Page 124 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

Borders and arenas: open concepts
The meaning of a ‘cultural front’ has itself been polysemic from the beginning.
The term has been used mainly in Marxist lines of critical theory as a way to
link political struggles with mass mobilization (Mattelart 1977). More recently,
Michael Denning (1997) has studied in detail the proletarian avant-garde that
shaped American culture in the wake of the General Strikes of 1934; the cul-
tural front came of age in the labor movement, in New Deal art projects, and
in the emerging media industries. New York University Press has launched a
book series named ‘cultural fronts’ with the same radical commitment across
a range of cultural issues (Nelson 1997; Linton 1998). As a theoretical tool,
cultural fronts should therefore be understood as an open systemic concept. It
cannot be applied separately from its relations within other theoretical con-
structions: hegemony, cultural field, social network, and so on. As Bourdieu
points out, ‘concepts have no definition other than systemic ones, and
are designed to be put to work empirically in systematic fashion’ (Bourdieu
1993: 96).
I use the term ‘cultural fronts’ to refer to some key ways for organizing such
critical social analyzes. Variously located symbolic universes constantly produce
‘borders’, cultural boundaries that are determined by the objective positions of
social agents. The borders must be considered as porous limits constructed
under terms that represent and express the interests and strategies of various
sociocultural formations and collective entities – nations, classes, groups, and
regions.
Cultural fronts can be understood also as sites or struggling ‘arenas’, versions
of which are constructed through elaborate discursive work which traces the
dynamics of situated conflicts and tensions. For example, a regional sanctuary
of Catholic devotion can be understood as a cultural front (González 1994:
97–157) because its physical space operates like a border between at least two
ways of understanding and practising the Catholic religion. The cultural front is
the arena in which popular religion – that of poor peasants and the urban prole-
tariat – intertwines and mixes in micro spaces with the ‘official’ and ‘legitimate’
definitions of faith, deities, and saints that occupy the religious discourse of the
field claimed by the upper socioeconomic classes and by the religious hier-
archy. We can empirically document and describe that discursive co-existence
as relatively peaceful, but at the same time traces of intensive and sometimes
passionate cultural struggles emerge too. These spaces are the sites of symbolic
struggles around the meaning of ‘divine images’ and their relationship with
humans. We can find the same symbolic borders and arenas in the midst of a
public ritual like a local celebration or feast. There, the ‘regional identity’ of an
imagined community is created through the process of connecting and dismiss-
ing cultural traits as the public limits of ‘amusement’ are elaborated through
discourses and practices that differ among social classes (González 1994: 185–
225). We might also think of cultural fronts in terms of the crossover appeal of

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