Page 135 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

of complex symbolic forms (Thompson 1995) to anticipate a more expansive
passive or active consensus. That consensus or ideological agreement is linked
to a first-order elaboration, designed to evoke either passive or active recogni-
tion of an elaborated hierarchy of meanings and narratives as a more complex
form of organizing and transmitting symbolic vectors across time and space.
The role of the public ritual as a cultural front in the construction of con-
sensus narratives in this process has already been highlighted (White 1990,
1991) as key to understanding how hegemony works. In the contextualized
study of the cultural fronts, therefore, we can identify various strategies to
compose, limit, and occupy common symbolic territory by analyzing how
social powers frame discourses. But we can also identify the polysemic portrayal
of rhetorics which have the potential for diverse and even contradictory inter-
pretations of the very same community of symbols. No exerted power can exist
without multiple resistances, and, similarly, no discourse goes forward without
counter-discourses. That takes us now to the symbolic dimension of the
cultural fronts.

Symbolism
The study of cultural fronts must always be connected with historical and social
determination, but at the same time it must resist any kind of reductionism. We
are contemplating meaningful actors, actions, relationships, and processes, so we
need to be able to describe in some detail the dynamics of how meanings take
form in actual social settings and public rituals. Certainly we cannot deduce
directly and mechanically any determination of meanings from structural and
historical conditions. We must work in detail with the symbolic specificity that
underlies and permeates the constant and complex discursive elaboration of
experience. In fact, that specificity operates as a sort of second reality, as cultural
semioticians sometimes say, but it is as real as the first-order reality of human
beings. Any struggle or conflict in which we can locate structure, history, and
contexts has its own symbolic specificity, and is in no way secondary. Symbolic
specificity is thus crucial for understanding cultural fronts.
On the one hand, there is a complex structure of specialized organizations
(cultural fields) occupied in the creation, preservation, and delivery of complex
symbolic forms. Throughout world history these fields have produced their
own specialists – priests, scientists, educators, philosophers, journalists, singers,
painters, and many others. All these symbolic producers have supervised the
creation and recreation of multiple specialized and complex discourses and
practices known as religions, sciences, pedagogy, philosophies, journalism, arts,
and so on. They have their own internal stakes, rules, and struggles to preserve
or change, maintain or challenge, the specific relations that define a field. All
cultural fields have a variable degree of autonomy with respect to other social
constraints and meta-processes coming from the ‘ fields of power’ (Bourdieu
1993). What Bourdieu calls a ‘field of power’ should be understood as an

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