Page 23 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

xxii Communication, Culture and Confrontation

practices—and then to convince by getting them actually shared by
others:
[I]n our time, reality is scarce because of access: so few command
the machinery for its determination. Some get to speak and some
to listen, some to write and some to read, some to film and some to
view. It is fine to be told that we are the species that actively creates
the world and then simultaneously to be told that we are part of the
subspecies denied access to the machinery by which this miracle is
pulled off ….
Therefore, the site where artists paint, writers write, speakers
speak, film makers film, broadcasters broadcast is simultaneously
the site of social conflict over the real. It is not a conflict over ideas
as disembodied forces. It is not a conflict over technology. It is not
a conflict over social relations. It is a conflict over the simultaneous
co-determination of ideas, technique, and social relations. It is above
all a conflict not over the effects of communication but of the acts and
practices that are themselves the effects. (Carey 1989: 87)

Ambivalence, let alone ambiguity, is the second characteristic
feature of the use of cultural forms in processes of communicational
intercourse. Instead of clear-cut polarization, we observe deep, multi-
farious and farreaching moves of transaction, whatever be superficial
and temporary evidences to the contrary. An amazing and bewildering
variety of terms crop up in the minds of a number of scholars studying
various moments in the history of intense civilizational encounters. 2
They all eventually point to moves of articulation, negotiation, inter-
weaving, reinterpretation, etc. All these attempts could be categorized
as multilateral transitivity, the implication being that in the process
the forms are genuinely exchanged to the extent they are invested in
the transaction with a more or less different value. As a result, the same
form is shared, but with a difference. Ambivalence is an unavoidable
mode of cultural exchange, reappropriation and contention (Poitevin
2001, 2002: 81–87).
The relevance of both these parameters is determinant in the studies
in this volume and essential to the broad model that is implicitly or
explicitly reflected in them.