Page 81 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

56 Vibodh Parthasarathi

transform the social organization of various institutions of culture and
communication from being a minority political monopoly to majority
social representation (Somavia 1982). This demands that articulations
therein be free to express themselves in a non-standard ‘language’
inasmuch as they are an attempt at cultural decolonization.
It is from such a perspective that one needs to view interventionist
tendencies in contemporary cultural practice. Only by analysing its
social basis and the political processes it is associated with would one
be able to determine whether its existence—as being simply innovative
or holistically counter-cultural—resonates with the praxis of alterna-
tive communication. Before going further, however, two factors need
to be kept in mind.
Historically, communication processes independent of the dominant
sphere have been prevalent in different ways. Moreover, such processes
have varied with identity, such as class, gender and ethnicity, as also
with space—rural, metropolitan and now cyberspace. It is the techno-
logical wonders of our present ‘information age’ that have (once again)
enabled the production of ‘outside the dominant sphere’ possible, even
if it is to a limited extent as is the case today. Thus, at one level, alterna-
tive communication reflects a mixture of pre-industrial and industrial
modes of communication. Second, realizing that alternative communi-
cation involves strengthening a distinct ideological sphere should not
blur the fact that such an augmentation has been largely facilitated
by adopting and adapting, the prevailing communication technology.
Thus, at the analytical level most current practices in the alternative
communication are essentially superstructural innovations by cultural
activists. However, neither should one pessimistically infer that these
efforts at alternative communication are too benign vis-à-vis the all-
pervasive mass media, nor jump to the conclusion that it is the coming
into being of a coherent politics of ‘alternative communication’.
In the immediate context, the notion of alternative communication
enables me to conceptualize the multidimensional links between the
politics of resistance and the emancipatory dimensions of the arts, the
media and cultural practice in general. An agenda for emancipation
drawing on the gamut of existing counter-cultural articulations can be
said to have three components: demystifying existing structures and
mechanisms of the culture industry; unifying cultural practices shar-
ing common ideological undercurrents and submitting a constructive
critique of the modes of representation in such cultural practices.