was ‘What is the intersection between the floating signifier, democracy and an independent press?’.
This work of political philosophy engages concepts and case studies. The concepts outlined above were utilised to shed light on the complex relationship of democracy to the media and how attempts are made to pin down ‘democracy’, a floating signifier, into a fixed meaning tied to transformation and loyalty to the ANC. The qualitative findings, through interview material, newspaper stories, letters from the public to newspapers, recorded meetings, panel discussions, protest action, and the range of ANC and other documentation, have been examined through the prism of the conceptual analytical tools discussed above. This has enabled the drawing together of reflections, the identification of patterns or attachments, the splits and contradictions, and the ambivalences on the part of both the media and the ANC. Critical discourse analysis has been used primarily to understand the ideological workings in the tensions between the ANC and the media, specifically the press.
This work adopts a multi-pronged integrative methodological strategy in order to provide a richer and fuller (as opposed to a linear) interpretation of the relationship between the media and the ANC. First, events that have occurred since 1994 have been elucidated and a historical context has been provided. While these ‘events’ can be called case studies, they are not case studies in the classical and traditional sense; nor will they be used for any traditional empirical or quantitative purposes. The methods of discourse analysis will, rather, be used to foreground the ideological underpinnings that help us to understand the positions adopted by different actors.
Besides the theoretical conceptual method, critical discourse analysis has also been deployed throughout the book. It is through language that subjugation takes place and, according to Lacan, ‘hysteria’ emerges when a subject starts to question, or feel discomfort in, his or her symbolic identity (Žižek 2006: 35). For the ANC, the media’s reaction to the proposed media appeals tribunal has been ‘hysterical’. Macdonell (1986) also explained, in Theories of Discourse: an Introduction, that the field of discourse is not homogeneous. Discourse is social, and the ‘statement made, the words used and the meanings of the words used, depend on where and against what the statement is made’. She drew on the works of Pecheux, for whom ‘words, expressions and propositions, change their meaning according to the positions held by those who use them’. As a result, ‘conflicting discourses’ can develop, even when ‘there is supposedly common language’. Words do not have universal meanings, but change over time and at any given moment the same word can hold different meanings. Pecheux, according to Macdonell argued that meanings are part of the ‘ideological sphere’ and discourse is one of ideology’s principal forms.
The interview method, which comprises a reflective commentary, was an important component of my research. A sample of journalists from the English-speaking newspaper media was interviewed. They were over the age of thirty-five and were able to look, in perceptive ways, backwards to their days as reporters under apartheid, during the transition to the new dispensation, to the present, and forwards to the future. A selection of media academics, lawyers and non-governmental activists was also interviewed.
Other sources of information came from newspapers; letters from the public as an indication of the views of civil society and citizenry; academic journals; Letters from the President in ANC Today; statements from media bodies including the FXI and Misa; and official policy documents, as well as attendance at and recordings of panel discussions and seminars on media freedom such as the Right2Know Campaign launch and colloquium. Media figures from the ANC’s communications department, as well as the SACP intellectual Jeremy Cronin were interviewed on the subject of developmental journalism. These interviews and recordings enriched the project with ‘real, live’ voices from South Africa’s unfolding democracy.
The theoretical conceptual research method I adopted aims to deepen our understanding of the significance to a democratic society of a self-regulating and independent media. Is political philosophy and theory pie in the sky? Butler (2000: 265) also questioned the value of theory. She turned to Aristotle, who had reflected: ‘As the saying goes, the action that follows deliberation should be quick, but deliberation slow’. The philosophical arguments between Butler, Žižek and Laclau are united by their foundation: they are ‘motivated by a desire for a radically more restructured world, one which would have economic equality and political enfranchisement imagined in much more radical ways than they are’ (op. cit.: 277). However, the question is how to make the translations between philosophical commentary in the field of politics and the re-imagining of political life. My work is motivated by a commitment: to media freedom, to wanting to see this aspect of life in South Africa flourish, believing that media independence makes a difference to the deepening of the unfolding and unrealised democracy.
As I use terms ‘the ANC’, ‘the media’, ‘the social’ ‘independence’ and ‘free’, I acknowledge that these organisations, terms and entities are split, and not unified. I have used the terms ‘independence’ and ‘free’ while acknowledging that ‘the media’, can only be relatively free and independent. It has to be responsible and accountable to the public, qua the citizenry, plus its readers, viewers and listeners’ to the Constitution; and to its code of professional ethics. And so I have to agree with Ramphele’s opening quotation to this chapter, that gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It would be irresponsible and a shirking of one’s duty to entrust the future of society solely to a party, or parties, associated with the liberation struggle.
NOTES
1Dr Mamphela Ramphele, from a speech made at the University of Cape Town at the launch of the Open Society Monitoring Index (‘House of Freedom is open to all’, Mail & Guardian, 13-19 August 2010).
2‘Interpellation’ means naming, hailing, labelling, calling and subjecting that person to that name, for example: lesbian, black, white, racist. Ideological interpellations are demands or social injunctions with the aim of subjecting and making the subject toe the line – the subject becomes the subject by heeding the call, acknowledging the hailing – for example, ‘enemy of the people’.
3The point de capiton, in Žižek, is a knot, an upholstery button, which pins down or ties up meaning to avoid slippages and slidings.
4Had the law been in place at the time, the following stories would not have been published legally according to experts polled in August 2010: the Oilgate story about the payment of R11 million in PetroSA money by a private company to the ANC’s 2004 election campaign; a story on the link between the wife of minister of state security, Siyabonga Cwele, and an international cocaine ring; a story on the SABC wasting R49 million on dud shows; and the 2007 exposé of baby deaths at the Mount Frere hospital in the Eastern Cape (see Sunday Times: ‘Read all about the info bill’: 15 August 2010).
5He was in possession of an apparently fraudulent letter of resignation, which the premier of Mpumalanga, David Mabuza, was supposed to have penned to the president. The letter was subsequently traced back to the premier’s office and it would seem that the journalist had become a victim of power politics in the province of Mpumalanga. The arrest of Wa Afrika was a sign of sheer intimidation (see Mail & Guardian: ‘Sin doctor red faced over fake letter and the nine lives of Wa Afrika’: 13-19 August 2010).
6The use of the term ‘transitional’ raises the question, of course, of transitional from what to what? I use the term in a Derridean way: democracy is never fully realised; it is constantly unfolding. That is what Derrida meant when he wrote ‘democracy to come’ which means that democracy is a philosophical concept ‘an inheritance of a promise’. In On the Political Mouffe writes that democracy is something uncertain and improbable and must never be taken for granted. In The Democratic Paradox she offers that the moment of realisation of democracy would see its disintegration. I use the terms unfolding democracy and transitional democracy, then, in this Derridean and Mouffian sense.
