Page 15 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

xiv Communication, Culture and Confrontation

within given communities and between different communities. Systems
of communication mirror systems of cognition. Social forms of symbolic
communication drive us towards their anthropological foundations in
the cultural moorings of the communities.
Second, we cannot, in this respect, escape an immediately obvious
fact that we take as point of departure: symbolic forms of social com-
munication can hardly be reduced to a comprehensive set of stable
patterns that would dissolve ideologies, iniquity and social conflicts
into a gentle flow of self-regulating processes governed by universal
concepts. This had been the dream—or rather the imposture—of the
market-driven global world imagined by the managers of massmedia.
This consensual view abruptly faded away when the fear of international
terrorism revived the evidence that communication can be at the service
of ideological interests that had not been anticipated by the thinkers of
the electronic age. Symbolic forms of communication are transactional
in nature, and very few transactions, if any, may be disentangled from
patterns of dominance and resistance.
We wish to emphasize the intimate love/hatred binding that inex-
tricably pervades the rapport of power and culture. We are as much
concerned in this volume with cultural configurations that display
themselves as forms of communication, weave human beings into col-
lectives and link collectives with one another in one form or another
of constantly evolving social binding, as with the power parameter
that permeates them. Much in the same way that symbols cannot be
reduced to bytes and pixels, cultures cannot be reduced to sets of items
traded in the hegemonic space of global communication. This is despite
the fact that this new space of communication has produced its own
ideological pitfall by introducing itself as the end of a historical process
whose ultimate ‘show’ must have been the battle won by capitalism
over socialism. In her pioneering work, Waring (1988, 1999) brilliantly
pointed out the fallacy of thinking in terms of global economics, when
the system has become so selective of its gain/loss categories that it
denies the ‘reckonability’—hence, any sort of recognition—of such
vital human activities as household work, child education, care of the
environment, etc.
Similarly, a recent report submitted at the Second Specialized
International Conference of the International Institute of Adminis-
trative Sciences, pointed to the ‘paradoxes’, ‘biases’ and ‘schizophrenic
approach of the evaluation of sustainable development policies in the