Page 14 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

introduCtion:

Remoulding the ‘Cultural’
as the ‘Contentious’

Bernard Bel, Jan Brouwer, BiswaJit das,
ViBodh Parthasarathi, Guy PoiteVin

The first volume in this series on communication processes focused on
the media, techniques and technology of communication. The second
volume addressed the ‘relations of communication’, embracing both
the particular type of human rapport that each specific medium gives
support to, and the forms of social relation that the media are called
to serve. In order to better describe the articulation of these systems
of relations in the contradictory, tension-driven and ever-changing
framework of society, the emphasis was on the function of symboliza-
tion as an agency of correlation specific to the human mind. Commu-
nication appears to be a matter of symbolic forms that tend to shape
the dialectics, that is to say, the dialogue, interaction, links, rapports,
osmosis or encounters between human beings under the spell of the
systems of domination and/or appropriation that control them. This
third volume specifically focuses on those symbolic forms themselves,
gathered under the wide category of the ‘cultural’ or, alternatively,
‘cultural forms’.
We cannot escape being once again driven away from the media of
communication with their underpinning symbolic artefacts, and from
the social systems of relations that make symbolic forms of commu-
nication instrumental in reaching their ends, towards another level of
analysis where forms, ways and media of communication appear in
connection with the culture of the communicators and their audiences.
Cultural patterns, systems of representations and knowledge and
cognitive structures contrive modes, forms and means of communication