The possibilities Jesús Martín-Barbero left for us to understand Latin America

Contribution to the field of communication

Communication has been a difficult field to establish from a disciplinary perspective. What is it that occupies us and makes us part of this professional and academic universe? Journalism is the most obvious, but then a wide range of media constituted us. McLuhan (1962) placed the beginnings of this galaxy in the printing press, the book, the printed newspaper. However, it was the 20th century, with the arrival of photography, cinema, radio, and television, that inaugurated the systematic reflection that precedes us. We became part of a media tradition. In Latin America, communication programs navigated between technological dazzlement and systematic denunciations of the ideological manipulation that inhabited it. In lands of military regimes, fragile democratic institutions, and dictatorships, the ideological apparatuses of the state, which Althusser (1971) taught us to decipher, became evident. We walked as tightrope walkers between the manual craft of those who produce communication and the philosophical denunciation of the constitution of hegemony. What to do when standing on such thin ground?

In 1972, a young Martín-Barbero began to address these concerns and drew conclusions that transformed the field. Communication is not only a matter of media, but of mediations. That is, the field of communication does not deal with a specific object of study (television, radio, and newspapers), but with the communication processes that are possible from these situations. Hence came the famous phrase “we lost the object to gain the process.” This also brought about a profound reform in many Latin American communication programs, which increasingly incorporated reflections on esthetics, art, politics, and culture in general. Equipped with Ricoeur (1965, 1969), concerned about the way we construct a text – any text, all texts – Martín-Barbero pointed out that Latin America cannot be understood without popular cultures, and that these popular cultures are a sediment that resists beneath the desire for homogenization of the modern and enlightened project of the nation-states. He insisted that we cannot understand the configuration of nation-states without placing melodrama at the center and approaching semiotically all the media discourses that evoke a completely emotional and, in some cases, hopeful sense of belonging.

On the other hand, Martín-Barbero brought Freire (1970) into the conversation. Freire, the Brazilian author who revolutionized how we understand popular cultures. He insisted that they were not only expressions of oppression, but also a place of emancipation, of liberation. He pointed out that traditional educational processes are useful for changing situations of injustice, not so much for what they teach us, but for how they teach. In other words, if we think of Freire in communicative terms (and Martín Barbero did), we have to remember that for communication to be liberating, it is not enough to focus on the content (whether profound or critical), but it is necessary to reflect on and make evident the way the message is transmitted. And from there, Martín Barbero found a new center in melodrama.

He made us study telenovelas, plazas, and markets as places of communication and dialog. He made us think about the cultural dialogs of the Middle Ages as a moment when the different sensoriums that would later shape modernity engage in dialog: the sensibility of the sacred and that of carnival. The world of the profane and that of faith and belief. And he insisted that we could not be communication and/or media researchers without understanding what these processes implied. Without knowing what lessons were left from those blends, those mestizajes, those hybridizations.

But Martín-Barbero not only draw from Freire and Ricoeur. His intellectual suitcase, filled with dialogs and references, made us turn our gaze to Benjamin (1991), Arendt (1970, 1973), Adorno (1971, 2007), García Canclini (1982, 1990), De Certeau (1999), Mazzioti (2006), Rincón (2006, 2018), Rodríguez (2001, 2011) Reguillo (1991, 2012), Le Bon (1959), Monsiváis (1995), and Chaui (1980; Chaui et al., 1984). His work opened doors and windows so that our Latin American dialog could be enriched with many reflections.

In other words, his own education, his intellectual dialogs, and his life experience allowed for shifting the field of communication research from a field centered on an object – the media – to the study of a process – the culture that is both popular and mass and constitutes the field of hegemonic disputes that ultimately constitute the process of nation building, in the sense of Castoriadis (2010). Martín-Barbero’s reflection allows us to revisit several debates of Ibero-American philosophy linked to esthetics and cultural disputes. His proposal led to understanding communication from the theoretical lens of the philosophy of language, especially from pragmatics, and this had other implications: the recovery of the symbolic universe of the popular from the medieval legacy (Bajtin, 1974), the possibility to understand and dialog with a popular-Baroque reason (Echavarría, 1998).

When I think about Jesús Martín-Barbero’s contribution to the field, I imagine him as a weaver who brought together many patches of fabric that were separated and made a large blanket, a quilt, out of them. Or perhaps, even better, as a craftsman building bridges, some fragile but capable of taking us to a new shore that we had not been able to imagine.

The perspective on contemporary Latin America

Beyond contributing to the configuration of the field, Jesús Martín-Barbero also allowed for the construction of an interpretative framework for the current Latin American conjuncture. A conjuncture that oscillates between popular reason and populist and antidemocratic temptations. Popular reason is the one Martín-Barbero develops in different spaces, but above all in his classic book De los Medios a las Mediaciones (translated as Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, 1993). Popular reason emerges from a marginalized place in the configuration of the nation state. However, it endures. Popular culture has been a major concern for Martín-Barbero: understanding it and comprehending its potential power. The popular is not a place of origin, authenticity, or beauty, but rather a space of representativeness. Hoggart (1972) insists that popular life is familial, communal, neighborhood-oriented, with a mixed morality that oscillates between contestatory cynicism and elemental religiosity, a living for the moment, improvisation, and a sense of enjoyment. And Benjamin (1969) confirms it: the popular gaze is oblique. Understanding the popular today means comprehending the tensions embodied in Latin America by the popularity of politicians who embody warrior, melodramatic, cynical, and manipulative archetypes. Popular culture refuses to become “a good citizen,” and instead, navigates through the world offered by carnival and spectacle. Resistance is not experienced through grand projects but through the clandestine centrality of everyday life (as Reguillo, 1998, has taught us).

A text that has received little attention in Martín-Barbero’s work and complements and allows for new possibilities of discussing the popular is his doctoral thesis. This document was presented in 1970, titled “La palabra y la acción” [Word and Action], and brought together the theories of Brazilian Paulo Freire and the Frenchman Paul Ricoeur in a reflection on the philosophy of language and the emancipatory potential of the word. This work was not published until 2018. The thesis was his first systematic reflection, defended in 1970 before a tribunal at the University of Louvain, in Belgium. In this work, Martín-Barbero develops three reflections: objectification, which revisits the structural processes of language, the role of objective forms, and their articulation with action. The second reflection is on communication. Here, he explores for the first time what happens with mediations and how processes of signification go beyond what language itself attempts to express; thus, language is mediation and is embedded in the realm of culture. It is not possible to think of communication without understanding cultural mediations.

Finally, the work reflects on the concept of self-implication. This pertains to the level of the individual person. The question is to what extent language can lead us to action, and how it is possible to make individuals feel involved and moved when it comes to communicating something. Can a word (language) become a device that triggers liberation? Martín-Barbero asks.

Living in Latin America, with fragile democracies and constant totalitarian temptations, with flirtations with militarization and insecurity breathing down our necks, understanding the processes of self-implication means questioning our possibilities of constructing citizenship and resistances that transform our societies into more dignified, kinder, and more enjoyable places to live (as the Colombians have taught us with their motto “Vivir Sabroso” [Living Deliciously])

For Martín-Barbero, the great problem of academic analysis is that we have prioritized the analysis of structures and displaced the concern for individuals and their actions. We must return to Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) project, which considered language as “the subject’s positioning in the world” (p. 213) To do so, Martín-Barbero proposes three historically proven language devices that allow individuals to position themselves and move toward praxis: myth, prophecy, and poetry.

These language devices may sound old and outdated in this world of 5G and the metaverse. However, they point the way. I want to elaborate on this a bit more. As I mentioned before, I come from Latin America, more specifically from a small country, El Salvador, which has been widely discussed in global social media. Living in El Salvador today means reflecting on the seductive power of communication and the reifications that have long allowed totalitarian projects to take root, projects that now appear with an anti-feminist, racist, militaristic agenda, populated by algorithms. The state apparatus of communication holds immense power. Our investigations in El Salvador have shown that the ruling party has the ability to create, manipulate, and install a new digital narrative in approximately 12 hours, while civil society organizations seeking to establish an agenda on democracy, diversity, and human rights take about 501 hours to position a topic in the public sphere. Beyond digital devices and their structures, Martín-Barbero reminds us that the progressive agenda is more rational and enlightened than popular and melodramatic. And that’s why we continue to lose the battle for democracy in many parts of the continent.

What I rescue from Martín-Barbero, then, is that agenda that brings us back to ways of being and existing from/with/for the people. New forms of recognition, which are the only way to overcome reification.

We must reclaim myth as a space for the survival of memories. Reclaiming myth means distancing ourselves from the rational and positivist thinking of the modern project and allowing other forms of knowledge to enter. It means understanding that there are other logics that give meaning to the world, using metaphor, returning to origins, being cyclical. Reclaiming myth means understanding that, as Adorno told us, As Adorno (2007) would tell us, we don’t always have to do concept work, because the myth is familiar, obscure, and obvious at the same time (p. 27) and that’s why it invades all spaces of our modernity. What are social media platforms now if not places where myths and beliefs circulate, fake news disguised as barely intelligible dreams and prayers? Reclaiming myth is reclaiming the memory that has brought us to where we are. Myth is not only inhabited by the solemnity of ceremony; it can also be carnivalesque or driven by laughter, dance, or outcry. Myth can be ancient magic and also new magic.

Secondly, Martín-Barbero’s (2018) proposal is to use poetry: “That single word, naked in its thickness of standing sign” (p. 141). As an esthetic device capable of reordering language and mobilizing, we find it today on social media through the dispute and mobilization produced by hashtags. Poetry is #YoSoy132 and #OccupyWallStreet, it is #BlackLivesMatter and #ResistimosParaLiberar resonating in Iran since the torture and murder of Masha Amini.

Finally, Martín-Barbero (2018) proposes we recenter our attention on prophecy, as “the word of the event. In the face of the discourse of eternal return, [prophecy] discovers the discontinuity, the dramaticity of history” (p. 139). Prophecy is the narrative that channels social anger and disenchantment, which, as tradition dictates, denounces power, and announces the establishment of a new time. Social movements throughout Latin America are inhabited by prophecies. The prophecies of young people and Afro-descendants, women, indigenous people, and the LGBTQ+ population insist on denouncing the established social order and announcing the establishment of a new world. And this is word turned into action, which, according to Martín-Barbero, comes into being when theoretical reflection takes on its mission: to take the word and embody it in stubborn facts.

Martín-Barbero’s strategy was to stop thinking about communication as theory and to begin understanding it as a process; to move from the reflection centered on the subjects to their practices. Communication was his hermeneutical place, his process of enunciation and interpretation. And that adventure remains necessary, even urgent, in these times. To un-silence ourselves. To return to speech as praxis. To believe that a new spirit of the age is possible, inaugurated by social media but in great need of bodies, myths, poetry, and prophecies. This is our gamble today.

And I will borrow the words of the great writer and activist, Roy (2017), to summarize the challenge posed by a thinker who reminds us of the challenge of academic thought: “To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you (. . .) To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. . .”.