Page 80 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 55

participation and/or is guided by the notion of ‘target groups’—the
2
phrase itself being blindly borrowed from the advertising industry.
Consequently, media interventions at the periphery, despite being
(relatively) innovative in themselves, cannot be ipso facto termed
‘alternative’ as in their instrumental use of the media and conventional
social organization of communication they diverge from the ideological
basis of ‘another’ politics.
Keeping this in mind, how can our insights on history and reflec-
tions on the present help in sharpening perspectives on ‘alternative
communication’?
At a rudimentary level, alternative communication concerns
social articulations that, in devising new practices in the media and
organically linked to processes redefining and broadening the ‘polit-
ical’, challenge the monopoly of established modes of communication
(Stangelaar, Unpublished). My inquiries reveal that what is being
referred to as alternative communication represents, first, media inter-
ventions associated with anti- and asystemic processes concerning the
politics of recognition and redistribution; and, second, ideologically
relevant cultural innovations within the mass media oriented towards
affirmative or transformatory advocacy (Parthasarathi 1997). On the
face of it, these appear as two distinct processes. While this is true in
some instances, what is crucial to understand is that both arise from
varied degrees of opposition to the material and symbolic basis of the
systemic universals—be it the state or the culture industry. Since the
culture industry essentially projects a particular mode of producing and
reproducing social life, the praxis of alternative communication seeks
to challenge this dominant mode of producing life. In other words,
alternative communication occupies itself, directly and indirectly, with
questioning the character of current economic activity and related
political structures, that is, questioning the ‘discourse of Development’
(Escobar 1984).
In this context, the entry of the underclass into processes of com-
munication has signified not merely a change in social agents; it has,
more importantly, transformed their status from being consumers of
mass culture to the producers of a radical/competing popular culture;
from being the source of ‘information’ for the culture industry to
proactive subjects of counter-cultural words and images. Quite obviously,
thus, the present thrust of alternative communication also seeks to