Page 119 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

Cultural fronts: the fundamentally human
formations at stake
Because of this poor implementation of hegemony in theory and research,
the core role of a number of fundamentally human elements or transclass
cultural formations has been neglected. What is missing, as the Italian anthro-
pologist Alberto Cirese has brilliantly pointed out (1984), is a discussion of the
plausible creation of diverse and expansive commonalties. Similarly, the space
of position-taking in the search for ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984) is established
precisely from the actions of competing contestants operating on symbolic
transclass formations. These fundamentally human elements should never be
taken as immanent essences or as ‘natural’. They all have been historically
generated in relation to primary needs to survive as a biological species –
feeding, housing, caring, loving, believing, eating, gendering, aging, trusting,
honoring, and so on – and all of them have been generated and molded
through the long term of history. Crucial contemporary issues like gender
definition, ecology, economic development, and ethnicity have been shaped
into discursive formations that are shared across social divisions: women have
been subjugated mercilessly in every social stratum; ecological movements
cannot be expanded as the exclusive property of any particular nation; eco-
nomic policies over migration affect post-national realities, and so on. Transclass
elements are constructed, not given, and owe their actual shape and symbolic
existence to the tensional forces of different sociohistoric contingencies and
contestants.
1
Hegemony is the name given to the momentum of the objective relationships
of forces that exist between different collective social agents (for example,
classes, groups, regions, and nations) situated in a determined social space which
we observe from a symbolic point of view – that is, where the creation and
recreation of meanings take form in the enactment of all social relations.
I find myself more comfortable, therefore, not conceiving of hegemony as a
negative given fact like a syndrome of class control or a cancer to extirpate.
Instead, I believe we can create a dialogical understanding of our common
symbolic existence if we ask questions about how, from where, and between
whom specific relations of symbolic authority have been structured, decon-
structed, and re-created across a specific history. By history I mean changes and
movements that are prompted by social agency and symbolic force performed
both by specialized cultural institutions (acting as centralizing or ‘centripetal’
strengths), and by networks of social agents (the dissipative or ‘centrifugal’
forces).
Viewed within this framework, no society can organize its everyday produc-
tion of life without hegemony. Thought of in a positive way, we can study any
society as an integrated, structured set of objective relationships that emphasizes
symbolic interaction. The cultural fronts approach, therefore, should be con-
sidered a kind of methodological intervention that permits us to interrogate

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