Page 139 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

differential identities, and plausible values. These elements and themes must be
thought of not as ‘essences’ but as symbolic occupied territories. Those mean-
ingful and mobile territories can be understood as porous boundaries between
different situated ways of defining possible common understandings. At the
same time the territories are struggling arenas, even cultural battlefields, where
diverse, sometimes opposite, elaborations and definitions of common meanings
interact.
Cultural fronts has been proposed as a tool for understanding how, where,
and when social relationships of hegemony are created. With the help of a
dynamic systems approach, we have a powerful tool for the study of hegemony
as a space of possibilities instead of a negative fact that is inevitably linked to class
domination and exploitation.
Studying symbolic processes as cultural fronts has another important implica-
tion that is linked to the social organization for the generation of knowledge.
Social research is typically thought of as an individualized, isolated task that is
normally performed in vertical, authoritarian structures. That social definition
of research activity should be contested. The methodological strategy of
cultural fronts implies a different organization – a horizontal network in which
different voices, abilities, and skills can be merged and auto-organized to
produce reflexive knowledge about our own common sense.
For this reason, the cultural fronts approach suggests second-order reflexivity
in the sense that, as the research project goes on, the research team can deeply
ponder the relationship between observer and observed. Unlike a positivistic
approach in which subject and object are to be kept separate, and where the
project shouldn’t be ‘contaminated’ with the subjectivity of the researcher, a
cultural fronts approach deals squarely with the critical re flexivity of those who
produce the knowledge (the research team or network). The process and results
of the work can be used in action research as a critical tool for the empower-
ment of social agents and researchers. The very act of dismantling and making
observable the trajectories, structures, contexts, and symbolic specificity of pre-
constructed social meanings can be used as a tool for increasing the degree of
our own self-determination.
One ongoing attempt to do what I am describing here is a national research
project that is producing a system of cultural information in Mexico ( La
Formación de las Ofertas Culturales y sus Públicos: FOCYP). A group of
researchers connected by information technology throughout Mexico is
mapping the differential development of eight cultural fields in the country
spanning the past hundred years. For us, perhaps even more important than the
cultural knowledge this project is producing, is the creation of new, more
democratic research communities, a dialogical reconstruction of Mexican
people’s collective memories, and a thoughtful reflection on our most beloved
dreams and expectations (González 1997). The challenge therefore is to create
a wider space for those who have been historically conquered, excluded, and
expelled from their own symbolic territories to be able to reflect and confront,

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