Page 78 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 53

Alternative Communication as Cultural Practice

The term ‘alternative’, taken conceptually rather than literally, seems to
have been first employed in the body of work now known as ‘Develop-
ment Studies’. There seems to be as yet no precise understanding, let
alone even a broadly accepted definition, of ‘alternative’. As a result,
its connotations vary with themes, context, practitioners and writers.
Despite a theoretical incoherence and conceptual variance, this notion
has travelled to many spheres of social sciences, finding its way only
recently in writings on culture and communication. The way in which
other concepts whose genesis can be traced back to Development
Studies (such as ‘participatory’ and ‘grassroots’) have been related with
‘communication’ is striking.
Contemporary Latin American and European efforts in the sphere
of culture and communication has been largely responsible for con-
ceptualizing and emphasizing such a perspective in our agenda. What
one had inferred is that their understanding of ‘alternative’ suggests a
hybrid between a present-day derivative of Gramsci’s ‘subaltern’ and
Brecht’s notion of the ‘popular’; both essentially symptomatic of an
oppositional tendency towards what the former called ‘the official
world that has emerged historically’ (Gramsci 1977). This rich geneal-
ogy aside, the term ‘alternative’ remains and will remain elusive as
long as it fails to clarify:

1. whether it is suggestive of a rupture from historical processes
of communication, or part of a continuum of conflicting articu-
lations concerning the production and interpretation of social
reality;
2. how it defines established processes and structures of commu-
nication it seeks to contend or transform?
3. whether it exclusively concerns initiatives by progressive coali-
tions or includes cultural innovations by fundamentalist and
neo-conservative forces as well.

One needs to, consequently, sieve through history as much to (re)view
the genealogy of non-dominant communication as to understand
political tendencies in popular culture to refine the notion of
‘alternative’ in the present context.