Page 19 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

xviii Communication, Culture and Confrontation

It is carried out by a will to social discrimination by particular social
agents. Social or political clashes in the name of culture are actually to
be predicated upon a sheer want of culture. They stage social figures
of communication that are directly the reverse of any genuine cultural
encounter as we figure it out. They actually are its antinomy because
they are prompted by a denial of interbreeding through sustained and
fruitful communication of idioms.
Culture as encounter should, therefore, by no means be confused
with the ‘clash of civilizations’ that Samuel huntington (1998) des-
ignated as the front line of the battles to be waged in the twenty-first
century. ‘Culture’ no more than ‘identity’, ‘nation’ and their derivatives,
‘cultural identity’, ‘cultural nationalism’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the
like can ever be social actors. They are simply abstract though mes-
merizing signifiers, but with no historical agents such as a state, class,
trade union, political leader, community organization, mob, warlord
or mafia. Clashes such as those to which Huntington refers exist only
between socio-political forces competing for ascendancy and domin-
ation as collective actors, and instrumentalizing culture and cultural
violence as a weapon to massively arouse masses and thus negotiate
their access to power. 1
The immediate, and sometimes fatal, macro-political efficacy of
such signifiers dramatically highlights the relevance of several micro
studies gathered in this volume. They are likely to give some insight
to the ways for cultural forms to socially, that is, politically, operate.
They may then work as a warning by showing how the discriminatory
processes that they unleash are alien to culture and kill attempts of
genuine cultural encounter.
As a consequence, the focus of cultural studies may be seen as
oscillating, on the whole, from one extreme to the other, namely, going
from the most repetitive models of interaction, mimetic modes of
transmission and, as a result, static and consensual forms of commu-
nication, to creative models of symbolic innovation through breach of
continuity, inversion or simply denunciation of consensus and radical
semantic reappraisals. however, denial and denunciation, reappraisals
and re-evaluation are no breach of communication, but forms of an-
tagonistic communication. We may, therefore, oppose as antithetical
counter-culture to control-culture, although both are only ideal and
static constructs. In reality, both trends result in antagonistic interac-
tion, the dialectic embraces the semantic relevance of that which is