Page 263 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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of technologies of communication, no less than a better knowledge of
one’s heritage of symbolic forms, has as such motivated individuals and
communities to use them for self-expression and social intervention.
A will to own and appropriate only signals a responsible ‘user’ and a
citizen (Vitalis 1996).
The successful control of the medium, whether traditional or
modern, is proportional to the mental weakness of its clientèle. Means
of mass communication may tend to turn culture into a package for
consumption and destroy local, native practices. The fault is not
with the means, but those who ‘consume’ instead of reappropriating.
Similarly, the potential of traditional forms of communication may
remain untapped due to a comparable impotency or unwillingness.
The modern hold of dominant systems of production and circulation of
cultural goods is far from having succeeded in erasing all ‘indigenous’
forms, which remain available to communicators if they really wish to
make use of them. Both the accounts of Hema Rairkar and Paul Biot
in this section on street theatre and action theatre respectively bring
home the point that cultural creativity is a matter of a social agent being
capable of using and determined to use available forms, irrespective of
their being labelled by others as ‘new’ or ‘modern’. Similarly, the account
of Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay shows that his novelist owes his impact
to a capacity to use Gandhian social signifiers prompted by a will of
‘resisting colonial modernity’, that is, of substituting ‘alternative’ or
‘counter-cultural’ forms to the ‘dominant’ and ‘stereotyped’ ones,
to talk in the terms of the seminal essay of Vibodh Parthasarathi on
interventionist tendencies. In both cases the medium is turned into
a utility out of the will of committed users to effectuate a symbolic
reconstruction of their contemporary society. Such was already the case
with the accounts of Tara Ubhe and Kusum Sonavne in reactivating
a traditional performance capacity, namely, using grindmill songs as
means of cultural action within a totally different historical and social
settings. What matters is not the hold of the medium, but the sway
of the social actor over the medium. Any discourse complacently and
unilaterally focusing only on the medium, whatever the validity of its
aesthetic, semantic or technical arguments, shall henceforth be suspect
of complicity with dominant and repressive orders.
The third set of opposites, ‘form’ versus ‘process’, is actually
implied in the two first sets. It is analogous to the dichotomy of ‘text’
and ‘context’ previously discarded in the chapter by Karine Bates on