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Néstor García Canclini
How useful is the notion of hybridity as we approach the century's end amid a drastic reconfiguring of cultural boundaries and markets? In the following paper García Canclini reviews his proposed responses in Hybrid Cultures, taking into account the attention being paid to multiculturalism in the 1990s, the processes of supranational integration and hybridisation being promoted by international free trade agreements (NAFTA, Mercosur, etc.), the rethinking of modernity and postmodernity in this decade, and some debates that the book has engendered in the six years since it was published.
I continue to believe that, as Jean Franco said, Hybrid Cultures 'is a book in search of a method', insofar as it attempts to construct a line of thought 'not corseted into false oppositions such as high or popular, urban or rural, modern or traditional'. Since the search for this method, and for articulations between the disciplines that separately address these areas (aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, and communication) are works in progress, I see this book as a rather open text, which can be entered and exited in many ways. Returning to it now, I will concentrate on two questions: a) the epistemological legitimacy and methodological fecundity of the notion of hybrid cultures; b) communication strategies in the processes of Latin American development and stagnation in the 1990s.
Hybridity as an explanatory resource
I have been asked several times about the usefulness of applying the notion of hybridity, derived from biological sciences, to cultural processes. Isn't a hybrid 'something infertile, like a mule?' Doesn't 'cultural vitality' reside in 'each culture's capacity for reproduction and renovation?' (Schmilchuk).
My biologist friends tell me that there exist several examples of hybrids that are fertile, enriching, that generate expansion and diversification. Among vegetables, since Karpeahenko's famous experiments that crossed radishes with cabbages there have been efforts to combine the properties of cells from different plants to improve growth, resistance, and the quality of the produce. Most of the commercially-grown corn in the United States is the result of hybridisations carried out by geneticists to strengthen it (Villée-Dethier, chs. 8 and 10). The hybridisation of human DNA with bacteria to produce proteins has become the principal way of producing insulin.
In any case, I see no need to get trapped in the biological dynamic from which the concept derives. The social sciences have imported many ideas from other disciplines without invalidating their uses in their original contexts. Biological concepts such as reproduction were reworked to speak of social, economic, and cultural reproduction: the debate carried on from Marx to the present day is based on the theoretical consistency and explanatory power of that term, and does not ultimately depend on the use assigned by another science. In the same way, polemics about the metaphorical use of economic concepts to examine symbolic processes, such as that of Pierre Bourdieu when he refers to cultural capital and linguistic markets, need not be centred on the migration of these terms from one discipline to another but on the epistemological operations that situate their explanatory scope and their limits within cultural discourses: do they or do they not permit greater understanding of something that would otherwise be inexplicable? Scientific knowledge has repeatedly advanced through carrying on with notions originating in different semantic universes in the same way that some artists have experimented with others' symbolic resources. In the cultural realm, particularly, it might be useful to think of uncertainties and contradictions with the same liberty that Marcel Duchamp, by painting the Mona Lisa with a moustache, rethought Leonardo. The difference between work with scientific pretensions and such artistic actions lies in logically situating the notion transferred into the conceptual system of the new discipline that is receiving it, and confronting it with the empirical referents that one is trying to explain.
My purpose has been to elaborate the notion of hybridisation as a social concept. As I explained in Hybrid Cultures, I found this term better suited for grasping diverse intercultural mixtures than 'mestizaje', which is limited to racial mixings, or 'syncretism', which almost always refers to religious combinations or to traditional symbolic movements. I thought that we needed a more versatile word to take into account those 'classic' mixtures as well as the interlacing of the traditional and the modern, the educated, the popular, and the mass. A characteristic of our century, which complicates the search for a more inclusive term, is that all of these types of multicultural fusion intermingle and draw strength from one another.
The notion of hybridity seemed useful for designating the mixtures of indigenous styles with Spanish and Portuguese iconography. It also served to describe processes of independence and national construction in which modernising projects have co-existed - to the present - alongside traditions that are scarcely compatible with what Europeans consider characteristic of modernity. Assembling various conceptualisations of this process, principally those of Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Howard S. Becker, I found that they could be synthesised into four concepts: emancipation, expansion, renovation, and democratisation. But the secularisation of cultural fields, the self-expressive and self-regulating production of artistic and political practices, the rationalisation of social life and growing individualism, all of which have been considered sources of modern emancipation, coexist in Latin America with religious and ethnic fundamentalisms, illiteracy, and archaic power relations. Social and cultural expansion, as well as renovation have been manifested in the rapid industrialising development and in the growth of secondary and higher education, in artistic and literary dynamism and experimentation throughout the twentieth century, and in the fluid adaptation of certain sectors to technological and social innovation. However, these renovating impulses do not replace local traditions; at times they accompany them and at other times they conflict with them, yet without destroying them. In addition, multicultural mixtures can be observed in the metropoles, but one characteristic that demands attention in Latin America is that heterogeneity is multitemporal. Industry does not eliminate folk art, democratisation does suppress authoritarian habits as if by evolution, nor does written culture suppress ancient forms of orality.
In some cases, the persistence of ancient customs and ways of thinking can be seen as the result of unequal access to the benefits of modernity. But at other times these hybridisations persist because they are fertile: as analysed in my book, they have engendered happy marriages between pre-Columbian iconography and contemporary geometrism, between elite, folk, and media industries' visual and musical cultures. This is evident in much Mexican, Peruvian, and Guatemalan folk art which combine their own myths with transnational images, in the rock music that enlivens local festivals and is nourished with ethnic melodies which may later achieve international dissemination. Many works have taken the dialogue between the elite, the popular, and the mass as their test-bed: from Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Astor Piazzola and Caetano Veloso, these testify to the fertility of liminal creations and rituals that are concerned less with the preservation of purity than with the productivity of the admixture.
None of this takes place without contradictions and conflicts. Cultures do not coexist with the serenity that we might experience in moving from one room to another in a museum. To understand this complex and often painful interaction, these experiences of hybridisation must be read as part of the conflicts of Latin American modernity. I have attempted to understand the sinuous trajectory of these interactions discarding the thesis of a simple imposition of modernity as if it were an external force. The history of how our exuberant modernism is articulated - that is the intellectual projects of modernity based on deficient socio-economic modernisation - is the story of how the elites, and in many cases the popular sectors, have ingeniously hybridised the desired modernity with traditions that they do not want to cast away, in order to take charge of our multitemporal heterogeneity and to turn it into something productive.
Thus, the term hybridity does not take on meaning on its own, but rather is part of a constellation of concepts. Some of the principal ones are: modernity-modernisation-modernism, difference-inequality, multitemporal heterogeneity, reconversion. The latter, taken from economics, allowed me to propose a perspective that combined elite and popular classes' strategies of hybridisation. Sociocultural hybridity is not a simple mixture of discrete and pure social practices which have existed separately and which, upon combining, generate new structures and new practices. At times this occurs in an unplanned way, or is the unforeseen result of processes of migration, tourism, or of economic or communications exchanges. But often hybridity emerges from the attempt to reconvert a legacy (a factory, professional training, a set of knowledge and techniques) in order to reinsert it into new conditions of production and of the market. This is how Pierre Bourdieu used this expression to explain the strategies through which a painter becomes a designer, or national bourgeoisies acquire the languages and other competencies necessary to reinvest their economic and symbolic capital in transnational circuits (Bourdieu 1979: 155, 175, 354). But, as I analysed in Hybrid Cultures, strategies of economic and symbolic reconversion are also found in popular sectors: rural migrants who adapt their knowledge in order to work and consume in the city and their handicrafts in order to appeal to urban buyers; workers faced with new production technologies who reformulate their working culture; indigenous movements that reshape their demands into those of transnational politics or of an ecological discourse, and learn to communicate these through radio and television. Ultimately, for such reasons, for me the object of study is not hybridity, but rather processes of hybridisation.
The empirical analysis of these processes, articulated to strategies of reconversion, shows that hybridisation is of as much interest to the dominant as to the popular sectors that want to appropriate the benefits of modernity. At times, subordinate groups faced with economic and cultural policies that damage them resort to traditional political means, incorporating the modern in a hybrid or atypical way as a survival strategy. But as mixed formulas also arise from protests and negotiations, modernisation, the present globalisation, and in general all hegemonic politics, cannot be understood only as imposed by the strong on the weak. Studies of hybridisation have discredited the manichaean perspective which radically opposes dominator and dominated, centre and periphery, sender and receiver. Instead, they demonstrate the multipolarity of social initiatives, the obliqueness with which power may be exercised, and the reciprocal borrowings that take place in the midst of differences and inequalities.
Binary and polar philosophies of history are revealed to be particularly inconsistent at those intercultural borders where there is intense hybridisation. But strictly speaking, in this era of globalisation we all live on borders criss-crossed by multiple diversified strategies. Those groups in which power is concentrated and which relate to subaltern groups, up to a point, must take into account their diversity and demands. In international debate, the time of extreme opposition, of binarism and unidirectional manipulative conspiracies, has passed. Stuart Hall maintains that to understand current forms of economic and cultural power, we must face this apparent paradox: we live in a 'multinational but decentred' world. Even though 'global mass culture' seems to be centred in the West, 'it speaks English as an international language'. 'It speaks a variety of broken forms of English'. Its expansion is achieved through an 'enormously absorptive' homogenisation of local and regional particularities, 'and it does not work for completeness'. 'It is not attempting to produce little mini-versions of Englishness everywhere, or little versions of Americanness. It is wanting to recognise and absorb those differences within the larger, overarching framework of what is essentially an American conception of the world'. In one specific reference to the ties between the United States and Latin America, Hall says that the hegemony of the United States is not understandable solely as the elimination of difference; rather, he observes, there are multiple ways that Latin American cultures can be 'repenetrated, absorbed, reshaped, negotiated, without absolutely destroying what is specific and particular to them' (Hall 1991: 28-29).
Neither do recent studies of popular sectors sustain that polarity. Since many of them are interested in modernisation, they not only confront and resist, but also transact and consent, borrow and reuse. Local cultures grow and expand by necessity to become cosmopolitan, once they discover that the pure preservation of their traditions cannot by itself reproduce and reelaborate their situations. The prosperous artisans of Michoacán and Guerrero, in Mexico, have done this: by incorporating contemporary scenes into the devils of Ocumicho and the amate paintings of Ameyaltepec, by learning English and travelling by air, or by using credit cards, they acquire the money that allows them to modernise their daily lives and at the same time revitalise their ancient traditions and ceremonies. The renewed rural and indigenous struggles of recent years in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico show them using the Internet and other unconventional means by which popular groups seek to integrate themselves into modernity and turn it to their advantage (Zermeño).
The aggravation of long-standing inequalities by the recent changes in Latin American society makes the confrontations seem at times like a simple opposition. There is no shortage of situations in which difference and inequality are exacerbated to the point that classes and ethnic groups act as if everything were reduced to confrontations. Or, if there are hybridisations between 'our own' and 'the foreign' it is because there is no choice but to accept them. In these situations, it may be useful to distinguish between dominated hybridities and hybridities of resistance, as does Homi K. Bhabha. He has made a considerable contribution towards constructing the notion of hybridity as a linguistic one, beyond biology, defining it as 'a metonymy of presence' (Bhabha: 115), and situating it among power relations, not as if the hybridisation of two cultures were simply a matter of intercultural relativism. But I find the constant polarity that he establishes between the colonial and resistance inappropriate for Latin America, because our countries ceased to be colonies almost two centuries ago, and our culture cannot be analysed 'as a colonial space of intervention', but is rather a site where the meaning of modernity is contested. In this context of a relatively independent modernity (whose peripheral and subordinate characteristics cannot be captured by the term postcolonial), even the vast sectors that were damaged by the recent neoconservative restructuring interact, hybridising the hegemonic and the popular, the local, the national, and the transnational. Among these entities 'an interstitial intimacy' develops, an expression that Bhabha uses to challenge the 'binary divisions' (13) between private and public, past and present, psychic and social, and to recognise the complex intertwinings that take place 'in between', in the porous boundaries of the intersections. Bhabha does not apply this subtle understanding to the relations between members of hegemonic and subaltern groups, possibly due to his subordination of the cultural to the political confrontation that governs his thinking. But in Latin America - as I have analysed in more detail elsewhere (García Canclini, 1995: ch. 9) - this perspective is indispensable for understanding the partial autonomy achieved by cultural fields in modernity, as well as the importance of transactions and negotiation in the development of hegemonic and popular identities.
Latin American hybridities: a comparison with cultural studies
In recent years, there has been a confrontation between ways of thinking about the hybridisation of tradition and modernity, and various types of modernities, in Latin American and the United States. I would like to comment on how I see the Latin American situation in this debate and its perspectives in terms of globalisation and regional integration.
For this I find it useful to start from two criticisms of the book Hybrid Cultures, which also allow me to detail ideas I have been developing about the philosophy of history. George Yudice contends that my position 'tends to overstate the case of hybridizations in abolishing "the hierarchies among historical periods".' He continues:
While I agree that the temporalities (and spatialities) have been blurred, I cannot wax so sanguine about the hierarchies. The fact is that the vast majority of traditional group and other subaltern peoples continue to live under conditions of diminished opportunity. Cultural reconversion - that is, making cultural production marketable - is certainly an improvement over not having sufficient resources for the "pursuit of life and happiness", but it is to accept an economic rationale as a solution for cultural production and reception and their role in the construction of more democratic civil societies (Yudice, 1993: 151-52).
Meanwhile, Renato Rosaldo claims in his introduction to the English translation of my book that my
analysis of tradition and modernity may prove difficult for readers in the United States to apprehend. The gap in comprehension derives form the absolute ideological divide between North and South, between nation-states regarded as having completed their modernization and those that have not yet done so. In Latin America, modernization and development remain vital issues that are named as such in the discussions that reflect and create national self-understanding. In the United States, on the other hand, questions of modernization do not enter the public realm of grappling with vital social issues. Such social issues as poverty and the shameful infant mortality rates among African Americans and the poor, for example, are treated neither as signs of underdevelopment nor as failures of uneven modernization (as they conceivably could be in principle and no doubt would be in Latin America). Thus readers of this translation will need to remember that questions of modernization may not be as alien to them as North/South ideologies would make it appear. . . . Debate with Hybrid Cultures in the United States will focus not only on the tradition/modernity distinction but also on the notion that the contemporary historical period contains different temporalities (traditional, modern and postmodern), as if epochs could persist relatively unchanged into the present (Rosaldo, 1995: xiii-xi and xvi).
Two authors with much in common theoretically, both situated in North American cultural studies, hold different views of my way of examining hybridity in Latin American countries. While Yudice finds that I do not sufficiently distinguish the temporalities that coexist in the present and that I suppress the hierarchies between historical periods, Rosaldo contends that from a country that is fully modernised (United States), and from a discipline like anthropology that opposes evolutionism, it is difficult to accept that different eras persist separately and relatively unaltered in the contemporary world.
To try to overcome both these difficulties, I devoted many pages to examining how artisans and other traditional groups reelaborated their cultural heritages in order to participate in modernity, which is the dominant epochal condition of Latin America. But I believe it is necessary to recognise that the historic contrivances of social, economic, and cultural exclusion generated processes of dualisation and preserved marginal, 'traditionalist' circuits or pockets, limiting their weak ties to and insertions in modern hegemonic processes. Although the hybridisations generated by modernisation reach rural and indigenous villages through the commercialisation of their economies - the arrival of cultural industries and other movements that connect them to contemporary development - I feel it is necessary to study the scanty integration (not isolation) of traditionalist sectors into the social totality in order to understand the socio-economic and cultural bases of Neo-Mexicanist, Neo-Incan and other indigenist movements that attempt to reinstitute idealised traditions as antimodern utopias. I share with Rosaldo the opinion that these utopias should be examined as part of modernity. But additionally, so that they do not seem to be simply absurd ravings, we need to see them in connection with the structural conditions that make them marginal. In the context of the current selective and unjust globalisation, to which I will refer later, what I find surprising is not so much that well-rounded traditions persist into modernity but rather that the sharpening of asymmetries and forms of exclusion push ever broader sectors toward the ideological regressiveness of fundamentalism.
To my mind, the most important difference between cultural processes in the United States and in Latin America is not their ways of conceiving the ties between tradition and modernity, but rather their ways of understanding hybridity with respect to different visions of multiculturalism. Perhaps the key discrepancy between United States multiculturalism and what in Latin America has been called pluralism or cultural heterogeneity is, as various authors have observed, that in the United States 'multiculturalism means separatism' (Hughes, Taylor, Walzer). We know that, as Peter McLaren says, it is useful to distinguish between conservative, liberal, and left-liberal multiculturalisms. For the first, separatism between ethnic groups is subordinated to WASP hegemony and the canon that stipulates what must be read and learned to be culturally literate. Liberal multiculturalism postulates the natural equality and cognitive equivalence of races, while the left-liberal version attributes violations of this equality to the unequal access to resources. But only a few authors, such as McLaren, proclaim the need to 'legitimate multiple traditions of knowledge' simultaneously, and to emphasise building solidarity around each group's claims. Therefore, analysts like Michael Walzer express their concern that 'the sharp conflict in North American life today does not oppose multiculturalism to some hegemony or singularity', to 'a vigorous and independent North American identity', but rather opposes 'the multitude of groups to the multitude of individuals'. 'All the voices are loud, the intonations are varied and the result is not harmonious music - contrary to the ancient image of pluralism as a symphony in which each group plays its part (but - who wrote the music?) - but rather a cacophony' (Walzer: 109 and 105).
What could be called the canon in Latin American cultures owes much to Europe, but throughout the twentieth century it has combined influences from various European countries and has linked them in a heterodox way with diverse national traditions. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes cite German expressionists, French surrealists, Czech, Italian, and Irish novelists: authors who do not know one another, but who writers from peripheral countries, 'can manipulate', as Borges said, 'without superstitions', with 'irreverence'. Although Borges and Fuentes may be extreme cases, I find in most specialists in the humanities and social sciences, and in general in Latin American cultural production, a restructured appropriation of metropolitan canons and a critical use with respect to various national needs. Furthermore, Latin American societies were not formed on a model of ethno-communal belonging, but were based upon the lay idea of the republic and of Jacobin individualism, yet at the same time with an openness to the modulations that the French model had acquired in other European cultures and in the United States Constitution.
Since the 19th century, even in the most westernised nations such as Argentina and Uruguay, our reading has combined national authors and translations of European and North American literature. That variety of experiences was enriched by the Spanish and Italian orality brought by immigrants, from which emerged hybrid musical genres like the tango, the burlesque, and a peculiar type of colloquialism that took on its own specific name: 'the cocoliche'. All of that was integrated into national cultures which, while unjust and discriminatory towards the contributions of indigenous groups, tried to bring about a system based on the 'melting pot' that Spanish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, French and other migrants had created in the River Plate area.
In Mexico, quite a different society, from the beginning of the twentieth century, post-revolutionary modernisation programmes tried to regain possession of the 56 indigenous cultures in a unified nation-building project. Without denying the unsatisfactory scope of its achievements nor the creole and mestizo society's oppression of the indigenous peoples, I would like to emphasise here that national development was guided by a multicultural conception that pursued integration and not separation. Even today, as old and new injustices erupt, it is inconceivable that these might be overcome by means of the isolated affirmation of each group. Instead, attention is focused on changing the nation as a whole.
The inclination to hybridise led those visual artists in various fields who were most reflective about national and Latin American identities, from Torres García and Antonio Berni to the informalists and geometrists of the 1960s and 1970s, simultaneously to appropriate artistic styles from different tendencies and nations. Although there were attempts to establish orthodoxies (Siqueiros, some academics and vanguardists), overall a flexible cosmopolitanism prevailed, the combination of multiple aesthetic and ethnic contributions in a multicultural patrimony.
Because of its different history, Latin America's countries tend not to resolve multicultural conflicts through affirmative action policies. This is not to say that the region has lacked nationalist and ethnic fundamentalisms. To resist hybridisation, these groups have promoted exclusionary and absolutist self-affirmations and a single cultural patrimony which, illusorily, is believed to be pure. Analogies can be drawn between a separatist emphasis based on self-esteem as key to the demand for women's and minority rights in the United States and some Latin American nationalist and indigenous movements whose manichaean interpretations of history assign all virtue to their own side and attribute all the defects of development to the others. Nonetheless, this has not been the prevailing tendency in our history. Less still in this era of globalisation in which the hybrid constitution of ethnic and national identities is more evident, as is their asymmetrical interdependence, unequal but unavoidable, within which each group's rights must be defended. Therefore, artistic and intellectual movements that identify with ethnic or regional demands such as Zapatismo in Chiapas situate this problematic, as do the Zapatistas themselves, in a debate about the nation and about how to reposition it in international conflicts. That is, in a general critique of modernity.
Recent photographs and videos in Latin America provide many examples of this articulation of the local and the global. I am thinking of two in particular: a) the series on refugees by Sebastián Salgado, exhibited in various capitals of Latin America and other continents with the sponsorship of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, which organises into a single discourse the dramas of Rwanda-Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Bosnia, and Southeast Asia; b) the photomural and video called 'Montezuma's foreboding' by Paolo Gasparini. This Italo-Venezuelan artist, who has recorded the continent's sociocultural contradictions for several decades, used Mexico City as a site for one of the most critical reflections on Latin American modernisation ever carried out. Based on a manuscript in which Montezuma announces the catastrophe of the Mexican capital, on Walter Benjamin's text about Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, and on a exasperated montage of Pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern images of Mexico City, Gasparini indicates that the brazen multiculturalness of this metropolis is the result of a national project based on inequality. By combining the street sign that indicates Montezuma Street, folded and twisted by an anonymous inhabitant; a mask of the great fighter himself alongside other masks being sold on the street; and a photo of a Zapatista wearing a balaclava, next to indigenous and mestizo faces and bodies - bewildered, lovingly embracing, anguished, getting on and off buses and the metro - he offers, as he says, 'a selection of post-battle images: all the civilising corpses are scattered about and the various cultural strata interweave and coexist in the crossroads of the urban scene: from the Pre-Columbian debris and the ruins of modernity to the already-decomposing pastiche of globalisation' (Gasparini: 17).
This example allows me to link the crisis of modernity in Latin America to the new forms of multicultural hybridity. The first thing I would like to suggest is that experiences such as those of Salgado, Gasparini and other Latin American artists (León Ferrari, Felipe Ehrenberg, Alfredo Jaar, Guillermo Kuitca), which I have analysed elsewhere (García Canclini 1993), indicate a new stage in the cultural functions and communicative strategies of art. In this era of audio-visual hyperreality, electronic information overload, and the spectacularisation of disconnected fragments, they propose networks of meaning and sensitisation that link dispersed parts of society. Without the pretence of shaping a single totality, nor even a single version of it, they contribute to problematising the given, the ordered ethnic, national or monopolistic conventions, causing diversity to emerge and making its articulations visible.
What does this have to do with relativism and affirmative action? It is easy to understand that setting quotas proportional to the demographic size of each group for university entrance and in the job-market has been useful in one stage of the struggle for rights, as a way to offset prior exclusions and injustices. But, as Hughes notes, the continuing application of these quotas in museum and foundation policies ended up narrowing the distance between aesthetic pursuits and propagandistic slogans. Hughes maintains that art must again find a place between the pressures that have suffocated it in the United States in recent years: on one side, censorship and funding cuts when the National Endowment for the Arts wanted to end such irreverences as Andrés Serrano's work and Robert Mapplethorpe's nudes; on the other, the political pressures of the radicals that, in defence of racial and gender differences and in the name of political correctness, have engendered 'a hotch-potch kitsch'.
Even without falling into kitsch, the compartmentalised and separatist affirmation of each minority in the United States has led to the multicultural juxtaposition of aesthetics that, as Mari Carmen Ramírez wrote, do not seek to be more than 'literal representations' of each identity (Ramírez: 16). Thence the monotony of the recurring stereotypes in Chicano and NeoMexicanist art, the overvaluing of the artesanal and naive execution as opposition to 'good painting' and technical sophistication, the over-ritualising of traditional emblems and scenes. The encapsulation in these self-affirmations of 'one's own' ends up blocking formal innovation and transcultural exchange, which are conditions of creativity and critical thought in a globalised society. Various unresolved dilemmas of United States multiculturalism seem to be summed up in this question: how can we move from the isolated acknowledgements of each group that in the long run perpetuate inequality and solidify differences, to the shared recognition of difference within the clashing, axial sociocultural relations of society?
The malaise of hybridity: strategies and contradictions of globalisation
Finally, let us look at some unresolved dilemmas of multiculturalism and hybridity in Latin America. This debate about the differences between multiculturalism in the United States and in our continent would be incomplete if we did not mention conditions common to both societies in the processes of contemporary hybridity, or point out that within current asymmetric globalisation, certain forms of hybridity and resistance to hybridity, present in both Americas, are results of inequality in exchange.
Recessive homogenisation. Beginning with economic conditions, we see that Latin America was never subjected to a process of continent-wide standardisation. Now, however, there is recessive homogenisation. Privatisation and transnationalisation policies were similarly applied in all Latin American economies. As a consequence, even the countries that were formerly the most dynamic (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) produced negative indices of growth in the eighties, and the few societies that managed to restore their Gross Domestic Products in the early nineties then suffered economic contraction again, with increased unemployment and external debt. The quality of life is deteriorating in the continent's big cities, which until a few years ago were seen both by governments and by rural migrants as the leaders of our modernisation. They have become dramatic centres of violence. Many of them are similar, insofar as their streets and plazas have become chaotic scenes of a poverty that attempts to survive through the 'informal' market. Policies of economic retreat and social decomposition create a paradoxical electoral consensus through the exacerbation of various 'premodern' characteristics (populist leaders' strongman tactics, clientelism and corrupt dealings with the masses least incorporated into education and modern production), which are allied to the perverse products of modernity (drug trafficking, international financial boycotts, unpayable external debts). The most negative signs of the hybridisation of the traditional and the modern are mobilised to generate consensus for policies of deindustrialisation, unemployment and increased dependency: in sum, the national self-destruction carried out by the governments of Menem, Fujimori, Bucaram, and others in the region.
This recessive homogenisation also affects the production and consumption of culture. In the last two decades the production of books, records and films in Latin America has declined; cinemas, bookshops, theatres, art museums, and cultural support programmes have closed down. Many publishers and radio stations have been bought by European and United States companies that have altered their programming to follow foreign models. Governments, overwhelmed by external debt, have reduced spending on public services, including education and culture. In every country they say that culture should be self-financing, should show a profit, and that it is better to leave it to private initiative. But the economic recession, the drop in consumption, and the indiscriminate opening of national markets to international competition are strangling large private enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. The inefficient adaptation of Latin American cultural industries and the economic recession have impoverished endogenous production and lessened the possibilities of competitive participation in globalisation. The shrinking of public spending and the weakness of private activity have brought about the following paradox: more trade is being promoted among Latin American countries and between them and the metropolitan centre at a time when these selfsame countries are producing ever fewer books, fewer films, and fewer records. Integration is being stimulated when there are fewer cultural goods to exchange and when falling salaries are reducing the majority's ability to consume.
Only the transnational communication companies such as Televisa and Globo have increased their investments, and only in the areas where they are most confident of recouping their outlay (television, video, and mass magazines). As Jesús Martín-Barbero wrote,
in the 'lost decade' of the eighties the only industry that developed in Latin America was communication. The number of television stations multiplied - from 205 in 1970 to 1459 in 1988; Brazil and Mexico acquired their own satellites; radio and television opened world links via satellite; computer, satellite, and cable TV networks were set up; regional television channels were established. But all of that growth took place following the rhythm of the market, with little state intervention, even undermining the meaning and the possibilities for such intervention, that is leaving public space without real support, and increasing monopolistic concentrations (Martín-Barbero, 1995).
Lastly, I would like to probe the possibilities of cultural and aesthetic development that this phase of transnational integration and recessive homogenisation allows Latin Americans. The openings created by globalisation generate diverse opportunities for the hegemonic and popular sectors. For reasons of space I will limit myself to pointing out two features which both sectors share.
Integration and segregation.
Free-trade agreements principally benefit peripheral countries' business and governing elites, and they reproduce these countries' subordinate position as endogenous production and international competitiveness diminish. But at the same time globalisation homogenises all sectors and brings them into the consumption process. The transnational expansion of communications, which weakens local traditions, has produced a world folklore or, as Renato Ortiz calls it, an 'international-popular culture': communities of consumers are organised less and less according to national differences, and, above all among the younger generations, they define their cultural practices in terms of homogenised information and styles that can be received by audiences in different societies independently of their political, religious, or national backgrounds. Consumers of all social classes are capable of reading the referents of a multilocalised imaginary that television and advertising bring together: Hollywood cinema idols and popular music stars, jeans and credit card logos, sporting heroes and politicians from various countries make up a constantly-available repertoire of signs.
Nonetheless, the same process that integrates and hybridises also segregates. Multiculturalness and its differences are now formed not only through the coexistence and conflict of diverse historical traditions within each nation, but also because of the stratification that results as countries, and sectors within each society, have unequal access to advanced communications media. Inequality between central and peripheral nations, just as between economic and educational strata within each, engender new injustices. The masses' incorporation into global culture is limited because they have access only to the first stage of audiovisual industries' offerings: entertainment and information that circulate on free radio and television. Small subsections of the middle and popular classes can receive more up-to-date and complex information by participating in the second stage of communications media use, which includes the circuits of cable TV, environmental and health education, and political information disseminated on video. But it is really the entrepreneurial, political, and academic elites who successfully use the most active means of communication. These form the third stage, which includes fax, electronic mail, satellite antennas, and leisure pursuits, from making amateur videos to developing horizontal international electronic networks such as the Internet. The popular sectors have only limited participation in these latter circuits through the production of community periodicals, radio and videos.
It would seem difficult to develop contemporary forms of democratic citizenship without generalised access to the two last forms of communication, that is without connections to international information and the ability to intervene significantly in global and regional agreements. The multinational dimension of such matters as pollution, drug trafficking, and technological and cultural innovations requires that citizens possess information that transcends local and national spaces. Therefore, cultural policies should co-ordinate actions suited to what we may call the supranational public sphere (CEPAL 1994; UNESCO 1995).
Equalised hybridity
What takes place in those communication circuits where symbolic goods are offered on a mass basis to all publics? The current ease of access to music from many continents, even from peripheral societies, aids composers, interpreters and audiences to become familiar with other cultures' offerings and to blend them with their own traditions. The global expansion of large communications concerns allows all of us access to multicultural repertoires. But the recording and reproduction technologies that bring us distant styles make them too easily commensurable, submitting them to standardised tastes: the percussion from a samba school or a salsa band sounds more and more like symphony orchestra kettledrums and the drumming of African or Indonesian religious music.
As José Jorge Carvalho observes, this transnational homogenisation generates misunderstandings: 'The postmodern urban listener learns to receive as familiar something that is conceived by its creators and traditional cultivators as singular, original; and the typical listener from a traditional musical community has serious difficulties understanding the fundamentally ironic, allegorical, or simulacral character of musical production generated by the contemporary mass media. In other words, instead of the ideal of mutual exegesis, of the hermeneutic fusion of musical horizons, what we must analyse increasingly often are situations of communicative incompatibility' (Carvalho, 1995: 4).
However, these misunderstandings and this incompatibility are hidden by electronic artifice. A key recourse for reducing discontinuities between the variations in timbre and melodic styles implied by musical otherness is the equaliser, the device that organises the sound-balance among the instruments in a band and between instruments and voices. Applying to intercultural differences the capacity to moderate treble sounds with mid-range and bass, as well as to adjust the various channels so that everything can be heard clearly and the sonic totality is agreeable, is an intervention that transcends the aesthetic. These changes in communicative strategies imply new multicultural policies.
The search for an aesthetic of sound balance, which was first apparent in airports, restaurants, shopping centres and other places where the surroundings were 'conditioned', is now expanding through industrial recording techniques that eliminate 'the discordant'. Carvalho has studied some of the main procedures used: a) the intensities of various musical genres and instruments - the pianissimos and fortissimos - are balanced to produce orchestral homogeneity or subordinated to the voice channel; b) the abuse of the echo or reverberation effect in shows and bars, which atrophies the listener's ability to hear subtle passages, is extended to young peoples' hang-outs and even to those using the Walkman, for whom the best way to listen to music is to go for the highest amplification; c) the compact disc consecrates standardising paradigms of listenership by offering 'cleansed' versions that are presented as if they had been produced in balanced acoustic chambers with the perfect orchestra and the spectator in the ideal listening position: the equalised recording, with a uniform listening subject, always in the centre.
This ethnocentric and naively modern perspective which pretends not to understand the crisis of representation that has built up over decades in literature and film disguises its erasures: many subtle balances of intensity and rhythm eliminate vocal inflections, the displacement of energy, oscillations between moments of great sonic eloquence and significant silences:
All that remains is the sequence of chords, the meter, pure and simple, and the melodic scheme with the lyrics, all loaded with reverberation. Technical effect replaces the musical dynamic. In other words, there is execution without interpretation, without presence, without aura. The 'music' is reproduced live, but it is no longer lived by the reproducer, much less by the listeners (Carvalho, 1995: 9).
Invented as an instrument of Western taste, equalisation becomes a procedure for a tranquillising hybridisation, a reduction of points of resistance to other musical aesthetics and of resistance to the challenges of diverse cultures. The sense that we can be near to others without being concerned about understanding them is hidden beneath the appearance of a friendly reconciliation of cultures. As with hurried tourism, as with so many transnational cinematic superproductions, sound equalisation is usually an attempt at a monologic conditioning, an acoustic comforting amidst the din of the world.
Certainly, equalisation has also served to reinstate the feeling of ancient, medieval and renaissance musics, to refine the recording of non-Western musics, and to experiment with original acoustic effects and resonances in electronic composition and interpretation, minimalism and experimental music. On the other hand, pulling the plug is always an option: since Eric Clapton recorded Unplugged, Sinéad O'Connor, Neil Young, and Latin American musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Charly García have reminded us that it is still possible to rediscover the modulations and subtleties of diverse styles. They have not escaped from the monopolistic transnational circuits with these 'alternative' explorations, as is shown by MTV's interest in broadcasting them, but perhaps they help us see the interaction among artists, intermediaries, and publics in a multidirectional way.
These musical oscillations may be understood as metaphors for broader aesthetic options, which are at the same time various ways of handling multiculturalism, hybridity, and those differences that do not lend themselves to hybridisation, that cannot be equalised. Thus, the close of the century is opening up unprecedented opportunities for communication with many other cultures, for constructing hybrid repertoires and for recognising that which, being irreducibly distinct, does not need to be isolated in a separatist way. The risks of this opening up of each society to interaction with so many others, have provoked reactions such as chauvinist essentialism, xenophobia, and the abstract reconciliations of the sound equaliser. Can a culture that is reconquering its critical and solidaristic potential also discover unknown possibilities of building a dialogic and democratic Babel?
Translated by Nancy Morris and Philip Schlesinger
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