Page 48 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 23

1. A first set of questions relates to the clashing claims of authentic-
ity and legitimacy. These claims raise questions of validity: on
which grounds does each mode of transmission claim author-
ity over and legitimacy against its counterpart? The concept of
authenticity is often put forward as grounds for legitimacy and
a claim of validity for a particular cultural statement, a trad-
itional practice, a claim to recognition of ethnic or communitar-
ian identity. In which context and for whom does the notion of
authenticity makes sense? How would one define the validity
and relevance of this concept?
2. As a matter of fact, the polemic claim of authenticity for popular
indigenous traditions against modern, dominant or elaborate
traditions is often just a counter-claim against the mythical
value that has been given to the practice of writing for the last
400 years:
Progress is of a scriptural kind. To producte text is to produce society
as text. Orality is, therefore, defined in many different ways, as what
a ‘legitimate’—scientific, politic, educational, etc.—practice should
distinguish itself from. ‘Oral’ is what does not work for progress;
reciprocally, ‘scriptural’ is what separates itself from the magic
world of voices and tradition. A frontier (and a front line) of Western
culture is chalked out with that line of partition. (de Certeau 1990:
198–99)

The First Decades of Communication

through Print

Empirical observations present the oral and the written not as two
separate and opposite extremes, but as the two poles of a magnetic
field, the configuration and modalities of which are determined from
outside by the system of relations use them as stakes. In a given context
and set of circumstances their attributes and functions are determined
by the capacity and will of the partners of that system of relations to
avail of them to serve their ends. This is clearly illustrated by the study
that Natalie Z. Davis made of the consequences of the introduction of
print technology on the popular culture of people in the countryside
and in the cities during the sixteenth century in France (Davis 1965;
Goody 1968).