“The revolution is a new form of communication” …

“To dialogue is to enter into a person-to-person relationship, it is to launch my word to meet not a resonance but a response. When I address myself to another, it is not a universal discourse that I am looking for, but on the contrary, his particular word. To ask a question is to assume a name. In his response or his silence, the other accepts or not to form the “we” which makes communication possible. The dialogue is thus woven on a background of names, or better still of personal pronouns which form the texture of intersubjectivity ”. This is how Jesús Martín-Barbero understood communication. The paragraph corresponds to his doctoral thesis in philosophy, presented in 1972 at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and first published in 2018 by the Javeriana University of Bogotá. The same work in which he asserted that “as the foundation and root of sociality, communication becomes the fabric in which men are linked and knotted. From where every revolution is the search for a new form of communication and every change that affects communication attacks the elements of coexistence”.

Jesús Martín-Barbero, native Spanish (Ávila, October 3, 1937), Colombian citizen since 2003 and Latin American by decision when since the 1970s he decided to tirelessly travel this part of the world, he saved the cultural wealth of our peoples to use as a prism to look at history, political and social processes and communication, with their feet planted in this land. He died on June 12 in Bogota.

Those who have passed through Latin American and world universities studying his proposals, reading his vast bibliography will be able to account for the capacity of a philosopher who, through anthropology and semiosis, transformed the field of studies of communication to save the centrality of the person in communication processes and asserts culture, in particular Latin American popular culture, as a space of multiple riches. Amidst a prolific scientific and academic production, “From Media to Mediation” (1987) is probably his most read work by researchers and communication educators around the world.. He affirmed there, in dissonance with those who maintained the omnipotence of the media system, that “to think the processes of communication starting from there, starting from the culture, is to stop thinking about them starting from the disciplines and the media is breaking with security that reducing the problem of communication to technology ”. (From the media to mediations, 1987). This look at culture rooted in Latin American history also allowed him to claim the ways of making politics of Latin American cultural processes, with popular radio, radio theater and telenovela, circus, music. , theater, by promoting research between the cultural industry and popular expression. , always based on the recognition of local identities.

He was the creator and director of the Communication Department of the Universidad del Valle de Cali (Colombia), between 1975 and 1995. Between 1999 and 2003 he taught at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, in Guadalajara (Mexico). He was president of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC). But beyond these spaces, most of the study houses in the region and in different parts of the world have opened their doors to listen to him. Many others have recognized him with titles and accolades. In Argentina, the National University of Rosario and the University of Cuyo have awarded him honorary doctorates. In Colombia, the Javeriana University of Bogotá and the University of Antioquia (Medellín) have done the same. The list of academic awards is long.

Although Jesús Martín-Barbero is marked in the history of thought as the one who changed the interpretive paradigm of communication sciences, his ideas and thoughts have largely transcended this field. He campaigned for the idea of ​​emancipation. In 2014 and on the occasion of one of his visits to the country, Jesús Martín-Barbero declared Page 12 this “Emancipation is that type of freedom that makes us more equal, that is to say that destroys all inequalities that they colincharon (editor’s note: in Colombia colinchar: integrate, unite), that they clung to a completely perverse and unemancipated notion of freedom. It is the rich man who thinks that with his money, since it is his, he can do what he wants. One moment. We all live on this planet and then we have to start thinking of the majority and when we start to think of the majority we realize how difficult it is to help us to emancipate ourselves personally. And we know how many things we would have to free ourselves from ”.

At the same time, he allowed himself to promote “the return to chaos”, convinced that “currently this world is so out of its orbit that only a return to chaos will allow us to reinvent society”. And he encouraged the search “for a society capable of embracing all the diversity that exists on this planet today, all the diversity of sensibilities, of inventiveness, of types of hope, all of the narrative diversity that exists. today, the narrative explosion of young people. . “.

However, beyond his virtues as a philosopher and communicator, as a theoretician of the social sciences, those who had the opportunity and the chance to meet him and share with Jesús Martín-Barbero will always keep the memory of the partner, the friend, the activist, the united man, sometimes paternal, sometimes filial, always close and deeply human in every way and in the best possible way.