedure is bound to the control that discourses have on themselves.This means that disciplinarization and the foundational discourse are the basis of its internal coherence.They are sustained by rules that form the formulation of discourses (the return of determined discourses in new discourses) and by the determinations that constitute the order of discourse.The author is, thus, constituted as the person [...] responsible for the control principle of a discourse production, which fixes limits by the workings of an identity, or rather, a permanent reupdating of rules (FOUCAULT, 2004, p. 36).
The disciplinarization is the internal control principle of the discourse with regard to itself.In other words, discourses are regulated and overdetermined by the social factor.The institutions regulate what constitutes the urban discourse and what 'may or should' be within the formulation axis (discourse line) and represents the voice of all and the voice of none.In such a discourse there is the dialectic functioning given by the apparent impersonality of the interlocutor who speaks for the institution and for the visible presence of the subjects/urban citizens in whom discourse is formed and for whom it is forwarded.However, the institutional subject is not subjectified as 'I' but as a collective being, working with the effect of truth and simulating full identification between the subject and the Subject.According to Pêcheux (1997), the latter is the subject of knowledge and functions as a locus that collects unanimity.Through disciplinarization, the text enters the order of the discourse and significantly circulates within the urban space.Through its functioning, the subjects 'acknowledge' the legitimation that naturalizes the meaning.
The textuality of the urban discourse: functioning Two texts were chosen to exemplify the textualization of the urban discourse.A representation of the Brazilian author Erico Verissimo, who pervades the imaginary of the subjects/citizens of the city of Cruz Alta, located in Rio Grande do Sul State in Brazil, is present in the texts.The first text consists of a billboard that identifies the southern Brazilian city of Cruz Alta as "the land of Erico Verissimo" (Figure 1), providing great visibility to the author.The text is present at the entrances of the city and legitimizes its belonging.In fact, the belonging derives from the imaginary relationship between the memory on the author and the city.The two seem to be the same there are erasures, gaps and slides.It should be highlighted that, in spite of the apparent homogeneity, other texts echo from the past that are not forgotten and signify 'presence in absence', according to Courtine (1999).
The second materiality on which the textuality of the urban discourse is based in the current essay is the advertisement published by the daily newspaper Jornal Diário Serrano (2004), produced in Cruz Alta and in the statewide daily newspaper Jornal Zero Hora on the 183 rd year of the city's political emancipation.The advertisement proclaims the city as 'the land of Erico Verissimo' and gives visibility to such representation through the discourse (Figure 2).The above text went around Cruz Alta and the state of Rio Grande do Sul during 2004, the year before the birth centenary of the writer.It is structured by enunciations that sustain the city's symbolical materiality and by the image-enunciations.In fact, the billboard shows the frontiers and limits of Cruz Alta.It becomes legitimate to say 'son of this land' because it was previously announced that Cruz Alta was the land of Erico Verissimo.A simulation of the reality exists in such materiality: there is everything in its small limited space.The ideology brings forth evidences that saturate the intradiscourse and erases the memory that escapes through the meshes between the symbolical and the imaginary.The reading of the margins is made impossible as if the frontiers were closed and the meanings saturated.
Further, the materiality discussed above gives visibility, within the formulation axes, to the past and to the institutional memory with regard to what 'should and may' be said and done so that 'all future generations would benefit from such a heritage', or rather, the memory of Erico Verissimo.It is highly important to note that the positing of the University institution is extant.The University is legitimated by its status.It even binds its logotype, its colors and its memory to the writer.The textuality of this sample of urban discourse proclaims without any ambiguity its belonging to a higher discourse, namely, the memory of the city.External coercions, the value of truth and internal coercions force that wordings and knowledge to enter the order of the discourse.By its signs in the text, the University of Cruz Alta, on the one hand, authorizes itself to say what it actually says and, on the other, acquires legitimation with regard to this wording since in the urban space it is the 'locus of memory' that updates, bears and institutes such legitimation through what it represents.
Within the text, the discourses that return are those that place culture, heritage and inheritance in the same locus.Discourses are returned through these three elements: the religious discourse of a previous period, albeit not the current one; the political discourse determines 'who could or who would say or do'; the family discourse derives from tradition and from the space between the home and the street.According to DaMatta (1997), citizenship inhabits the street space and is subject to coercions and punishments.Inhabiting the inside (the house) does not mean being 'merely' a citizen, but a 'subject of relationships', protected by them.
These relationships are underscored so that the University could be placed within a public space.The meaning of the term public is less broad than that desired.In fact, it is the place where many people would wish themselves to be, but few are successful.Not all are in the house; all are on the street.

Final Considerations
The current article does not bring forth the whole textuality of the urban space and the discursivity that the discourse entail -it reveals less the coercions that allow it to enter within the 'discourse order'.However, it has been possible to signalize the opacity of the urban discourse and the fact that cities remember/commemorate through names, events, values and culture.The subjects/citizens see themselves and signify themselves.They also signify the city space and the subjects that inhabit the space.
The 'place of memory' is one of the elements that sustain the remembrance (discourse 'of') and the commemoration (discourse 'on').This means that remembrance/commemoration, as the locus of materiality, may be analyzed through this concept.In fact, knowledge, power, ideology and the trespassing of the subject by the unconscious are, thus, delineated.
The 'place of memory and the foundational discourse' have a very similar functioning.In fact, they update speech.The first does so through discipline, organization, distribution and, thus, allows the understanding/interpreting/comprehending the discursive materiality.The second does so through stabilization and subversion of the paraphrase.They install the discursivities that repeat and regularize meanings, placing in the same locus the old and the new, the same and the different, the different and the same.
Another important consideration deals with the fact that the urban discourse, seen through what is remembered/commemorated, is institutional and, thus, coercive, determinative and constitutes imaginaries through the freezing of meaning.However, meaning slides away through such freezing and by evidences.It is signalized towards a lack, towards a fault, towards what is silenced.Meanings echo from the interdiscourse, as voices without names, as a subject without space, as the subject in the street who identifies himself and transfers to himself the success of the other and what he sees in the other, and which, at the same time, denies the other.
The results show that these discourses reinforce the belonging of whom would like to be the 'city of birth of or the land of,' but which contradictorily reinforces the differences of whom constitutes and reinforces.Orlandi calls the above as 'excesses' due to the trespassing of the discourses within the texture of the discourse itself, reinforcing institutionalized values that control the speech and repetitions.However, the meaning slides and ruptures (FOUCAULT, 2004).It gives meaning to what 'should or could' have been articulated to be said in the original discourse and for several reasons were erased or remained latent.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. 'The land of Erico Verissimo' and gives visibility to such representation through the discourse.
and refer to memory functions.