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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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Cultural Studies Questionnaire

Jess Martn-Barbero Available online: 03 Aug 2010

To cite this article: Jess Martn-Barbero (2001): Cultural Studies Questionnaire, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 10:2, 223-230 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569320120068284

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2001

Cultural Studies Questionnaire

S MARTI N-BARBERO JESU

Jon Beasley-Murray: Which practitioners of cultural analysis do you particularly admire?

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Jesu s Martn-Barbero : My aquaintance with cultural analysis emerges around two sets of authors and follows two distinct paths. The rst is marked by Gramsci and Benjamin. The formers concept of hegemony radically recon gures mechanical conceptions of social domination, whilst the latter suggests studying the dynamics of the social from the point of view of culture understood as the historical transformations of the sensorium. The second path starts, towards the end of the 1970s, with my discovery of the historian E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. I had arrived in Colombia in 1963, where I remained until 1968, the year I returned to Europe to carry out research for my PhD. This is when I entered the eld of Communication Studies from philosophy. During the 1980s, the perspectives emerging from the Birmingham Centre were to have a profound in uence on me. At the time they represented the most advanced forms of both Marxism and cultural analysis. Then, Michel de Certeau, who I knew relatively early on, and Stuart Hall, were fundamental. And amongst these I must also include a less well-known intellectual who has also marked my work very deeply, the Argentine historian Jose Luis Romero, who pioneered cultural history in Latin America, especially with his Latinoamerica: las cuidades y las ideas. In this book, he brings historical facts together with information coming from novels and other ctions, composing a sociocultural history of cities which includes an original approximation to the worlds of popular culture and the culture industries in all their ambiguous and contradictory senses. J. B-M: And Foucault? J. M-B: Yes, but he falls inside what had been my academic training until then, which I then reworked from the point of view of communication studies in the direction of cultural analysis. Paul Ricouer, whose courses I followed, also taught me a lot, but I wouldnt put his work on the same level as de Certeaus on contemporary urban popular culture or Jose Luis Romeros on the massi cation of cities, and his conception of alluvial folklore (which is how he refers to the culture industrybut without the apocalyptic or e litist tones of Adorno). Rather, he locates his study in a historical phenomenology which links phenomena like football and tango to urban transformation and social pracISSN 1356-932 5 print/ISSN 1469-957 5 online/01/02022308 DOI: 10.1080/1356932012006828 4 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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tices. This is what has been important for me in both these critics work, as well as their ne political readings which have no time for easy mechanical determinisms but which rather bring out and reinstall ambiguity in the environments they investigate. J. B-M: Who do you consider your interlocutors in the eld today?

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J. M-B: Amongst the closest, and not only in the territorial sense, I would include Ne stor Garc a Canclini, Beatriz Sarlo, Renato Ortiz, Nelly Richard, An bal Ford, Mart n Hoppenhayn. I am also very close to critics from younger generations: Rosana Reguillo, Alejandro Grimson, Germa n Rey, Ana Mar a Ochoa, William Fernando Torres. We are a rather diverse group, both because of where we come from and the speci cities of our work. But, notwithstanding our differences, we have managed to generate some trust and even empathy, which helps to maintain a certain attention as well as to sustain an openly critical gaze at a time when everything around us would seem intent on closing down all critical sense, jargon threatening to overtake ideas. It is my relationship with this group which not only keeps me informed, but which also gives me the intellectual hints and the energy I need for intellectual renewal. J. B-M: How did you become involved in cultural analysis, what are the principal concerns of your own work, and what areas might you work on in the future? J. M-B: My location within the eld of culture begins when I am very young. vilathe provincial Spanish town where I When I was at secondary school in A was bornI had an extraordinary professor of the history of philosophy who was also the professor of cultural history. He was called Alfonso Querejazu , and he died three years ago. He structured my intellectual thought, and taught me to put knowledge into historical perspective and to understand culture more as process and practice than a series of works. So that when I enter the eld of Communication I do so with a series of very well-de ned sets of parameters. So much so that in the rst Faculty of Communications in which I worked, where I organised a research seminar in linguistics, semiotics and aesthetics and taught texts by Emile Benveniste, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, the task I gave students was to investigate the differences between the modes of communication of a popular market-place and a supermarket, a traditional and a modern cemetery. It was a matter of investigating everyday practices of communication as cultural keys to worlds of sense: what was heard, what was seen, what was smelled. In other words, I have never identi ed communication with the means of communication, or only with the media. I have rather concentrated attention on everyday practices of communication, on the strategic spaces in which the organisational matrices of culture, as well as their transformation, present themselves to experience. So that cultural analysis was the peculiar way in which I entered the eld of Communication. One of the rst texts I wrote was called Communication from the point of view of Culture, which was part of a larger workmy introduction to the eld, so to speak called Retos a la investigacio n de la comunicacio n en Ame rica Latina, nished towards the end of the 1980s. In it there was a proposal which caused some

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polemic: the idea that we stop thinking about communication as a strategy of domination but instead analyse domination as a process of communication. This meant inserting Gramsci into the eld and looking at domination as a process of interpellation, of seduction, of complicity rather than only as repression and coercionbecause a lot of Marxism only thought about domination as it was gured by the image of a boot squashing an insect, where there is very little cultural density at all. This is exactly what communication demands that we think. And this is where the work of Williams, Thompson and Hoggart provided me with arguments and working strategies. Hoggart, for example, was the rst to analyse the oblique ways in which workers read newspapers as well as their deviant uses of music. Whilst the obsession at the time was with the ideological reading of texts and messages, I was always more concerned with readings and usage, with the relations people established with the media, the ways in which they inserted what they read, heard or saw into their everyday lives and with what dimensions of their lives were touched by watching television, listening to radio, seeing lms. This was my way in, and was the reason I suggested some years ago in an interview I gave in Germany that in Latin America we had been doing Cultural Studies before the label appeared. My principle themes have been, rst, the relation between communication and popular cultures, thematised especially from the point of view of processes of appropriation and social use, rather than what communication people call reception. The process of reception only illuminates the apparatus and the child watching the apparatus, whilst the social use of the media, their appropriation, relates to the rest of life, not only to the moment in which we watch television or listen to the radio, but rather to the spaces and times of the production and circulation of the meaning of what is seen and/or read. This is where culture is, whether we like it or not, thick and de ant for us intellectuals. So, I am not so interested in the message in that sensebut without going to the other extreme of thinking about the reader as an omnipotent consumer either, which is what the adverts tell us (All power to the consumer!), and has nothing to do with social analysis. I have never believed that. What I have believed is that in communication there is appropriation and negotiation , that messages do not function either immediately or in isolation from the other messages, images and practices that, in a myriad of ways, make society. It was so as to make this view intelligible that I decided to write a history of the social practices of communication since the Spanish seventeenth-century cordel to the follet n and circus, radio and football, cinema and TV. The second dimension of my work is the relation between changes in the processes of communication, on the one hand, and cultural transformation, on the other. Following Benjamin, this involves studying the emergence of new sensoria, new forms of perceiving space and time, new sensibilities, and thus new narratives and rhythms. I have pursued these themes in two ways: rst, with regard to the city, looking at transformations in the mediated (modern) city and the emergence of the virtual (late modern) city, seeing how they oppose each other and how they overlap; and second, with regard to the speci city of Latin American modernity, where the majorities enter and appropriate it without abandoning their oral cultures. From the point of view of a modernity centred on the culture of the book, this is a kind of deviant modernity, which most people in Latin America enter not through the book, but through the narratives

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produced by the audiovisual culture industry: cinema, radio, television, videogames and music videos. This is the project I am designing now. Like my research on melodrama, which lasted from the beginning of the 1980s to the mid-1990s, I see this as long-term research. Now I am more interested in looking at the relation, the complicities, between oral culture and visual technology. I am tired of typing orality-visuality into data banks and retrieving material on the wordimage relation only in the sense of an image illustrating the word. How is it possible to design cultural policies of national and Latin American integration when we still think culturally about Latin America from the point of view of the lettered city, subordinating all to it, or excluding all that does not t? And how are we relating to the oral cities and the audiovisual worlds that are inhabited by the majorities who, although they have learned how to read, do not live in lettered cultures but rather in that secondary oral culture that grammaticalises rock and rap, music videos and the new writing that is emerging with information technology? The political projection of my work is now linked to the much needed transformation of the educational system, so as to make room for the new sensibilities associated with the young, as well as the new languages and forms of writing crucial to the formation of the citizens our countries need. This is why a substantial part of my effort is now linked to international institutions interested in Latin American integration such as the Acuerdo Andre s Bello and the OIS. J. B-M: You seem to be making a distinction between cultural analysis and political activitiy here J. M-B: No. What I am looking for is precisely the ways in which to accede to the terrain of the political from cultural analysis; and that it become concretised in the framing, not of a politics of the media, but of a cultural politics of communication that recognises and defends a minimum of collective rights to information and citizen participation, preventing the market from organising the world of information and communication according to its own whims. Its a long, and for some already a lost, battle, but which in Colombia, for example, is having concrete results, especially in television, through citizen monitoring groups that keep an eye on the behaviour of the National Television Commission. These give form to collective demands that make public-orientated television possible at national, regional and local levels, making sure that it takes account of the truerather than just the folkloriccultural diversity of the country and broadcasts the information necessary for an active citizenship. The other issue is the question of the young, and the battle against the prevailing view that disquali es and stigmatises them as part of a world of violence and drugs, and which looks to the market as the means for converting them into rst-class consumers whilst hypocritically looking to the state for policies of social and political control in the guise of the defence of moral values! J. B-M: What are the key problems that confront cultural criticism at the beginning of a new century? J. M-B: Im now putting together a book called something like Una agenda de comunicacio n para el nuevo siglo, and I could just outline for you what is on this

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agenda. Basically, it deals with the perception of cultural decentring, the dis-ordering of cultural hegemony in a society which, although maintaining a centre, no longer operates either from the same position or with the same force. Even the re-centralisation effected by the concentration of capital functions through highly vulnerable and precarious strategic alliancesas we have recently seen in the new economy of new technologies and information enterprisesrather than through any process of centralised fusion. Cultural dis-ordering and de-centring operates in my view at ve strategic levels. The rst is at the level of knowledges, and here I am following the trail opened up by Ulrich Beck, Zigmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens in their work on re exivity as a form through which modernity can think the risks that are central to its very reason (rather than mere collateral effects). In this context, the use of such specialised knowledges, which multiplies the risks, cannot continue without society having to re-learn other kinds of knowledges that come from social experience. Our fragile world needs gural-narrative knowledge much more than discursive-scienti c knowledge. We are thus confronted by a dis-ordering of knowledges which, in turn, dis-orders the traditional mapping of the professions and labour. New abilities and knowledges are needed, not only from the business point of view, but from a social point of view toowhich involves, for example, the professional exercise of the social sciences. This also has to do with the dis-orderings introduced by new forms of technicity into the world of linear and vertical knowledgesfrom left to right, up and down, following the Western model introduced by the bookwhich remain prevalent in schools and which should make room for the interlacing of the palimpsestthe text of memorieswith the hypertext the text of ows. This is the tragedy of school education, turning its back on the radical transformation in the dispersed circulation and dissemination of knowledge. The second level is the level of territories . Here, dis-ordering affects the separation between the inside and the outside, the national and the foreign, the local and the global. We are living through a momentous change in the ways cultures relate to territory. It is not enough to say, however, that a global culture now confronts local ones since, as Renato Ortiz has pointed out, the mundializacio n of world culture is not about the appearance of another which is separate from local ones, but a question of the profound transformation of the conditions of existence of the latter, so that now communities are exposed as never before to the other cultures of each country and of the world. It is from within each culture that relations to territory are changing, which similarly re-orders their relations to space and time. The third level relates to technicity . I use this word, coming from the work of anthropologists like Marcel Mauss and Leroi-Gourhan, so as to distance my re ections from the manichean polarisations that threaten criticism and to relocate it between Heideggers posing of the question of technology, on the one hand and anthropological thought on the technical dimensions of perception and communication, on the other. Changes in technicity refer not to the quantity and sophistication of the apparatus, but to the disorder in modes of perception and to the emergence of new languages and writings. We need a philosophical gaze to work through sociology so as to account for the structural dimensions that technicity acquires when it constitutes itself as a communicative ecosystem an ecosystem as strong as the green ecosystem, for example, since it effects what

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Merleau-Ponty refers to as le corps propre, that is, the bodys relation with others and with the world. Today virtuality is not only spiritual potential but also bodily potential, the power of bodies that are de-centred and dispersed. The fourth level refers to the disordering of socialities . With the work of Alain Touraine, the idea of sociality, traditionally confused with that of sociability, no longer refers to the unmadesolid and crystalliseddimension of society and its institutions, but rather to society making itself, to new forms of being together . On the one hand, this has to do with the reinvention of the political, the crisis of representation and the recognition of new subjects: women and homosexuals do not want to be represented as much as recognised as citizens in all their differences rather than despite them (which is to negate them). On the other hand, I am thinking of new ways of being together, new senses of community emerging amongst the young, hermeneutic communities and especially the new movements emerging around cybernetic networks.

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J. B-M: Wouldnt the problem of violence enter here? J. M-B: Yes, but laterally, since I am writing a book on Colombia focused on violence and fearand the role of the media in this mediation that is eroding the social fabric to an unthought-of degree. I see the violence here as mainly associated with symbolic rather than physical violence. Finally, the fth level centres on the dis-ordering of stories, which I would like to think of basically with regard to tensions and con icts between what Benjamin referred to as narrationsthat special ability to relate experiences that are always linked to collective experienceand formats, industrial formats: pure combinatories, formula and syntax. And between both, the relevance today of genres , traditional oneslyric, epic, dramatic etc.as well as those emerging in the media, newspaper genres, ctional television, lm and video genres. Here the relation/tension between the palimpsestmemories which overlay and traverse each other in timeand the hypertext the textualities that unfold in the space of connectionsis also relevant. This is the guiding thread of my work on stories, which will be accompanied by a re ection that I have been pursuing for some time now on the role of the image in new forms of narrative. This last level overlaps with the rst: the dis-ordering of stories is linked to the need our societies have for gural and narrative knowledge. J. B-M: Cultural Studies are currently becoming fashionable, particularly in the USA and Britain but also in Latin America. How do you view this development? Or, perhaps one might now say that Cultural Studies are no longer fashionable J. M-B: What seems to me to be positive in Latin America is that cultural analysisthinking about society from culture, not in the culturalist sense, but as the articulation of the meaning of con ictsis gaining ground, and doing so precisely where analyses which are exclusively economic or political are failing, as for example is the case with regard to the analysis of the many forms of violence that are threatening Colombia. I have been involved in polemics with the violento logos because I use the expression and the idea of a culture of violence, by which I mean not that Colombians are naturally violent, but on the

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contrary, that we have a history of forms of violence that have thickened into cultures of political, familial, school and labour violence. In this context I see cultural analysis gaining ground. At the moment I am coordinating annual meetings on Cultural Studies in Colombia organised by the CESCentre of Social Studiesof the National University in Bogota . From now on we are going to alternate yearly between an international meeting, one year, and a local one moving from region to region, the next, so as to trace a map of what is being studied of the contemporary and historical cultures of each region, and from the point of view of which disciplines they are being studied underor even whether transdisciplinary perspectives are becoming widespread. Beyond the small world of the universitywhich has its own logics and tribal con ictsthe legitimation of cultural analysis in Latin America is advancing, and with some force. In this sense, it is making possible a renovation of the political, because the crisis of political parties has less to do with television spectacle than with the loss of the ideological and symbolic density of political parties themselves. Without symbolic density, politics loses its capacity to convoke and interpellate. This is why it has become corrupt. Emptied of such social meaning, of this capacity to gatherand thus not just to representparties become mere electoral machines with an eye on power. And in this scenario the media becomes indispensable, whilst the cost of participation rockets. It is in this sense that I think that cultural analysis is a crucial resource for political change. As long as it remains open to conceptual production from all over the world, and helps us [to] understand the cultural crossroads we are experiencing, cultural analysis will gain more and more space within critical thought, and even within the academy. We have established relations with people in Europe, the USA, Australia. At the moment, my only concern with regard to the US case is that cultural analysis may serve there as a space for opportunists, where escapist tendencies may be disguised. In Latin America we must be alert to such opportunist culturalism, since we cant afford to play this game, risking our lives and futures. What I see are emerging forms of renovation that pass through multiple social movements, NGOs, community radio stations and television channels that are gathering and exhibiting the social experience of the excluded and nding their own forms of expression. What is more dif cult to nd are the modes of articulation with which to elaborate national and Latin American political projects. Our context is still rather confusing in this sense, ambiguous, because we cannot do without political partiesand thus further the efforts of those like Fujimori and Cha vezbecause doing away with parties means leaving things wide open for populisms as, or more, authoritarian than the old ones, and without their social content. Processes of globalisation are having negative effects on national politics, on its traditional scenarios and actors. I cant see such populist leaders serving as points of articulationwhich are still so crucial with the new social movements. J. B-M: Is there anything else you would like to add? J. M-B: Yes, something that I have been talking about in Colombia for some time: the need to differentiate between specialist cultural criticism and cultural debate. I recognise the richness of the former, but our countries really need the

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debate. By cultural debate I mean a dialogue that moves beyond the illumination and questioning of workswhich is the function of criticismso as to relocate them, as well as movements and cultural practices, onto the terrain of collective experience and struggle and interrogate them as to their secret connections with the dynamics of social life and the hopes of people. We need cultural debate about architecture, the plastic arts, literature, the customs of politicians and the mentalite of ex-guerrillas, the youth subcultures of young gunmen and urban lm and video narratives, a debate that might help us understand what cultures feed different forms of violence and what violence is suffered by the different cultures that make us. I am not opposing criticism with debatewe need criticism to feed debatebut noting their differences and daring to suggest that in these times of crisis debate is more important. If unemployment grows, if the quality of life becomes more impoverished, if the majority of people remain living at mere subsistence levels, the only meaning that our analytic baggage possesses lies in feeding cultural knowledges into processes of social transformation. I feel that the university is currently going through a profound and confusing transformation, such that it can have no real sense of the ways in which it is becoming distanced from the rest of society even from what we dont like about society, but which still needs analysing. I am very critical of the ways in which universities today are cutting themselves off, looking inwards and thickening their own internal world: it is a way of not confronting a broken, more opaque society which refuses legibility. And since society no longer offers itself up for reading according to our schemas we decide to read other things. Translated by John Kraniauskas