Page 43 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

18 Guy Poitevin

strategies tend to convert them into a wishful ‘other’, manipulate their
words into an inert folkloric corpus and turn a cultural elite blind to
what it excludes, we have to find our way towards the living conscious-
ness of people themselves.
Second:

Can we think of a novel organization within culture which would not
be dependent upon a change in the relations of social forces?
This is precisely what the historian […] may point out to the lit-
erary analysts of culture. His function is to chase the latter out of an
alleged status of pure spectators through showing them everywhere
the presence of social mechanisms of choice, criticism, repression,
through reminding them that it is violence which always gives
knowledge its ground. (ibid.: 71)

Third, a countervailing political will should consist in unearthing
the nature and means of the active alterity of people’s voice and will
against the passive otherness in which the ‘folklorization of difference’
confines them as inert marginal residues (de Certeau 1975: 167). This
directs the attention towards people’s effective capacity, within their
actual historical context, to articulate about themselves representations
of their own, invent different practices, and this possibly may trigger
transformations in the political and cognitive social orders.
In brief, popular cultures apparently ought first to be the object of
social censorship or, on the contrary, of enthusiastic glorification to
become the subject matter of a scientific constituency. The ‘popular’
raises interest when its danger are eliminated or its magnificence, a
dream of wonder in the past, namely, in both cases, once its histor-
ical substance has been subdued or converted into something else, by
some one else, for something else. Popular cultures seemingly come
to existence and operate in the contemporary world in the mode of
alienation.
We may choose to confine our investigation into traditional peas-
ant communities, Adivasi—indigenous—tribes or social sections
which make a point to keep alive customs and rituals inherited from
past generations. We may equally prefer to focus on present ‘popular’
practices emerging in a modern industrial and urbanized context, ‘in
the very heart of the strongholds of the contemporary economy’ and
most advanced computer-based technology. Whatever our focus, prior