Page 42 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 17

[I]nterpreters sort out the elements of a ‘popular culture’ with re-
ference to a predefined model of what constitutes the ‘authentically’
popular. They present this (fictional) model of authenticity in terms of
a seductive ‘origin’ whose traces and aura are supposedly discernible
in the texts which they interpret. They are thus able both to mask
the nature of their own interpretative intervention and to preserve,
despite the inevitably corrupted nature of their documentary
evidence, a reassuringly idealized image of the people. They can
therefore remain deaf to the questions raised by more unsettling
manifestations of popular sensibility. (Ahearne 1995: 135)
Mainly since 1960, a Marxist or ‘populist’ inspiration has prompted
2
in France the concern for popular culture out of an inverse utopian
connection of the elite with the masses. Still, this may not have dictated
to the scientific method of operating rules different from those of the
past. We may as well prefer to be gullible enough as to fantasize and
see popular cultures as an era of tranquillity preceding history, on the
skyline of a lost nature or paradise:

The same process of elimination continues. Knowledge remains
bound to a power which authorizes it. What matters is therefore not
ideologies nor options, but the rapports that a scientific object and
methods entertain with the society which allows them. If scientific
procedures are not innocent, if their objectives depend upon a
political organization, the very discourse of science must confess a
function which is allotted to it by a society: hide what it claims to
show. This means that an improvement of methods or a reversal of
convictions will not change what a scientific operation does with
popular culture. A political action is required. (de Certeau 1993:
47–48)
Let us remember three crucial methodological perspectives. First,
‘does popular culture exist elsewhere than in the act which deletes it’
(ibid.: 70)? The ‘popular’ seemingly raises interest when its dangers
are eliminated or its magnificence is displayed as a dream of wonder in
the past, namely, in both cases, once its historical substance has been
subdued or converted into something else, by someone else, for some-
thing else. ‘Popular cultures’ come to scientific existence among the
elite classes and operate in the modern world in the mode of alienation.
Bracketing the fixed sets of representations that figure as ‘popular’ in
the learned discourses of cultural elites, let us focus on the versatile
voices and practices of the vast majority of people. While cognitive