This article was downloaded by: [Jeffrey Cedeño]On: 19 December 2011, At: 17:04Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Journal of Latin AmericanCultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Cultural Studies QuestionnaireJesús Martín-Barbero

Available online: 03 Aug 2010

To cite this article: Jesús Martín-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

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any formto anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses shouldbe independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall notbe liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs ordamages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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

Cultural Studies Questionnaire

JESUS MARTIN-BARBERO

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

Jesus Mart õ´n-Barbero: My aquaintance with cultural analysis emerges aroundtwo sets of authors and follows two distinct paths. The �rst is marked byGramsci and Benjamin. The former’s concept of ‘hegemony’ radically re-con�gures mechanical conceptions of social domination, whilst the latter sug-gests studying the dynamics of the social from the point of view of cultureunderstood as the historical transformations of the sensorium. The second pathstarts, towards the end of the 1970s, with my discovery of the historian E. P.Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. I had arrived in Colombiain 1963, where I remained until 1968, the year I returned to Europe to carry outresearch for my PhD. This is when I entered the �eld of Communication Studiesfrom philosophy. During the 1980s, the perspectives emerging from the Birming-ham Centre were to have a profound in�uence on me. At the time theyrepresented the most advanced forms of both Marxism and cultural analysis.Then, Michel de Certeau, who I knew relatively early on, and Stuart Hall, werefundamental. And amongst these I must also include a less well-known intellec-tual who has also marked my work very deeply, the Argentine historian JoseLuis Romero, who pioneered cultural history in Latin America, especially withhis Latinoamerica: las cuidades y las ideas. In this book, he brings historical factstogether with information coming from novels and other �ctions, composing asociocultural history of cities which includes an original approximation to theworlds of popular culture and the culture industries in all their ambiguous andcontradictory 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 thedirection of cultural analysis. Paul Ricouer, whose courses I followed, alsotaught me a lot, but I wouldn’t put his work on the same level as de Certeau’son contemporary urban popular culture or Jose Luis Romero’s on themassi�cation of cities, and his conception of alluvial folklore (which is how herefers to the ‘culture industry’—but without the apocalyptic or elitist tones ofAdorno). Rather, he locates his study in a historical phenomenology which links‘phenomena’ like football and tango to urban transformation and social prac-

ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/01/020223–08 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1356932012006828 4

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

224 J. Mart õ n-Barbero

tices. This is what has been important for me in both these critics’ work, as wellas their �ne political readings which have no time for easy mechanical determin-isms but which rather bring out and reinstall ambiguity in the environmentsthey investigate.

J. B-M: Who do you consider your interlocutors in the �eld today?

J. M-B: Amongst the ‘closest’, and not only in the territorial sense, I wouldinclude Nestor Garc õ a Canclini, Beatriz Sarlo, Renato Ortiz, Nelly Richard,An õ bal Ford, Mart õ n Hoppenhayn. I am also very close to critics from youngergenerations: Rosana Reguillo, Alejandro Grimson, German Rey, Ana Marõ aOchoa, William Fernando Torres. We are a rather diverse group, both becauseof where we come from and the speci�cities of our work. But, notwithstandingour differences, we have managed to generate some trust and even empathy,which helps to maintain a certain attention as well as to sustain an openlycritical gaze at a time when everything around us would seem intent on closingdown all critical sense, jargon threatening to overtake ideas. It is my relationshipwith this group which not only keeps me informed, but which also gives me theintellectual hints and the energy I need for intellectual renewal.

J. B-M: How did you become involved in cultural analysis, what are theprincipal concerns of your own work, and what areas might you work on in thefuture?

J. M-B: My location within the �eld of culture begins when I am very young.When I was at secondary school in Avila—the provincial Spanish town where Iwas born—I had an extraordinary professor of the history of philosophy whowas also the professor of cultural history. He was called Alfonso Querejazu, andhe died three years ago. He structured my intellectual thought, and taught meto put knowledge into historical perspective and to understand culture more asprocess and practice than a series of ‘works’. So that when I enter the �eld ofCommunication I do so with a series of very well-de�ned sets of parameters. Somuch so that in the �rst Faculty of Communications in which I worked, whereI organised a research seminar in linguistics, semiotics and aesthetics andtaught texts by Emile Benveniste, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, the task Igave students was to investigate the differences between the modes of communi-cation of a popular market-place and a supermarket, a traditional and a‘modern’ cemetery. It was a matter of investigating everyday practices ofcommunication as cultural keys to worlds of sense: what was heard, what wasseen, what was smelled. In other words, I have never identi�ed communicationwith the means of communication, or only with the media. I have ratherconcentrated attention on everyday practices of communication, on the strategicspaces in which the organisational matrices of culture, as well as their transform-ation, present themselves to experience. So that cultural analysis was thepeculiar way in which I entered the �eld of Communication. One of the �rsttexts I wrote was called ‘Communication from the point of view of Culture’,which was part of a larger work—my ‘introduction’ to the �eld, so to speak—called Retos a la investigacion de la comunicacion en America Latina, �nishedtowards the end of the 1980s. In it there was a proposal which caused some

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

Cultural Studies Questionnaire 225

polemic: the idea that we stop thinking about communication as a strategy ofdomination but instead analyse domination as a process of communication. Thismeant inserting Gramsci into the �eld and looking at domination as a process ofinterpellation, of seduction, of complicity rather than only as repression andcoercion—because 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 littlecultural density at all. This is exactly what communication demands that wethink. And this is where the work of Williams, Thompson and Hoggart providedme with arguments and working strategies. Hoggart, for example, was the �rstto 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 ideologicalreading of texts and messages, I was always more concerned with readings andusage, with the relations people established with the media, the ways in whichthey inserted what they read, heard or saw into their everyday lives and withwhat dimensions of their lives were touched by watching television, listening toradio, seeing �lms. This was my way in, and was the reason I suggested someyears ago in an interview I gave in Germany that in Latin America we had beendoing Cultural Studies before the label appeared.

My principle themes have been, �rst, the relation between communication andpopular cultures, thematised especially from the point of view of processes ofappropriation and social use, rather than what communication people callreception. The process of reception only illuminates the apparatus and the childwatching 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 televisionor listen to the radio, but rather to the spaces and times of the production andcirculation 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 sointerested in the message in that sense—but without going to the other extremeof thinking about the reader as an omnipotent consumer either, which is whatthe adverts tell us (‘All power to the consumer!’), and has nothing to do withsocial analysis. I have never believed that. What I have believed is that incommunication there is appropriation and negotiation, that messages do notfunction either immediately or in isolation from the other messages, images andpractices that, in a myriad of ways, make society. It was so as to make this viewintelligible that I decided to write a history of the social practices of communi-cation since the Spanish seventeenth-century cordel to the follet õ n and circus,radio and football, cinema and TV.

The second dimension of my work is the relation between changes in theprocesses of communication, on the one hand, and cultural transformation, onthe other. Following Benjamin, this involves studying the emergence of newsensoria, new forms of perceiving space and time, new sensibilities, and thus newnarratives and rhythms. I have pursued these themes in two ways: �rst, withregard to the city, looking at transformations in the mediated (modern) city andthe emergence of the virtual (late modern) city, seeing how they oppose eachother and how they overlap; and second, with regard to the speci�city of LatinAmerican modernity, where the majorities enter and appropriate it withoutabandoning their oral cultures. From the point of view of a modernity centredon the culture of the book, this is a kind of ‘deviant’ modernity, which mostpeople in Latin America enter not through the book, but through the narratives

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

226 J. Mart õ n-Barbero

produced by the audiovisual culture industry: cinema, radio, television, video-games and music videos.… This is the project I am designing now. Like myresearch on melodrama, which lasted from the beginning of the 1980s to themid-1990s, I see this as long-term research. Now I am more interested in lookingat the relation, the complicities, between oral culture and visual technology. I amtired of typing ‘orality-visuality’ into data banks and retrieving material on theword–image relation only in the sense of an image ‘illustrating’ the word. Howis it possible to design cultural policies of national and Latin American inte-gration when we still think culturally about Latin America from the point ofview 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 areinhabited by the majorities who, although they have learned how to read, do notlive in lettered cultures but rather in that secondary oral culture that grammati-calises rock and rap, music videos and the new writing that is emerging withinformation technology? The political projection of my work is now linked to themuch needed transformation of the educational system, so as to make room forthe new sensibilities associated with the young, as well as the new languagesand 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 internationalinstitutions interested in Latin American integration such as the Acuerdo AndresBello and the OIS.

J. B-M: You seem to be making a distinction between cultural analysis andpolitical activitiy here …

J. M-B: No. What I am looking for is precisely the ways in which to accede tothe terrain of the political from cultural analysis; and that it become concretisedin the framing, not of a ‘politics of the media’, but of a cultural politics ofcommunication that recognises and defends a minimum of collective rights toinformation and citizen participation, preventing the market from organising theworld of information and communication according to its own whims. It’s along, and for some already a lost, battle, but which in Colombia, for example, ishaving concrete results, especially in television, through citizen monitoringgroups that keep an eye on the behaviour of the National Television Com-mission. These give form to collective demands that make public-orientatedtelevision possible at national, regional and local levels, making sure that it takesaccount of the true—rather than just the folkloric—cultural diversity of thecountry and broadcasts the information necessary for an active citizenship. Theother issue is the question of the young, and the battle against the prevailingview that disquali�es and stigmatises them as part of a world of violence anddrugs, and which looks to the market as the means for converting them into�rst-class consumers whilst hypocritically looking to the state for policies ofsocial 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 thebeginning of a new century?

J. M-B: I’m now putting together a book called something like Una agenda decomunicacion para el nuevo siglo, and I could just outline for you what is on this

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

Cultural Studies Questionnaire 227

agenda. Basically, it deals with the perception of cultural decentring, the dis-or-dering of cultural hegemony in a society which, although maintaining a centre,no longer operates either from the same position or with the same force. Eventhe re-centralisation effected by the concentration of capital functions throughhighly vulnerable and precarious strategic alliances—as we have recently seen inthe ‘new economy’ of new technologies and information enterprises—ratherthan through any process of centralised ‘fusion’.

Cultural dis-ordering and de-centring operates in my view at �ve strategiclevels. The �rst is at the level of knowledges, and here I am following the trailopened up by Ulrich Beck, Zigmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens in theirwork on re�exivity as a form through which modernity can think the risks thatare central to its very reason (rather than mere collateral effects). In this context,the use of such specialised knowledges, which multiplies the risks, cannotcontinue without society having to re-learn other kinds of knowledges that comefrom social experience. Our fragile world needs �gural-narrative knowledge muchmore than discursive-scienti�c knowledge. We are thus confronted by a dis-order-ing of knowledges which, in turn, dis-orders the traditional mapping of theprofessions and labour. New abilities and knowledges are needed, not only fromthe business point of view, but from a social point of view too—which involves,for example, the professional exercise of the social sciences. This also has to dowith the dis-orderings introduced by new forms of technicity into the world oflinear and vertical knowledges—from left to right, up and down, following theWestern model introduced by the book—which remain prevalent in schools andwhich should make room for the interlacing of the palimpsest—the text ofmemories—with the hypertext—the text of �ows. This is the tragedy of schooleducation, turning its back on the radical transformation in the dispersedcirculation and dissemination of knowledge.

The second level is the level of territories. Here, dis-ordering affects theseparation between the inside and the outside, the national and the foreign, thelocal and the global. We are living through a momentous change in the wayscultures relate to territory. It is not enough to say, however, that a global culturenow confronts local ones since, as Renato Ortiz has pointed out, the ‘mundializa-cion’ of world culture is not about the appearance of another which is separatefrom local ones, but a question of the profound transformation of the conditionsof existence of the latter, so that now communities are exposed as never beforeto the other cultures of each country and of the world. It is from within eachculture that relations to territory are changing, which similarly re-orders theirrelations to space and time.

The third level relates to technicity. I use this word, coming from the work ofanthropologists like Marcel Mauss and Leroi-Gourhan, so as to distance myre�ections from the manichean polarisations that threaten criticism and torelocate it between Heidegger’s posing of the question of technology, on the onehand and anthropological thought on the technical dimensions of perceptionand communication, on the other. Changes in technicity refer not to the quantityand sophistication of the apparatus, but to the disorder in modes of perceptionand to the emergence of new languages and writings. We need a philosophicalgaze to work through sociology so as to account for the structural dimensionsthat technicity acquires when it constitutes itself as a communicative ecosystem—an ecosystem as strong as the green ecosystem, for example, since it effects what

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

228 J. Mart õ n-Barbero

Merleau-Ponty refers to as ‘le corps propre’, that is, the body’s relation withothers and with the world. Today virtuality is not only spiritual potential butalso 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 AlainTouraine, the idea of ‘sociality’, traditionally confused with that of ‘sociability’,no longer refers to the ‘unmade’—solid and crystallised—dimension of societyand its institutions, but rather to ‘society making itself’, to new forms of beingtogether. On the one hand, this has to do with the reinvention of the political, thecrisis of representation and the recognition of new subjects: women and homo-sexuals do not want to be represented as much as recognised as citizens in alltheir differences rather than despite them (which is to negate them). On the otherhand, I am thinking of new ways of being together, new senses of communityemerging amongst the young, hermeneutic communities and especially the newmovements emerging around cybernetic networks.

J. B-M: Wouldn’t the problem of violence enter here?

J. M-B: Yes, but laterally, since I am writing a book on Colombia focused onviolence and fear—and the role of the media in this mediation that is eroding thesocial fabric to an unthought-of degree. I see the violence here as mainlyassociated with symbolic rather than physical violence.… Finally, the �fth levelcentres on the dis-ordering of stories, which I would like to think of basicallywith regard to tensions and con�icts between what Benjamin referred to asnarrations—that special ability to relate experiences that are always linked tocollective experience—and formats, industrial formats: pure combinatories, for-mula and syntax. And between both, the relevance today of genres, traditionalones—lyric, epic, dramatic etc.—as well as those emerging in the media, news-paper genres, �ctional television, �lm and video genres. Here the relation/ten-sion between the palimpsest—memories which overlay and traverse each other intime—and the hypertext—the textualities that unfold in the space of connec-tions—is also relevant. This is the guiding thread of my work on stories, whichwill be accompanied by a re�ection that I have been pursuing for some time nowon the role of the image in new forms of narrative. This last level overlaps withthe �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 theUSA 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 fashion-able …

J. M-B: What seems to me to be positive in Latin America is that culturalanalysis—thinking about society from culture, not in the culturalist sense, but asthe articulation of the meaning of con�icts—is gaining ground, and doing soprecisely 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 ofviolence that are threatening Colombia. I have been involved in polemics withthe ‘violentologos’ because I use the expression and the idea of a culture ofviolence, by which I mean not that Colombians are ‘naturally’ violent, but on the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

Cultural Studies Questionnaire 229

contrary, that we have a history of forms of violence that have ‘thickened’ intocultures of political, familial, school and labour violence. In this context I seecultural analysis gaining ground. At the moment I am coordinating annualmeetings on Cultural Studies in Colombia organised by the CES—Centre ofSocial Studies—of the National University in Bogota. From now on we are goingto alternate yearly between an international meeting, one year, and a local onemoving from region to region, the next, so as to trace a map of what is beingstudied of the contemporary and historical cultures of each region, and from thepoint of view of which disciplines they are being studied under—or evenwhether transdisciplinary perspectives are becoming widespread. Beyond thesmall world of the university—which has its own logics and tribal con�icts—thelegitimation of cultural analysis in Latin America is advancing, and with someforce. In this sense, it is making possible a renovation of the political, because thecrisis of political parties has less to do with television spectacle than with theloss 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 thiscapacity to gather—and thus not just to represent—parties become mere elec-toral machines with an eye on power. And in this scenario the media becomesindispensable, whilst the cost of participation rockets.… It is in this sense that Ithink that cultural analysis is a crucial resource for political change. As long asit remains open to conceptual production from all over the world, and helps us[to] understand the cultural crossroads we are experiencing, cultural analysiswill gain more and more space within critical thought, and even within theacademy. We have established relations with people in Europe, the USA,Australia.… At the moment, my only concern with regard to the US case is thatcultural analysis may serve there as a space for opportunists, where escapisttendencies may be disguised. In Latin America we must be alert to suchopportunist culturalism, since we can’t afford to play this game, risking our livesand futures.

What I see are emerging forms of renovation that pass through multiple socialmovements, NGOs, community radio stations and television channels that aregathering and exhibiting the social experience of the excluded and �nding theirown forms of expression. What is more dif�cult to �nd are the modes ofarticulation with which to elaborate national and Latin American politicalprojects. Our context is still rather confusing in this sense, ambiguous, becausewe cannot do without political parties—and thus further the efforts of those likeFujimori and Chavez—because doing away with parties means leaving thingswide open for populisms as, or more, authoritarian than the old ones, andwithout their social content. Processes of globalisation are having negativeeffects on national politics, on its traditional scenarios and actors. I can’t see suchpopulist leaders serving as points of articulation—which 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 sometime: the need to differentiate between specialist cultural criticism and culturaldebate. I recognise the richness of the former, but our countries really need the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11

230 J. Mart õ n-Barbero

debate. By cultural debate I mean a dialogue that moves beyond the illuminationand questioning of works—which is the function of criticism—so as to relocatethem, as well as movements and cultural practices, onto the terrain of collectiveexperience and struggle and interrogate them as to their secret connections withthe dynamics of social life and the hopes of people. We need cultural debateabout architecture, the plastic arts, literature, the customs of politicians and thementalite of ex-guerrillas, the youth subcultures of young gunmen and urban�lm and video narratives, a debate that might help us understand what culturesfeed different forms of violence and what violence is suffered by the differentcultures that make us. I am not opposing criticism with debate—we needcriticism to feed debate—but noting their differences and daring to suggest thatin these times of crisis debate is more important.

If unemployment grows, if the quality of life becomes more impoverished, ifthe majority of people remain living at mere subsistence levels, the only meaningthat our analytic baggage possesses lies in feeding cultural knowledges intoprocesses of social transformation. I feel that the university is currently goingthrough a profound and confusing transformation, such that it can have no realsense of the ways in which it is becoming distanced from the rest of society—even from what we don’t like about society, but which still needs analysing. Iam very critical of the ways in which universities today are cutting themselvesoff, looking inwards and thickening their own internal world: it is a way of notconfronting a broken, more opaque society which refuses legibility. And sincesociety no longer offers itself up for reading according to our schemas we decideto read other things.

Translated by John Kraniauskas

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Jeff

rey

Ced

eño]

at 1

7:04

19

Dec

embe

r 20

11