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Enrique Bustamante
Dialogue between Latin American and European thinkers on communication, in particular, and between everyone working in this field, in general, is crucial to understanding the world in which we live today. Accordingly, the author of the following article pleads for 'a positive alternative project, able to respond to a new communication model and to meet contemporary challenges' in the context of the transnational - or global - era.
Latin American communication research has a much greater value than the international community in this field has accorded it, and international relations of power, language, and academic dissemination have added to the unjust marginalisation of the most important Latin American contributions. Given the limited possibilities available in Spain, I have tried to remedy this situation by publishing many contributions by Latin American authors in the journal that I edit. Issue number 19 of Telos was entirely dedicated to Latin American research, with an enthusiastic response from more than 20 invited contributors who made it an authentic anthology of Latin American thought concerning communication, including a section on new technologies.
At the time, we could not know that the date of that issue - 1989 - signalled a rupture in many currents of Latin American thought. In hindsight, however, it is apparent that Telos featured not only research along well-established lines but also the first major indications of what was to come. Suffice it to cite the articles of Jesús Martín-Barbero and Néstor García Canclini which practically coincided with the publication of their most representative works (respectively, De los medios a las mediaciones, 1987; and Culturas Híbridas, 1989), as well as empirical analyses of new information technologies in developing countries that marked a departure from the generic and speculative approach of prior research. Six months ago, I took on the task of soliciting articles for a new themed issue on Latin America, which, I believe, well represents the changes and current thinking in the region, with all of its contradictions and paradoxes.
But to be quite realistic, this seminar has greater practical value than all of that, not only because it is, significantly, taking place in an Anglophone country, with all the repercussions that this entails, but also because it constitutes a serious attempt at dialogue between two research cultures, the British and European on the one hand and the Latin American on the other. This breaks the pattern - disastrous, in my opinion - that has governed the external relations of European research: the exclusive and continuous 'dialogue' - more often a monologue - between scholarship in each European country and United States research.
With this recognition and respect in mind, and given the presence here of many of the most distinguished Latin American researchers in the field, my contribution could not hope to be a summary of or a gloss upon this thinking. More modestly, and hoping solely to spark debate, I will simply try to point out some aspects that seem to me particularly interesting, and also to pose questions that arise from the contraposition of European and Latin American thinking about communications.
Limits on the standing of the researcher
The first element that strikes me as notable in Latin American thinking in this field is its long-standing ability to examine the place of the communications researcher and continually to re-evaluate findings and question the role of research in society. This attitude toward research, lamentably unusual in the world of scholarship, is related to the diverse origins of Latin American researchers, to their level of social commitment, to the long-term lack of institutionalisation of their studies, and to the urgent demands of developing societies that make it more difficult for researchers to ensconce themselves in comfortable ivory towers.
Not only do Latin Americans continually take the social pulse of their research, but they also demonstrate a genuine capacity for self-criticism. A few years ago, for example, in an interesting encounter between Latin America and Iberian Europe, a prominent Mexican researcher analysed the hardships of Latin American scholars, concluding with a key question that we have lived with in Europe for many years without admitting it: 'social scientists or market researchers?':
Can we seek extra resources and carry out paid studies without being obliged to change from social scientists into market researchers; in that case, better to join the private sector - which pays better - and leave the academic cloister. We are in a situation where neither 'basic' nor 'applied' research is totally established, whether from a social, or institutional, or organisational, or ethical point of view (Sánchez Ruiz, 1994).
More recently, Héctor Schmucler denounced the break occasioned by the conformity that was taking root in some communications research, although with notable exceptions (Schmucler, 1996), and Martín-Barbero indicated that the institutionalisation of the discipline of communication was creating great tension: 'the use of research not as a tool for understanding but as an instrument of legitimation that trades theoretical scope for academic territory' (Martín-Barbero, 1996).
Self-reflection concerning their own practices and epistemological and methodological starting-points has also led some Latin American researchers to 'undermine' the security offered by communication taken as 'an object of study', instead 'opening up holes through which to ventilate the field and connect it to the concerns and lines of inquiry' of other social sciences (Martín-Barbero, 1990). This attitude is unknown in many countries of Europe, where any allusion to multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity - even taking into account all the necessary scientific and methodological precautions - is seen as an attack on academic corporatism and provokes a defence of the scientific and institutional legitimacy of communication sciences.
The far-reaching Latin American capacity for self-criticism also has its contradictions and its negative side. For instance, the major denunciations of domination and cultural imperialism have generated a greater level of retrospective rectification and contextualisation by many of the most important Latin American theorists of the 1960s and 1970s than I have seen in any other theoretical communications current. Such an attitude would have been welcome among some of the many United States and European functionalist theoreticians who assailed us for years with their sterile theories; or among some of the standard-bearers of 'modernisation' in the 1950s and 1960s who, taking advantage of United States domination of international organisations, wreaked havoc in developing countries with their diffusionist projects; or, again, among those apprentices of Marxism who, in the 1970s, preached such confused theses as those of the 'ideological state apparatuses' and others, derived from a mechanistic reading based in the most simple Leninism concerning the press and the media as perfect instruments of capitalist power, without even distinguishing between public and private media outlets.
Nonetheless, recently I have read fierce criticisms by young and not-so-young Latin American academics of those theorists who put forward a different view in the 1970s, providing at least the possibility of questioning the near-complete dominance in Spain - in Europe too? - of United States empiricist thinking. These critics forget, at the very least, that the theory of domination was part of a whole theoretical framework that was broader than the social sciences, namely, that of dependency theory, and the 'development of underdevelopment'. They also forget that this approach was a child of the conditions of its production: Latin American 'national security' states that took the form of military dictatorships, with coercion as their preferred instrument in the service of quite specific national and international interests.
Limits of the research context
Many of these recent critiques attempt to disguise a noteworthy conformity with the evolution of 'reality'. They attempt to overlook the fact that current Latin American critical thinking is undeniably descended from those currents and those theorists, based in their own experience and critiques, and that its subsequent evolution is directly related to the political and economic transformations in Latin America since the 1980s: the installation and consolidation of democratic structures since 1983 in the larger Latin American countries; their consolidation and expansion in the late 1980s (Paraguay) and early 1990s (Central America); the demise of both revolutionary illusions and populist governments; and the generalised integration of Latin America into a 'global economy'. The new monetarist policies have produced notable growth - despite 'accidents' such as the Mexican crisis - but they have also produced a solidification, if not an accentuation, of levels of poverty and inequality.
García Canclini has lucidly traced this evolution, relating it to the shifting economic and political context of Latin America. He has highlighted how a focus on anti-imperialism and theories of manipulation is inadequate 'for understanding current international power relations', and how presently hegemony 'does not act in an overbearing or unidirectional manner, it is supported less by violence than by contracts', and therefore, 'hegemonic goods and messages interact with the perceptual codes and daily habits of the popular classes'. He has pointed out that when hegemony fails 'they resort to violence' (as in Central America), but that such domination 'is neither the principal nor the most durable form of social control' (García Canclini 1988).
It would be absurd on my part to try even to summarise the richness of these theories. García Canclini and Martín-Barbero, as well as many others, have revived the role of the audience by examining social practices and by questioning earlier comfortable and manichaean assumptions concerning popular culture, national identity, mass communication and notions of genre. They have challenged the media centrism common to communications scholars, without neglecting the role of media as a fundamental place for the constitution and (re)production of culture and the recomposition of political representation. They have produced a broad body of theory which, in my view, establishes a foundation for an epistemological and methodological revision of the study of communication and culture in the era of global/transnational communications and economics. This has prompted a programme of new research in many Latin American countries, in which studies of the telenovela have been the most productive vein, but by no means the only one. In this regard, I must remark on a possible risk: the sense of excessive 'pride' that I have seen in some authors with respect to the international expansion of Latin American telenovelas and media enterprises, which is all too reminiscent of the chauvinism of many European authors when it comes to their own private sector 'national champions'.
But there are more serious questions to be addressed in the 'dialogue' with European investigation, which it would be interesting to discuss.
Limits between the micro and the macro
The Latin American rediscovery of the active role of the receiver highlights the asymmetry of communicative relations. But this should not be confused with the exaggerations concerning this issue into which some European research has fallen. Many European authors have happily jumped from sender-receiver 'negotiation' in language, symbols and genres, to the notion of a communicative pact among equals, suspiciously close to the eternal refrain of the mass media (that of 'giving the public what it wants'), and including the extreme and vulgar forms of a supposed complete consumer sovereignty (the continual 'vote' of the reader or viewer on the programming and the medium). Nor may Latin American cultural analysis be identified with some culturalist approaches in Europe that for years now have produced a multitude of hermetic micro-analyses which, it is seemingly presumed, will by themselves provide a global theory simply by accumulation.
In this respect, the most recent Latin American investigative trends have ceaselessly insisted upon the need to link the micro to the macro, which is also a problem of limits. Relatedly, most of the analysts considered here do not overlook the question of the relationship between culture and communication and economics and politics. To do so 'would de-politicise the processes, forgetting the weight of power structures' (Martín-Barbero, 1996). In other words, 'we refuse to admit the postmodern disinterest in the social totality. One can forget the totality when one is interested only in the differences between people, but not when also interested in inequality' (García Canclini, 1990).
At the theoretical level, those studies should be linked to other relevant bodies of work, such as those dealing with political economy; medium- and long-term media effects, variously conceived; agenda setting; and to the social construction of reality effected, at least partly, by communication media. Studies of professional routines, and especially those of the use of sources, particularly developed in Anglo-Saxon countries but of which there are also some brilliant examples in Latin America, should be interwoven, in all their richness, with studies of the institutions and weapons of power, carried out through the analysis of reception and of social practices.
In actual fact, the absence of a new critical paradigm from which to consider the totality of communication and culture has serious repercussions in many broad fields in which there are practical outcomes of communication research. Critiques of communication and cultural policies for example have shown extraordinary foresight in recent Latin American thought (Martín-Barbero, 1989; White, 1988) and have great value not only in Latin America (where the lessons have been assimilated from a long experience of failures and disappointments) but also in Europe where the 'diffusionist' and 'conservationist' model of communications criticised by Latin American authors still holds sway. But my impression, at least, is that we still lack a positive alternative project, able to respond to a new communication model and to meet contemporary challenges. States have handed over their functions and sovereignty in communications. These have been taken over by large private groups and corporations, and these have expanded to a hitherto unknown size, without any loyalty to a territory or to the 'nationalism' of governmental discourses. And, of course, there is the growth of new communication networks based on international alliances that, in many instances, combine large communication enterprises with other types of business (such as telecommunications, computing, banking).
In the transnational - or global - era these gaps in theory are serious, especially when they coincide with diagnostic pessimism. García Canclini (1988) has asserted, for example, that 'the current hegemony of economic and cultural neoconservatism throughout Latin America 'is greater than that achieved previously by any of the dominant projects (oligarchic, developmentalist, populist) or alternative projects (developmentalist, socialist).'
Limits of integration and of the information society
Two concrete and interrelated problematics clearly demonstrate the situation affecting both Europe and Latin America: attitudes towards the process of regional integration, and towards the myths and the social project that underlie the discourse of the Information Society. In the first case, Mexican literature on the cultural industries facing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reflects the same perplexities expressed in Europe about the European Union. Mexico and Europe have faced similar debates and confusion regarding the 'cultural exception' and the future of national communications and cultures. But Latin American analysts appear more pessimistic about the power of the state, and their sense of already being swept up in cultural transnationalisation seems to be paralysing alternative approaches (Guevara and García Canclini ,1992; VV.AA 1993).
But the study of hegemony and identity, borders and sovereignty is now undoubtedly being undertaken by way of the study of new technologies and communications networks, which are closely linked to assumptions about and models of economic growth as well as of development in general. Here it must be noted that Latin American research - after an initial phase of rejection, related to theories of domination - has for some time paid attention, both critical and empirical, speculative and also concrete, to new information technologies within the notable tradition of the study of communication for development which for years has included the communication media.
Many seminars and studies are evidence of this sensibility and effort (VV.AA. 1986; Pasquini, 1987; VV.AA. 1989), with pioneering critiques of the founding myths of the 'information society' and of its economic, social, and cultural consequences for development. And yet, the many studies produced have seemingly been unable to suggest global alternatives to the dilemma despairingly pointed out some years by ago two Mexican researchers: 'to develop infrastructure at the cost of increased dependency, or to remain at the margins and be left behind' (Fadul and Fernández, 1989). Considering that today Latin America receives most of the satellite TV networks, that its cable and pay television systems have expanded rapidly (more than 10 million subscribers in a few years), and that the deregulation and privatisation of telecommunications have made the region a favoured area for 'convergence' on the part of the large international conglomerates, it is clear that in reality the decision about any possible alternative has already been taken.
This situation may not seem unusual in Europe, which is debating the truly disembodied myths of the information society using critical theory coupled with practical impotence. These myths are propagated not only by best-selling authors and ideologically conformist researchers but also by governments and by the European Commission (Schlesinger, 1995). But I would like to register my surprise at certain recent texts by Latin American authors. Having passively used the European public service model as an example for years, some authors continue to present the European model as a goal, while leaving its governments - the sponsors of myths about the information society - out of the picture.
This and other examples demonstrate the extent to which dialogue between Latin American and European research in the broad terrain of communication and culture could be mutually beneficial. I hope to have contributed by highlighting some of these connections.
Translated by Nancy Morris and Philip Schlesinger
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