Page 123 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

and skillful elaboration, designed precisely to conquer and occupy symbolically
the semantic space of those deeply human events. This process of symbolic
occupation involves both the quality and quantity of people whose space of
possible meanings has been shaped and centralized around the particular
definitions of a certain social group. We can find a good illustration of this
in the work of Jane Tompkins (1985), for instance, who shows how stereo-
typed female characters and melodramatic plots in literature were designed to
touch large audiences between the years 1790 and 1860. These are precisely
the years of the formation of a national identity in the USA, embracing such
central notions as independence and westward expansion. Tompkins brilliantly
shows how sentimental novels of that period, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, oper-
ated ‘as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that
both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time’ (Tompkins 1985:
126). This kind of literature was either not taken seriously or deplored by most
literary critics, but it immediately appealed to thousands of readers. Instead of
disappearing, it has endured for generations.
In such cases, all the specialized discursive vectors are in constant interaction
with an infinite number of non-specialized discursive elaborations that
together create and sustain the common social discourse. This dynamic inter-
play gives us our first sketch of the total social discourse of any society (Fossaert
1983). In order to understand this complexity, we can invoke the familiar
example of any society’s ‘gross national product’ – the sum of the total eco-
nomic value produced by a population within a concrete nation-state. In a
similar way, the total social discourse should be the ‘sum’ of the total symbolic
value generated within the confines of a particular geo-human location. As we
can imagine, it is endless, always in arborescence, and cannot be quantified. It
looks infinite because it really is.
These constellations of objective differences and positions can be connected
only via an intensive discursive production whose precarious equilibrium can
be interpreted as the momentum of hegemony. However, I do not consider
hegemony to be the sum of the circulating dominant ideology. Hegemony as
considered here does not have a measurable, fixed, or deterministic character.
Hegemonic consensus and all its junctures must be considered to be very
unstable. Every situated hegemony is always subject to a variety of symbolic
struggles in which various social agents – corporations, institutions, classes,
groups – invest mightily in the hard work of discursive elaboration of possible
links and commonalities. Those conflicted crossings of precarious equilibrium
are what I call cultural fronts.
Cultural fronts can be used both as a theoretical construct in cultural studies
and social science generally, and as a methodological strategy for making
observable and understanding the complexity of symbolic power in everyday
life. In order to understand this complexity, we need a complex approach.
The study of a cultural front can be accomplished only by constructing
multi-dimensional configurations of empirical information.

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