Page 138 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

Figure 6.3 Cultural fronts as order out of chaos

like economics, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics because they are useful
to describe and understand the dissipative structures that compose any
relational framework (Prigogine 1984).

Conclusion: cultural fronts, grounded reflexivity,
and empowerment
A key issue in the study of the cultural dynamics of modern societies is the
construction of commonalities of meaning within disputed symbolic spaces
between different social agents who are loaded with different skills and
resources. Cultural fronts has been proposed as an open concept that rejects any
positivistic definition, advocating instead a systemic understanding through
interacting, differential levels of complexity. Each level needs its own kind of
observables, understood as a relation established between information coming
from the object and meaning coming from the subject. In order to analyze
symbolic processes as cultural fronts, we must elaborate and deal with four
different types of related observables: structural, historical, situational, and
symbolic information.
Through these complementary configurations we can understand from a
well-grounded standpoint that any possible common meanings can only be
constructed from intense, contested, discursive elaborations of a variety of
transclass cultural elements, or basic human themes, normally linked to needs,

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