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. »
 2

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.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

 3

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

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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

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

 5

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.

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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.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

 7

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

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 8

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-

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

 9

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.

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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.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction

 11

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.

Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Introduction