Abstract
In Latin America, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers captured by his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relations between communication, culture, and politics. This essay explains five characteristics of Martín-Barbero’s style: (i) his reflections about expressions of popular and mass culture such as music, telenovelas, fairs, and celebrations; (ii) his gaze at and from local territories, identities; (iii) his innovative way of thinking from the Global South while in conversation with Western philosophy; (iv) his proposal for a theory of mediations as a way to understand cultural interactions and the production of social meaning; and (v) an intellectual passion that led him to engage daringly in political issues in society. As one of his students and colleagues, the essay ends with my own notions of what a communication researcher should do/be.
Jesús Martín-Barbero’s intellectual legacy can be found in his permanent obsession with understanding cultural phenomena from a different perspective. His work was defined by a constant search for creating new ideas to make sense of the practices of everyday life. In Latin America, those working in his wake in the field of communication and culture now approach media messages with different eyes; we are truly convinced that the media are about much more than mere business, marketing, and cultural codes. We have realized that media play important roles in processes of recognition, identity games, and the making of cultures that mediate lived experience.
Whenever Professor Jesús Martín-Barbero went on stage to give a lecture, we, the audience, got excited because he did not focus on the main point but rather performed orality and traveled through ideas that made us think. And think differently, at that.
Jesús Martín-Barbero was our mentor; he arrived from Spain and then turned into a Latin-blooded Colombian citizen who insisted on inventing new ways of thinking about communication, culture, media, lo popular, young people, women, sensitivities, technologies, etc. – everything that gave intellectuals of the social sciences an “evil eye.” “Evil eye” was the term that Martín-Barbero used to refer to scholars’ and elites’ difficulty to research and understand “lo popular,” and even more so “lo masivo,” or mass cultures, as places of social meaning and thought. An example of such difficulty is Adorno’s statement (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1988) made in 1944 whereby mass culture represented the decadence and ruin of culture. There are many essays and five well-known books written by Martín-Barbero (1978) in which he creatively grappled with this cultural terrain: Comunicación de Masas: Discurso y Poder [Mass Communication: Discourse and Power] where he pioneered the ways in which politics inhabits the media, and the modes of domination and resistance that exist in the enunciation machines of collective messages; De los Medios a las Mediaciones [From the Media to the Mediations] (1987), his masterpiece, that leads us to inhabit communication and culture as places traversed by stories about and knowledge of territories, identities, politics, and lo popular; Televisión y Melodrama [Television and Melodrama] (1992), which looks into the Latin American massive cultural product, the telenovela, in order to understand its deep roots in popular culture; La Educación desde la Comunicación [Education from the Perspective of Communication] (2002a), a statement on the role of education in contemporary modes of communication as tools for civic engagement and transforming societies; and finally, Oficio de Cartógrafo [The Craft of the Cartographer] (2002b), where he recounts his ways of examining night maps, listening to territories, and holding dialogues with Latin American youth and people from the arts.
Today, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star in Latin America and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers of his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relationship between communication, culture, and politics. This original way of thinking – what I am calling here the Martin-Barberian style – is found in the way of naming, writing, and imagining the social world. It implicates a way of being specific to the Global South, but yet is in dialogue with the influences and colonial residues of the Global North.
The Martin-Barberian style is enunciated in mantras, ideas that look like slogans, which serve as tutorials to intervene the fields of communication, media, and culture. Some good examples of Martín-Barberos’ mantras include:
We have to lose the object (of communication) to gain the process (of culture)
Doing research in the field of communication means seeing with others
We must move from the media to the mediations
The key issue is not media effects but the processes of recognition and identification that happen when people use media
We need to move from reasoning and illustration to telling and narrating
While commercial television is made for the consumer, public television is produced for the citizen
Internet is NOT a revolution in information distribution (like Gutenberg’s printing press) but in writing
We are writing in an oral-visual way.
These communication mantras are frequently repeated in Latin America, but we do not really know what they mean. This is so because the Martin-Barberian way of thinking and imagining means provoking, disrupting, and disturbing rather than defining. It means leaving meaning open to adventure, like a work-in-progress. Scholars are trained to be obsessed with defining. In fact, it could be said that they quarrel over defining. But Martín-Barbero’s struggle against Manichaeism and the dualism involved in defining – which is common in religion, the left and the right – allowed him to think and name from a place of ambiguity, the gray side of things, the in-between. By doing so, he managed to “insinuate,” to “provoke,” to “incite” so that his readers and his audiences would find their own paths toward imagining meaning.
What follows is a description of the five main characteristics of the Martin-Barberian style.
Popular 1 culture and communication
Martín-Barbero (1987) sustained that in the study of communication, culture, and politics, the question on the meaning of “popular” cannot be avoided. The Martín-Barberian concept of lo popular masivo implies moving away from the North American and European media-centered research about the supreme power of media over the articulation of mainstream “pop culture,” political issues, and people. Lo popular is not northern pop culture but a practice of territories, identities, politics, mass media, and culture (Rodríguez, 2019). It is a remix of traditional identities, knowledge, and practices, plus media and pop culture. When thinking and feeling is rooted in lo popular, storytelling is the main way to make sense. What Martín-Barbero taught us is that too frequently, people’s experiences can only be communicated in stories. This conception of popular culture makes it possible to study the contradictory act of resistance and complicity that occurs in mass popular cultural expressions, such as music, telenovelas, fairs and festivals, and popular celebrations (Martín-Barbero, 1981, 1985, 1987).
Martín-Barbero’s conceptualization of lo popular strayed from both the Marxist idea of cultural imperialism and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 concept of cultural industries (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988) – both notions stating that in popular culture people do not have the power to create new meanings. Martín-Barbero went beyond these concepts, to believe in people and pointed out the density and ambiguity of lo popular which is, at the same time, a set of practices and experiences of submission, complicity, and resistance. The idea was to destroy positive Manichaeism which aggrandized the manipulative power of media, businessmen, and cultural industries to idealize enlightened people and elite classes. Or the myopic one-sidedness of Marxists who worship people and popular culture unconditionally; it is well known that for left-wing Latin Americans, “popular culture” is the home of revolutions. The Martín-Barberian master stroke was to step away from the academic and ideological predetermined paths to gain a more profound understanding of how the remix and ambiguity of lo popular is woven into political and cultural issues.
Martín-Barbero’s (1978, 1987, 1992) work was thus a direct and sustained intervention in the concept of popular culture as a depository of the ideas of the powerful. He removed it from the periphery and placed it at the center to describe “the mass popular.” His theoretical trespassing followed four interrelated threads: 1. He deprived the concept of its aura of exoticism, folklore, and subalternity; he assumed that cultural industries produce meanings and practices that go well beyond domination. 2. He dared to examine, understand, and explain spurious products of culture, such as telenovelas, music, and popular celebrations (i.e., carnival, patron-saint fiestas, and festivals). 3. He also trespassed when he decided to engage his research with narratives which are more appreciated for their repetition than for their originality (the aesthetics of repetition). 4. Finally, he dared to do research on the sides of meaning that are not centered on learning or reasoning but instead emerge from the logic of recognition: those practices and narratives that people embody in their search for identity and belonging; practices and narratives that empower people, instead of reminding them about their lack of knowledge.
Consequently, Martín-Barbero discovered that the pleasure of lo popular does not reside in consumption but in retelling what one saw, heard, or read because retelling becomes part of people’s lives and exemplifies how meaning and sense are produced from below. Through these shifts in conception and perspective, the mass popular is seen as: a new way for the popular to exist. A mode that emerges in new conflict spaces—in the neighborhood and at home, in healthcare situations, in romantic relationships, in social security, in religious spaces—and centered on new social actors like women, youth, the retired, and by emerging urban subcultures such as prostitution and alcoholism, homosexuality, and drug addiction, crime, etc. (Martín-Barbero, 1985: 11).
Lo popular is, therefore, neither a doctrine nor an adjective. It is an experience that assumes dialogue and articulation between the cultural industries (cinema, television, radio, printed media, and music), people’s ways of being in their territories (food, celebrations, death), and identities (Afro descendants, indigenous peoples, women, youth, among others). It is a remix that produces meaning and, above all, enjoyment that emerges from and is rooted in people’s lives, thus creating a reality where virtuosity and the canon of beauty disappear to gain the vitality of everyday life (Rincón and Amado, 2015).
Martín-Barbero (1987) was not a naïve believer in the popular. Instead, he pointed out our need to be concerned with “the intercrossing, the intertwining of submission and resistance, of contestation and complicity” (p. 210), provided that in mass media and in the cultural industries there is a “new way of existing of the popular.” Consequently, he suggested a conception of the popular whereby the ambiguities of unfinished modernity mix with ancestral notions of “buen vivir,” and the lustful and flavorful popular cultures mix with narratives. His idea of lo popular spares neither emotions nor politics. It is filled with spirituality and religion (and/or rituals); it mediatizes (interacts with digital media and media culture); it entertains (infuses emotions into leisure and collective life); and it politicizes individuals in their articulation with the cultural industries. Lo popular is conceived both as an experience of re-enchantment with the world through the revindication of daily-life pleasures, and – from the perspective of illustration – as an anarchic expression of a cultural sin because it involves physical pleasure, public enjoyment, collective jouissance, the narrative expression of being. Therefore, lo popular is a cultural experience that embraces “the reinvention of festive in the strongest ritual sense, in the sense of dense community-gathering time” (Martín-Barbero, 2009: 33).
Theoretically, lo popular is the “memory of a wordless experience that can only become real when it is told” (Martín-Barbero and Muñoz, 1992: 23). This is the key issue: lo popular exists as the subject of narration, not as a concept. In the same line of thought, García-Canclini (1989: 323–324) stated that understanding popular cultures requires “the inclusion of emotional drives and the participation in supportive or ancillary activities in which both dominant groups and subalterns need each other,” activities that cannot be inspired by those in power. García-Canclini also suggests that cultural relationships consist of “transversal pathways to manage conflicts.” In this sense, lo popular provides communities with strategies to manage conflict; thus, it opens alternative paths for coexisting and being part of a group; in fact, lo popular can only exist in collectivity, in commonness.
The Martin-Barberian elaboration of popular culture is inspired in Latin America; it is the remixing of ancestral knowledge, folklore, territories, everyday practices, identities, mass media, social networks, and the coolture (Rincón, 2018), which is the cultural form of the 21st century and of capitalism, entertainment being its supreme value and source of meaning. Understanding the Latin American popular means participating in the life of communities, sharing their “birth marks,” their “ways of practicing,” their everyday “tactics,” all “those elusive, poetic, and non-static celebrations referred to as ‘inventiveness of the weak’” (De Certeau, 1979).
Based on this understanding of popular culture, Martín-Barbero researched various subjects: telenovelas (Martín-Barbero and Muñoz, 1992) as a key to understand the ways of feeling and signifying in Latin America; popular music (from tango to ranchera, from bolero to rock) as old and new emerging sentimental plots; cemeteries and markets (Martín-Barbero, 1981) as time-space networks where different meanings are at play; with collective celebrations at the center.
From this perspective, we should devote less time to study media effects and more time to try to understand how media and coolture generate recognition and processes of identity building. By doing so, Martín-Barbero invited us to conceive telenovelas as a struggle for the cultural recognition of Latin America, a continent that finds in drama the recognition of who it is. Therefore, the plot of our telenovelas is always driven by an evasive identity and a struggle to be recognized (Martín-Barbero and Muñoz, 1992). He also invited us to think of cemeteries and “plazas de mercado” (markets) as cultural spaces where relationships, conversations, and other experiences of communication, culture, and politics are anchored in ambiguities, corporality, memories, and identities that hinder the market’s search for efficiency, productivity, and anonymity. Telenovelas (where success is attained through love), popular music (where corporality and emotions are put together in the form of tango, bolero, ranchera, cumbia. . .), cemeteries (where death is celebrated as a source of stories), plazas de mercado (where food means collective identity), festivals and carnivals (where capitalism is put away to enjoy the experience of becoming and being with the others) are the spaces, times, and practices where lo popular is expressed with full vitality, far away from standard practices and the quest for efficient time. Understanding these popular practices as experiences of meaning-making turns them into practices of re-enchantment – in the religious sense of the term – of identity, modes of community performance, festive, and joyful ways of bringing corporality back into everyday life; and away from the secularization and rationalization of everyday life and identity building processes.
Seeing with others
What we, scholars, usually do is to ask questions. But Martín-Barbero taught us that our main goal should be to change the place from where we ask our questions, moving from safe places to unstable ones. This means looking at phenomena from a different angle, listening to what young people have to say, their sensibilities and from where they are experiencing/interpreting, engaging with artistic practices, thinking from below, believing in communities, in others, and in beauty. Therefore, his proposal was to move from reasoning and illustration to storytelling/narrating. Martín-Barbero talked about “contar para contar,” a Spanish pun where “contar” means to narrate and at the same time to count politically. At the same time, he pointed out the need to research and create
He forced us to change our perspective and to start thinking about those who enjoy mass media, digital media, and pop culture because it is there where our senses are located: in what people do, see, read, hear. Pleasure and joy are the key values, central to lived cultural experience. Moreover, people’s joy lays in the retelling of what they see, hear, or read. Hence, doing research in the field of communication means “seeing with others” so that, as researchers, we understand that our research needs to tell, document, interpret the complex heterogeneity of identities. People’s interaction with media is like a springboard that launches them to create their own narratives from their own life experiences.
This shift in perspective transforms the concept/practice of researching communication and culture by opening it to powerful paths toward diversity, difference, and fragmentation. Researching communication and culture should be centered on practice and meaning but mostly on enjoyment, knowledge, and politics. We need to change our place of engagement as researcher, we should look at those who enjoy media and popular rituals because it is there where meaning can be found: in what people do with what they see, read, hear. This is how Martín-Barbero realized that research on communication, culture, and politics means “seeing with others,” understanding others’ experience of being re-enchanted by their identity in everything that is communitarian and festive.
Living in the contradiction of modernity
Martín-Barbero was a son of modernity and its enlightenment. He grew up in the time when modernity was conceived as utopia, but he espoused a critical way of thinking and a human rights perspective. He studied Philosophy in Spain, lived and studied in Paris, and earned his doctoral degree in Leuven, Belgium. He intended to be modern by assuming a critical perspective to fight against and reveal the hypocrisies of the Western world, and to explore a less white, less Western, less masculine way of thinking. His critical hope was set on the South but in dialogue with Western philosophy. From the South he went beyond modernity to create what he called jodernidad – a pun between joder [fuck] and modernity, sort of a playful modernity, more chaotic and open to difference, the feminine, afro, indigenous, gay, trans, and young versions of life (Martín-Barbero, 1987).
Martín-Barbero sustained that, in communication studies, we should lose the object to gain the process. This means to stop centering out thinking on communication products and to start considering the cultural logic behind the process of designing, producing, and circulating messages. It means researching and interpreting how people consume, enjoy, and use mass media, digital media, and cultural products. By moving the place where our questions are asked, we can make the processes of media and cultural meaning researchable.
The political drives culture and communication
Jesús Martín-Barbero was more than a scholar. He was a public intellectual because he engaged daringly in political issues about society and cared about transforming reality. He wanted to intervene his community, to build a new way of thinking that involved political action, to foster collective narratives and political transformations. Perhaps his ambitions drove his desire to do research where hope exists, on issues that academics do not like to explore, such as the popular practices of eating, crying, enjoying, and dying, and the cultural products of the poor (music, telenovelas, fairs, carnivals, and celebrations).
Martin-Barbero asserted that without politics there is no culture or communication, and that society is re-invented by listening to lo popular. For these reasons, he permanently fought against moral dualism (of God and family) and ideological Manichaeism (the left and the right). His constant search for ambiguity and diversity challenged him to get out of the moral and superior comfort of academic thinking, theoretical frameworks, and Western knowledge. This means that, in communication, we cannot avoid issues like difference, cultural diversity, and how power is woven into this mesh.
From media to mediations
In 1987, De los Medios a las Mediaciones was published. It is a book written from the South, a dialogue between European philosophy and Latin American thinking which reveals the popular feeling of our cultural heterogeneity. It discusses the most cited but also the least cherished/ understood/intervened category in communication and cultural studies. In spite of its more than 300 pages, Martín-Barbero’s book does not contain a clear definition of “mediation.” And this is so because Don Jesús chose to open instead of closing, exploring over defining, playing around over being specific.
I don’t know. . . To be honest with you, I don’t know what has happened to this book. I wrote it and it traced its own little paths, it moved in its own way, it became entangled with some reasons and certain visions. It has traced its own path. What matters to me is that it is alive, and this is so because it is a book that has moved not only communication scholars but also people from the social sciences. And the point is that it is a book on social sciences, not a book on communication and media. I wrote it to influence the social sciences by introducing an agenda of topics that seemed important to me, in politics, society, and culture. The book has traveled around a small part of the world and somehow it still has some energy left to get me into trouble (Martín-Barbero 2018: 9).
From this book, he created his most famous theory: that of mediations. Mediations refers to the cultural interactions and productions of social meaning in a political scenario. Based on this idea, he argued that in the study of media “we must move from media to mediations,” so that we stop instrumentalizing media as carriers of information, and we can begin to truly see media as traversed by interrelationships between popular culture, industrial machines, and politics.
Afterword
Martín-Barbero thought, lived, and loved during his time in Colombia. Although he died in 2021, we can still learn from him that communication is a meeting point for broken communities like ours in Colombia, that mass media and digital media can be spaces of cultural connection and political intervention, and that we, Latin Americans, need and require new forms of recognition, expression, and narration.
In these times of excessive communication, it is good to take a pause to pay homage to the one who taught us to think differently and to turn communication research into a field not only of theories but also of cultural recognition, the practices that trigger processes of cultural identification. The truth is that Jesus Martín-Barbero has made us better people, better researchers and scholars, . . .and much more concerned/engaged with politics.
In closing, I would like to comment on Martin-Barbero’s minimalist idea concerning the task of communication researchers. He said that every communication researcher should do three main things: (1) to think with our own head; (2) to have something to say; and (3) to trap the audience. In order to think with our own heads, we must do a lot of reading, researching, exploring the field in the territories, holding conversation with others, and listening. For us to have something to say requires doing research over and over again, listening time and time again to find people’s stories, experiences, and knowledge, so that we have something to say to the world about people and their media. To trap the audience, we need to practice better ways of sharing our research, better ways of telling stories that connect us with society.
