Page 74 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 49

Not surprisingly, in a decade-old trend, fundamentalist forces (the
political right) have transformed, re-contextualized objects of worship
and mythological tales rooted in popular culture into symbols of
political conflict and sociological documents respectively. I say ‘not
surprisingly’ because the media culture industry (the economic right)
has always drawn on elements of popular culture, projecting them as a
de-contextualized and de-politicizing ‘culture-ware’—be they are brand
names in television soaps or in advertisements.
Quite obviously, promoting popular culture was never the primary
objective in all three instances. What these forces sought was to employ
expressions from the ‘popular’ towards attaining their underlying
ideological and material objectives. In other words, in each case hege-
mony has been to a large extent achieved through an instrumental
use of popular culture in their media campaigns and political discourse.
Thus, what we have witnessed is that the three most dominant forces
in the country are instrumentally employing elements of the ‘popular’,
redefining their meaning and relocating their contexts to suit their own
discursive practices. While some of these may represent popular aspi-
rations and others merely populism, commonality lies in each of them
projecting a history and a world-view. In their articulations of popular
culture, these three forces may either find themselves in conflict, sym-
biotically overlapping or operating in distinct social terrains.
Nevertheless, all three have integrated various means of communi-
cation and cultural practices towards furthering their political agenda.
Their mode of communication is characterized by a purely instrumental
use of the media; encouragement of de-contextualized presentation of
image, sound and text; disregard for critique from within; monopoly
over cultural production; homogenizing and universalizing the essence
of their specific cultural products and an active reproduction of struc-
tures of dominance as much through their media practice as within
their own mode of communication. The modes of organization of such
dominant cultural processes provide the institutional base for the
creation of a ‘new’ individual and a collective self in accordance with
the respective logic of the state, the market and the Hindu right. At the
same time, their cultural production sets the political context within
which other cultural practices are taking shape.
Does the context thus sketched out provide space for initiatives to
foster a critical cultural practice?