“El valencià no se pedrà mai”: la manipulació mediàtica de les emocions col·lectives en l’anticatalanisme valencià durant la transició (1976-1982) / “El valencià no se pedrà mai”: Media manipulation of collective emotions in Valencian Anti-Catalanism during the Transition (1976-1982)

Political identities reflect social inequalities and are rewritten at every historical conjuncture with symbolic materials, arguments and states of consciousness that prevail. Languages that use a human group in this context are vehicles for such reconstruction and act simultaneously as a reflection and a mental space where tensions generated by the socio-political struggle are crystallized. In this dual role, languages are powerful catalysts for group emotions. They incorporate these emotions into to socio-communicative dynamism and express them as a complement to other systems of social semiosis. Furthermore, language is quite a malleable material that infiltrates social practices, shapes ideological enunciation and lends itself to political manipulation, triggered by the media. However, for political manipulation to exist, certain conditions for the receptivity of such messages must also exist. The breeding ground of emotions has to be rich enough and respond to external stimuli in an intelligible way. Under these assumptions, we consider three interdependent objectives: (a) to make a provisional balance of academic research on the so-called phenomenon of blaverisme, (b) to consider the problems in the method inherent to understanding the conflict and (c) to analyze the historical and cultural substrate of fear towards the other and fear of linguistic impersonation, emotions, in our opinion, that are the genesis of Valencian anti-Catalanism.