Page 65 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

40 Guy Poitevin

4. Popular symbols or feasts openly fuel revolt and may prompt
sudden emotional outbreaks (Bercé 1994).

An analysis carried out in 1974 of the language of oppressed Brazilian
peasants from the state of Pernambuco shows that their discourse was
dividing the social space into two parts with the construction of two
stratified levels (de Certeau 1990: 32–33). There was first the antag-
onistic socio-economic level of hostility and resistance structured by
an immemorial struggle between the ‘powerful’ and the ‘poor’, a field
of permanent victory of the rich and the police, and the realm of lies
in the sense that the powerful not only triumph, but cheat the poor
with deceptive statements—‘People do know but they cannot speak
loudly out,’ say the peasant. The oppressed are perceptive enough to
detect the conflictual networks below the semantic cover of language
(Poitevin 2000). The second level was opening up a realm of utopia
where a miraculous alternative asserted itself in a religious language
in terms of heroic deeds of a liberator striking people’s enemies with
heavenly punishments.

Performance versus Competence

I suggest a concept of popular cultures as performances. I borrow this
concept from linguistic models on account of the distinctive dimen-
sion of spontaneity or inventiveness that singles out popular cultural
events. The ways, modes and forms of processes of popular practices
homologically point towards that unassuming modest gap or differ-
ence ‘in the margins of the legal texts’, which according to linguistic
theories distinguishes enunciation as performance from language as
competence (de Certeau 1990: 36, 56).
The act of speech, with all its procedures, tactics and skill, is not
reducible to the knowledge of the language system, nor the content of
what is stated or embedded in given idioms. To speak up is a produc-
tive or creative act with four specific characteristics.
The enunciation (Benveniste 1966: 251–66) as a performance is:

1. a realization or an effectuation of the linguistic system: it exists
in reality only through an act of speech in the field of language