Page 41 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

16 Guy Poitevin

scholarly operations which continue to be carried out upon popular
traditions as upon a corpse. By unreflectingly taking over a pre-
constituted corpus considered as ‘support’ or ‘reflection’ of a ‘popular
mentality’, they fail ‘to make a sufficient inquiry into the historical
operations which had provided them with their material’, and, as a
result, they are ‘reduplicating the separation between this material and
the life of the people it was supposed to represent’ (Ahearne 1995: 133).
For instance, who wrote such literature? Who was reading it? What
about internalized censorship and literary convention?
Among the interpretative operations, the following ones consolidate
the construction of the popular as the ‘other’: the inherited exclusion
of disturbing aspects of the popular (violence, sexuality and the
threatening alterity of the child) and abstraction from the historical con-
ditions in which popular representations were produced, although ‘the
links between the texts and a political history are fundamental. They
alone can explain how a particular gaze was constituted’ (de Certeau
1993: 67. Emphasis mine). The edifying myths of the ‘people’ which
circulate in a variety of administrative, interpretative and ideological
discourses imply an excision of less comfortable or convenient forms
of alterity.
Eventually one detects in erudite studies of popular culture an
obsession with the question of a lost origin—a quest or a fascination that
we have already often seen associated with folklore. ‘The fantasmatic
presence of a putative origin endows the productions of popular culture
in the eyes of learned observers with a distinctive aura’ (Ahearne 1995:
134). This aura is ambiguous as it tends to overshadow those elements
that would clash with the pure and authentically popular origin as
preconceived by the interpreters. What is then its essential function?
de Certeau raises the question in the very terms of an historian of
popular cultures:

Henri Marrou said that in the last instance, ‘the folksong draws its
distinctive character from the popular halo which covers it in our
eyes’. What is then the meaning of this phantom that designates the
origin and at the same time conceals it, this ‘halo’ that manifests
while it ‘covers’? (de Certeau 1993: 58–59)

de Certeau, Julia and Revel’s answer is that while setting the truth of
the people back, as it were, from the actual texts or people, who stand
in front of them: