Page 77 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

52 Vibodh Parthasarathi

and social base. The need to shape such a perspective, I may add,
is motivated as much by a critique of existing structures of communi-
cation and culture, as by an understanding of the drawbacks of past
efforts to do so.
The media and its culture have been with us since the beginning of
time. Recognizing that cultural practice today is being constantly pro-
duced and/or relocated by the mass-producing zeal of the media culture
industry as also by the cultural matrix constructed by the state that does
not exclude the existence of cultural processes outside/independent of
such dominant fulcrums. The latter have emerged and continue to exist
as an expression, more importantly as a documentation of ‘another’
view of events unfolding. One may add that, depending upon the pol-
itical processes it is associated with, cultural practice articulating
‘another’ view could be pronounced as revivalist or interventionist.
Each epoch has thrown up a variety of cultural practices reflect-
ing or questioning the problems and achievements of that particular
society. At the same time, it is has been through a certain political
tendency that cultural practices have been able to articulate a critique
of the historical present. The plethora of social interventions in the
sphere of communication which draw and build upon elements of
the ‘popular’, is an instance of such cultural practice. Can one identify
common undercurrents linking what appears to be diverse and often
scattered cultural practices? In conducting such an investigation, one
must move away from merely describing either the social application
of communication technology or the role of various cultural practices;
rather, one must focus on the social processes and the political conflicts
that communication processes engages in.
Focusing on a spectrum of anti-systemic political processes (Arrighi
et al. 1989) will bring to light not only how the ‘popular’ becomes
interventionist, but also whether their aggregate hints at a communi-
cation process whose trajectory is different from that of dominant
communication. The following pages put together fragmentary notes
on those structures and processes of the ‘popular’ that are associated
with projects of redefining and broadening the scope of the ‘political’.
By problematizing ‘alternative communication’, itself arising out of
anti-systemic politics, I will analytically demonstrate how this praxis
facilitates certain cultural practices in challenging the productive and
symbolic basis of dominant institutions of communication.