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I started with an anecdote. As a professor of the subject of general sociology in the degree of international relations at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid, I used Armand Mattelart’s essay as a mandatory text History of the information society. A critique of the apologists of the information society and a history of its evolution. Every year, students came up asking about his work. Therein lies the greatness and strength of his thought, whetting the appetite for knowledge in young people who begin their intellectual journey.
Focusing on social communication means bringing up Marshall McLuhan, but few relate it to the most prominent theorist of the 20th century in the discipline: Armand Mattelart, a Belgian sociologist who died on October 31. Mattelart dedicated his intellectual and militant life to unraveling the mechanisms of ideological domination in the political forms adopted by the dominant classes and the development of mass communication. Living in Chile since 1963, after the 1973 coup d’état he moved to France together with his partner Michelle Mattelart, a pioneer in the studies of social communication, gender and ideology in photonovelas.
The work of Armand Mattelart can be defined as germinal. He rose to fame for the writing in tandem, with Ariel Dorfman, To read Donald Duck. Mass communication and colonialism (21st century, 1972).
In those years, pointing out that comics projected class ideology was heresy. Noting that Walt Disney’s cartoons contained hidden advertising by using a simile meant breaking the fantasy world on which he built his factory. This is reflected in the synopsis on the back cover in its 39th edition: “Undressing the idol by denouncing the fallacies contained in his creations meant breaking family harmony and, with it, dismantling the metaphor of bourgeois thought that Donald embodied.”
And so its authors added: “Donald was the spokesman not only of the american way of lifebut also of the dreams, aspirations and patterns of behavior that the United States demanded of dependent countries for their own salvation. The comic revealed itself as an instruction manual for underdeveloped peoples on how their relations with the centers of international capitalism should be.
But Mattelart is not only the co-author of To read Donald Duckthe most cited, but not the most relevant. His work alone or in collaboration forms the foundations of the theory of contemporary social communication. Early on, together with Carmen Castillo and Leonardo Castillo, he published The ideology of domination in a dependent societyan analysis that “aims to dismantle the structures – of discourse – referring to the rationality of domination of traditional groups through an ideological reading and to determine their flexibility and recovery power to neutralize the changes induced by other social sectors.” And in 1972 it appears Aggression from space. Culture and napalm in the satellite era. Primitive work that studies the links between comics, discourse and political power, uncovering how the United States Information Agency had “prepared pamphlets to benefit private oil exploration to be distributed in Ecuador by Texaco-Gulf Oil (…) and in Bolivia it had produced a book of comic strips on urban terrorism to be distributed by the Ministry of Information (…) there were 148 thousand copies of the comic strip The disappointment. The copies without its trademark were sent to the agency’s subsidiaries in 10 Latin American countries.
Revealing the forms of control of the dominant classes through social communication marked his intellectual imprint. Nobody like him captured the ideological mechanisms, the political forms, the dynamics on which the capitalist State built its living space, generating a new type of social communication. Problem addressed in Communication-world. History of ideas and strategies.
Likewise, his concern about the militarization of society, and its repercussions on the violation of human rights as part of a theory of information in times of total war, led him to write in 1978 Ideology, information and military stateemphasizing that “… it is not about, as in the sixties, about involving the population in a model of consumption and aspirations, having the middle classes as a reference and target (…) It is rather about, as in any war, about destroying the enemy.”
In the barrage of neoliberal reforms, together with Michelle, they publish The media in times of crisisa preview of the changes that will lead to cybercapitalism: “…after the tape recorder, the video disc and the teletext, we will soon have the computer at home: we are entering the era of telematics (…) And the culture industry, like the traditional sectors, does not escape redeployment: television, the press, cinema, publishing, leisure are the subject of a total redistribution of cards with great interest: the search for consensus lost.” Afterwards, it will come out The invention of communicationkey to understanding the union between communication, dominance and control of the media, as the last stage of cultural imperialism and mass psychology. And already in 2015, with André Vitalis, it saw the light From Orwell to cyber controlwhich addresses the transition towards a digital imperialism of cybernetic control and the beginning of neocortical warfare, thanks to new technologies of cultural and ideological domination.
Armand Mattelart’s work has been prolific. However, his writings highlight the theoretical rigor and militant commitment to making visible the ideological mechanisms of social control present in social communication, intertwined with the forms of cultural colonialism developed by imperialism. Without a doubt, his reflections earn the immortality of the giants of critical thinking.
