BEYOND THE CITY

A SEMIOTIC OVERVIEW

JORGE ECHA VARRIA C.

"Through the years a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face."

Jorge Luis Bo rges

Because of the city's complex network of relationships on multiple levels, a common subject appears repeatedly throughout contemporary bibliography on urbanization as a self-critique common to different theoretical approaches. It is the assumption that the city cannot be embodied in a single framework, which leads, in turn, to a recognition of the need for more "qualitative" tools. Almost all of these proposals include both an implicit admission of theoretical weakness and a subordination of the "new qualitatively-focused" disciplines to such classical disciplines on urban growth as economics, history, sociology, anthropology, etc. Thus, the new vision has remained strongly limited by a self-defense of the major disciplinary frontiers. As a result the city has remained in need of an adequate common ground of interdisciplinary interpretative models able to avoid a "dependency theory" in relation to their own academic context.

MacC annell (1982) explores what he called post-disciplinary fields involved in this effort to cross disciplinary boundary lines in order to extend the known models of culture beyond the classical approaches, and thereby to contribute to a general semiotics of culture. Blo nsky (1987) traced this evolution of the semiotic vision in three stages. The first stage, ruled by the linguistic sign, sought to see the world or to "catch its meaning" in a logocentric manner, that is, to put the signifier in the service of the signified. Such semiotic thought slipped to being a mechanical technique for reading only what can be verbalized; and lost interest in the social character of the sign. A second semiotic approach concerned the functioning of the world's semantic organization; it attended not to meaning but to signification or the production of meaning. In this stage of development semiotics focused upon urban studies in architecture, literature and anthropology and explored the deep meaning behind non-verbal systems. In its present, third, stage semiotic studies now accept as a main task to emphasize the mechanisms for the production of culture, cultural values and interactions, and changes in the perception and action of societies, in order to enable us to perceive and comprehend these in terms of their structural relationships with other groups and entities.¹

This semiotic interest is not possible without a radical critique of the logocentric model of thought, the fictional and arbitrary philosophical and moral divisions (self/other, West/East, signifier/signified, subject/object . . . ) which have supported conventional Western science and philosophy. This model of thought, or "logocentric epoch" in Derrida, is metaphysical closure, a reduction to empirical and rationalist models interested in the search for systematic knowledge where "truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions," as Nietzsche puts it (quoted by Nor ris, l983). Hence, the contemporary semiotic movement addresses "the problem of how we know and how things mean from a non-abstract standpoint" (Mac Cannell, 1982). This, in turn, transforms semiotic concern into potential political action, because, in "seeing the world as signs able to deceive, semiotics should teach the need to fix on every fact, even the most mundane, and ask `what do you mean?'" (Blo nsky, l987).

The privileged position given to language in earlier semiotics (very clearly in Benveniste and Barthes) is also transcended as semiotics turns to the explanation of meaningful human existence. This liberates meaning from language and vice versa, centering and decentering the linguistic hierarchy on a Freudian-like condensation point, at which the sign-components of meaning join to produce meaning.² Some cultural products can re-open cultures to creative speculation in the same way that dreams condense in images many experiences and emotions, and allow individual psyches to face them. This semiotic approach is also cross-disciplinary. Her meneutics, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic anthropology and semiotics itself intersect in a mutual analysis. This dynamic is found in all cultural systems.³

The first milestone in this contemporary effort at cross-disciplinary experience was the work of Lev S. Vygotsky on many issues related to the field of semiotics. Specialized in literature and interested in the psychology of art, Vyg otsky in the early 20s began the development of a unified Marxist psychology. The three sources Werts ch (1986) identified for the Vygotskian construct were: the psychological approaches of his time (from Pa vlov to Pia get), Marxist philosophy, and the semiotic theory of cultural development. To these I would add his primary interest in art as the catalyst of his entire framework. Vygotsky developed the Pavlovian concept of the Second Signal System, which he described as "the world encoded in language: nature transformed by history and culture" (Wertsch, 1986).

On Marxist theory Vygotsky based both his assumption of the social origin of psychological processes and his methodology. He sought psychological support for Marx's basic claims about the social origin of consciousness and the link between natural and cultural human development.

Through his interest on the nature of signs and their impact on the organization of culture he was able to recover the notion of mediation for signs and language.⁴ In this way, he came into a unified explanation of how, through the progressive control of external signs by children, consciousness first emerges and how subsequently the move from elementary to superior mental processes is shaped and mediated by language. Werstch (Me rtz and Parm entier, 1985) suggests that the work of Bakhtine, which develops a more exact notion of semiotic social mediation than Vygotsky, could provide a theory of semiotic mediation including both social context and individual psychological processes. Bruner (1986) remarks that Vygot sky's work was first conceived in tracing the changing peasant mentality through language and its products.

Vygotsky's work contributed to the research of such American cognitive and cultural scientists as Jerome Bruner and Michel Silverstein, and to the valuable neuropsychological approach of the Soviet, Alexander Lu ria. In summarizing Vygotsky's contribution, Bruner says: "Looking at his work again after many years of inspiration from it, I think he provides the still needed provocation to find a way of understanding man as a produce of culture as well as a product of nature" (1986).

This relationship between language and cultural change, which is close to Benveniste's assertion, is modified in the Tartu school. They see this as "dependent, at least in part, on the existence of other cultural forms" (MacCannell, 1982), which act as semiotic mechanisms of cultural evolution--meaning production structures--thereby introducing a dynamic of evolutionary elements to explain cultural change. The Tartu scholars reserved a particular primacy for "artistic acts" conceived as productive, models in generating cultural production, but almost every cultural production potentially provides a meta-system for the interpretation for other cultural aspects, as is shown in the works of Lev i-Strauss, E. Gof fman and Marvin H arris.

Based upon this conception of cultural production, Ma cCannell (1982) deduces a double interpretative model. On the one hand, cultural models appear as the result of a culture's self-reading mechanism, which is the interplay between a mnemonic function (or self-consciousness of the origins) and resistance to such remembering. On the other hand, a cultural sign model "defines a unified, and artificially schematized image that is raised to the level of a structural unity. When imposed upon the reality of this or that culture, it exerts a powerful regulating influence, preordaining the construction of culture, introducing order and eliminating contradiction" (Lotman/Uspensky quoted by MacCannell, 1982). This latter model reflects a mimetic culture--one concerned only with reproducing itself in a series of sterile images, whose social and ethnic groups construct images of themselves in order to live in this officially accepted sign world.

If it be accepted that culture is pure change,⁵ we can approach morality and values as sign systems by which "a culture is constantly in a process of being recreated and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum of negotiating and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for actions" (Bruner, 1986: 123). Thus, culture is conceived as a permanent transactional negotiation, where subjects are not limited to passive roles but are active in the creation and recreation of their culture through a redefinition or resignification of their meaning.

The structuring mechanism of values, based upon a primary associative and open act,⁶ works by creating an exchange of values or developing a comparative value set into comparative scales, this allows one sign to be compared to another or exchanged against the other in order to determine at least a relative meaning, value or worth. In the first operation the basis for the structure of values is metonymy (exchange); in the second it is metaphor (comparison). Both processes fix values and give a second nature appearance to culture, thus closing off the possibility of negotiating new meanings. "The scales of value, based upon an original metaphorization, tend to rotate ninety degrees around an axis, and to be applied metonymically to other aspects of culture. Items which should only be compared (e.g., persons) are exchanged, and items that should be exchanged (e.g., goods) became compared" (MacCannell, 1982: 35). Lot man, Usp ensky and Pjat igorskij (in Lucid, 1977 and Lotman, 1979) explored the implications of these processes through the concept of text as a separate message, perceived as being clearly different from a non-text, whose functions are its social role or ability to meet the specific needs of the collective that creates the text.

A culture's attitude towards its texts can vary from considering its texts meaningful because of their sacred character (in closed cultures) to considering them meaningful because of their functional role in historical experience. Thus, culture can be defined both as a totality of texts--or as a complexly constructed text--and as a totality of functions in which texts are derivative of a function or function set.

This does not mean, of course, that non-texts should be excluded from semiotic studies. On the contrary, their interaction with cultural texts not only "fixes" the limits of each, but also carries complementary traits of cultural expression. In fact, when a system of truth and values ceases to be considered as true and valuable by the members of society, "distrust arises toward the means that compelled perception of a message as a text and testified to its veracity and cultural significance" (Lotman and Pjatigorskij in Lucid, 1977). Only a message that does not have the marked limits of a text could fulfill the emptiness. In these processes of continually exchanging roles, a non-text fulfills the functions of texts and becomes a text itself.

Because of these semiotization and desemiotization tendencies, it is necessary to consider the description of the system of textual meanings that defines the social functions of texts in a culture. They have three types of relations, from which we can derive three independent viewpoints for cultural description:

- subtextual meanings (common linguistic meaning),

- textual meanings, and

- functions of texts into a cultural system.

From this approach, Lotman and Pjatigorskij (in Lucid, 1977) postulate the existence of two types of cultures: a text-oriented culture which tends to create specialized texts for each cultural function, and a function-centered culture which tends to erase the distinctions between texts so that uniform texts can perform the complete set of cultural functions.

Hence, through a semiotic reading the multitextual reality of a contemporary city, besides its material definition and mechanisms,⁷ could be interpreted as a product of the struggle between two cultural tendencies which are related not exclusively to the urban/rural polarity, but to different semiotic processes of cultural creation and interpretation: the homogenous attitude of the closed, text-centered societies, or the open, function-centered attitude toward culture of pluralistic societies. This could explain how, in spite of the diversified production of texts for the specific purposes of each group and/or individual in the mostly urban mass-society, instead of plurality, society achieves homogeneity and anonymity, as pointed out by Sch neck above.

It could explain also how communities lose their historical perspective and reject the plurality offered by a function-oriented culture. Text-centered cultures forget the mediation character of signs and make them sacred, reinforcing the regulatory character of modeling systems. This is the normative social definition. However, as Uspensky (Lotman, 1979) shows, conflict situations juxtapose "languages," as systems of information processing. Thereby their mechanisms are revealed and possibilities are opened for cultural awareness and change. This takes place both for the material and the non-material dimensions as languages participate in structuring all dimensions.

Culture is not a rational structure--it cannot be reduced to either its arché or its telos--but can be understood in the processes of development, of change and of reading and re-reading of its texts.⁸ Texts, signs and values communicate not only a finished product, "but also the processes which make the ongoing production of that (those) message(s) possible" (Blanchard, 1980). It is not only a question of urban values within an urban culture, but a semiotic question regarding the processes of the production of such values in order to recover the human beings "subsumed under the categories of abstract urbanization processes" (Friedman, 1987).

Vygot sky's efforts at developing a culturally based conception of cognition, that is, a cross-cultural psychology, resulted in his concept of a Zone of Proximal Development, that is, the difference between the actual development and performance of children and the superior potential level of activity they can achieve under adult guidance and with peer collaboration. On the basis of contemporary research in anthropology, Cole (in Wertsch, 1986) understands this mechanism in a cultural manner as "the structure of joint activity in any context where there are participants to exercise differential responsibilities by virtue of differential expertise."

Here several ideas converge. The role of social guidance varies in its particular shape from society to society, but that role is always related to an individual engaged in a "goal directed activity under conventionalized constraints" (Cole in Wertsch, 1986) and to the acquisition of culturally appropriated behavior as a direct result of this interaction. In traditional societies these processes act as a clear link between tradition and the present, where culture and cognition create each other. Both suggest answers to the questions on "the roots of learning in community" and the role of tradition as a significant perspective that allows judgment regarding the present, as Gad amer, points out.

This provides a basis for discussing an old polemic recently brought up by Kola kowski (in Revel, 1988). He suggests that the intellectual's role in society is to serve as critical link with the cultural tradition, not as political ruler.⁹ It helps also to understand Dech ert's (1980) definitions of subsidiarity and voluntarism as specific facets of the zone of proximal development as regards social performance dimension, and his transactional approach (Dechert, 1988) as being not human engineering, but human participation where "the pupil . . . becomes a party to the negotiatory process by which facts are created and interpreted. He becomes at once an agent of knowledge making as well as a recipient of knowledge transmission" (Br uner, 1986).

The symbolic quest for identity, a traditional topic in the arts and social research in Latin America, reflects clearly the struggle both for a transactional participation in the local and international spheres, and for an understanding of the place of tradition in modern society.¹⁰ This requires a translation of the mestizo cultural awareness, a plural level text that had been repressed or reduced to a marginal role. Although these processes began very early in the Spanish colonial city and were shaped by ideological and economic practices, it is in the contemporary city that they appeared as dynamic forces. In that generally weak and limited space for democratic expression, they appear not only as an urban power, but mostly as the historical momentum of cultural consciousness.

This finds in the city structure a sort of amplifier¹¹ for its claims, an opportunity for cultural change through an understanding of, and action upon, the mechanisms of the juxtaposition of cultural texts. "Urbanization makes the urban the primary level at which individuals now experience, live out, and react to the totality of social transformations and structures in the world around them" (Harvey, 1985). The city is a contradictory material reality which people experienced, and from which they constructed, an elementary consciousness of the meaning of its phenomena.¹² Thus, the growing of self-consciousness and identity were attached not to the land or to settlement, but to the construction of a culture that allows plurality on the basis of the common ground provided by the cities. The city is a cultural opportunity to face the "others" and, in that way, to be able to read themselves. This is an important opportunity in countries with well differentiated and isolated regions which are closed to foreign migration.

The so-called `alternative culture', developed as a marginal space won by the courageous action of people struggling against repression, is the expression of a non-textual proposal attempting to give new meaning to a culture and to traditional values. In this light the quest for identity is neither a chauvinistic or naive project, nor the possibility of realizing some kind of historical fate, but the acceptance of a semiotic and socio-historically grounded identity such as a mestizo culture. It is an `uncentered' project of culture which began before the Spanish conquest, passed through colonization into the Western and Arab legacies, received an African influence, and is still being continued as a complex everyday reality. This underlines the creative potential of culture to adapt and survive; it is a permanent effort to yield communal meaning to life in everyday interaction through non-conventional actions and alternative communication. In this it uses both traditional, popular and rejected texts to forge a colorful and energetic affirmation of life as based on the dynamic of difference.

As Du ssel (1980) remarks, popular culture in Latin America implies a project for the liberation of culture.¹³ This must be shaped by a new pedagogical project which, in turn, is realized through the reciprocal interaction of popular culture and intellectual reflection. This is a very controversial issue and is widely discussed. In any case it points to the interaction of political change, cultural dynamic and pedagogical mediation.¹⁴

Heraclitus's conception of logos as a wall which protects the city from barbarians, is translated in Latin America into a logos that denies alternative projects of culture and political action. In doing this it benefits the imperial culture (Fre ire, 1971) as a prevalent text which overwhelms the possibilities in the mestizo cultures to giving integrative meaning to tradition and change, since "a live tradition is both communitary and historically conscious" (Dussel, 1980). In contrast, the new pedagogical project refers ethically to alternative projects. In these, cultural transactions and the recognition and action in a cultural version of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development play the main roles both in the acceptance of a set of integrative skills developed by popular cultures, and in the new dynamic of cultural change.

Lef ebvre (1972) explains how urban experience changes every day life through transforming quantity into quality by the intervention of ludic activity and fiesta times; these restore the preeminence of usage value over exchange value. Following a different pattern of analysis, Friedmann (1987) in comparing such features as streets and markets in North American and Latin American cities observes that the interaction in the barrio, based upon a permanent usage of streets and nuclear plaza-like spaces,

brought back to life (the idea the polis) without fanfare or even knowledge of the extraordinary nature of this event. . . . A revolution without violence, the (new) polis is engulfing the ancient régime that clings ever more desperately to its privileges. This constitutes an emergence of polis as a convivial society, in the course of which it is discovering its own forms and institutions. Dense social networks cross and recross the barrio, giving rise to myriad activities which, taken together, sustain life.

Hence, it is not at all surprising that literature and arts, as privileged ambits of ludic exercise, according to Hui zinga (1943), allow for the insertion of a reflexive consciousness into daily urban interaction and make possible the continuation of a man-world dialogue as a double presence of mankind in the world and of cosmos in man. In environmental esthetic activity, the daily patient exercise of communal practices, and the fiesta's esthetic--the extraordinary emergence of collective and individual beings--provide the possibility of decoding the processes through which a culture is built and projected into the future, as Sepúlveda (1982) points out. In short, creative activity established the basis for an integrative space of social practice. Literature and the arts provided the first approaches to these alternative and lively realities.

In a Vygots kyan transliteration of concepts, this Zone of Proximal Development is a potential space for communitary education established on a transactional base. It enables us to look at ourselves through a de-centered project of culture and life and to look at the so-called "poor neighborhoods" as a common ground which establishes a new standpoint on the urban processes. This is the direction of social semiotic activity which is the basic context of a life. "Despite its Spartan circumstances, life in the barrios is a generous and optimistic life based on natural aid, cooperation and democratic self-guidance" (Fried mann, 1987).

This recognition of new social practices linked to rapid urbanization processes could help also to incorporate in social studies the visions of poets like Neruda in describing Valparaiso's barrios, as pointed out by Walton, or the vital network of spatial and esthetic acts of appropriation in the working-class barrios in Medellín. This appears in the painful beauty of the works of, among others, Helí Ramír ez, Fernando Mac ías, Juan José Ho yos and José Libardo Po rras,¹⁵ who themselves are human and cultural projects of their community's semiotic definition. Sklovskij (in Fokk ema and Ibsch, 1986) observed that "only the creation of new artistic forms may restore to man awareness of the world, resurrect things and kill pessimism," this echoes Proust's claim that art is the only way of getting outside of ourselves and knowing another's view of the universe.

Those fragmentary constructions of semiotic space, each one a non-text with proper and shared values, provide us with an ability to understand the mechanisms for building up communities on the basis, not only of conflict resolution, but of the esthetic appropriation of cultural texts and physical realities. This can be done only on condition, as de Certeau (1986) points out, that before being studied popular culture not be censored in an attempt to eliminate its danger toward the prevalent text. Communities, also, are built by their active responses to concrete situations, regardless of the nature of the circumstances.¹⁶

Latin American cities are implied, even without being stated, in what Wal lace (Cau ghey, 1984) called a "revitalization movement." This is a radical cultural reform in the search for a more satisfying culture, through a growing recognition of the multiplicity of texts, languages and voices, each of which "mutually inter-animates the others in a dialogic relationship" (Bakhtin, 1985). In fact, they face the challenge of their own renovation, as Bre cht observes, "the assimilation of the cultural legacy is not a peaceful process" (Fokkema and Ibsch, 1986) in either the material or the symbolic orders.

Lot man (Lu cid, 1977) proposes that each culture assumes different attitudes toward signs, attitudes of variable semioticity. These vary from the so-called medieval high level of semioticity where nothing is culturally meaningless, to the enlightenment cultural position based on qualifying things as natural or unnatural. Then, signs are disapproved and only the world of objects is taken as real. Concepts of social value are also linked with these extreme positions and their historical variations and vary between two poles. On the one hand is an axiology of the sign marked "not only by the value of the thing for which it is a substitute in the cultural code's general system, but also by a certain qualitative characteristic in the relation between content and expression, the presence of the creator in his creation." (Lotman in Lucid, 1977). On the other hand is the enlightenment position where "things that only received a meaning in sign situations are revealed to be valueless and false" (Lotman in Lucid, 1977). The effort to bring together the "medieval" and the "enlightenment" positions toward cultural signs is in some way the effort to introduce social and cultural modernization without discarding traditions.¹⁷ The attempt of the city to rule culture through an "enlightenment" set of value relationships in all its actions and institutions has not been successful in Latin America. The logocentric model of city forgets both the semiotic mobility of the cultural text according to which different information is furnished from the same text and the same cultural rules of encoding messages.¹⁸ It forgets as well the existence of a multitextual reality at the base of Latin America historical construction.

The complicated tissue of cultural production in which different connections alternate, overlap or combine to determine the texture of the whole--transliterating Heisenberg--is produced in semiotic mediation. This semiotic environment makes human consciousness possible and is now an important concern for Colombian social and human research. I have tried to show here that the main issue in this research tendency is cultural-dynamic. Cities play an important role, but not the only one, for other semiotic processing levels are also implied in this change. In general, these works include the following.

a. The Cultural Development Plan for Antioquia, which has a broad interest in urging an interdisciplinary approach to cultural manifestations on the regional level.

b. The socio-historical research done by Orlando Fals-Borda. He develops the model of research and reflection through community participation (investigación-reflexión-acción) in order to recover the hidden historical development of marginal communities. This model has been used to obtain materials and approaches to communitary education and participation.

c. Jesús Martín Bar bero's work in progress on soap operas as significant structures of the perception of everyday life.

d. The film work of Gloria Triana is a first attempt to give to national public opinion a deep, serious and aesthetic view of marginal communities throughout the country.

e. The filmwork of Víctor Gaviria, a young director, to develop a proper language for approaching regional identity.

f. The semiotic work of Armando Silva on the use of spatial relations and marginal communication in a public university, and his work on popular markets and cemeteries.

g. The effort of a handful of students and teachers to apply semiotics models to study and understand the use of public parks, fashions or political cartoons (Universidad Nacional, Medellín).

h. The deep insights of CINEP in its research on popular culture and alternative communication.

i. The academic awareness of Antioquia's universities and cultural institutions in discussing and extending the basis for research and action on culture, concretized in periodic meetings to discuss theoretical and practical issues in applying semiotic models to cultural analysis.

j. The architectural effort to identify the shapes of our space, color and use of native materials.

All these efforts, and many more, suppose a broad consciousness and an academic response to the challenge of cultural change. Returning to Borges' quotation at the beginning of this paper, it is perhaps an attempt to recognize our own face in the labyrinth of culture, while we are yet alive, through creative and culturally renovative approaches. Thomas Ku hn (as quoted by Alves P ires, F., 1986) suggests that the evolution of science is linked to revolutionary transformations.

Sa vater (1983) speakes against the idea of a well defined identity, against the utopia that excludes doubt and imperfection: "Man's city must not be a mausoleum but a work in progress; it must remain as open and ever unfinished as Penelope's fabric or Ulysses' sea" (Savater, 1983).

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

Medellin, Colombia

1. This project is also close to Habermas' proposal in Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, l971) relating specific symbolic acts to the broader symbolic environment in which they occur, instead of relating culture to social structure.

2. Derri da's work pointed this out (see MacCannell, 1982; Derrida, 1977 and Nor ris, 1982).

3. MacC annell (1982) explores deeply the development and implications of this semiotic model. See also John N. Deeley Introducing Semiotics: Its History and Doctrine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

4. See also Wert sch, 1985.

5. "Cultures do not continue by repeating themselves. They grow and change, yet remain the same" (Bakhtin, 1985).

6. For a complementary elaboration of this idea, see Evon Z. Vo gt and Ethel Alb ert, The Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures (New York: Atheneum, 1966).

7. "Bakhtin . . . pointed out that within the domain of culture it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between expression and meaning" (Fok kema and Ibs ch, 1986). Lot man and Usp enskij suscribe to this conception, developing a definition of meaning as "the invariant in reversible operations of translation" (see Lotman, 1979).

8. Ja uss (in Fokkema and Ibsch, 1986) observes that even where there are a plurality of meanings in the text, only certain possibilities can be chosen at the expense of others. In this Jauss adds a clarification to Eco's "Opera Aperta."

9. See also Ba rthes (1964) and Freire (1970).

10. Pope John Paul II in his message to intellectuals and university teachers in Medellin, pointed out: ". . . la identidad cultural es un proceso dinámico y crítico: es un momento en el cual se recrea en el momento presente un patrimonio pasado y se proyecta hacia el futuro para que sea asimilado por generaciones nuevas. De este modo se asegura la identidad y el progreso de un grupo social" (Medellín: Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 1986).

11. See Rest repo (1984) for a discussion of what he called "the village roots of corruptness", an attempt to show how many contemporary problems are not exclusively urban related in Latin America, mainly in the field of changes in value patterns.

12. For urban consciousness formation see Har vey (1985), where he relates the urbanization of capital and the urbanization of consciousness. See also Cau ghey (1984) and Ber ger and Luckmann (1966) on the cultural relativity of conscioussness building.

13. Project means here "ideal", in the sense given to it for the phenomenology of axiological ethics (Max Scheller in Dussel, 1980).

14. See, for example, Octavio Pa z, El laberinto de la soledad (México: FCE, 1973); Enrique Duss el (1980); José Vasconcelos La raza Cósmica (México: Espasa-Calpe, 1966); Paulo Freire, Pedagogía del oprimido (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1970) and La educación como práctica de la libertad (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971); Frantz Fa non, Los condenados de la tierra (México: FCE, 1969).

15. Helí Ra mírez, En la parte alta abajo--poems; La noche de su desvelo--novel; Luis Fernando Ma cías, Amada está lavando-novel; Juan José Hoy os, Tuyo es mi corazón-novel; José Libardo Por ras, Es tarde en San Bernardo-short stories.

16. Linking together some of these issues, J.L. Cau ghey observes, "The mass media did not create these (pernicious) values. They have their roots in the American values system".

17. The new economic approaches developed by Manfred Max Ne ef in Development Dialogue (special issue, 1986) and Hernando de Soto, El otro sendero (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 1987), attempt to put together this multiple definition of culture and the creatively oriented community building ecomomic alternatives in Latin American countries. Needs are both lack and potency.

18. As shown by M.L. Lekom ceva and B.A. Uspenskij in their work on fortune telling with playing cards as a simple syntaxis semiotic system that involves different information (Lucid, 1977).

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