TN #: 1049512 AMM ACN Thank you for borrowing from: BINGHAMTON | LIBRARIES Borrower: VVB *BNG,BTS,ZCU,VMC,CSU,LRU,MOU,NBU, OKU Location Bartle Library Call # PQ7081 .P52 2018 Journal Title: Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic literature and culture / Volume/Issue: / Month/Year: 2018 Pages: 45-63 Article Title: Bourdieu in Latin America Through the Eyes of Néstor Garcia Canclini Article Author: Juan Poblete Odyssey: ill.baruch.cuny.edu Email:illbb@baruch.cuny.edu Maxcost: 0.001FM ILL #: 207538675 (NALA AAU NOTICE: This material may be protected by Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code)CIIAPTER 3 Bourdicu in Latin America Through the Eyes of Néstor Garcia Canclini Juan Poblete ‘There is a process of selection [what is to be wanshated, what is to be pub Fished, who it will be translated by, who will publish it), a proc ss of labeling, and classification [...] by the publishers, the question of the series in which ir is to be inserted, the choice of the translator and the writer of the preface avho in presenting the work will take some sort of possession of it, and slant it with his own point of view, and explain how it fits into the field of recep tion, only rarely going so far as to explain where and how it fits into its field of origin) [... and finally, the bound to perceive the text in di cading process itself, as foreign readers are erent way sf Like Angel Rama before him, Néstor Garcia Canclini, in his own cons eration of Latin American culture and, especially, its artistic production, has bridged a sociological approach, emphasizing structural conditions of pro duction, and an anthropological approach, considering, the view from the perspective of the actors and agents involved in such processes. In Garcia Canclini’s case, Pierre Bourdicu’s effort to straddle a similar span has long served as a pivotal point around and against which he has developed his J. Poblete (4) Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 45 1. M. Sanchez Prado (ed.), Pierre Bonrdien in Hispanic Literature and Culture, hups://doi.org/10.1007/978-3. 319-71809-5 3460 J. POLLETE own theori about the functioning of Latin American cultural fields (art, cinema), institutions (museums, the state, non-profits, and 5 nies), actors (different publics, brokers ivate compa » producers), and circuits high, popular, middlebrow.) More generally, Bourdicu has been crucial to Garefa Canclini’s evolving thought on cultural production and consumption, and on their relations to the limits and possibilities of culture in a Latin Ameri national, regional, and global context. If, as Jean Franco proposed and Garcia Canclini accepted, the latter's seminal 1989 book Culturas hibridas (Hybrid Cultures) was “a book in search of a method,” then it could also be said that a good deal of that method in Gareja Canclini’s career has been developed in a critical conver sation with Pierre Bourdieu. In Garcia Canclini’s sustained dialogue with the work of the French theorist there are a few crucial moments that | propose to investigate. ‘They span the period from the early Arte popular y sociedad en Ameérten Latina (1977) and Las culturas populares en ef capi- talismo (1982) to his most recent work on the new culture of creativity based capitalism (2013), and they include Garefa Canelini’s own long, introduction to a modified Spanish version of Bourdieu’s Questions de soc ologie (Sociologia ¥ Cultura, 1990), the 1995 book Consnmidores y ci- dadanos, and the two chapters of direct engagement with the French theorist in Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados(2004)2 In the end, | want to assess the impact Of Bourdieu’s oeuvre in the wor' Zan ofa Latin American critic who has, in many ways, plaved regionally a role similar to the one Bourdieu played globally. In an interesting article on “Lhe Reception of Bourdieu in Latin America and Argentina,” Denis Baranger shows, perhaps surprisingly, that Bourdiew’s contact with the continent was quite limited. He never visited and only spoke at two regional events via videoconference in 1999 Baranger, however, adds: “On both occasions, Bourdicu spoke in Spanish, even when answering questions from the audience.”* OF the forty-two doctoral dissertations Bourdieu directed, only two were written by Latin American scholars (both Brazilians ), Sergio Miceli (1978) and L., Cavaleanti (1990), The Actes de la Reserehe en Setences Sociales, Bourdiew’s own jour- nal, published 172 issues between 1973 and 2008: “only 25 articles refer to Latin America, an average of one reference for every seven issues.”* Part of the explanation, according to Baranger’s informants, lay in the strong, hold that Alain fouraine, Bourdieu’s colleague and rival at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes ev Sciences Socintes, had on the market of Latin American doctoral students at the Ecole.BOURDIEC IN LYLIN AMERICA THROUGH LHP bbs OF NESTOR GARCIA 47 Like Bourdicu’s work in the United States, bs impact in Latin Ameri owes a great deal to the specilicity of his “discovery” and gradual transha tion in the continent, Undoubtedly, Néstor Garcia Canclini occupies a central place in such broader continental diffusion of the French author. Both Bourdieu and Canelini were originally trained in philosophy and then moved to practice a form of social anthropology for which Marxism was a crucial reference, positively and negatively, Both developed academic and research careers that combined sociology and anthropology with a methodological and epistemological flair for both empirically grounded and often collective work, and individual, more — philosophical theorization. From Mary they derived a particular mode of insertion in social theory. If classical Marxism in the cultural realm was almost exclusively interested in the eco nomics of capitalism and its capacity to structurally produce a direct deter mination of the cultural and ideological world— that is, if culture was both the opposite and a direct reflection of economies ~ Bourdieu chose instead ro study culture as a field of forces constituting its own market, and paid attention to the specificity ofits different submarkets and their rules within the general economic field, Furthermore, if Marxism was all about pro. ductive forces in the work economy, the author of Distinction preferred to concentrate On consumption practices during leisure time, in order to show how social meaning was produced and reproduced, This meant studying, how ideology manifested and was recreated in daily life, in cul taral practices such as the structure of home space, photography, and museum attendance. Gareia Canclini’s work has followed a remarkably similar path, from studying the production and consumption of popular art to that of museums and cinema, and including the high art of the avant: gardes. My general claim here is that, as in their respective relation with Marxism, for Garefa Canclini, Bourdieu has functioned, diachronically but sometimes simultancously, as a model, a point of differentiation, and a point of return. As a model, Bourdieu illuminated for Canclini a method and a form of approaching the cultural realm and, more precisely, an understanding, of its structuring order and logic. As a point of differentia- tion, Bourdicu’s perceived intransigence about the strict class-based and segmented nature of such order was contrasted in Garcia Canelini by an emphasis on hybridity and the new forms of order or even the new cultural disorder emerging, first in postmodern, and then in global, times. As a sm, as much a point of departure as of difference for both, : t q $ ‘ :48 J POBLETE point of return, Bourdieu has been for Canclini a permanent reminder that if one wants to understand not only the new forms of differences but also persisting, inequalities, the question about a more just cultural order becomes imperative, and with it the question about the role of the state in such a process. Bourpieu AS Moput. There is litle doubt Bourdieu has been a model for Gareia Canclini in many ways. In his lengthy 1990 “Introduction” to a modified Spanish edi- tion of Questions de Soctologic (1984), Garcia Canelini explicitly states one of the ways that is less obvious than the conceptual ones I will establish in a moment: Bourdieu’s capacity and interest to work, write, and think in a dual modality that includes as much philosophical and aesthetic reflection as it does empirical, statistical, and ethnographic involvement? Vhis dual register coincides with the early efforts of Garefa Canelini’s first three books on the sociology of art, and is corroborated throughout his long career. from Culturas bibridas (1990) to his more recent Las industrias culturales el desarrollo de México (2006) and La sociedad sin relato. Antropolonia + estética de la inmanencin (2010).° Bourdieu’s conceptual and methodolog- ical impact on the early Garcia Canclini can be assessed by comparing briefly two important books by the Argentine critic, both devoted to the analysis of popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s: Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina (1977) and Las culeuras populares en el crpitalismo (1982), In Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina, Garcia Canclini states: En conclusion, podemos decir que el andlisis integral del proceso artistico xplicacion de ia estructura interna de la obra; 2) la explicacion de las situaciones sociales involucradas en la produccién y comunicacién de 1a misma; 3) cl andlisis del tipo de praxis que fa obra efvettia, el modo en que transforma 0 convalida- incluye: 1) la cal o imaginariamente—as relaciones sociales.” [Lo conclude we can state that the full analysis of the art stig process. includes: 1) an explanation of the internal structure of the work; 2) an expla- nation of the social situations involved in the production and communica tion of said work; 3) the analysis of the type of praxis the work operates, the way in which it transforms or validates—in reality or imaginarily—social relations. | By contrast, in the second book—in which he attempts to define pr cisely the place of Lay culturas populares en el capitalismo--he propos toBOURDIEU IN LALIN AMERICA PHROUGHE TIE FYES OL NESTOR GARCIA 49 analyze not just works as representations or as the products of a conerete material praxis but also the specific structure of the artistic eld within which they are produced and its particular set of social relations, refracting, general social relations within a space that has its own logic. If the objec tive of the first book seems to be both the ideological analysis of the work of art and its process of production, in order to determine whether it fos ters a radical culture of popular empowerment and social transformation or participates in structures of domination, that of the second book has added what can be called the analysis of the general capitalism. While for the first text art has an ideological role in the repro duction or transformation of industrial so cond, symbolic ly life, organized red fields of operation, have been discovered as central to the ymbolic economy of ty, for the violence and the imposition of a cultural arbitrary in da in special new economy of what would later be called postindustrial capitalism. In addition to the increasing awareness of the centrality of the manipu Jation Of signs, codes, and discourses for the functioning of the new capi talisms, the discovery of what would become Bourdicu’s Reproduction and his theo y of fields and habitus is the crucial change here. Armed with this new conceptual apparatus, Garcia Canclini, who had begun to criticize the neo-Gramscians for their idealization of always-resisting subaltern cultures, could more confidently proceed to analyze, in all their complex- ity, two forms of popular culture within and not simply against capitalism: artisanal handcrafts and fiestas. They involved texts, sets of social relations and spaces, and manifested the economic, political, and psychosoei functions of culture in the production and reproduction of society. ange of perspective may scem subtle, bur it is crucial. Instead of simply being, the historical conditions under which a particular art object is pro- duced, those circumstances articulated a field of forces actively generating both the characteristics of the work and the cultural dispositions generat ing the productive and receptive capabilities of both producer and consumer, In 1979, in La Producciéu simbélicn, Teoria y mctodo cx soctologia del arte, Garcia Canclini confirms theoretically, and in Bourdieusian language, this crucial insight: al he Las claves sociolégicas del objeto estético y de su significacion en el con- junto de una cultura no se encuentran en la relacion aistada de fa obra con el Contexto social; cada obra es el resultado del campo artistico, el complejo de personas ¢ instituciones que condicionan fa produccién de Jos artistas y que median entre fa sociedad y la obra, entre la obra y la sociedad.”50), POBLETE {The sociological keys of the aesthetic object and of its meaning in the content of a culture are not found in the isolated relation of the work with the social context; each work is the result of the artistic field, the set of people and institutions that condition the artists’ production and mediate the relation between society and the work, between the work and society. | And more explicitly: “El comportamiento de cada integrante del proceso artistico—el artista, Ja obra, el intermediario, cl espectador cuenci es conse a de su posicidn en ese campo” [ “Phe behavior of each participant in the artistic process—the artist, the work, the intermediary, the spectator— is a consequence of their position in such field” |!” What is at stake in this field-specific struggle for a certain unequal distribution of symbolic capital connects, in its own particular way, with the broader social field in which similar but 5 ic field-organized struggles and habitus-forming, pro- cesses are taking place. Or, to pur it in Bourdieu’s contemporary words in his Inaugural Lesson at the College de France in 198 “substituting, for the naive relation between the individual and society the relations con- structed betweea those nwo modes of existence of the social, the habitus and the field, history made mto a body and history made into a thing. “!! Moreover, this central Bourdicusian insight has for Garcia Canclini impor tant methodological consequences: Para gue el conocimiento cientifico rompa con los prejuicios del sentido comin y con las ilusiones que crean los miembros del campo artistic, para pasar de las representaciones individuales o grupales a las relaciones objeti vas, ¢s indispensabl Ja observacion, recoger los datos, con una concepcion previa del sistema social que asigne a la produccion lugar especifico en le Jucha por el poder simbdlico,"? [In order for scient emprende tética UN knowledge to break with the prejudices of com mon sense and with the illusions created by the members of the artistic fields in order to move from individual or group representations to the objective relations; it is fundamental to begin observation, and collect the data, with a previous conception about the social system that assigns to artistic produc tion a specific place in the struggle for symbolic power. | ‘The distinction between a generalized doxa or common sense, a system of beliefs or illusions within a field, and the objective relations within that held; the insistence on the centrality of field-specific symbolic struggles for the functioning not just of the aesthetic field but also the broader social ones; the language of field position and habitus (or set of dispositionsBOURDIEE IN LACEN AMP RICA THROUGH TELE EYES OF NISTOR GARCIA wn within a field) ~ these ar . Bourdicusian contributions to the system atic process of rethinking the sociology of art Gareia Canclini had been carefully engaged in in these early and pioneering books, They allow the Latin American critic a better balance between ideological self positioning, and empirically grounded theorizing. They also begin a process of using, Bourdieu while departing from some of his central sociological tenets about art and culture in society. BourbiEu As POINT OF DIFFERENTIATION 3ourdicu’s two fundamental questions, said Garcia Canclini in £990, are: “). Como estin estructuradas —-econdmica y simbolicamente—la repro- duccin y la diferenciacion social? 2. Como se articulan fo econdmico y lo simbolico en los procesos de reproduccidn, diferenciacion y construcci6n del poder?” [*1) How are reproduction and social differentiation struc- tured economically and symbolically? 27 How are the economic and the symbolic articulated in the processes of reproduction, inequality, and power construction?” |.!* While the Argentine critic would centrally deal with both in the Latin American context, it is precisely that context that allowed him a clear process of separation from some of the stricter repro duetionist emphasis of Bourdicu’s work. These points of departure can be summarized as epochal and geocultural differences. In part by virtue of their slightly different: generational ascriptions (Bourdieu was born in 1930 and died in 2002; Garcia Canclini was born in 1939) it seems fair to say that Bourdieu ended up being one of the central theorist of culture in the modern, national period of an advanced democracy (France); exiled in Mexico, Garefa Canclini, on the other hand, became one of the standard-bearers of the need to rethink the national modern and its cultures in a highly heterogeneous continent, under the new conditions of what was first known as postmodernity, then as global ization. Bourdieu insisted on national processes of tight integration con- stituted, socially, in the multiclass dispute over cconomig resources; and, culturally, in the multiclass struggle over the same cultural capital, with symbolic Jegitimation and predominance as its goals. Along, these lines, France was for Bourdicu a single society clearly divided into dominant and rentiation in the use of a dominated sectors; and social distinction or di single cultural capital uncqually distributed was, in the cultural realm, a clear manifestation of that division. While Gareja Canclini began theoriz- ing, the same processes of (failed) national integration and development we = ALES520} PORLETE and the cultures (plural) they produced, he was soon faced with the need to think their radical transformation by a modernity that brought national unification (to the degree that it did) not through a single economic trans formation reaching all of society while integrating it, but, instead, through the paradoxical means of alluvial rural migration to the cities and transna tional mass media that heightened its heterogencity. If Bourdieu had theorized the cultural processes that assured unequal social reproduction of both economic and cultural capitals within a highly homogencous soci ety, Garcia Canclini became, first, the theorist who insisted on thinking, ethnically thick traditional cultures in a modern national context, and then the analyst of how in Latin America that national modernity (never fully constituted) turned into accelerated processes of de- and reterritorializa tion thar had both internal and external origins. Accordingly, while Garcia Canclini clearly valued Bourdieu’s contribu- tions to the sociology of culture—in his family and school system-centered studies of consumption practices and social reproduction—he faulted the French author for paying no attention to the new mass media that, also in France (said Bourdieu’s French critics), were now so decisively constitut- ing key spaces for the production of meaning in everyday life. In fact, Canclini’s 2004 Diferentes, Desiguales y Desconectados. Mapas de la inter- culturalidad includes a section titled: “Pierre Bourdieu: El socidlogo en la television.” In it—along with registering his surprise that a sociologist (Bourdieu) so involved with culture in modernity would not have con cerned himself with mass media, and summarizing Bourdicu’s critique of the new mass media discursive landscape, once he finally got around to doing it in his 1996 Sur la Television--Gareia Canclini registers his percep tion of the master’s inadequacy when it came to dealing with the new culture." Bourdieu, Garcia Canclini argues, used to the forms of exchange that defined the fields within which he had moved, was indignant and h the specific formats imposed by televisual discourse. anding the logic of televisual practice and inteHectualizing communicational unable to cope He was also incapable of unde forms; and, finally, he was guilty of ov processes without really penetrating their codes. Moreover, this incapacity to understand the functioning of the televisual field as field reflected another Bourdieusian limitation, in Garefa Canckini’s view. While very per- ceptive about the forms of differential appropriation of a common capital defining, the activity of the players engaged in symbolic struggle ina given field, the French theorist was curiously uninterested in the differences among fields.HOCRDIEL IN LATIN AMERICA PHROUGELLEEE EYES OF NESTOR GARCIA. 53 Jn other words, Bourdieu clearly saw what different fields had in com: mon-—the struggle for symbolic and actual positioning involving control of resources and the avant-garde’s attempts at subversion— but he did not seem to care about the specificity of what happened within any specific field or the differences between the nature of activities in diverse fields." What Bourdieu had mostly missed was nothing less than the fall reorgani zation of the cultural realm by mass media technologies and their industri alized forms of production, circulation, and consumpuon of cultural goods, Even more importantly for Garcia Canelini, the geocultural di atin America were crucial in establishing the proper distance from Bourdien’s theories. To the already mentioned dif ferent degrees of national development, and thus of centralized unification when comparing, France and Latin America, Garcia Canclini added both cultural and political differences that called for a re-evaluation of the mas- rer’s methods. ences between France and Culturally speaking, Latin America presented a much higher degree of racial, linguistic, social, and economic diversity than France did. Obvio bur crucially, Latin America has a long history of coloniality while France was itself a colonial power. This meant that in the different national cul- tural contexts in the continent, in addition to whatever existing degree of internal distinction between culturally dominant and dominated sectors of the population, there was an often more important distinction effect related to access to the cultural goods and discourses of the metropolis. In other words, the cultural field was never the internally defined, indepen- dent, and fully closed national symbolic struggle Bourdicu had conceived for France. Moreover, in Latin America the relative degrees of educational attainment in the second half of the twentieth century meant that most of the population rich, middle and working class, and poor—was integrated and educated less by the formal institutions of the state than by the power ful mechanism of the private and transnational mass media. In such acon rext, the forms of what Canclini would come to call hybridization of cultural levels obtained, As a result —as an analysis of the so-called Boom of Latin American narrative would prove for the 1960s and 1970s--the cultural capital of high and middle culture were in fact mediated more by the rules of mass media than by self: standing cultural precepts. Importantly too, and using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, Garefa Canelini insisted that, if the meaning of cultural goods is not intrinsic but the result of the interactions among the players in the relevant field, as Bourdieu had taught us, such hybridizations should not be considered < mis PSS40 |. POBLETE forms of corruption of an otherwise independent or pristine high cultural capital.'° Using the work of one of Bourdicu’s two Latin American doc toral students, Brazilian anthropologist. Sergio Miceli, Canclini high lighted how, contrary to the high degree of unification of a single capitalist economy and market in the French case studied by Bourdieu, in Latin America capitalism was itself heterogeneous, more a collection of multiple forms of production than a single unified dominant mode. Similarly, no class had ever attained in the continent the capacity to actually constitute itselfinto a truly hegemonic class capable of homogenizing, by way of the imposition of a singular cultural capital, the multiplicity of levels and cul- tures characterizing the heterogeneity of the Latin American scenario.” All of these differences entailed a radical reconceptualization of the con cept of the popular (Jo popular) that distanced Gareia Canelini’s ideas from Bourdieu’s. This reconsideration had at least two important aspeets. First, under the new conditions created by the hegemony of mass media, what interested Canchini were less the clear-cut distinctions between dominant and dominated cultures, and more their obvious points of interpenetration and mutual borrowing, Both high art and handcrafis, literature and convies, are now under the rules defined by mass markets and national and transnational cultural industries, rendering, invalid any pretension of radical autonomy in both the formal aspects of the work and the set of dispositions required for their consumption. Thus, culture is not mostly the unequally appropriated patrimony as determined by the educated, nor is the popular (/o popular) just what the people do or valae. Popular culture is not, in Bourdieusian par! just the internalization of symbolic violence, a space for social reproduction of an unjust systems of cultural legitimation whose center lies elsewhere. Neither is it, necessarily, an essentially resisting, practice ‘Then, introducing the second aspect of the reconceptualization of the popular, Garefa Canclini tells an aneedote that I can only summarize here: instead of Jamenting the contamination of the designs and representations of hybridized handerafts mixing traditional styles with motives coming from Mird, Picasso and Klee, he had learned, upon entering a store in a small village in Oaxaca, that the producers themselves were fully compe tent in multiple cultural systems, had connections with museums and art spaces in Mexico and the USA, and spoke three languages (Zapotcco, English, and Spanish). What Garcia Canelini had discovered, against Bourdieu, was the relative independence, agency, and capacity to adapt and transform that defines the power and vibrancy of traditional popular cultures in Latin America. nee,BOURDIRE IN LATIN AMERICA FIROUGH LTE BYES OF NESTOR GARCIA Politically speaking, there were important lessons in the story for an anthropologist using Bourdicu’s ideas in Mexico, Ian early article, signifi cantly entitled SGramsei con Bourdieu, Hegemonia, consumo y nuevas for mas de organizacion popular” (1984) [SHegemony, Consumption, and New Forms of Popular Organization” |, Garcia Canelini first summarized what would become the position underpinning Cadsuras htbriday and his later books.!” In the article, Garefa Canclini called for a contrastive but pro- ductive reading of Bourdieu and Gramsci, Such dual reading might enable an overcoming, of what he would later call the limitations of deductivism and inductivism when it comes to defining the popular. If the former defines popular culture mostly by the forms imposed on it by ome external agent, be it imperialism, the cultural industries, or the dominant class, the latter derives what it considers intrinsic qualitics of such popular culture from its subahternized nature (resistance, radical subversion)?" At stake was what he would Jater call “el papel no simplemente reproductivista de los sectores populares” [*the not simply reproductivist role of popular sectors” |"! Popular culture, or the muluple forms of culture of the popular sectors, could not be reduced in Latin America (or elsewhere) to a reactive form of culture, wholly dependent in their subordination to the dominant culture and its standards of quality. Instead of defining, popular culture negatively by ns limitations and lacks, or considering, its 3 esthetic categories as deformed sions of the dominant taste, what was needed, said the Argentine critic in his manifesto-like Cadturas hibridas, was 10 study their particular or specific aesthetics, Such a could not be simply reduced to being the negative, wholly pragmatic side of the dominant bourgeois aesthetic of disinterested - ness. Only then could a proper study of their multiple and often creative ve el imterpenetrations with other forms of culture under mass media hegemony be conducted. Indeed, Gareia Canclini concluded his Introduction to the Spamsh edition of Bourdieu’s Questions de soctolomie by stating: “su concep- dn reproductivi ta del consenso no deja espacio para entender la especifici dad de los movimientos de resistencia y translormacion” | “his reproductivist concept of consensus does not leave any room to understand the specificity of resistance and transformation movements” }.7* Bourpiru As A Poiny oF REevURN Perhaps the most important point of convergence and differ Bourdieu throughout Gar nee with ia Canelini’s career has been the latter’s evolu- tion regarding the concept of cultural consumption, Its consideration will56 |. POBLETE also allow me to establish to what degree, and despite all their diflerences, Bourdieu has remained a vital and central reference for the Argentine critic. The central text in this regard is Couswmidores y cindadano Conflictos multiculturales de la globalizacion (1995). Vhis book mark: radicalization by Garcia Canclini of Bourdieu’s recuperation of the useful- ness of cultaral consumption for social analysis in general. If Bourdieu had shown sociology and Marxism that culture and consumption could be productive vantage points in the analysis of the social, Garcia Canclini would take thar revalorization one step further: consumption in the time of sociocommunicationally defined forms of participation or citizenship may be the most important aspect of culture and, perhaps, politics. In this effort, Garefa Canclini tries, not always succes: fully, to bale his enthusiasm for the new form of studying consumption motivating his book and his realization that the new cultural order—based on consump tion and imposed by new mass mediated technologies and transnational industrics——has not been accompanied by equally effective global or trans- national forms of representation, much less decision-making. Thus, the relative “decomposition” of modern politics and its representative institu tions (the nation, elections, representation, political parties, unions, ete.) is replaced by the emergence of'a new sphere of participation and meaning making: consumption, often of massively offered and mediated goods and spectacles. If that cighteenth-century-originated politics is still the only one available at thar level, these new forms of private and mass mediated consumption offer in the new urban and giobalized scenarios of today an alternative form of social participation and shared connection. In an effort to incorporate these new dimensions to the classic Bourdicusian analysis of cultural consumption as segmented participation in three levels of one market (high, middle, and low cultures), Garefa Canelini proposes to dis- tinguish “four sociocultural circuits” within which consumption is central: the historico-territorial circuit (or the cultural capital of the nation); the nation-based, but increasingly internationalizing, culture of elites; mass communications, the most extended, consisting of the offerings of cul- tural industries; and restricted systenis of information and communication (where decision-making often takes place).23 While conceding that neolib- eral globalization offers a very limited space for de ision-making at a mass level, Canclini also wants to acknowledge that: “al consumir, también se piensa, se clige y reclabora ef sentido social [...]. En otros. términos, debemos preguntarnos si al consumir no estamos haciendo algo que sustenta, nutre y hasta cierto punto constituye un nucvo modo de ser a weBOURDIEU IN LATIN AMERICA THROUGH JE PYRS OF NENTOR GARCIA 57 ciudadanos” |“when we consume we also think, select, and reelaborate social meaning [...] In other words, we should ask oarselves if consump tion does not entail doing, something that sustains, nourishes, and to a certain extent constitutes a new mode of being citizens” }.2* This new type of political democratic potential lodged in consumption practices also means, for Canelini, the need to rethink public policies con- cerning culture --often dependent on the always unsuccessful and, in the end, authoritarian effort to spread the same cultural capital ro all citi zens-~along the lines of a multiplicity of tastes and interests, That is to say, it means abandoning the Bourdicusian universe for which the struggle over one unified cultural capital and its dependent class variations defines the singularity of the culture game, Consumption becomes here the sphere of a “racionalidad sociopolitica interactiva™ through which we participate “en un escenario de disputas por aquello que la sociedad produce y por las maneras de usarlo” | “interactive sociopolitical rationality” through which we “participate in an arena of competing claims for what society produces and the ways of using it” |.2* Thus consumption is not only a means of producing social categorization (distinction) and division in a struggle for searce goods, but also, insofar as it p part of what holds a societ ssupposes shared codes and messages, together in the individual and collective search for the satisfaction of needs: “Debemos adnutir gue en el consumo se construye parte de la racionalidad integrative y comunicativa de 1a socie- dad” { “We should acknowledge that consumption contributes to the inte grative and communicative rationality of a society” |?” Of course, this does not mean that we are all equal now. fe means that the links of solidarity between elites and popular sectors in two different countries respectively may cross national boundaries and connect more strongly elites with clites or people with people across national boundaries than wishin them. For Gareia Canclini, however, this participation cannot lead to an abandonment of the search for better state policies for the cul tural realm, and more broadly, for a more just and equal national society In fact, under the current neoliberal rules of market-society, conditions are y inhospitable for a truly democratic practice of consumption. For that to happen, for “consumption to articulate with a reflexive exercise of eiti- zenship,” some requirements, according, to Garcia Canclini, need to be met: truly diverse and accessible international circulation and availability of goods and messages; “informacion multidireccional y contiable acerca de fa calidad de los productos”; and “participacion democratica |... ] en las decisiones del orden material, simbolico, juridico y politico donde se orga Zz g ¥ 4 4 t58 1. PORLETE nizan Jos consumos” [“multidirectional and reliable information on the quality of products”; and democratic participation “in material, symbolic, juridical, and political decisions that organize consumption” }.?7 ns clear thar in his later work Garcia Canclini has taken a mostly critical view of Bourdieu’s (in jeapacity to understand the new configura: tions of culture and intervene effectively in the French mass mediated public sphere; it is also true that, even if mostly negatively, Bourdieu has remained a mandatory point of reference for the Argentine critic, From carly statements in Culturas bibridas (“Uno puede olvidarse de la totali- dad cuando solo se interesa por las diferencias entre los hombres, no cuando se ocupa también de la desigualdad” [“One may forget about totaly when one is interested only in differences among people, not when one is also concerned with inequality” ])’’ to the structure of the 2004 book Diftrentes, desiquales y desconectados, Bourdieu has persisted as the crucial springboard from which Canclini launches his arguments. In fact, the central idea of the latter book is precisely that the three problems indicated by its ttle (respect for cultural difference, concern for social inequality, and the right to be properly connected to the networks of contemporary culture) must always be kept together in the mind of the analyst: es dificil imaginar algtin tipo de tansformacion hacia un regimen mids justo sin impulsar politicas que comuniquen a los diferentes (étnicas, de género, gidas de esas diferencias y de las 5 inequitativas de recursos) y conecten a las sociedad giones), corrijan las desigualdades (sur de owas distribucior con Ta informa’ expandidos globalmente.?” [Icis difficult to imagine any transformation towards a more just regime without proposing policies capable of communicating those who are diffe! ent (ethnically, gender wise, regionally); correcting, inequalities (emanating trom those differences and other unequal distributions of resources); and vonnecting socicties with globally expanded information and cultural, health and wellbeing repertoires. | nm, con los repertorios culturales, de salud y- bienestar CONCLUSION In one of his contributions to the recent Jérenes, cultnras urbanas y red digitales (2012), Garcia Canclini describes cultural field as a too static and all-encompassing structure and concept. This logic of the position of actors in a field does not, according to the author of Hybrid Cultures,BOURDIGE ES LATIN AMERICA THROUGH TEE EYES OF NEXLOR GARCIA 59 consider transversal processes and networks that allow for a different kind of action, one deriving less from a fixed position than from a point of insertion ata given time: SUna de las motivaciones de este estudio es la incomodidad que sentimos con ciertas explicaciones que tratan de dar cuenta, con Viejas herramientas, de procesos que son muy nuevos” {SOne of the motivations of this study is the discomfort we feel regarding cer iain explanations that auempt to give an account, with old tools, of pro cesses that are truly new” f.*" Useful in this regard is Canclini’s outline of the trajectory that goes from field (national) to tribe Gocal) to tendency (often international or transnational) and their respective relations with stability and territoriality. We move, then, from reproduction within a delimited space to less permanent forms of aggregation and action that claim’ a given territory, to non-permanent and sometimes quite evanes: gent tendencies. These tendencies manifest as both spaces for the sell conceptualization of the cultural producers or creative self production and as collective poiesis in networks of non-permanent collaboration. Vor Gareia Canclini’s new focus is often less on cultural consumption of goods than it is on access to Snuevas formas de creatividad y sociabili- dad” {“new forms of creativity and sociability” |. What interests him now is the “usos no convencionales de los capitales educativos, culturales » tecnolégicos por parte de los jovenes que les dan competencias dis- rintas a las previstas por la historia social” [ “the non-conventional uses of educational, cultural and technological capitals youth use to develop competencies not foreseen by social history” | or the tactics and strate gies they adopt to “crearse empleos, desplegar nuevas vias de creatividad v socialidad” [“create employment for themselves, deploying new ways of creativity and sociability” |. In other words, what now interests C Canclini is how young people no longer inhabit the world described by Bourdicu’s highly stable and institutionalized spaces, cate gories, and actors. However, the almost verbatim reproduction in Difereutes, desiquales y desconectados of a significant portion of the text from the 1990 “Introduction” to the Spanish version of Questions de Sociolagie shows a high degree of relevance of Bourdieu’s ideas for Garcia Canelini, indi cating a long-lasting relationship and assessment of the strength of Bourdicu’s work. I have, nevertheless, hopefully shown three important differences. Garcia Canclini, following the Latin American rediscove of Gramsci in the 1980s, first introduced what he thought w. FASC) y a needed an correction to Bourdieu’s reproductivist biases at the time i 4 ‘ ‘60 1. PORLETE {while also using Bourdieu to correct the excesses of the neo-Grams cians); secondly, this correction Jed him to discover a potential geocul tural limitation of Bourdieu’s work in relation to the multicultural and heterogeneous societies of Latin America. While Bourdieu provided Gareja Canclini with both the theoretical and the methodological tools to explore the unequal distribution of cultural capital in society and the imposition of a cultural arbitrary, the critique of Bourdicu and the spec- ificity of the Latin American cultural and critical tradition allowed him to explore differences that could not be reduced to inequality and were therefore crucial to democracy. Both these caveats became, in the third and final moment or aspect of this relation, an epochal illumination: whar Bourdieu could not explain was how culture shifted its modes of being under the combined impact of globalization (which relativizes the national cultural field and its structures) and new technologies (which allow and/or impose new forms of production and consump- tion, new definitions of creativiry, and new forms of unequal distribu- tion of resources), Bourdieu, thus, would have been the theorist of order and structure and could not provide the tools for an understand ing of a different moment of modernity defined by the de-structuration of the forms of order (field, structure, habitus) Bourdicu’s analysis privileged. Nores 1. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas,” in Bonrdien, A Critical Reader (Oxlord: Blackwell, 1999), 222 w stor Garcia Canelini, Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1977); Las culeurns populares en el carpitatisimo (Mexico: Nueva Vision, 1982); Néstor Garcia Canclini and Juan Villoro, eds., Lar ereatividad redistribuida (Mexico: Siglo XX1, 2013); Pierre Bourdieu, Socivlogia y Culiara, ed. Néstor Garcia Canclini (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1990); Néstor Garcia Canclini, Couswauidores y cindadanos. Conflictos mulrient- turtles de te globalisneiin (México: Grijalbo, 1995); Diferentes, designates ydesconeciados, Mapas de ln turerculruralidad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2004), Denis Baranger, “The Reception of Bourdieu in Latin America and Argentina,” Sociolygicn 2 (2008), 2 +. Bayanger, “The Reception of Bourdieu,” 2. Garcia Canclini, “Introduccion,” in Bourdieu, Svciolagia y cultura, 9-50. Néstor Garcia Canclini, Culenras bibridas. Estratenias para entrar y salir de fn inodernidad (México: Grijalbo, 1990); La Sociedad sin relato. weBOURDIEG IN LATIN AMERICA THROCGIL TUE EYES OF NESTOR GARCEN ol 10 VW. 12. 3. 14. 15 16 17 18. 19, Vw - x were Nhbty Sun we be 0 » Garefa Canclini, Culinras popnilares, 75 noe » Garcia oG = Antropoluzia ¥ estérice de lo ismanencin (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2010); Néstor Garcia Canclini and Ernesto Piedras Feria, eds., Lay Industrias Culenrales y ef Desarrollo de México (Mexico: Siglo XXL, 2006). Garcia Canclini, Arte poprfar, 96. All translations are mine unless other wise noted, Néstor Garefa Canclini, Lat produceiin simbalica. Teovin y iétodo en suci~ oloyia del arte (Mexico: Siglo XX1, 1979), 37, Gareia Canclini, Prod neciin simebilicn, 90 Pierre Bourdieu, Iu Other Words, Eways Towards a Reflexive Socivlugy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19901, 190-91 Garcia Canclini, Prudnveiin simbslica, 48 Gareia Canclini, “Introduccion,” 14 Gareia Canelini, Diferenres, 91-108. 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