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

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Communication,
Culture and Hegemony
From the Media to the Mediations

Jesús Martín-Barbero

Introduction to the Spanish Edition

(Translated by Elizabeth Fox and
Robert A. White, Sage Publications, 1993)

« This is how communication began to be seen more as a

process of mediations than of media, a question of
culture and, therefore, not just a matter of cognitions
but of re-cognition. The processes of recognition were at
the heart of a new methodological approach which
enabled us to perceive communication from a quite
different perspective, from its ‘other’ side, namely,
reception. This revealed to us the resistances and the
varied ways people appropriate media content according
to manner of use. This changing perspective, however,
was not just a reaction to an earlier overemphasis on the
powerful media or a passing theoretical fashion. It
involved a recognition of history, a historical
reappropriation of Latin American modernity as, yes,
very much part of the present moment of our evolution
but also as somehow out of phase with our Latin
American identity. This enabled us to break out of the
circle of false logic which made it appear that
capitalistic homogenization is the only meaning of our
contemporary modernity. »
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What you have before you bears the marks of a long jour-
ney. I came from the field of philosophy, and moved along
the paths of linguistic studies until finally I met up with
communication. Coming down from the Heideggerian
contemplation of being, I now found myself in the slum
shacks of man, built of clay and reeds but nevertheless with
a radio and television set. Ever since, I have worked in this
field of mass mediation, this environment of cultural pro-
duction, with its rituals of consumption, and its love of new
technological gadgets. Increasingly, I have become im-
mersed in the world of performance made possible by the
media, a world with its special codes of montage, percep-
tion and recognition of identities.

During much of this time, I was especially interested in

how the mass media manipulates us with a discourse that
somehow brings the public to accept its fraudulent claims.
My research was, above all, concerned with how ideology
pervades messages and imposes on this process of commu-
nication the logic of domination. Thus, I diverted my
journey through sociolinguistics and semiotics to find the
tools for an ideological analysis of texts and cultural prac-
tices. I left evidence of my journeys, not concealing my
debts, in a book entitled Comunicación Masiva: Discurso y
Poder (Mass Communication: Discourse and Power).

That was ten years ago. Already, at that time, some of us

were beginning to have doubts about a conception of the
media process which left room for nothing but the strata-
gems of domination, a process defined simply as a few
powerful message senders controlling passive receivers

Communication, Culture and...- Introduction to Spanish Edition

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without the slightest indication of seduction or resistance.

Did these messages not reveal some internal conflicts or
contradictions? Were there not some struggles at the origins
of these messages?

It was precisely in those years that something shook the

foundations of our sociopolitical reality – earthquakes are
common things in these latitudes – and opened to clear
visibility the profound gap between our method and the
situation in which we live. We suddenly became aware that
virtually nothing of the way people work out the meaning of
their lives the way they communicate and use the media,
could fit into our predetermined schema. Put in another
way, the social and political processes of those years –
authoritarian regimes in almost all of South America, con-
tinuous liberation movements in Central America, enor-
mous migrations of the leaders of politics, the arts and so-
cial research fleeing into exile – all tended to undermine the
old certainties. For the first time, many people came out of
the world of academia and government planning offices and
had to confront the cultural reality of these countries: the
new combinations and syntheses – the mestizajes – that re-
veal not just the racial mixture that we come from but the
interweaving of modernity and the residues of various cul-
tural periods, the mixture of social structures and senti-
ments. We became aware of the memories and images that
blend together the indigenous Indian roots with a campesino
culture, the rural with the urban, the folkloric with popular
culture, and the popular with the new mass culture.

This is how communication began to be seen more as a

process of mediations than of media, a question of culture
and, therefore, not just a matter of cognitions but of re-
cognition. The processes of recognition were at the heart of
a new methodological approach, which enabled us to per-
ceive communication from a quite different perspective,

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 4

from its ‘other’ side, namely, reception. This revealed to us

the resistances and the varied ways people appropriate me-
dia content according to manner of use.

This changing perspective, however, was not just a reac-

tion to an earlier overemphasis on the powerful media or a
passing theoretical fashion. It involved a recognition of
history, a historical reappropriation of Latin American mo-
dernity as, yes, very much part of the present moment of
our evolution but also as somehow out of phase with our
Latin American identity. This enabled us to break out of the
circle of false logic which made it appear that capitalistic
homogenization is the only meaning of our contemporary
modernity. For, in Latin America, cultural differences do
not imply – as perhaps they do in Europe or in the United
States – countercultural dissidence or antiquated relics fit
only for museums but, rather, a dense variety of strong,
living popular cultures which provide a space for profound
conflict and unstoppable cultural dynamism. We are also
recognizing in recent years that the term ‘popular’ does not
apply just to native American or peasant cultures, but also
to the thick layers of mestizajes or mixtures and in that de-
formed evolution of urban, mass culture, found in the
enormous new settlements surrounding Latin American
cities. In Latin America, at least, we are discovering that,
contrary to the predictions of a social implosion and depoli-
ticization, the masses still ‘contain’ – in the double sense of
control and conserve within – the people. We cannot think
of the popular as an actor relegated to the margins of the
historical process creating mass society. Nor can we think
of the popular as unrelated to the masses gaining visibility
and active social presence through the processes of massifi-
cation that constitute mass culture. We cannot continue to
construct a critique which separates massification of culture
from the political reality that generates the historical emer-
gence of the masses. And we cannot separate this from the

Communication, Culture and...- Introduction to Spanish Edition

 5

conflictive movement which produces in this historical

process the intimate linking of the realities of mass culture
and popular culture. The phenomenon of mass becomes
one of the modes of existence of the popular. Note carefully
that the trap lies both in confusing the popular memory
with the cultural imagination – like confusing the mask and
the face behind it – and in believing that there might exist a
memory without a fund of cultural imagination in which to
anchor this memory in the present and inspire it toward the
future. The clear separation between memory and cultural
imagination is as important as understanding the links
which produce these cultural mestizajes.

This has been the challenge of this book: to change the

point of view from which questions are raised, to study the
processes creating mass culture without being influenced by
the culturalist blackmail that inevitably transforms these
into a process of cultural degradation. This has meant
studying these processes from the perspective of mediations
and the protagonists of culture. In other words, we are in-
terested in the articulation between practices of communi-
cation and social movements. This perspective has sug-
gested the three parts of the book –the situation, the proc-
esses and the debate– and the inversion of these three parts
in the order of the book. Although the Latin American
situation is the logical point of departure, it is placed at the
end, the process we are eventually aiming to explain. I am
hoping that the sign posts that I have set up along the de-
velopment of the argument in the earlier parts of the book
will activate the reader’s complicity in the argument and
allow the reader to recognize this complicity during the
journey toward our understanding of the present cultural
processes in Latin America.

At the beginning, I spoke of the marks or scars left by the

journey that became this book. I want to point out a few of

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these. In Part I, it was difficult to present a philosophical

and historical discussion without distancing myself from the
issues and experiences I was trying to decipher. This left the
unsatisfactory sensation of dallying half way between ana-
lysis and commitment. Other pages left me an uncomfort-
able feeling of trying to settle old accounts.

In Part II, I fear that I may be taken for an archaeologist

searching the layers of the past for those elusive authentic
modes and practices of communication. In fact, what I am
searching for is something radically different, not what has
survived from another era, but rather those forces operating
at the present time which enable certain cultural values to
continue their influence and which link an anachronistic
narrative with the contemporary life of the people.

In Part III, I am plagued with the doubt that by studying

the forms in which the people are present in the masses, I
am abandoning the criticism of social inequality cloaked by
the concept of mass and making the concept an instrument
of ideological integration.

These scars are perhaps the price of daring to break with a

dualistic logic and recognize the different logics within mass
culture. It is the price of accepting that mass culture has
accommodated both the requirements of the marketplace
and a cultural matrix, a sensorium, which nauseates the elites
while at the same time it constitutes a site of appeal and
recognition for the popular classes.

Many people and institutions have supported the research

for this book. Among them I owe a special thanks to the
Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, which gave me a
research commission to set up the project and collect the
necessary documentation, and several years to carry out the
research. I am grateful to the communication professors and

Communication, Culture and...- Introduction to Spanish Edition

 7

researchers of the Universidad de Lima, Peru and Universi-

dad Autónoma Metropolitana de Xochimilco, Mexico, who
believed the study was possible when still in outline form
and invited me several times to discuss its development. I
thank the Instituto Para América Latina (IPAL) for making
it possible for me to visit various research centres to discuss
the project and collect documentation.

My sincere thanks to those who helped me with my intel-

lectual debate and supported me with their affection:
Patricia Anzola, Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Héctor Schmucler,
Anamaría Fadul, Rosa María Alfaro, Néstor García Can-
clini and Luis Peirano. And to Elvira Maldonado who each
day suffered my work in companionship.

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