Apuntes para una reflexión sobre comunicación y política

Abstract

This text outlines a theoretical proposal for a conception of the political that takes as its point of departure two main conditions: on the one hand, the political as a feature of collective action is capable of creating the social experience which conjugates time, history and identity as collective processes, and, on the other hand, the political as an index of the exercise of explicit power, in the sense put forward by Castoriadis. This conceptual analysis makes it possible to distinguish the political from other forms of the exercise of power, which have non comparable qualities: according to the first one, power emerges from the normative web of culture itself; according to a second one, power emerges from the strategies forged by functional institutional agents of social control, which openly aim to determine social management procedures, to achieve control of political agents or to breed forms of domination, explicitly oriented to serve a specific, predetermined, political destiny. The political conceived as an undetermined feature of social action reveals the chief facets of its sense: its attributes of sheer event, radical creation, and undetermined movement, likely to engender its own values and teleology in its emergence. As a consequence, the political is also envisioned in relation to symbolic processes and their sway upon the social production of mass media.