w w w . m e d i a c i o n e s . n e t

Communication,

Culture and Hegemony

From the Media to the Mediations

Philip Schlesinger

Introduction

(Translated by Elizabeth Fox and

Robert A. White, Sage Publications, 1993.)

« The new turn in research and analysis represented by Martín-Barbero (and by others such as Néstor García Canclini) began to take off in the early 1980s and prescribes that we analyze how popular media articulate with the texture of everyday life. Published in the middle of the 1980s, Martín-Barbero’s book stands as an outstanding example of a redirection in thinking shared by a significant current of academic writers. […] In Europe and the United States […] there has also been a convergent movement of research in recent years under the labels of ‘reception analysis’ and ‘the ethnography of the audience’. Like the work of those active in Latin America, the recent spate of audience studies has offered a line of inquiry into how media are variously interpreted by those who consume them. Thus, by virtue of a critique of established positions within his own continent’s frame of reference, Martín-Barbero’s book works its way towards intellectual ground very familiar to those in the Anglophone world. »

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

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Readers in the Anglophone world should find engagement with Jesús Martín-Barbero’s book a rewarding and thought-

provoking experience. Within these covers the reader will

find a work of theoretical synthesis which at the same time

offers a wide-ranging review of much little-known Latin

American work on communication and culture. I would be

surprised if it does not stir up a substantial critical response

and come to be judged as a major contribution to cultural

and media studies.

To those well versed in contemporary European cultural

analysis, many of the touchstones will be familiar. There are multiple points of orientation, too, for those who come with

a sense of the historical development of debates in modern

social and political theory. Furthermore, none who has

attended to the evolution of media theory in the past two productive decades will feel lost in the pages that follow.

Why, then, given so many well-trodden paths, does one

feel the sense of something new, of a distinctive sensibility at work? The answer, I think, in part lies in the original style

of thought with which Martín-Barbero combines his theo-

retical concerns and arguments to dispute several orthodo-xies. It may go against the grain of current fashion to dis-cern an authorial voice, but I do hear one in the pages that

follow, as I have in person. However, there is also some-thing more, which derives from the way in which his

thinking is conditioned by working in the dynamic and creative Latin American intellectual field.

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Undeniably, current work on culture and the media in Latin America is characterized by a working over of a dis-tinctive set of themes and problems. Indeed, the central,

animating preoccupation for much recent writing is pre-

cisely the attempt to develop a properly Latin American approach to the problems of communication and culture on

that continent. Like any other field of research, the investi-

gation of culture and the media in Latin America has had its own distinct stages of development and has been subject

to the broader movements, whether sociopolitical, eco-

nomic or intellectual, that he behind the emergence of new

problematics.

At the centre of the recent history of Latin America me-

dia research has been a struggle against intellectual depen-dency. In the period immediately after the Second World

War, North American theoretical models and procedures

held sway, with work on content analysis, audiences, ef-

fects, and journalistic professionalism following the familiar pathways of positivism. The ruling assumptions in main-

stream social science at the time were crassly diffusionist:

the ‘modern’ (capitalist) societies of the West provided a universal model for the ‘traditional’ to follow. In that uni-linear optic, mass communication had its part to play in

acting as a ‘modernizing’ force and also, in the form of

newspaper circulation and the number of radio and televi-sion receivers, as a crude index of development. The mechanistic and ethnocentric assumptions of such thinking

have long since ceased to satisfy even their original expo-nents.

However, the UNESCO-sponsored work in the 1960s and

1970s, which first initiated serious research on mass com-munication in Latin America, was based on such imported

models. Dissatisfaction with the prevailing conceptual frameworks led to a variety of critical reactions. This time

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

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models were imported from Europe. By the 1970s a number of quite distinctive approaches had developed, which will not be unfamiliar to Europeans. For instance, a strong se-

miotic current was associated with the Argentinean scholar,

Eliseo Verón, and his collaborators, whereas a Marxist political economic analysis was being elaborated by Ar-

mand Mattelart, then in Chile, and others such as Héctor

Schmucler, another Argentinean. Debates throughout Latin America about the relative merits of studying signifying

practices as against the political economic preconditions of

media structures paralleled contemporary discussion in

Europe.

However, debates about communication policy, popular

culture, democratization, ideology and so forth, are one thing when conducted in the liberal-democratic climate of

Europe or North America. They are something else again

when taking place under the dictatorial cloud that covered

eight out of ten countries of the southern cone by 1977. Where national security doctrines reign, perceptions of ruler

and ruled are unclouded by any niceties about the defense

of the public sphere and the duties of the fourth estate. The United States’ support for the military dictatorships brought about a new and very pointed interest in the relations be-

tween transnational political power and the mass media.

Repression resulted in the temporary migration of many researchers from South America to the friendlier climate of Mexico.

Such a widespread experience could only reinforce a con-

cern with dependency, whether upon imported capital, technology, professional practices or ideas. Hence, by the early 1970s, the first moves had already begun in redefining the proper interests of an autonomously conceived Latin

American research agenda. This desire was reinforced by the growing movement during the 1970s amongst countries

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of the ‘Third World’, in debates coordinated by UNESCO, to redress imbalances in the flow of information by creating a New World Information and Communication Order, aspi-

rations which were most fully codified by the MacBride

Report in 1980.

Concern about transnational control of communication

has taken on a new lease of life since the 1980s with the further evolution of telecommunications and audiovisual

technologies. One response has been a growing interest in

the development of national communication policies, which

has become one of the most researched questions in Latin America. In fact, the notion of a coherent set of policies

adapted to national needs as opposed to the workings of the

international market also derives from a UNESCO initiative of the mid-1970s.

One prominent strand of Latin American work has taken

the factors conditioning the evolution of policy as its main preoccupation. Such work is often informed by nationalistic

and statist assumptions, political-economic in cast, and

infused with a rationalistic conception of policy-formation, conceived as an antidote to the chaotic and dependent na-

ture of decision-making by national governments that do not control their own destinies. The invasion and reshaping of national cultural space by transnational capital, and the imposed imperatives of private, class interests over a com-

mon, public good are the key problems addressed. The denunciation of ‘media imperialism’ has been an important part of the political rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s.

However, the ‘media imperialism’ thesis –at least in those

versions that assume the unmediated transmission of ideol-ogy from metropolitan centre to peripheral receiver– has come under increasing pressure in recent years, with mount-ing evidence of its theoretical and empirical inadequacies.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

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One result of a growing skepticism has been an attempt to investigate the actual conditions of reception and consump-tion of cultural products in the context of popular cultures.

One of the most prominent voices in this, the camp of popu-

lar cultural studies, is that of Jesús Martín-Barbero. For him, ‘the nation’ represents not a rational instance of deci-

sion making but rather a field of rich contradictions, where

cultural identity is under continual negotiation.

The new turn in research and analysis represented by

Martín-Barbero (and by others such as Néstor García Can-

clini) began to take off in the early 1980s and prescribes that we analyze how popular media articulate with the texture

of everyday life. Published in the middle of the 1980s,

Martín-Barbero’s book stands as an outstanding example of a redirection in thinking shared by a significant current of

academic writers. Indeed, to switch genres, those familiar

with the extraordinary fiction-writing currently emerging

from Latin America will find congruent literary expressions in works such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the

Scriptwriter and Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango.

In Europe and the United States (in parallel, but for rea-

sons of a different kind) there has also been a convergent

movement of research in recent years under the labels of

‘reception analysis’ and ‘the ethnography of the audience’. Like the work of those active in Latin America, the recent spate of audience studies has offered a line of inquiry into

how media are variously interpreted by those who consume them. Thus, by virtue of a critique of established positions

within his own continent’s frame of reference, Martín-Barbero’s book works its way towards intellectual ground very familiar to those in the Anglophone world. There are many students of the field, therefore, who will easily recog-

nize exactly what he is saying, and why.

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The popular culturalist analysis of the multifold character of everyday life has become increasingly important in Latin American research since the 1980s. It has an underlying

political message, for it addresses neglected modes of par-

ticipation in everyday life and sets out to find forms of action that offer entry points into the dominant culture and

power structure, by subverting it if necessary, and by appro-

priating it to other uses. What therefore emerges is a strong sense of the ambiguities and contradictions of cultural prac-

tices, one quite averse to seeing them as under the

uncontested control of a system of domination, or indeed,

as at all totally rationalizable by policy-making apparatuses. In short, the analysis departs from notions of the vitality of

popular culture and of resistance to hegemonic forces which

have much in common with the tradition of cultural studies in Britain developed by Raymond Williams, Richard Hog-

gart and Stuart Hall. Indeed, occasional references to the

work of Williams and Hoggart do appear, although so far as

European writing is concerned one would judge the work of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau,

Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci to have exerted the

strongest influences on Martín-Barbero’s thinking. Martín-Barbero’s book is in three parts, each of which

tackles a different, but related set of issues. Whereas Part III

is most fully and obviously centred upon Latin America, and is the heart of the work, Parts I and II offer an indispen-sable point of entry into understanding how European and

North American research and writing have been refocused under the impact of a distinctive set of concerns. As a pre-

liminary step in developing his perspective, the author has first addressed an impressive variety of theories in critical vein.

At root, what Martín-Barbero contends is that we should shift attention from forms of analysis concerned with the

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

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ownership and control of media structures and with mes-sages conceived as hegemonic ideology to modes of recep-tion in the context of wider social relations. This is not the

place to enter into the detail of his arguments or interpreta-

tions, nor, indeed, to take issue with some implications of bending the stick this far. It seems most useful simply to

summarize the main thrust of the argument and then to

invite the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Martín-Barbero is concerned to rescue the category of ‘the

people’ from elite theorists (whether conservative or Marx-

ist) who identify the popular with ‘the masses’. Popular culture, under contemporary conditions experienced as

mass culture, he maintains, is not to be dismissed as an

absence of culture. Moreover, against the grain of leftist

class-reductionism (now under heavy assault everywhere)

he also sets out to resist the assimilation of popular culture

to that of the class struggle. And at the same time, too, he

wishes to set aside all kinds of contemporary romantic an-thropology, arguing that the popular is not the primitive.

In essence, the import of his theoretical critique is that Latin Americans need care when importing frameworks of

analysis and conceptual paradigms. These may – and do – have profound effects upon the perception of cultural proc-esses and how these relate to the apparatuses of communication.

Of particular importance is Martín-Barbero’s approach to

the transnationalization of culture: past orthodoxy, he ar-gues, has tended to see this as entailing cultural homogeni-

zation. On the contrary, he maintains, one cannot even take

‘the nation’ itself for granted. In fact, new problems of iden-tity are now appearing at the level of the nation-state, a level of social organization that tends to deny the differences of ethnic groups, classes, religions, regions and cultures. Hen-

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ce, the key questions do not really begin to be addressed by considering formal national politics and policy-making but only when we start to consider the workings of popular

culture in its multifold manifestations. However, this prob-

lem now has to be conceptualized in an increasingly complex way in which notions of communication go well

beyond a concern with the media alone. He proposes that

‘mediation’ become a central category for this kind of analysis. The concept of mediation entails looking at how

culture is negotiated and becomes an object of transactions

in a variety of contexts. How to begin such an analysis is

conveyed by the numerous vivid examples in the book, which range across the cinema, the popular press, radio,

television, the circus, musical performance, and much else

besides.

What, therefore, emerges strongly from Martín-Barbero’

account is a sense of how the historical formation of na-

tional culture involves multifold transactions, and is always provisional. Modernity in Latin America has brought about

what he calls ‘massification’ via the workings of national

populist politics and the emergence of mass communica-tion.

But mass communication is far from uniform in its im-

pact. Whereas, for instance, he suggests, television may constitute single public, neither the press nor radio do. Moreover, television, he maintains, has largely failed to

offer a point of self-recognition for the urban masses, unlike the indigenous cinema. But the failure is not complete, for

television is the vehicle for distributing telenovelas which are

the Latin American televisual genre, and which play a major

role in popular culture by offering images and themes that evoke powerful forms of identification.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

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By starting from the standpoint of consumption, then, we are compelled to recognize the syncretic nature of popular cultural practices (whether music, feasts, theatre, dialects or

artistic forms) and the ways in which these contribute both

to the preservation of cultural identities and their adaptation to the demands of the present. At the core of the argument

is the notion that processes of popular cultural mediation

contain the capacity to resist and transform dominant cul-tures in ways undreamed of by simple theories of domina-

tion.

There are many themes in the work of Martín-Barbero that will strike a chord with those currently interested in the

general question of how various kinds and levels of collec-

tive identity are developed and sustained and the role which media may play in these processes. Indeed, one way of

interpreting his study is precisely as a discourse upon the

constitution of identities and the struggles that this entails.

In concluding, therefore, it seems appropriate to draw out further some of these implications, as the closing years of

the 1980s have made collective identity an inescapable

theme, one which is with increasing rapidity moving to centre stage of work in the human sciences.

Let us take but one pertinent example. In recent years,

those of us who live in Europe have been particularly sub-ject to the elaboration of various official grand designs for collective living. Increasingly, one is bound to wonder

which – if any – of these can be successfully realized. In-deed, if like Martín-Barbero we apply a perspective that

stresses the role of ‘mediations’, we cannot but be made aware of the potential sources of resistance and transforma-tion that present obstacles to the smooth realization of such half imagined futures.

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For instance, the proposed achievement of a Single Euro-pean Market within the European Economic Community by 1993 has been thrown into sharp relief by the disconti-

nuities between polity, economy and culture in Western

Europe. (Moreover, now the turbulent changes in the ‘Other Europe’ of the erstwhile East have made the problem

even more complex.) Whereas economic integration has

proceeded at one pace, the political superstructure used to manage the EEC’s future is increasingly being shown to be

inadequate, not least in terms of its so-called ‘democratic

deficit’ and in the fields of foreign and defense policy. Even

more glaring is the disjuncture between economic integra-tion and the level of culture. Not surprisingly, then, there is

currently competition in political and bureaucratic circles to

fashion and define a new collective identity suitable for an increasingly integrated EEC social space. In this struggle,

there have been sharp differences between those who imag-

ine a ‘European Village’ to be the desirable and necessary

future and those who defensively wish to preserve existing national identities against the encroachments of Brussels.

As we progress further into the 1990s, the Eurocrats’ grand designs have been made much more complex by the emergence of German unification and its uncertain impact

on the wider European order, by the implosion of the Soviet

Union, and by the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia. These, together with numerous other developments, have put the undecided scope of the new European order firmly on the

agenda. The uneven progress towards democratization and economic viability in the countries of the former Eastern

bloc remains a major preoccupation. And this is precisely where the question of resistance

comes in. Running counter to the Euro-sloganeering first

launched in the later 1980s has been the resurgent force of nationalism. The Soviet Union’s collapse into a fissiparous

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grouping of successor states and the intense value attached to the national principle in East-Central Europe (with its troubled, imbricated histories) have been paralleled by vari-

ous neo-nationalist tendencies in the West. Nor is the

question simply one restricted to the European continent. As shifts occur in the relative power of the major capitalist

states, one cannot fail to notice how hostile projections of

collective identity have begun to appear, reciprocally, in the United States and Japan.

All of which is to say that making sense of challenges to

existing patterns of identity, from both above and below, and also horizontally, together with the possible transforma-

tions that might ensue, will need all our analytical skill and

ingenuity. As one presently engaged in such work, I have learned much of value from the thinking of Jesús Martín-

Barbero, who with both imagination and flair has tackled

kindred issues in a very different context.