copenhagen conference

7/28/2019 Copenhagen Conference

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Programming Commercial Media in Colombia

Coloniality of Power, Audience Segmentation and Popular productivity

Juan Carlos Valencia

PhD CandidateMedia, Music & Cultural Studies

Macquarie University

1. Governmentality, post-Colonial theories and CommunicationFor those academics who have been studying and using subjectivation and post-colonial theories in

the most critical quarters of disciplines like History, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, it

comes as a surprise to discover the little impact that these theories have had so far in other

disciplines. Economics (Charusheela and Zein-Elbadin 2004), Psychology (Macleod and Bhatia 2008)

and Communication (Radha and Raka 2002), just to name a few critical areas of contemporary

power/knowledge, have been largely reluctant to engage with critical governmental approaches, let

alone with post-colonial theories.

Im not that innocent to believe in the emancipating purposes of academic knowledge; suspicions

about the role of education institutions in the establishment and ongoing operation of disciplinary

and control societies have been fostered not only by Foucault but by other, less controversial

analysts (Commission 1996). And yet, this persistent disregard of such important critical

theorizations perpetuates regimes of truth and practices that legitimize and sustain coloniality

around the globe and limit the scope of critical efforts in these important disciplines.

In the past decades, the media has become an increasingly important topic in most Social Sciences

but sadly, Communication studies have grown more and more inward looking, with many scholars

moving from a focus on media-in-society to forms of media-centrism and parochialism over the

years (Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee 2008 p.8). According to Nick Couldry (2008) , contemporary

media research tends either to operate in a theory-free zone or in isolated capsules of theory

saturation ... unconnected to each other or to any wider space of debate (p.161). Although

theoretical work on communication has been described by some scholars as flourishing (Craig 1999),

others talk about a lack of contemporary theory building in the field and attribute it to t he skills

emphasis, applied orientation, and methodological fixations (Burleson 1992). This worrying trend

has emerged at a particularly inconvenient time, when the media has contributed to create an ever

expanding and far reaching 24-hour matrix and seems to occupy a central point in power dynamics

around the world.


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The frantic emergence of Internet-based technologies like social networks and the adoption of

digital multimedia portable technologies by those who can afford them in the nodes of todays

information society flows have become the central research topics of an increasingly isolated

Communication Studies field and intensified some of its obsessions. Blogs, Twits and Facebook wall

posts are the new material to produce old-fashioned grounded theory, an anthropology-lite

scholarship that fills the vacuum created after the death of most of the more relevant cultural

theorists of the late 20th century (Eagleton 2003). Communication Scholars with an interest in social

science theory, perhaps a dying breed, continue to fantasize about the recreation of the perhaps

never existing public sphere or naively glorify diversity and multiculturalism. Others, the heirs of the

Frankfurt school, continue to denounce the ever more monopolized media corporations and insist

on discarding popular culture products as mediocre.

On the other hand, the approach to media prevalent in most quarters of post-colonial scholarship

and governmentality studies, could be described as simplistic, painting complex dynamics in black

and white, too dismissive of the findings of decades of reception studies. It could be argued that

post-colonial academics are mostly blind to the struggles for meaning and to the amazing

productivity that sustains the contemporary avalanche of media contents around the world.

I think that the transdisciplinary field where I inscribe my research, critical Communication Studies,

stands to benefit from the use of both governmentality approaches and post-colonial theories. Andthat at the same time, post-colonial scholarship and governmentality studies could refine or

transcend their current heavy-handed approaches to media by considering in detail the complex

dynamics of cultural production. This paper is an example of how all this could be carried out in the

study of a specific topic: targeted media programming. My current research specifically analyses the

way that marketing and commercial interests are organizing the programming of highly popular

radio stations in a Latin American country, Colombia.

I will start by explaining what I mean by targeted media programming, then I will advance a first

analysis of it based on subjectivation, post-Marxist and Latin American critical communication

theories. Then I will present the work of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality group. Their post-

Colonial theories qualify and deprovincialize Western social science approaches and will allow me to

offer a more nuanced analysis of targeted media in a non-Western context. This paper argues that

contemporary media programming could be understood as a tool of biopolitics and that the

organizing principle of that programming is coloniality.


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2. Subjectivation and Electronic MediaThe discourse of contemporary commercial media is closely associated with the idea of identity. As a

matter of fact, the very definition of targeted media is based in a particular view of identity.

Conventional marketing wisdom asserts that certain groups of individuals are thought to be

attracted to specific types of programming that fit into their lifestyles and match their demographics

(Norberg 1996). If a media outlet is able to continuously capture the attention of one of these

groups, one that is interesting to advertisers, economic success is guaranteed (Gross et al. 2005). But

then, success is linked to the continuous validation of audience representations, obtained through

what is thought of as scientific research (Ang 1993). Medias power, according to this discourse,

resides in its capacity to continuously interpellate specific subjects and social groups, based on

representations of identity, an identity closely defined by the choices of what are supposed to be

free, autonomous individuals that express their taste through the application of wealth and

disposable income(Wehner 2002 p.12).

This brief description, common in the fields of commercial media and marketing, and very close to

the principles of political liberalism (Ang 1996), seems ripe for a detailed analysis from a critical point

of view.

Michel Foucaults work, although not addressing the topic of communication, is especially useful for

understanding the links between power, subjectivation and media. His views on power render the

conventional divisions between public and private spaces or spheres irrelevant, and the concern

about ideology as illusory. For Foucault, power was not something divided between those who have

it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Critical Social Science

academics are familiar with the triangle created by sovereignity, discipline and biopower, with the

subject in the middle so Im not going to repeat these concepts. I will use them to explain the

transformations of electronic media programming in the past century. Interest and new

developments of his concepts of biopower and biopolitics move the discussion of the role of media

in contemporary societies beyond the trite theorizations about media effects and active audiences

(Bratich 2008).

The first electronic media, radio, started to develop in the West in a context of fast industrialization,

imperialism and expansion of markets. Fordism allowed the participation of the industrial workers in

the new mass product market. Since the very beginning, the technologies of discipline, biopower

and biopolitics started to operate in media. Biopower and Biopolitics are forms of governmental

power fundamental in the conduct of conduct that takes place at innumerable sites, associated to


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institutions but also beyond them (Bratich et al. 2003). With electronic media, the organization and

training of people became more extensive and reached the privacy of homes, living rooms and

bedrooms (Andrejevic 2002). Foucaults metaphor of the panopticon extends the role of surveillance

beyond the realm of prisons and the workplace, to throw light on zones of consumption and

entertainment (Lyon 2006 p.6). In this line of thought, the media could be thought of as another

disciplining institution, in the line of family, school, factory and the hospital, contributing to create a

closely meshed grid of productive coercions. Lyon (2006) claims that:

The apparently least-panoptic forms of surveillance are the ones in which a paradoxical

docility is achieved in the name of freely chosen self-expression. Perhaps we should call it

the panopticommodity (p.6)

Bratich (2005) has found three main discourses about the audience that erupted in the early times of

electronic media, between the 1920s and the 1940s and legitimized the deployment of the

technologies of discipline: those surrounding war propaganda that saw the audience as prone to

irrational, mass behavior; those of marketing that equaled audience with consumers and those of

moral panics that legitimized the action of disciplinary institutions. The notion of audience emerged

in those early days of electronic media and inaugurated a series of conceptual captures of the

mediated multitude, especially via the term mass (Bratich 2005 p.248). It was widely and

unproblematically assumed that a fairly consistent group of people, the audience, was out there,and that science had just to develop the tools to research and understand it. Hegemonic academic

and public discourses in Western countries in the early decades of the 20th

century talked about the

mass, a social construct marked by its irrational, suicidal and vulgar behavior:

Ever since the inception of the mass media, concepts about the masses (as being irrational

and stupid) have been central to an understanding of how the media is taken to work and

have its effects, as well as the manner in which the mass of people consume the media

(Blackman and Walkerdine 2001 p.2).

Raymond Williams (1961) argued that there are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as

masses (p.20). Post-Marxists argue that modernity is marked by a series of attempts to measure,

contain, and name the multitude (Bratich 2005 p.247). The mass audience was produced

empirically, theoretically and politically in a way that served the imagining institutions of Western

modernity. But behind this fear of the vulnerable, passive, irrational, easily manipulated mass that

led to an exaggeration of the effects of media, lay a fear of audience powers: whereas this era is

canonically defined by its belief in the great power of media, it can just as well be described as the


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anxiety over the great power of media subjects (Bratich 2005 p.253). The mass audience was the

discourse of truth that legitimized the co-opting of media.

Radio and later television and newer media were submitted to tight state control in European

countries and to the full grip of the market in North America; they were quickly co-opted and

became, among other contradictory things, a mechanism of organizing and controlling space and

time (Chen 2004 p.126), but we should not forget that media relies on popular production. Radio

enabled advertisers to jump over the literacy and even the language barriers of former peasants and

migrants all over the world, but it only could do it by relying on their cultural productivity (Martn-

Barbero 1993). Popular music, rich oral traditions and genres were resignified and recontextualized.

Mass culture rose from popular culture (Johnson 1988 p.4; Martn-Barbero 1993 p.157). It could be

argued that the seeds of the information age and post-Fordist capitalism were planted at this time.

While attempting to expand the market of industrial goods, capitalism discovered and started to

commodify popular culture. The concept of accumulation by dispossession seems appropriate to

describe this process:

Forms of creativity and knowledge which were not previously conceived as ownable are

brought into the intellectual property system, making them available for the investment of

capital and the making of profit, and helping to avoid the perennial problems of over-

accumulation which haunt capitalism (Hesmondhalgh 2008 p.96).

But the co-opting of popular culture and the attempt to produce modern subjectivities came with a

price: marginalized sectors of the population were also addressed and became visible social actors;

unusual and even insurgent discourses started to flow through the brand new media. A good

example of this was the case of the afro-American population of the United States that became an

increasingly visible social actor thanks to commercial radio broadcasts of popular Jazz bands in the

1920s and 1930s.

The grid of discipline created by the institutions of 19th

century Western modernity found a new tool

in media but also a formidable and enigmatic new space for the flow of resistance. The persistent

struggles of the social world emerged yet again in a new arena, that of media. With the emergence

and huge popularity of media, hegemonic social discourses had to rework themselves and adjust to

the conditions of this new space, but other discourses started to challenge them there as well. If

commercial media and its associated mass cultural products strayed too far from popular culture,

the price was commercial failure. Power tried many different mechanisms to discipline media and

popular production. Its important to remember at this point, as Bratich says, that for both Foucault


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and post-Marxists, its not that the media, as part of a mythical conspiracy of the elites, produced

from the top a whole, integrated, solid regime of truth to perpetuate domination. Since its very

beginning, the media was a field of social struggle. Hegemonic discourses attained higher visibility as

they do in other social instances but those discourses, as Foucault visualized, can be both an

instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance

(Foucault 2008 p.101). Social discourses in media are contradictory, shifting networks of

associations, systems of knowledge, expertise and problems that do not merely legitimate and foster

powers regime of truth but also induce desire and a subjective commitment to particular ways of

understanding and acting upon ourselves and others (Blackman and Walkerdine 2001 p.117) as well

as forms of resistance.

Through media, biopower found new ways to induce perceptions and organize the imagination, it

increased its techniques for establishing a subjective correspondence between images, (sounds),

percepts, affects and beliefs (Terranova 2004 p.152). Fictions of the normal self and the abnormal

Other distributed and ceaselessly acted across media outlets re-enact and reproduce subject-

positions created across a range of discursive practices such as schooling, education, practices of

consumption, leisure, advertising and so forth (Blackman and Walkerdine 2001 p.55).

The modern categories of subjectivity: race, gender, class and age, were quickly enforced and

reproduced in the then new electronic media. The emerging discourse of marketing wasfundamental in this regard. Advertisers needed the truth about the audience, and soon, media

audience research emerged as a scientific field and an industry, a new, productive field of

power/knowledge. Given the mobile and free-floating character of Western subjects in the late 19th

and 20th

centuries, statistical instruments made demographic flows and behaviors measurable and

manageable, the birth of media audience research was crucial in the development of biopolitics

(Bratich 2005). The very idea of a measurable audience implied certain cohesive regularities, even if

in practice, it was based in the extraordinarily tenuous kind of cohesion that results from millions of

viewers (and listeners), from all walks of life, each with his or her own history of experiences, tuning

in (Wehner 2002 p.3). However, audience research, in the liberal tradition, assumes a closed

universe of readings, making up a contained diversity of audience groupings with definite identities

(Ang 1996 p.172). Western media, during the golden age of Fordist capitalism and the height of

disciplinary societies, addressed subjects that were supposed to be more coherent, integrated and

whole. The logic of programming was based on this idea of the audience and the scarcity of channels

was not only a sign of the technological limitations of the time but also of the lack of need for

heightened diversity. Media succeeded in this role because it fulfilled with increased pleasure and


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perhaps less violence the desire to watch and be watched ... part of the endless pursuit of the

confirmation of selfhood (Skeggs and Wood 2008 p.180). It could be argued that media opened the

doors of leisure to the market, and that since the inception of media, leisure is not only a tool for

reproducing and replenishing labor power, but itself becomes a target for social management

(Bratich 2005 p.254).

Lets move on to post-disciplinary societies and the rise of post-Fordism. The press, films, radio and

television grew exponentially after the Second World War. Capitalism had found a new area for

growth and the burgeoning exploitation of popular culture production and its resignification as mass

culture proved immensely profitable. Wehner (2002) explains how in the U.S in the mid-1960s, a

new discourse about the audience started to circulate among advertisers. They began to complain

that mass media audiences included large numbers of unproductive members that did not

consume the products advertised at great expenses. Medias role had also started to shift. The large

increases in production achieved by industrialism required a concomitant expansion of the

consumer base. The proliferation of desire, necessary for this expansion is achieved through

subjection to a discursive regime of self-disclosure whose contemporary cultural manifestations

include not just the mania for interactivity, but the confessional culture of a talk show nat ion

(Andrejevic 2002 p.234).

Biopower extends its reach and now focuses on the production of forms of life. Media experiences arush towards segmentation, now, not in function of the rhythms of productive life and the limited

set of core subjectivities of modernity, but responding to and promoting an explosion of transient

and incompatible lifestyles. The old criteria for describing and understanding identity: gender, class,

race and age, start to seem unclear and incomplete. There are just too many identity options now,

the mirror of the social has multiplied in a fun-house effect (Terranova 2004 p.138). The mass

audience breaks down in the transition towards Post-Fordism; the process of segmentation gains a

dynamic of its own: the segmented audiences start to choose and increasingly produce their

contents, deepening their segmentation (Terranova 2004). The very idea of audience, unproblematic

in modernity, becomes a contested term, perhaps marking the demise of a long held, worn

problematization of the mediated multitude (Bratich 2005). The breaking down of the mass

audience, the proliferation of media outlets, the surge in options and styles of identity and the

multiple readings of texts, which depart from preferred readings have led some media scholars to

find resistance and evasive everydayness in the most trivial practices, but if we place these acts in

the more global and historical context of the chaotic system of capitalist postmodernity, then their

political status becomes much more ambivalent (Ang 1996 p.179).


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The explosion of media channels needing targeted programming comes with newer contents that

parallel the post-Fordist forms of governance (Skeggs and Wood 2008). Capitalism profits from the

communicability of the human species and at the same time, converts this resignified

communicability into a normalizing commodity (Crdenas 2007). Media became a key sector of the

economy, allowing a seemingly infinite increase in profits as well as an incomparable tool for the

control of the multitude. It enabled a general shift in the locus of social control from work to leisure

and from effort to pleasure (Bratich 2005 p.254). Multiple subjects are produced but they are all

directed towards a single way of life, anchored increasingly, in consumption. Butler (1997) suggests

that the production of ever more refined and detailed categories of desiring subjectivities serves as a

site for the reiteration of the conditions and relations of power, what Ang (1996) describes as an

institutionalization of excess of desire in capitalist postmodernity. Commercial media and

advertisement:

shifted their textual techniques from information-heavy, product oriented pitches to

transformational promises for the buyer... it trained audiences to think of themselves

primarily as consumers, as individuals with desires that could be resolved in the sphere of

consumption. Audience power was rerouted and transformed into consumer power (Bratich

2005 p.254).

Theres a new trend towards programming that deals with eating, dressing, looking after yourfinances, health, sex, etc. where ... (media) becomes a new governmental medium, offering to

acculturate us to the market under the guise of model citizenship (Skeggs and Wood 2008 p.178).

Melodrama, through conventional TV series, reality shows, radio talk shows and interaction with

listeners over the phone and the internet, continues to be, and deepens its role as, a dramatic device

for making moral values visible across many domains of social life (Skeggs and Wood 2008 p.183).

This programming also helps to legitimize the continued existence and opportunities of intervention

of the weakened disciplinary institutions of modernity (Bratich 2005).

Post-Fordist media is a vehicle for work, together with other information technologies, it enables the

participation in the market of even those who were excluded as unfit for labour in the industrial

regime. One of the most demanding tasks of our time, one in which media plays a key role, is

precisely that of the production of subjectivity, the incessant creation of life styles and identities that

powers the will to consume.

However, as much as the rise of new, interactive, networked media intensifies control, it also opens

new opportunities for resistance. The driving force of transformation is the productivity of the


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multitude. It was the people who made possible the transformation from the disciplinary-Fordist-

modern-fixed subjectivities era to the control-post-Fordist-multiple modulating subjectivities era.

The fact that the powers of labor were infused by the powers of science, communication and

language (Hardt and Negri 2000 p.364) introduces now an opportunity for radical change at the

very heart of social life. Power tries to maintain this productivity within the logic of profitable

production and consumption and to impose, contradictorily, scarcity and regularity in a field of

multiplicity. The diversity of lifestyles, the colourful spectacle of individuality, shown around the

world, live 24 hours a day, hides fundamental regularities: basically its compulsory nature, its

insistence on the myth of the autonomous self and the brutal rejection and confinement of

deviance, of those who dare to disqualify themselves as producers/consumers. The angst of

traditional electronic media programmers and the constant content changes may be the result of

the realization that the audience has turned increasingly fugitive, that it, as mediated multitude,

does not need media industries in order to produce culture (Bratich 2005 p.262). Post-panoptic

surveillance is deterritorialized as well as rhizomic (Lyon 2006) , but its far from perfect. It also

enables deterritorialized forms of resistance (Bogard 2006).

The previous description tries to explain the transformations of electronic media programming along

the past century but its very general, and concerns basically Western locations. Is it still plausible in

other contexts? I will qualify some of the assumptions of the previous paragraphs by resorting to

post-Colonial theories before coming back to my explanation of the transformations of electronic

media programming in my specific context: Colombia.

3. A Latin American Post-Colonial TwistPostcolonial theories, specifically those arising from the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas in

the second half of the 20th

century, contributed significantly to key transformations in some Western

social sciences and to the emergence and widespread influence of post-structuralism. These

theories, developed by highly original and insightful authors like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri

Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Parhta Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakravarty (Castro-Gmez 2007), cast a long

shadow on the claims of the Enlightenment and the teleology of progress and modernization that

had prevailed in Western scholarship for centuries. They denounced:

The colossal failure of the project of European modernity and its master tropes such as

democracy, self-determination, civil society, state, equality, the individual, free thought, and

democratic justice tropes that showed their limit and betrayed their own logic in the

moment of colonialism (Radha and Raka 2002 p.254)


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The visibility of postcolonial theories in some areas of Western academia has powered a move to

rethink social science theory in a wider context, that is, a push to deprovincialize knowledge and

deal with its geopolitics (Chakrabarty 2007). This is an ongoing struggle based on the idea that

theories created in a particular context and time cant mechanically fit other contexts and times and

that all theories and social discourses are produced by embodied subjectivities, with located

attachments and situated epistemologies. Even more, it is based in the belief that key Western social

science theories stem from a very provincial understanding of reality, one that largely ignores the

multiple interconnections of what in fact has been, for centuries, a world-system. For instance,

liberalism-inspired globalization theories are criticized for ignoring their place within the larger

historical sweep of colonialism and presenting global phenomena as new and fully formed (Radha

and Raka 2002). Paradigmatic social science theories like Marxism were created ignoring the

complex links and relations between the Western and the non-Western world. This ignorance of

interconnected histories weakened some theories to the point of making them irrelevant, examples

of the violence of colonialism and the persistence of its epistemic dimension: coloniality (Castro-

Gmez 2005b).

The members of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality group have close connections to the

South Asian and Middle Eastern scholars mentioned above who have come to represent the field of

post-coloniality in the English speaking academic world, but there are also some crucial differences. I

prefer to use their work because for all its originality and insight, the English speaking post-colonial

studies field cant explain some particular dynamics of the Latin American context and by

concentrating on the particularities of British and American colonialism (a possible case of Anglo-

Saxon ethnocentrism), it overlooks some aspects of coloniality and nearly four centuries of world

history (Castro-Gmez 2005b).

The work of the Modernity/Coloniality group questions the temporal and spatial assumptions about

modernity, points out the existence of a darker side to it and attempts to rethink the contemporary

world from what they describe as the other side of the colonial difference. They produce localized,

embodied theory from/about the Third World, that could also be used to critically explain dynamics

elsewhere in the world-system (Mignolo 2000). They agree with Wallersteins rejection of the notion

of a Third World and also with his claim that there is only one world, connected by a complex

network of relationships, a world-system (Wallerstein 1980). In a nutshell, the groups arguments

are the following (Escobar 2005):

Modernity emerged with the discovery and conquest of America starting in 1492 and not

later with the Enlightenment or at the end of the XVIII century.


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Colonialism, imperialism and postcolonialism (they prefer to use the term coloniality) are

constitutive phenomena of modernity, not pre-modern phenomena.

Modernity cant be explained as an internal European phenomenon, it only acquires

meaning when explained from a world-system perspective.

Colonialism and coloniality have been a condition of possibility for Modernity (and post-

modernity), therefore, the group members prefer to use the combined term

Modernity/Coloniality.

The knowledge produced by Modernity with pretensions of universality has been provincial

and Eurocentric from the beginning.

The work of Anibal Quijano is central to the project of the Modernity/Coloniality group. He argues

that what we call today globalization is just another phase of a process that began with the

constitution of America and colonial/modern eurocentered capitalism as a new global power

(Quijano 2000 p.533). One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the classification of the

worlds population around the idea of race, a discursive formation that legitimized colonial

domination and to this day, pervades global power and its rationality, eurocentrism:

The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and

stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of

power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality (Quijano 2000

p.533)

Before 1492, civilizations thrived or decayed in different parts of the planet, most of them in relative

isolation from each other, a few connected through limited luxury-goods trade. None of them was

capitalist in the sense that none of them was based on the structural pressure for the ceaseless

accumulation of capital (Wallerstein 1999 p.295) What we call Europe today did not exist as such,

that region of the world was inhabited by peripheral, secondary and isolated peoples, most of them

barbaric, to use (with irony) the roman term (Dussel 2005 p.41). 1492 marked the beginning of the

first real world-system. What arrived in the Americas was more than the colonial expansion of the

first powers of European Modernity (Portugal and Spain). What arrived was a European / ca pitalist

/ military / Christian / patriarchal / white / heterosexual (Grosfoguel 2008 p.5) matrix of power that

besides producing one of the worst genocides in history, created a complex and enduring system of

global hierarchies, that supports the production of subjectivity. Quijano calls this complex, the

coloniality of power. Grosfoguel (2008) understands this key concept as an entanglement of

multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual,


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linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation (p.6). Quijano uses the word coloniality

and not colonialism to highlight the continuities between the colonial times and our incorrectly

described post-colonial times and to indicate that colonial relations have a cultural dimension

besides the economic, political and juridical (Castro-Gmez and Grosfoguel 2007). He develops a

historical theory of the categorization of people that in the modern/colonial capitalist world system

has operated along four lines: work, gender, age and, in particular, race (Quijano 2007). He considers

that race is the organizing principle of these multiple hierarchies: race became the fundamental

criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new

societys structure of power (Quijano 2007 p.535).

Quijano (2007) insists that the codification of differences between conquerors and conquered based

on the idea of race, naturalized a discourse that explained the conquest and its aftermath on a

supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the

others (p.533). The members of the group argue that what European philosophers and historians

call Modernity is an incomplete narrative with a darker side, the fact that it was based on a key,

enduring discourse: that of racial purity (Castro-Gmez 2005b). The discourse of purity of blood used

by some of the small kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula to legitimize their struggle against the

Muslims in the XV century, turned, by accident, into a global design, the basis for the categorization

of people and civilizations in Modernity (Castro-Gmez 2005b). This discourse based in the category

of race produced new historical social identities in America. In the moment of the Iberian conquest,

America was home to a great variety of peoples, each with its own history, language, discoveries and

cultural products, memory and identity. Some centuries later, all of them had become merged into a

single identity: indians, a new identity that was racial, colonial and negative. Something similar

happened in Africa and centuries later in the Indian subcontinent, Asia and Oceania. Americas

population was categorized as composed of indians, blacks, mestizos and other redefined identities

like Spanish, Portuguese and later, European. Geographical associations acquired a racial

connotation that constituted hierarchies, places and social roles. Not coincidently, the first modern

European centralized states emerged simultaneously with the creation of colonial empires. Starting

in 1492 a historically new region began to emerge: Europe, or more specifically, Western Europe, no

longer a geographically determined cultural construct but a discursive, geo-cultural one.

There are two founding myths of Western Europe: the idea of the history of human civilization as a

linear trajectory of progress that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe (and

North America), and a view of the differences between Europe and Non-Europe as natural (racial)

differences and not as consequences of a history of power (Quijano 2000). These myths hide the fact


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that what is called Modernity in European philosophy was from the beginning a phenomenon that

took place around the world and not only in Europe itself and that it has, as Mignolo and Grosfoguel

point out, a darker side: Coloniality. The European industrial revolution was carried out on the

shoulders of the coerced forms of non-waged labour in the colonies, the new identities, rights, legal

systems and institutions of modernity (nation-states, citizenship, democracy) were sustained by

colonial exploitation of non-Western people (Grosfoguel 2008). What orthodox Marxists call

primitive accumulation took place on a global scale with the discovery of America. But the

emergence of the world-system also promoted the first expressions of global culture and the

establishment of mechanisms for the production of modern subjectivities. The Eurocentric version of

modernity just concentrates on supposedly exclusive intra-European events like the Italian

Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French revolution. This linearity reinforces the myth of

development, the unattainable idea that all other world nations have to follow a European-style

linear path to achieve emancipation and progress (Castro-Gmez 2005b). Dussel identified two

modernities, the first one took place between the XVI and XVII centuries and was dominated by

Portugal and Spain, the second one started in the XVII century, it discursively represented itself as

the only modernity (German Romanticism played a key role in this ideological invention), and was

dominated by Holland, France and England (Dussel 2005). In the beginning of the world-system, the

Spanish empire not only tried to militarily subjugate the Indians and destroy them, but also

attempted to transform their soul, to make them change radically their way of understanding theworld, and have them adopt the colonizer cognitive universe as their own (Castro-Gmez 2005b

p.58). The coloniality of power is:

the colonization of the imagination of the dominated...repression operates on the ways of

knowing, on the processes for the production of knowledge, images and image systems,

symbols, significations; on the resources, standards and instruments of formalized and

objectified expression (Quijano 1992 p.438)

Through religious indoctrination and forced labour, the colonizers attempted to civilize and

discipline the native population. It was a project that had the goal of naturalizing the cultural

discourses of the colonizers as the only possible way for the colonized to relate to nature, the social

world and their own subjectivity (Castro-Gmez 2005b). Castro-Gomez does not hesitate to use the

theoretical tools developed by the likes of Max Weber and Michel Foucault (Castro-Gmez 2005b),

but he applies them to times and spaces that they never included in their analysis: the

administration of the world-system was based on the coloniality of power, biopolitics and

eurocentric rationality.


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Castro-Gomez and Grosfoguel explain that Descartes ego-cogito implied a dualism between mind

and body that permeates Western epistemology to the present. By producing this dualism,

Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, omniscient divine knowledge (Grosfoguel

2008 p.4). This is what Castro-Gomez has called a point zero view, a perspective that hides itself and

implies that its not particular. The point zero view is supposed to be beyond the realm of

representation and is not embodied within a specific culture, space and time. Through it, Western

knowledge becomes universal knowledge, it does not accept its provincialism. The Eurocentric myth

of Modernity equalled Western perspectives with universality and colonialism as Europes past

(Castro-Gmez 2005b). The members of the Modernity/Coloniality group insist that the conditions

of possibility for the ego-cogito were determined by the previous existence of the ego -conquistus:

the existence of the imperial being, the subjectivity of those at the centre of the world, was made

possible because they have militarily conquered it. Hiding the location of the subject of enunciation

and not recognizing its conditions of possibility, has allowed the persistent use of supposedly

unquestionable claims to universality and truth:

We went from the 16th century characterization of people without writing to the 18th and

19th century characterization of people without history, to the 20th century

characterization of people without development and more recently, to the early 21st

century of people without democracy (Grosfoguel 2008 p.4).

By constantly treating the Other as primitive, underdeveloped, uncivilized, backward, a threat to

itself and civilization, the West has justified exploitation, domination and discipline, in all the regions

of the world-system. In Western Europe, this image of the inferior Other was instrumental in the

construction of the normal subject required by capitalism (white, male, worker, educated,

heterosexual) (Castro-Gmez 2005b). This perspective coincides totally with the critique of

Orientalism made by Edward Said.

The ego-politics of knowledge persist in the present, the point zero view of the Western sciences

continues to exist, even among the critics of Descartes and modernity (Grosfoguel 2007a). The

ongoing Eurocentric production of knowledge from a point zero perspective that presumes to read

the totality of time and space of the human experience based on its (unacknowledged) particularity,

constructs a radically exclusive universality (Lander 2005 p.17).

The success of Western Europe in becoming the centre of the first real world-system, developed

within the Europeans a trait common to all imperialists: ethnocentrism. As Dussel, Mignolo and

Quijano have explained: the Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and


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relocated the colonized population, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a

historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe (Quijano 2000 p.541). The new region, Western

Europe, was then the culmination of a linear historical process that started in Greece. It did not

matter that it was the Muslim civilizations that kept alive and expanded the legacy of Greek arts,

science and philosophy and that the Roman Empire moved east and survived for centuries in what

today is Turkey. Western Europeans persuaded themselves, starting, especially, in the 18th century,

that in some way they had auto-produced themselves as civilization, at the margin of history

initiated with America, culminating an independent line that began with Greece as the original

source (Quijano 2000 p.552). Relations between Western Europe and the rest of the world were

codified in a strong play of new binary categories: East-West, primitive civilized, magic/mythic-

scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern (Quijano 2000). It is notable that the West was

successful in spreading and establishing this Eurocentric perspective as hegemonic within the new

intersubjective universe of the global model of power (Quijano 2000 p.543). The other attempts at

explaining the ways of the world, the oscillations between chaos and the appearance of order have

again and again been silenced and repressed by this Eurocentric discourse (Cesaire 1955). They have

been given the stamp of irrationality and considered archaic, magical or folkloric. Hegemonic

Western cultural discourses have been especially skilful in becoming associated with reasonability,

truth and systematicity (Castro-Gmez 2005b). Other knowledges, other ways of understanding and

of living, are perhaps quickly and irrevocably disappearing in the abyss of time or continue to beinvisible (Quijano 2007).

Whats the groups take on capitalism? The conquest of the Americas and the creation of the first

truly world-system allowed the constitution of a new structure of control of labour, resources and

products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known previous structures of

control of labour, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity,

together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market (Quijano 2007 p.534). The new

historical subjectivities produced by colonialism, based on the idea of race, were associated with

social roles and places. The result of this was the creation of a racial division of labour. In the Spanish

and Portuguese colonies, the surviving natives were confined to serfdom, with the exception a few

members of the nobility that served as intermediaries with the dominant race, blacks brought from

Africa were reduced to slavery; the more whitened mestizos were allowed to work and collect

wages but only Spanish and Portuguese whites received high wages and were allowed to become

producers of commodities. These modern identities formed the basis of the hierarchies, places and

corresponding social roles of colonial domination in the Americas for centuries.


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The racial distribution of labour spread to other regions of the world where the rising European

nation-states began to expand, following the Iberian imperial example. Yellows and olives were

added to whites, indians, blacks and mestizos. Racial classification is then a constitutive element of

capital accumulation on a global scale starting from the 16th

century (Castro-Gmez and Grosfoguel

2007 p.14). Race and the division of labour became structurally linked and mutually reinforcing.

Each form of labour became associated with a particular racialized identity and consequently, the

control of a specific form of labour could be, at the same time, the control of a specific group of

dominated people (Quijano 2000 p.537). The regions and populations colonized and incorporated

into the new world market under European domination basically remained under non-waged

relations of labour (Quijano 2000 p.538). This is the Modernity/Coloniality groups explanation of

the contemporary situation where non-Westerners receive lower wages for doing the same work

that whites do: the racial inferiority of the colonized implied that they were not worthy of wages

(Quijano 2000 p.539) and they were assigned jobs that were associated with nil or low value within

the international division of labour. The articulation of all forms of labour and the racial division of

labour was then colonial from its inception and Global capitalism was, from then on,

colonial/modern and eurocentered (Quijano 2000 p.539). Brazilian sociologist Darcy Ribeiro (1968)

summarized the economic and cultural impact of modernity/coloniality by saying that:

The colonial people, deprived of their riches and of the fruit of their labour under colonial

regimes, suffered, furthermore, the degradation of assuming as their proper image the

image that was no more than the reflection of the European vision of the world (p.68).

The heterogeneous global structures put in place over a period of four or five centuries did not

disappear with the political decolonization that started in Latin America with Haiti in the late 18th

century, we moved from a period of global colonialism to the current period of global coloniality

(Grosfoguel 2008 p.8). According to Quijano (2000), colonialism and its later expression, coloniality

put the control of labour, its resources and products under the capitalist enterprise; the control of

sex under the bourgeois family; the control of authority under the nation-state and the control of

intersubjectivity under Eurocentrism.

There are no pure totally un-colonized spaces anymore, but the richness of popular production, the

width of cosmologies and other epistemologies present in the region have never been fully

subsumed nor instrumentalized (Grosfoguel 2008 p.18). This view matches that of De Certeau (1988)

who rejoiced at how the American natives, even when enslaved nevertheless often made of the

rituals, representations and laws imposed on them, something different from what the colonizers

wanted:


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they were otherwithin the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of

the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge;

they escaped it without leaving it (p.xiii)

However, the success of the modern/colonial world-system has consisted in creating subjects that,

although socially produced as part of the oppressed side of the colonial difference, think and act like

the ones in dominant positions (Grosfoguel 2008). In colonial times control was enforced by physical

violence, in coloniality, violence is still used but control is achieved through more seductive

strategies that created and appealed to the desires and dreams of the subalterns. Contact and

acceptance of Eurocentric discourses opened doors, enabled participation in profits, prestige and

the illusion of power.

The first wave of decolonization that started in the Americas at the end of the 18th century and

continued with Asia and Africa throughout the 20th century was not completed, as it pertained only

to juridico-political independence. A second wave, the one that the members of the M/C group

aspire to be a part of, will address coloniality, the complex racial, ethnic, epistemic, economic and

gender relations that were left intact by the first wave (Castro-Gmez and Grosfoguel 2007). This is a

daunting task. They acknowledge that first colonialism, and later coloniality would have never been

possible without incorporating the discourse of eurocentricity into the habitus of both dominators

and dominated. But different from Edward Saids concern with Orientalism, the members of theModernity/Coloniality group study the way in which the coloniality of power has continued to

produce concrete forms of subjectivity in Latin America and around the world (Castro-Gmez

2005b).

The members of the Modernity/Coloniality group do use Foucaults concepts of governmentality,

but they do it after decolonizing them in at least three aspects (Castro-Gmez 2005b):

The technologies for the production and control of subjectivity did not originate in what

Foucault calls the classic age (18th century) but in the 16th century.

The racial dimension of biopolitics is at the centre of mechanisms for the production of

subjectivity, not only madness and sexuality.

The domination that ensures the unending reproduction of capital in modernity is based in

the Eurocentric colonization of imagination.

Castro-Gomez argues that any narrative about modernity that does not take into account the impact

of the colonial experience in the creation of the modern relations of power would not only be


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incomplete but also ideological. According to him, it was with colonialism that Foucaults disciplinary

power emerged and arrived at characterizing modern societies and institutions (Castro-Gmez

2005a). The concept of coloniality of power:

...widens and corrects Foucaults concept of disciplinary power, by showing how the

panoptic dispositifs created by the modern state belong in a wider structure, with world

reach, configured by the colonial relation between the centres and peripheries that emerged

with European expansionism (Castro-Gmez 2005a p.153)

Decoloniality changes the periodizations proposed by Foucault displacing them to earlier in world

history, insists that the stages of governmentality were not part of a linear sequence but

simultaneous and attempts to widen Foucaults genealogy of power/knowledge towards long-term

macro-structures; that is, it analyses the production of subjectivity from a geopolitical perspective

(Castro-Gmez 2005a). Both discipline and control have been used for centuries and non-Western

populations have been subjected to governmental technologies.

Foucault and the English-speaking world post-colonial theories (in particular, Saids Orientalism)

concentrated in criticizing modernitys epistemic essentialism on a micro-structural level, but forgot

the analysis of the capitalist macro-structures that enabled this essentialization (Castro-Gmez

2005b p.34). This analysis, made from the historical experiences of multiple local histories, could,

perhaps, break the dead end against which modern epistemology and the reconfiguration of the

social sciences and the humanities since the 18th

century have framed hegemonic forms of

knowledge (Mignolo 2000 p.22).

Capitalism articulates and exploits labour under all its forms and it uses domination mechanisms like

the categorization of people by race and gender (Quijano 2007 p.117). So capitalism, for the

Modernity/Coloniality group is a system that really took shape and became hegemonic with the

emergence of the world-system in the 16th century and has been from the start a structure of

heterogeneous elements as much in terms of forms of control of labour-resources-products as in

terms of the peoples and histories articulated in it (Quijano 2000 p.553). From a Latin American

perspective, the classic Marxist succession of modes of production (slavery, feudalism, imperial

capitalism, etc) is misleading, the modes of production were simultaneous in time and entangled in

space (Grosfoguel 2008). This notion of structural heterogenerity, that implies that all forms of

labour have coexisted in the capitalist world-system, is a key position held by the members of the

group. However, Grosfoguel does not like to use the word capitalism alone, because it only

emphasizes one of the dimensions of the colonial matrix of power, the one that was predominantly


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analyzed by world-system scholars like Wallerstein. He insists that capitalism is only one of the

multiple entangled constellations of the colonial power matrix of the European / modern / colonial /

capitalist / patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2008 p.7). The members of the group replace the

old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure by a historical-heterogeneous structure

that articulates multiple hierarchies in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative

but constitutive of the structures of the world-system (Grosfoguel 2008 p.7). And contrary to

Lenins description, the members of the group think with Braudel, Wallerstein and Arrighi that

capitalism has been monopolistic, imperialistic and financial since its emergence in the 15th

century (Grosfoguel 2007b). Free labour has been capitalized long before post-Fordism, its not the

new phenomenon that Terranova sees emerging only in the last decades of the 20th

century with the

information era (Terranova 2004). Similarly, post-Marxism is an Eurocentric critique of modernity,

one that thinks that industrial workers are diminishing while immaterial labour is growing (from a

world-system perspective, this is the time when industrial work has grown the most in history

(Grosfoguel 2007b)); that capitalism has become deterritorialized and lacks a power centre (Castells,

Flew and Grosfoguel agree in recognizing how some particular locations continue to be central in the

control of financial and military flows); Theres linearity in the stages of governmentality (they have

operated for a longer time and in a heterogeneous way) (Grosfoguel 2007b); and that with post-

Fordism, both imperialism and colonialism disappear because global capitalism does not need these

forms to reproduce and they even become obstacles for its growth (political economists have shownhow many rules and imperial actors continue to operate in our time (Bedggood 2009 ; Castro-

Gmez 2005b) and all the members of the group agree that in the same way as colonialism and

coloniality were constitutive of modernity, post-coloniality is the structural balance entry of post-

modernity (Castro-Gmez 2005b) ).

Castro-Gomez (2005b) and the members of the Modernity/Coloniality group see that capital is now

looking for post-territorial colonies to continue expanding and it does it with the coloniality of power

at its core, as it has done for more than five centuries. Now, besides the traditional underpriced

commodities and the cheap industrial products of the maquilas, capital needs the information

contained in genetic codes (expropriated through patents defended by supranational trade

institutions) and non-Western knowledge systems. Now, traditional knowledge is not searched to

destroy it, but to preserve it (and subsume it), although its still regarded as of low epistemological

value (Castro-Gmez 2005b p.91). Escobar (2005) claims that theres a new regime of coloniality in

the making, one where the categories created by modernity (race, ethnicity, gender, age and class)

continue to be important but are being reconfigured and articulated with others like religion.


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Where the members of the Modernity/Coloniality group coincide with post-Marxists like Hardt,

Negri and Terranova is in the recognition that contemporary technologies of governmentality

operate without a centre of government. Subjection in the world-system is guaranteed by the

persistence of decentralized control over bodies by institutions (family, factory, hospital, school,

media) but also by the irresistible seduction with commodities, identities and symbols ignited in the

imagination and desire of consumers (Castro-Gmez 2005a). Power produces subjects following

particular, situated and exploitable cultural logics, and they (we) are now helping with this

production. Media (in mostly post-Fordist localities or in the heterogeneous ones of the world-

system) have become a key site for the production of subjectivity around exploitable differences.

4. Electronic Media, Subjectivation and ColonialityAs stated at the beginning of this paper, media is not the strong suit of the work of the members of

the Modernity/Coloniality group and their approach to communication is too simplistic. For them,

media in Latin American are just a monolithic machine of discursive control that plays an important

role in the diffusion of values, consumption habits, and systems of beliefs that reinforce the

racial/ethnic/gender/sexual global hierarchies (Cervantes-Rodriguez and Grosfoguel 2002 p.xxi),

that is, in enforcing the coloniality of power.

Media has a clear bio-political and colonial role in the region but its more than an ideological

apparatus of discursive control: resistance, popular creativity, productivity and difference are also

evident. Martin-Barberos concept of mediations comes in handy:

With some exceptions, historians of the mass media have studied only the economic

structure and the ideological content of the mass media; few have given close attention to

the mediations through which the media have acquired a concrete institutional form and

become a reflection of the culture (Martn-Barbero 1993 p.163).

Media have become crucial spaces for the condensation and intersection of both cultural production

and consumption, and, at the same time, they catalyze some of the strongest networks of power

today (Martn-Barbero 2006). Martin-Barbero certainly emphasizes the creative reception of media

contents by people but hes also very much aware of how media in Latin America are one of the

most efficient mechanisms of (relating) to other cultures ... by submitting them to the structural

schema of differencesproposed by the West (Martn-Barbero 2002b p.52). In a more recent article

he finds communication becoming the most effective device behind the unhitching and insertion of

all cultures whether ethnic, national or localinto the sphere of the market(Martn-Barbero 2006

p.279).


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However, Martin-Barberos view of media is not the panoptic, disciplinary perspective common in

Foucauldian governmentality scholarship. His take could be said to be closer to Hardt and Negris

optimism about the multitude. Martin-Barbero and Garcia Canclini claim that popular culture is

neither devalued nor a sphere where the public are capable of making rational choices primarily

conditioned by a media elite, but rather is a space that is partially conditioned by the people, for the

people (Berry and Theobald 2006 p.192). They accept the findings of political economists that show

that media ownership in the region is mainly the preserve of the elites and increasingly of

multinational companies but they argue that this doesnt necessarily transfer into cultural

domination (Berry and Theobald 2006 p.193). Decolonial scholars like Grosfoguel and Escobar

mostly see alterity, resistance and the perseverance of difference in popular movements, but

Martin-Barbero and Garcia Canclini think that a multicultural mix of various cultural forms has

produced a hybrid culture, and it is this impurity that creates the true essence of contemporary

culture, a process largely achieved through mass media networks (Berry and Theobald 2006 p.193).

This is why Matin-Barbero insists that the study of communication needed to shift from media to the

places where they are consumed and given meaning to the social movements and especially to the

neighbourhood context of the popular classes(Berry and Theobald 2006). This study of media

reception in Latin America has shown what Bratich has argued for North America and what Hardt

and Negri describe in books like Empire and Multitude:

the making of history belongs to the people as much as it belongs to that elite who sit loftily

above the mass...popular cultural forms play an important role in conditioning and shaping a

sense of nation and identity in relation to other internal and external forces (Berry and

Theobald 2006 p.194)

Commercial media depends on popular productivity and although it attempts to co-opt that labour

and infuse it with coloniality (beyond the elements of coloniality that popular production already

carries within), media becomes a space for the continuity and re-invention of popular culture. The

popular continues to flourish in part, through media, although there are certainly other spaces for it

to flow. Martin-Barbero brilliantly inverts the terms of the discussion about media effects by

claiming that the actual starting point for the production of media content are the genres and

meanings that already exist and operate in popular culture (Berry and Theobald 2006 p.197). Berry

and Theobald (2006) summarize this original conception in the following way:

People in various parts of Latin America wouldnt simply go to the cinema or listen to radio

to become educated by a superior cultural dictator, but rather they would go to see or listen


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to a reflection of their lives delivered in various narratives that they immediately recognised

because it was theirs; it emanated from their very own social existence! (2006 p.197).

Thanks to media and because of urban migration, popular culture reached a larger audience and

attained a level of visibility that had been previously unthinkable. However, Martin- Barbero (1993)

agrees with the Modernity/Coloniality group in the critique of the naturalized categories of

segmentation and marketing: To reduce this crossroads of different logics to a question of

marketing and to deny the existence of other cultural experiences of matrices is methodologically

incorrect and politically flawed (p.228). He has synthesized his position around a paradox:

subversion lies embedded in integration (Martn-Barbero 1993 p.158). Thats why rejoicing in the

productivity of people cant lead to a naive identification between otherness and resistance. In other

words, its not correct to establish a:

...political identification of the popular with an intrinsic, spontaneous resistance with which

the subordinate oppose the hegemonic ... (but a realization of) ... the thick texture of

hegemony/subalternity, the interlacing of resistance and submission, and opposition and

complicity (Martn-Barbero 1988 p.448, 462)

Martin-Barbero sees two different historical stages in media programming and reception, one that

stretches from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s in which the people appropriated the media and

recognized their identity in them. In some Latin American countries this stage was tightly linked with

populism: Film in many countries and radio in virtually all countries gave the people of the different

regions and provinces their first taste of nation (Martn-Barbero 1993 p.164). However, the

particular case of Colombia was significantly different. The Hispanism discourse proved durable

there; the liberal reforms of the 1930s were meagre and encountered resolute opposition; the most

influential populist leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was assassinated; and as Mignolo (2000) points out,

nation-state building experienced high tension with laissez-faire principles (p.281). All this

translated into a civil war (called La violencia) and the start of the longest internal conflict of the

Americas. The second stage began in the 1960s when the political function of the media was

removed and the economic function took over (Martn-Barbero 1993 p.165).

The first stage of media development in Colombia was dominated by private capitalists and not by

the state and coincided with large increases in education and with the most extensive and dense

process of modernization in Latin America...linked decisively to the development of the culture

industries (Martn-Barbero 2002b p.35). A common matrix of schooling, urbanization, development

programs and new media outlets, contents and symbols created an astounding bio-political force


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that re-launched and updated the coloniality of power in big cities like Bogota, and tried to

homogenize, among other things, rhythms of life, gestures and ways of speaking (Martn-Barbero

1993 p.155). The modern categories of subjectivity, simplified by marketing concerns to become a

limited, fixed set of types, mingled with the categorizations produced by coloniality. Degrees of

whiteness and ethnicity explained naturalized class status; regional background and formal

education level explained naturalized categories of exemplary, acceptable or inferior speaking styles

and music tastes. But at the same time, the interpellation of some people as citizens allowed the

emergence of new forms of resistance and made other social actors visible.

This led to the second stage, when starting in the 1960s a re-organization of the role of media and of

the strategies of coloniality took into account the heterogeneity of subjectivities. The discourse of

Hispanism that held as a necessary condition for the construction of nation ignoring or dissolving

ethnic, gender, regional and cultural identities began to be questioned (Martn-Barbero 2002a). The

subsequent re-organization of coloniality could be observed through the changes experienced by

local media, which according to Martin-Barbero (2002a), is a uniquely expressive stage for this eras

contradictions. The media exposes people to the growing integration of heterogeneity into the

colonial system of differences (Martn-Barbero 2002a). Segmentation has become a necessity and

therefore there has been a rise of media outlets in which an accelerated substitution of exemplary

lives by the lifestyles proposed by advertising and fashion (Martn-Barbero 2002a p.43) is the

norm, while in others, the discourses of disciplinary modernity continue to dominate. This

heterogeneity explains why

the segmentation of audiences requires us to look at the culture industries not only from the

perspective of the market but also from that of culture, thus assuming the culture industry

and the mass media as spaces of the production and circulation of cultures, corresponding

not only to technological innovations or to the movements of capital, but also to new forms

of sensibility(Martn-Barbero 2002a p.45)

The increased availability of segmented media options is a sign of bio-political technologies

becoming more widespread and sophisticated, and in places like Colombia, they continue to enforce

and re-invent the coloniality of power while at the same time profiting from the productivity of

people. Consumption of products, services, styles and identities in this context has become the valid

path towards inclusion and acceptance, it promises subjects to let them transcend the

categorizations of coloniality while at the same time reinforcing them. Segmented media in this

context operates as a sophisticated, multiple aspirational mirror that offers and confirms

transformational promises for the audience (Bratich 2005). Paraphrasing Butler, the increased, more


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defined and dynamic segmentations offered and produced by Latin American media, serve as a site

for the reiteration of the coloniality of power (Butler 1997). Media in the region is a governmental

technology, offering acculturation to the market under the guise of model Eurocentric subjectivity, a

diverse window shop of styles and identities, produced by the cultural labour of people but

hierarchically organized in function of the categorizations of coloniality. Local media thrive on

popular creativity but tends to silence or thin out conflictive, heterogeneous and challenging aspects

of it (Martn-Barbero 2002a). Media in the region co-opts diversity and attempts to transform it into

segmentation and social fragmentation (Martn-Barbero 2002b). Otherness is stereotyped, banalized

or ignored, making it assimilable without any need to understand it (Martn-Barbero 2002a p.53),

but in a popular medium like radio, difference, other logics and epistemologies constantly manifest,

defying the linear correspondences of coloniality and marketing (Martn-Barbero 2002b).


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