Abstract
The thesis proposed in this chapter refers to the impossibility of forming a regional communication research agenda without a critical, decolonising review of the epistemological coordinates governing the work of the social sciences in general and of communication. However, the first step towards this is to break through the analysis of the academic field itself in order to situate the problem beyond scientific rationality. The central argument of this thesis runs as follows: for the shape of a decolonised regional research agenda, one must look into the kind of rationality underlying the shape of the historical development of Western modernity, which, we claim, has managed to impose itself as a universal framework based on dispositifs of representation, exclusion and delegitimisation of any possible alterity.
This essay forms part of the epistemological reflections developed in the framework of Regular FONDECYT project no. 1190286, named ‘Tecnopolítica Mapuche: redes de comunicación, interculturalidad y heteronomía desde el Wallmapu’ [Mapuche Technopolitics: Communication Networks, Interculturality and Heteronomy from the Wallmapu] and funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT), Government of Chile.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time, CIESPAL stood for ‘Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Periodismo para América Latina’ [International Centre for Advanced Studies in Journalism for Latin America]. The substitution of Communication for Journalism is evidence of a real concern to address the complexity inherent in communication as a social mediation that goes beyond mere practice of journalism.
- 2.
According to Vasallo de Lopes, the discursive context relates to the ‘history of a scientific field, the resources whereby it gradually takes shape, strengthening its traditions and trends of research’ (1999: 14).
- 3.
While colonialism and coloniality possess a relation of interdependency, they must not be seen as concepts that refer to the same reality. The following quotation clarifies this idea: ‘In analytical terms, we cannot confuse colonialism—a form of politico-administrative domination involving a set of institutions and metropolises/colonies—with coloniality—which refers to a deeper, more comprehensive pattern of global power. Once the process of colonisation ends, coloniality remains effective as a patterning of thought and framework for action that legitimise the differences between societies, subjects and knowledge. To put it another way, colonialism has been one of the constitutive historical experiences of coloniality, but coloniality does not stop at colonialism; rather, it involves many other experiences and connections operative even today.’ (Restrepo and Rojas 2010: 16)
- 4.
The concept of heteronomy is taken from Marc Angenot’s (1998) proposal for the study of social discourse. Angenot states that discourse analysis must consider the totality of existing systems, including those produced as dissenting discourses. The heteronomous refers, then, to expressions that burst into the discursive hegemony prevailing in specific social and historical contexts.
- 5.
Studies like Torrico’s (2014) establish that communication has been structured along the parameters of matrix theories, which, in particular historical periods, define the scientific field of social science.
- 6.
This concept goes a long way to capturing what we term here ‘colonial/racial misanthropic scepticism’, as elaborated by Maldonado-Torres (2007). For this Puerto Rican author, it accounts for the questioning that has emerged around the ‘other’ as human. According to Maldonado-Torres, ‘colonial/racial misanthropic scepticism’: ‘reveals doubts around the obvious. Statements like ‘You are human’ become cynical rhetorical questions like: ‘Are you really human?’ ‘You have rights’ becomes ‘Why do you think you have rights?’ By the same token, expressions like ‘You are a rational being’ become ‘Are you really rational?’ Misanthropic scepticism is like a worm at the core of modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 136).
- 7.
According to Foucault, subject knowledge represents ‘a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity’ (Foucault 1996: 18).
- 8.
This Manichaeism stems from the process of structural fragmentation that informs the modern project. For Edgardo Lander (2000), this is explained at the cognitive level via two macro-dimensions: ‘The first dimension refers to the successive separations of the world of the ‘real’ that occur historically in Western society and the ways knowledge is built on the bases of this process of successive separations. The second dimension is the way the modern knowledge is connected with the organisation of power, especially the colonial/imperial power relations that constitute the modern world’ (Lander 2000: 13–14).
- 9.
The notion of episteme is used in the Foucauldian (1968) sense to make explicit the existence of contextual rules defining the legitimacy of knowledge and their deployment as an exercise of power. These rules cannot remain trapped in the field of science alone but must be heeded in relation to the historical, administrative, economic and cultural regimes that intersect in the configuration of modern scientificity.
- 10.
For Dussel, the design of a trans-modern world lies in the need to incorporate innovating logics of human cohabitation founded on alternative criteria which have prospered thanks to modernity, coloniality, capitalism and hegemonic globalisation: ‘the cultures of the majority of humanity excluded by modernity (that are not and never will be post-modern) and by globalisation (because poverty is need “without money”, without solvency, and is therefore not a market) hoard a vast volume and number of cultural inventions necessary to the future survival of humanity and to a new definition of nature-humanity relation from the ecologic point of view and from the point of view of inter-human solidarity relations (not reductively defined with the solipsistic, schizoid criterion of increased profit rates’ (Dussel 2004: 222)).
- 11.
On this point, Tuhiwai (2016) establishes that research on indigenous peoples has fixed systems of representation that operate on the basis of a colonial/racial logic. She also states that the term ‘investigación’ [research] is conceived by many indigenous peoples as a constitutive act of imperial reason and policies of subjugation and domination.
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Maldonado, C. (2022). From the Episteme of Domination to an ‘Other Possible Communicology’. In: Del Valle Rojas, C.F., Sierra Caballero, F. (eds) Communicology of the South . Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08117-0_4
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