Page 53 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

28 Guy Poitevin

and delay the fixations of new values. The economic control of publish-
ing companies was not in the hand of big bookshop owners or traders.
Knowledge monopolies were broken and not replaced by effective
political or religious censorship, nor any theoretical or legal systems
of private ownership of ideas.

Popular versus Classical

Common sense and common parlance easily oppose ‘popular culture’
to ‘elitist culture’ as the untrimmed to the elaborate, the instinctive to
the restrained, the unpolished to the sophisticated, the ephemeral to the
permanent, the spontaneous to the civilized, the unbound to the
regulated, and so on. These dichotomies are arbitrary and misleading
denominations (Bakhtin 1970; Banerjee 1989).
They are unilateral classificatory categories coined from outside by
circles that identify themselves through force as elite over the ‘others’
simply by discriminating on their own authority upon what they
consider as not belonging to their fold. They secure legitimacy for their
statement by an effect of discourse that makes sense for both parties
with reference to a hierarchical framework which is taken for granted.
These circles differentiate themselves ‘from’ by discriminating them-
selves ‘against’ the rest of the others. The distinction rests upon a value
judgement enforced for reasons of social cultural dominance. There is
no denying the fact that ‘since the origins of contemporary research,
politics has inscribed the concept of the popular within a problematic
of repression’ (de Certeau 1990: vii, 31–49, 195–224, 1993: 45–72,
141–64, 165–91, 204–22). It does not result from scientific or epistemo-
logical considerations. If the latter happen to be brought forward, it
is out of need of a post factum legitimacy, as a cover-up for a will of
socio-cultural hegemony and not on account of insight of the specificity
or merits of various modalities of cultural creativity.
Through opening up a rift and a distance between two allegedly
clear-cut worlds of unequal standards of cultural creations, the oppos-
ition of popular to classical is to be construed as a social event through
which the representatives of ‘the classical’ advocate and appropriate
for themselves a right of control in cultural matters. Culture appears as