Page 58 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 33

1. values and models established as normative by a particular so-
cial section out of a will to power over the whole social fabric;
2. a patrimony of selected tangible works or immaterial productions
to be preserved against the damages of time and circulated as a
treasure;
3. a world-view—images, symbolic forms, cognitive frameworks—
particular to a given population or community;
4. patterns constructed by cultural anthropologists in reference
to behavioural, institutional, ideological or mythical systems of
reference, which globally differentiate one society from another
one; and
5. symbolic systems of communication and their media.

There can, therefore, be no substantive definition of popular culture.
Popular culture (Bigsby 1976; Mukerji and Schudson 1991) may
be better construed as a field of conflicting claims, an area of social
assets available to competing social agencies, a set of predicates for
11
ideological constructions:
[…] an arena in which the systems of signification and understanding
are closely intermingled. In this arena, domination is the very stake;
nevertheless, on account of the aesthetic qualities, the performa-
tive character and the highly symbolic forms specific to the popular
cultures, the practices which can be displayed are of a particular
nature. They use to be diverted, allusive, metaphorical (except when
we are in front of ‘committed’ artists).… They construct and transmit
representations of social realities … through symbolic, polysemic
languages the power of which essentially depends upon their capacity
to rouse emotion. (Jules-Rosette and Martin 1997: 25–26)

The processes of permanently interactive communication of idioms
are to be understood synchronically and diachronically. They may
justify the empirical concept of popular culture suggested by Jules-
Rosette and Martin (ibid.: 11–13) as the globality of the symbolic
systems which make sense for all the population of a given area,
whatever be the particular re-interpretations, selective or antagonistic
components (what is sometimes referred to as ‘sub-cultures’, ‘counter-
cultures’ or differentiated as ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions, seemingly
other words for ‘classical’ and ‘popular’): ‘One may possibly suggest that
by “popular” one may understand, within a universe circumscribed by