Page 98 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

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also been important: about ten years ago his work appeared in Media, Culture
and Society, and in the United States his work is often cited. But oddly,
Bourdieu’s work is like the powerful influence or great source that hasn’t been
officially recognized or invited into cultural studies. We invited him to the
conference in Italy, but he didn’t accept. In any case, I see him as having a
powerful influence in Latin American work, even if his influence is perhaps in
decline right now,
PDM: In the United States and England postmodernism has proved to be a
very provocative notion, receiving quite a bit of attention from some of cultural
studies’ central theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg, Angela McRobbie, bell
hooks and others. Latin American writers, on the other hand, have approached
postmodern theory with a little more caution, to some extent even an apparent
resistance to it. For example, Jesús MartinBarbero rejects postmodern
arguments for the analysis of culture. Your work, on the other hand,
demonstrates a certain receptiveness to post-modern theorizing. Can you explain
how you understand postmodernism and its application to questions concerning
culture?
NGC: I don’t have much more to add to what I’ve already written about in
Culturas híbridas. For me, this book was an attempt to take into account both
modern and postmodern questions, and negotiate an interpretive space within the
two discourses. Speaking broadly, I can say that post-modernism is more a
defined current of social thought than a theory, and it can act as a space to
reinterpret the crisis precipitated by modernization, the limits and frustrations of
modernity. So, I don’t consider postmodernity a theory, but it does generate
some interesting questions by radicalizing problematics associated with
modernity, and has shown how certain assumptions about modernity need to be
questioned because of their formulaic and totalizing tendencies. While there has
been little theory generated directly below the banner of postmodernism in Latin
America, what we can see is that it has contributed to our reinterpretation of
modernity. What has emerged is an understanding of modernity as a relative
process which plays on ironies, contradictions and disenchantment.
Postmodernism facilitates new understandings of style, rhetoric, fragmented
sensibilities and disconnections, but I wouldn’t credit it with much more.

PDM: What differences do you perceive between the interpretations of
postmodernism by Latin American writers such as yourself, José Joaquín
Brunner and George Yúdice, and more classical interpretations such as Jameson,
Lyotard or Baurillard?
NGC: Well, there are some differences, yes. For this question what I said
earlier is also valid: that in Latin America a set of distinct political circumstances
charges the articulation of culture; that is, that there are different ways in which
traditional modes of existence are articulated through modernizing processes. In
this respect, Latin American writers have shown a heightened sensibility for
recognizing cultural formations that are not necessarily ‘modern’; that popular