Page 137 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

specialized or not. We thus need a social semiotic and discourse analysis to
make observable the porous borders and symbolic confrontations that are con-
structed between different positions. The symbolic space created in between
discursive elements should always be considered as an occupied territory.
Mikhail Bakhtin has described these territories in linguistic and symbolic terms:
‘Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private
property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the
intentions of others’ (Bakhtin 1996: 294).
Bakhtin’s insight can be perfectly applied to a dialogical understanding of
culture as well. Indeed, Bakhtin’s seminal work and the dialogical in fluences it
contributes to cultural fronts merit a full discussion that is not possible here.
None the less, let me use some of Bakhtin’s thinking to help explain the forces
that are deeply embedded in our finest mediational tool for creating social
worlds – language:
Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the histor-
ical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression
of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not some-
thing given but is always in essence posited – and at every moment of
its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the
same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this
heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain max-
imum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into real, although still
relative, unity – the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and
literary language, ‘correct’ language.
(Bakhtin 1996: 270)

We can approach the study of cultural fronts by analyzing di fferent cultural
‘voices’ or languages (‘cultural heteroglossia’) that converge and clash in this
precarious order, this ‘unity’ we call hegemony. To do so, we must reconstruct
the detailed and conflictive history of symbolic confrontations, observing how
‘legitimate’ cultural fields (‘literary language’), try to impose unity and order –
the centripetal vectors and strength – in the middle of a multiple and chaotic
space of dissipative social networks – the centrifugal forces (Figure 6.3).
The cognitive target of the cultural fronts is exactly that provisional unity,
trajectory, and composition of symbolic social space generated in the clash of
contradictory cultural forces. My claim is that through the detailed internal
(intra) study of the construction of different cultural fronts, we can establish and
identify a number of non-linear symbolic flows and fluctuations that create in
other scales (inter and trans) the sort of dissipative structure of hegemony. From
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this perspective, hegemony can be understood as a complex attractorof differ-
ent forces that forms a structure that stays far from equilibrium. Originating in
physics and the biological sciences, the idea of non-linear flows, fluctuations, and
dissiptative structures is increasingly being applied in a number of domains

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