ABSTRACT
In the emerging global society based on the control and manipulation of information and images, and the production of new, more highly-skilled forms of labor power, our location within the cultural apparatuses, particularly in higher education, acquires a new and unexpected power of agency. In a similar way, in Latin America the dominant tendency on the Left has been to regard postmodernism as the product of a disenchantment with the "hot" politics of revolutionary nationalism in the sixties and seventies, and thus as the cultural accompaniment of the hegemony of neoliberal political economy in the eighties. If the formula of intellectual activism suggested by Rodo in Ariel was "the domination of quality over number", the aim of a Latin American Cultural Studies in conditions of postmodernity should be to favor the domination of number over quality. US and British-style Cultural Studies was in part the consequence of the deconstructive impact of mass culture itself on the human sciences.
