Page 18 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction xvii

music, literature, narratives, performing arts, social action, community
festivals, philosophy, symbolic or ideological production such as
ethics, legal systems, codes of conducts, norms and values, daily
behaviour and lifestyle. Culture thus proves to be a matter of politics
on a second and far-reaching account, that is, as a confrontation of
claims to different, let alone opposite, projects of sociality. We might
articulate this heterogeneity of apparently irreconcilable visions and
wills by measuring the distance that sets apart the antagonistic poles
of the literate and illiterate, elite and popular, dominant and subal-
tern, one and other, reason and image, concept and practice, fact and
emotion, event and theory, observation and categorization, conduct
and insight, and so on. The contributions in this volume are meant to
show that such abstract dichotomous concepts sometimes available
in culture studies to characterize the distinctive markers of ‘cultural
worlds’ standing apart from one another are unwarranted and sterile.
Such poles do not exist but out of a will to create a cultural hegemony
on the part of those in a position of domination or alleged superiority
claimed on the strength of ‘monologically authoritative interpretations’
(Mills 1991: 17).
All such interpretations are to be denounced and rejected in the
name of culture, which we understand as existing only as a two-way
transitive process, that is, as interaction or negotiation. This volume is
intended to show several forms of such processes. The significant fact re-
mains, nevertheless, that transactions between contesting world-views
do not always take place out of spontaneous needs or free will to re-
appropriate and own a heritage. They may well be enforced out of a
will to dominate and control. In both cases a confrontation takes place,
sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently.
By confrontation we understand the questioning to which given
forms are constantly subject on account of a multitude of locators and
social actors who, diachronically and synchronically, do interact with
one another. A living cultural constellation is the one that operates
under tension. Contention, reinterpretation, manipulation, appro-
priation, imposition, ascendancy, repetition, enforcement, refusal,
denial, reappraisal and encounter are some of the processes of culture
as confrontation.
Let us immediately eschew a possible misconception by stressing
the point that cultural violence is not borne by cultural differences.