Disclaimer: This will be an ongoing post. That is, it will be a permanent (or open-ended) draft, which I will edit and expand as this idea develops. I’ll do my best to clearly mark these edits and expansions.
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After spending over a decade working in the field of media studies, I am absolutely convinced that a Latin American branch of media studies is not only important but also urgent, and certainly possible. This doesn’t simply mean investigating more projects and case studies from this region—in fact, there is a significant number of scholars in the Global North who, across several fields, have devoted their careers to such an effort. Perhaps more importantly, it means developing a research tradition that, emerging from Latin America itself, can establish methods and theories that genuinely resonate with, and are the product of, the historical and cultural complexity of our region. Some may argue that this branch of media studies already exists, or that it is at least a latent development waiting to be drawn out of a series of ongoing research endeavors in neighboring fields such as cultural studies, STS, or the history of science and technology. I fundamentally disagree with this view, and that’s exactly why I’ve decided to write this text.
At the risk of generalizing—I’ll attempt to nuance this as I develop my argument—I argue that, on the one hand, fields such as media studies, STS, and the history of science and technology are the product of hardcore Western cultural frameworks. As such, these frameworks produce and/or follow modes of inquiry that allow us to observe and analyze objects and phenomena as if they were—sometimes they are—intrinsically entangled with this Western provenance. However, for this very reason, they don’t suffice for—even if some refuse to acknowledge it—objects and phenomena that are foreign to these Western frameworks. I’m well aware that I’m not the first to point this out, and this gives me the chance to introduce the first nuance to this generalization. Latour attempted to account for these cultural frictions with his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) and Reset Modernity (2016), among other works. The role that Viveiros de Castro’s notion of the extramoderns (2016) played in this context is an important and powerful example of the effort to acknowledge these frictions. However, I don’t believe that this or other similar endeavors have succeeded in producing, in this case, a fundamentally non-Western STS methodological and theoretical framework.
Before somebody asks: But what about Viveiros de Castro’s work, then? This lands precisely on the other side of my argument. I do think that—unlike STS—cultural studies in Latin America, where Viveiros de Castro and many other anthropologists have had a tremendous influence, has been able to develop a series of methods and theories that are genuinely Latin American. This is so not only because of their provenance but also because of the research-object epistemological circularity they make possible. The problem, however, is that cultural studies overwhelmingly understands and problematizes technology—or media technologies, for that matter—as a fundamentally Western apparatus. Put simply, this perspective contends that if the history of the relationships between the West and the Global South has coloniality and imperialism as its main pillars, technology has historically been tantamount to technologies of domination. I don’t fully agree with such a view.
Of course, the contemporary and global understanding of what a piece of technology is—a computer, an AI agent, an internet server, a cell phone, a data center, a satellite, etc.—refers in fact to Western developments. But if we expand this understanding and we purposefully push it beyond what we have been told technology is and is not—even as a thought experiment, if you will—then it is evident that there is also a history of technology, as we Latin Americans know all too well, developed in the non-Western world. Consider, for example, the Nazca Lines in what is today Peru. They call them lines, but they are in fact a sophisticated system of symbols that, developed two thousand years ago, aimed to be a cosmological technology for, so to speak, terrestrial communication with the universe. Western scholars may argue that this system is definitely not a piece of technology but a technique; that there is no lógos embedded in such a tekhné. You can see here the trap of the Western analytical framework: it is not a piece of technology if it doesn’t fit the Western formulation. But even if one remains within that framework for a minute—just to stir things up—it would be necessary to point out that the lógos in that formula became tantamount to modern Western science only because some all-too-modern Western men decided so. We could have a very long historical and philosophical discussion about how fair and accurate this claim is, but let’s settle it for now by acknowledging that in ancient Greece the notion of lógos had nothing to do with 19th-century European thermodynamics.
As the ancient notion of lógos suggests, any discussion around the question of technology has to necessarily recognize that, beyond technics and technicity, aspects of rhetoric and narrative—are these the right terms?—must also be taken into account. Working out what this actually means for reconsidering objects such as the Nazca Lines as technology is precisely the as-yet-unfulfilled task of a Latin American branch of media studies. These symbols on the vast uplands of the desert conceal not only a cosmological form of communication, but also an inner cultural narrative. They are, in this sense, a technology configured around the lógos of language—certainly other languages—and not the lógos of mathematics and logic, which modern science and philosophy have convinced us is what technology is all about.
As is already evident, we lack the right concepts to study and problematize these cases and issues without resorting to Western frameworks. This is certainly a major but inevitable challenge for the Latin American branch of media studies: to develop our own theories and methods. What we do have, however, is an aesthetic. I’m not talking here about the aesthetic qualities of the objects and cases we Latin American media scholars are compelled to study—which are certainly a precious asset for this endeavor—but about the aesthetic that circulates silently among us, in our cultures, in the way we approach technology. I mean the way in which this still unnamed lógos tells us something—something that we can’t really hear or understand yet—when we see a broken blender holding a plant in a forgotten garden, when we see a long, straight highway cutting a red hill in two, when we see, that’s right, a satellite-TV antenna fighting against the rain on a roof that can barely remain standing. These aesthetic murmurs are the echo, I argue, of that which, imitating the Westerners, we can for now only call lógos, but which carries the breath of what the peoples who originally populated the lands of Latin America—de la América toda, I dare say—left us.
Even if we still can’t name it—not properly—we can feel this breath, this lógos, as an intuition—an intuition that Latin American artists, especially Latin American media artists, have been able to explore, represent, and even simulate, in ways no media scholar has been willing to do. This should be taken as a challenge, as an invitation to find in this intuition or breath the thread that can help us develop the framework we need to understanding the true Latin American relationship, present and historical, with technology. In this sense, the most productive path for Latin American media scholars to begin this quest may be to jointly study historical-cultural cases with artistic ones.
