The reader of this book may feel disconcerted, not so much because one of his idols turns out to have feet of clay, but rather because the kind of language we use here is intended to break with the false solemnity which generally cloaks scientific investigation. In order to attain knowledge, which is a form of power, we cannot continue to endorse, with blinded vision and stilted jargon, the initiation rituals with which our spiritual high priests seek to legitimize and protect their exclusive privileges of thought and expression. Even when denouncing prevailing fallacies, investigators tend to fall with their language into the same kind of mystification which they hope to destroy. This fear of breaking the confines of language, of the future as a conscious force of the imagination, of a dose and lasting contact with the reader, this dread of appearing insignificant and naked before one’s particular limited public, betrays an aversion for life and for reality as a whole. We do not want to be like the scientist who takes his umbrella with him to go study the rain.
We are not about to deny scientific rationalism. Nor do we aspire to some clumsy popularization. What we do hope to achieve is a more direct and practical means of communication, and to reconcile pleasure with knowledge.
The best critical endeavor incorporates, apart from its analysis of reality, a degree of methodological self-criticism. The problem here is not one of relative complexity or simplicity, but one of bringing the terms of criticism itself under scrutiny.
Readers will judge this experiment for themselves, preferably in an active, productive manner. It results from a joint effort; that of two researchers who until now have observed the preordained limits of their respective disciplines, the humanistic and social sciences, and who found themselves obliged to change their methods of interpretation and communication. Some, from the bias of their individualism, may rake this book over sentence by sentence, carving it up, assigning this part to that person, in the hopes of maybe restoring that social division of intellectual labor which leaves them so comfortably settled in their armchair or university chair. This work is not to be subjected to a letter-by-letter breakdown by some hysterical computer, but to be considered a joint effort of conception and writing.
Furthermore, it is part of an effort to achieve a wider, more massive distribution of the basic ideas contained in this book. Unfortunately, these ideas are not always easily accessible to all of the readers we would like to reach, given the educational level of our people. This is especially the case since the criticism contained in the book cannot follow the same popular channels which the bourgeoisie controls to propagate its own values.
We are grateful to the students of CEREN (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Nacional, Center for the Study of Chilean Society, at the Catholic University), and to the seminar on “Subliterature and Ways to Combat it” (Department of Spanish, University of Chile) for the constant individual and collective contributions to our work.
Ariel Dorfman, member of the Juvenile and Educational Publications Division of Quimantú,1 was able to participate in the development of this book thanks to the assignment offered to him by the Department of Spanish at the University of Chile. Armand Mattelart, head of Quimantú’s Investigation and Evaluation of the Mass Media Section, and Research Professor of CEREN, participated in the book thanks to a similar dispensation.
4 September 1971,
First anniversary of the triumph of the
Popular Unity Government