Page 56 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 31

Michel Serres (1968: 11–20) conceives of communication as a network
or web of which one has, at will, enlarged the internal differentiation,
or as the image of a diagram constructed as irregularly as possible.
Such images forbid any linear and univocal flow of information and
agency. They point to a great number of possible mediations, the
consequent plurivocity of kinds of relations and the multi-linearity of
the ways to cultural inventiveness. Culture can be conceived in terms
of multiple determinations only. Such a complex interactive milieu
should nevertheless not be construed after the image of a vast ‘cultural
orchestra with no conductor or score’ (Winkin 1981: 106), in which
each player spontaneously adjusts to other players as per the rules of
a general musical composition understood as a systemic set of rules
of harmony ‘similar to linguistic codes’. Culture ought to be studied
as communication, provided semiotics is not made a substitute to
cultural anthropology, and entrusted with the study of all modalities of
patterned communication (Eco 1976: 22). Communication as cultural
process is a concept altogether different from communication as pat-
tern of interaction or system of symbolic exchange.
The new technologies of communication (transport, trade, informa-
tion) have not created these processes, they just give them tremendous
chances. Through facilitating exchange, they give wide opportunities
to cultural creativity. Culture is more a process of emergence through
interaction than a symbolic product. Let us outline the sphere of the
cultural under the horizon of culture conceived as an inalienable cap-
ability of semantic reappropriation and practical challenge of given or
normative idioms. This capability expresses itself in various processes
of reinterpretation.
The theory of inter-textual polyvalence first articulated by the
Russian Mikhaïl Bakhtin with regard to the study of literary works and
followed by his Bulgarian disciple Julia Kristeva and the latter’s com-
patriot Tzvetan Todorov, rests upon a dialogic approach, according to
which a literary text is ‘first of all a polyphony of voices within the very
text itself’ (Dosse 1992: 72–74, 104, 377–78, 380, 427, 517). What be-
comes essential is the dialogue of literary texts between themselves:
they are filled with previous texts with which they play. As a result, the
initial structure is removed off the centre. The critical study of a text
opens onto the historical context against which it stands. The principle
of the closure of the text in itself is disputed. Furthermore, T. Todorov