Page 44 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 19

to setting to observe and report, we have to clear our sight. When we
circumscribe an immense sphere of the popular as a way of life, a style
of thought and speech, a mode of performance, an alternative aes-
thetic, and so on, in short, an art devised by the common man somehow
at variance with the prevailing models, two questions beg our answer.
Our response to them pre-empts our search and findings:
They represent anyway the two faces of one and the same political
problem. On the one hand: this ‘art’, on what ground do we consider
it different? On the other hand, from where (from which distinct
position) do we set to analyse it? Possibly, while resorting to the
very procedures of this art, shall we come to revise its definition
as ‘popular’ as well as our own position of observers. (de Certeau
1990: 44)

Let us still not deceive ourselves, warns de Certeau, and naively
expect from our critical political questioning an emancipation of the
‘minority cultures’, a liberated, spontaneous and free emergence of
the ‘people’s voice’, as did wish the first folklorists in the context of the
German Romantic Movement (1768–1875) (Gibert 1979: 43–55). First,
a wish carries no political efficiency. Second, only a political act can
question the established patterns of power sharing, lay the foundations
of new articulations of science and knowledge, reverse the dynamics
of cultural repression and create the conditions of the possibility of
a general democratic communication of knowledge. ‘Nevertheless
3
though it gives ground to a new political participation. Another cul-
ture will still imply another repression. Language locates itself in this
ambiguity, between what it incorporates and what it announces’ (de
Certeau 1993: 71–72).

Oral versus Written: Dichotomy?
Antagonism? Mix?

The identification of ‘highbrow’ or ‘classical’ and ‘normative’ as
‘written’, opposed to ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ and ‘unruly’ as ‘oral’ is a frequent
simplistic categorization leading to wrong stereotyped classifications.
Highbrow tradition may be orally transmitted and written texts may
incorporate and carry large components of popular traditions as well