Page 29 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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to be currently structured as a homogeneous, singular politico-cultural
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impulse that feeds into and through appropriate cultural forms. For
example, British rulers in India were aware that they could play the
cards of both continuity and change by introducing a system of uniform
territorial rules based on universalistic norms articulated on authori-
tative orthodox Brahmanic laws (see Bates in this volume).
‘Popular cultures’, as a consequence, often happen to be advocated
and called to display alternative forms of communication pregnant
with more genuinely humane contents. To the industrial supply of
‘mass’ symbolic products, they substitute native initiatives. To so-called
‘mainstream’ cultures shaped, spread and enforced by communication
technologies, they oppose creative forms.
The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular
force—that is the nature of political and cultural struggle: to make
the divided classes and the separated peoples—divided and separated
by culture as much as by other factors—into a popular democratic
cultural force. (Hall 1981: 239)

This agonistic articulation of the social into a clear-cut divide of
repression and rebellion raises two questions. The first is that of the
social relations of production and exchange of cultural forms, represen-
tations and constructs (ibid.: 232). Culture should be apprehended with
reference to that struggle of classes, groups, individual and collective
agencies for the control of the means of production and exchange of
cultural goods on a market, which the present technologies of com-
munication open to the dimensions of the whole world.
The second question is a consequent effort to transcend the binary
of the aforesaid approaches and tentative definitions. The worldwide
extension of the competitive field of cultural contention leaves no room
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any more for a clear-cut dichotomous opposition of the ‘dominated’
to the ‘dominant’, a dichotomy that was already problematic in the
past. 6

It is no more possible in the past than in the present to locate a source
of popular cultural activity or expression which is not, at the same
time, profoundly shot through with elements of the dominant cul-
ture and, in some sense, located within it as well as against it. That
is what a dominant culture does; it dominates, it constitutes the