Page 59 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

34 Guy Poitevin

analytical needs, the zone where overlap the greatest number of systems
of meaning and where their imbrication is the most pregnant.’
This designation or representation of culture as a set of overlapping
constituent symbolic forms is consonant with the dynamic concept
of culture suggested by Michel Serres (1975) as a knot of connections
woven by history, with the specificity of cultures actually resting upon
the particular historical profile of these interrelations along a given
span of time:

The cultural space in which a group stays, works, lives and reasons
or speaks, is the space of the isomorphes. The set of reliable rela-
tions binding together the operations and elements of each one of
the spaces recognized as different. The group does not inhabit its
history, or its religion, or its myths, or its science, or its technology,
or its familial structure, it nests in the bridges through which these
islands communicate. Culture, its culture, is no more a space or quali-
fied spaces, but, precisely, that very space of isomorphes between
the said various spaces. (ibid.: 102)

Such a representation of culture as an isomorphic milieu of recipro-
cal transformations leads Denis-Constant Martin on the basis of his
studies on music and festivals to conceive of the following model for
the development of popular culture:

> Circulation > exchange > syncretism > innovation > circulation >
Source: Jules-Rosette and Martin (1997: 11–13).

In the perspective of such constant osmosis, a central question
according to him is that of the processes of production and consump-
tion, of which Table 1.1 gives a summary. The various possibilities of
combinations shows immediately that popular culture refers to a ‘field
of exchange’ filled with all sorts of objects now labelled as ‘cultural com-
modities’. Culture becomes an attribute of the category of ‘trade’.
In short, given a particular zone or domain of observation, two related
perspectives are to be discarded as inadequate: their static dichotomy
as well as their syncretic amalgam, once we relate the opposite terms
(popular and elitist) as the extreme ends of a continuum. Culture is cir-
culation from one place and from one sphere in both directions
with no solution of continuity or visible frontier differentiating, at a