Page 57 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

32 Guy Poitevin

and others with the notion of trans-textuality will stress another poly-
phony upon which rests the interpretation, the one that takes place
between the voices of the author, the reader and the literary analyst,
each of them operating as a confrontation of texts with personal ques-
tions, emotions and drives within a distinct historical context.
Culture as human agency cannot but be a process more than a
substance. We consider culture as human attribute comprises three
constitutive components:

1. a practice, whether cognitive, assertive or pragmatic;
2. an agency or a creation, resulting in a transformation; and
3. a meaning, a purpose or intent.

Though any human agency may be cultural, that activity is not neces-
sarily cultural nor inevitably recognized as such. For culture to really
exist, it is not sufficient to be the author of social practices; those social
practices ought to have a signification for the one who performs them.
It is a signifying practice. It consists not in receiving but in performing
the act by which each one puts his or her mark upon what others give
him or her to live and think.
Any culture requires an action, a mode of appropriation and own-
ing up; a personal transformation, an exchange within a social group.
Culture is a labour to be undertaken over the whole breadth of the
social life (de Certeau 1990: 121, 123, iii–iv). Culture as action is an
intervention binding the agents to determined objectives and targets
through bringing into play definite means and ways. It differs from
‘cultural development’, which envisages a homogeneous growth
within an ideology of continuity and invariability of the established
socio-cultural systems of reference. Our perspective should be one
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of cultural dynamics:

It is the action through which a human group, becoming aware of
himself, makes use of the techniques and knowledge which he has
or receives from other groups, creates new works, new practices, and
thus contributes to escape a process of reproduction of society or
of transformation solely controlled by the material conditioning and
the play of productive forces. (Chombart de Lauwe 1994: 22)
We may accordingly consider that the mistaken confrontational
approaches are grounded in inadequate static semantics that usually
define culture defined as (de Certeau 1990: 167–68):