Page 17 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

xvi Communication, Culture and Confrontation

This is not our approach. ‘At present it is incumbent upon us all to
resuscitate what remains of a universe of discourse, political language,
and democratic vocabulary’ (Carey 1989: 139).

Terms for a Field of Contending Forces

A first handicap of a conceptual nature immediately stands in our way.
We have to cope with a number of vague terms, readymade assump-
tions and worn clichés that happen to be easily available and commonly
used. They may even be taken for granted by communication agencies,
social actors and theoretical analysts. We need, therefore, to clarify our
own terms at the outset.
We do not understand culture as a substantive concept, but a dia-
lectic category to be apprehended as a field of contending forces: a
milieu of exchange, encounter, confrontation and possibly conflict. We
assume that, as a rule, communication of idioms is one of the secrets
of cultural creativity and one of the main channels of transformation
or evolution of human societies. The key to symbolic innovation is
interactivity and interbreeding (Martin 2001, 2002).
As a consequence, our focus can by no means be any delusive essen-
tialist representation of culture as a general category, with a privileged
emphasis put, for instance, on ‘elite’ or, on the contrary, ‘popular’
culture. This means that culture is essentially of a communicational
nature on two accounts. First, it is instrumental and subservient to
the aims of societal construction as it offers each collective, whether
a small local community or large regional entity, a symbolic means of
social binding. We should, therefore, activate all the static categories of
culture perceived as symbolic systems as they tend to build up orders
and secure social cohesiveness. Cultures ‘perform’ viable collectives.
however, the consensus that they expect to that effect can never
be secured, though they may try to obtain it per force. Rifts, dissent,
breach of consensus, and alternative or deviant practices are always
present. The ‘counter-cultural’ roles that some particular cultures play
at a certain period of time in a given cultural milieu, when some sections
depart from the established norms, codes or values hitherto received
by the majority of others, testify to the emergence of repressed voices.
Counter-cultures may arise in any field and whatever the latter’s idiom: