Page 40 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 15

and ‘immoral’ popular literature from the people while reserving it
to the learned class (and amateurs) for examination and repressive
counter-action. This police operation was in the context of the 1848
1
uprisings and their brutal subjugation:
[I]t constituted the condition for a host of subsequent literary
operations which fetrichized a sanitized notion of the ‘popular’,
converting it somewhat perversely into a reassuring object of
learned nostalgia. Nisard’s purge laid the basis for what Certeau,
Julia and Revel call a ‘castrating cult’ of the people, which they date
in this instance of its manifestation around the period 1850–1890.
They show how processes of idealization and aestheticization were
inseparable from processes of suppression. (Ahearne 1995: 133)
It was at the very moment when chapbooks were being pursued with
the utmost vigour that fashionable souls turned their attention with
glee to popular books and contents.… The collector’s interest was
a correlate of the repression used to exorcize the revolutionary danger
which, as the days of June 1848 had demonstrated, was still very
close, lying dormant. (de Certeau 1993: 51–52)

Therefore, it comes as no surprise if we are used to considering
popular cultures as disappearing, and make a point to preserve their
embellished ruins. Once popular culture has been exorcized and ceased
to be a disquieting world, it can be readily integrated into the national
heritage with the ‘beauty of a dead’. Cultural assimilation takes place
in a reassuring museum (ibid.: 53).
Popular culture is grounded in an operation that human sciences
refuse to own up to (Certeau 1990: 45): Politics, right from the begin-
ning of contemporary research, has registered the concept of popular
as a matter marked out for repression. We cannot therefore bypass an
initial fundamental question: ‘While looking for a popular literature
or culture, scientific curiosity does not know any more that.… it thus
seeks not to meet the people’ (de Certeau 1993: 46. Emphasis mine).
Unless we keep to quietly wait for a total revolution to transform the
laws of history, how can we now play tricks with the social hierarchic
order which organizes the scientific work on popular cultures and
repeats itself (de Certeau 1990: 45, 1993: 45–46 )?
Even the most progressive and commendable approaches to popular
culture by recent French historians (Bollème 1969; Mandrou 1985;
Soriano 1977) and modern interpreters could not, in the opinion of
de Certeau, Julia and Revel altogether break away with the effects of