Page 117 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

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CULTURAL FRONTS: TOWARDS A
DIALOGICAL UNDERSTANDING

OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURES

Jorge A. González

Every single day since birth we have been forced to situate ourselves inside a
vast number of different discursive environments and social situations that
touch what we consider necessary to ‘live well’, that help us construct the
meaning of ‘who we are’, and that introduce and reinforce the ‘common
values’ we share and pursue. As we produce material life in order to survive
(food, housing, clothing), we also find ways to exist in the middle of an intri-
cate, dynamic, and constant flow of social discourses. Some of these discourses
come from professional organizations whose very job is to de fine, regulate, and
concentrate the meanings of common needs, identities, and values considered
worth achieving and preserving. These tendencies are the centripetal forces in
society.
We will see through the cultural fronts approach, however, that what is con-
sidered and lived as normal, taken for granted, evident, given, truthful, and
obvious at any one time should be understood as a collective, but provisory and
momentary, symbolic order. This precarious arrangement and organization of
meaning is always subject to endless symbolic organizational counter-flows
between cultural institutions (for example, schools versus churches on sexual
information; scientists versus journalists on ‘objective’ interpretations of events;
‘good’ physicians versus ‘healers’ on the treatment of a simple cold; ‘true’ artists
versus ‘popular’ singers, and so on). This precarious order is also submitted (or
should be!) to other kinds of counter-flows and definitions coming constantly
from ‘bottom-up’, that is, material deployed from the unspecialized zones of
everyday life. These counter-flows can be seen as centrifugal forces, which not
only escape from the centralizing tendencies of institutions but take form as
cultural dialogues that can eventually change the ‘normal’ definitions of life.
Among the most important consequences of modernity have been the
processes in which institutional specialists in the symbolic elaboration of the
world have appeared, changed, and sometimes disappeared. Through intense

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