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Оглавление1. INTRODUCTION
The ANC and the media post-apartheid
Gratitude for liberation should not mean unending gratitude to the leading movement in that process. It is very human to be caught in the seductive embrace of one’s liberators, but it is irresponsible and shirking one’s duty to continue to entrust the future of one’s society solely to a party or parties associated with the liberation struggle.1
The role of the news media in South Africa’s democracy presents a paradox, a historically created conundrum: the South African media finds itself subjected to the ruling party’s desire for more unity and consensus in the country’s fractured society. The desire of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) would be met if there was a more supportive and loyal press but the press finds compliance with this desire out of kilter with its professional code of ethics, its role of holding power to account, loyalty to the citizenry, exposing abuses of power and being a ‘watchdog’ in the unfolding democracy. The historically created conundrum consists of the ‘logic’ that because the ANC led the liberation struggle and was democratically elected it deserves a more sympathetic press. But as Mamphela Ramphele has noted in the opening quotation to this chapter, it would be irresponsible to be ‘caught in the embrace of one’s liberators’, and then arguably in support of a media independent from political control she averred that ‘we must guard against the closing of the mind and inward turning of the gaze that leads to tyranny … We need to know how open our society is so that we have a yardstick against which to measure South Africa’s progress in creating an open society.’ Since 1994, prominent members of the ANC have, to varying degrees, conceptualised the media as an ‘us and them’, or in a matrix which positions the media as outside democracy. Yet the tensions are internal to, and inherent in, democracy itself.
This opening chapter provides an introduction which is thematically grounded in political philosophy. In their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argued that democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realisation, a foundational point which has been accepted by the key political philosophical works of the three authors whose perspectives have guided this book: Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe stated that the different political spaces, and the plurality of such spaces, are part and parcel of the deepening of a democratic order. Within this multiplicity of open spaces there are contestations, changing meanings and constant flux. Difference, rather than unity of opinion, is therefore necessary in any democratic transition. Dissension should be accepted, and those who criticise should be viewed as legitimate adversaries rather than as enemies. This is how a radical democracy is generated, according to Mouffe in The Democratic Paradox. One of my central arguments is that the media is one such space or platform for a diversity of views but, even more importantly, it is a medium for the questioning of meaning in politics. Running through this book is the thread that journalists are not ‘enemies of the people’ or outsiders in a democracy. On the contrary, they play a critical and essential role in the deepening of democracy. Democracy, in this book, is a floating signifier, which denotes that it does not have full meaning (a ‘signifier’ is more than a mere sign but stands for, or represents, the subject – and a floating signifier, then, is a signifier with no fixed meaning).
The intersection between the independent media (that is, the news media – journalism, news reporting, analysis and political commentary) and democracy in an unrealised democracy is under scrutiny, the aim of which is to preserve the ideal of democracy, to ward off dissolution, and also hopefully to inform action or activism to halt the whittling away of the ‘free’ space of the media (by ‘free’, here, is meant relatively free, relatively autonomous and relatively independent, with the focus on relative freedom from political pressures and state interference).
The South African media professes to play a vital role in entrenching the articles of the Constitution, ensuring a transparent democracy which holds public officials accountable for their decisions and actions and exposes the abuse of power and corruption by ruling elites. The questions are to do with the concept of democracy and its realisation; the tension between the two constitutive dimensions of democracy; and the realisation of the popular will – particularly pressing in South Africa with its history of apartheid racism, class divisions, growing poverty, unemployment, and failures of service delivery, especially to poor people.
According to Mouffe (2006: 974), in a ‘radical pluralist democracy’ the media can be gate-openers rather than gate-closers. Her model of democracy not only allows for theorising the increase of pluralism within journalism, but also allows for the increase of pluralism through journalism. In South Africa, as in many other parts of the world, the media does not exist as a fixed, homogeneous entity. Although organisational forums and non-governmental and academic bodies (such as the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef), the Forum for Black Journalists (FBJ), the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), Media Monitoring Africa, Institute for the Advancement of Journalism and Wits Journalism) enable representatives of the media to share ideas, debate professional issues and even outline codes of conduct, the media in South Africa does not share a collective or unitary identity.
Different forces drive editorial content, from the diverse theoretical platforms from which journalists operate to the different economic and political agendas of the media owners and managers. The South African media is fractured, open-ended and undecided in its nature. It is for this reason that I have chosen to use a radical democratic perspective, coupled with a blend of Žižekean psychoanalysis, which goes beyond the liberal democratic paradigm. In Žižek’s conceptual analysis, especially in his 1989 work The Sublime Object of Ideology, a postmodern twist is that of the Master-Signifier. The Master-Signifier could be described as a ‘quasi transcendental big other’. Through imaginary and symbolic identification we see ourselves in how we are seen by that ‘big other’. But as there is no ‘big other’, the Master-Signifier is empty, a signifier that puts an end to the chain of meaning. As Kay (2003: 159) has stated, the idea that there is an other of the other is psychotic; this is why we need to discover that the big other does not exist, that it is ‘merely an imposter … lacking or inconsistent as a result of its deficient relation to the real.’
The question is, if the media is not independent and free to criticise, what is the intersection between democracy and an independent press? A critical question is, first, how the ANC ‘sees’ the media vis-à-vis democracy. (I refer here to the ANC’s ‘gaze’, the lens of which one is part and which therefore prevents one from seeing from an objective distance – one’s own view is subscribed in the content of one’s gaze.) To use a personal example, my gaze, having worked all my adult life as a journalist, is inscribed in this book’s gaze on the media.
A second question, pointed out by Mondli Makhanya, then editor of the Sunday Times, in a 2008 interview, is how, in contrast to the ANC’s view, journalists view their role and seek not to be ‘ideologically in tandem’ with the ruling party. A third question follows, then, as to how attempts are made by the ruling bloc to unify society via foreclosures, and whether the media succumbs to the ideological interpellations2 or ‘turns’ from the attempt at subjugation. Are the attempts to quilt or unify society via a point de capiton, a tight knot of meanings (Žižek, 1989: 95-100)3 succeeding through the interpellations of the media? These are the key questions. While the book’s focus is on the relationship of the ANC and the media vis-à-vis democracy in post-apartheid South Africa, I also discuss and trace the ANC’s stance on the media prior to its becoming the ruling party. In 2010 three significant events took place which, it could be argued, highlighted the greatest tension in the democratic dispensation between the media and the ANC. The three events in 2010 that related to threatened closure of spaces for media freedom were: first, the desire of the ANC for a statutory media appeals tribunal became quite intense; second, the Protection of State Information Bill (dubbed the Secrecy Bill) which, in its 2010 form, would have created a secretive society and criminalised investigative journalism and whistle-blowers was on the table; and third, the arrest of the journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika of the Sunday Times on 4 August 2010 for ‘fraud and defeating the ends of justice’ which raised concerns about state bullying (The Times: 5 August 2010). These events signified the unprogressive hegemonising of society by the ANC. The reaction of the media, according to the ANC, was ‘hysterical’ (used as a psychoanalytical concept signifying paranoia and obession). In October 2010, the country dropped five places in the Reporters without Borders annual Press Freedom Index (Mail & Guardian: 22-28 October 2010), largely because of the behaviour of senior members of the ANC towards the press.
Let us turn to some of the main events in 2010 which signalled that press freedom was under serious threat from the ruling party and the state.
First, in July 2010 the ANC decided to revive the resolution from its 52nd National Policy Conference in Polokwane in December 2007 to investigate the establishment of a statutory media appeals tribunal to curb the excesses of a media that was, in the words of Julius Malema, leader of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), ‘a law unto itself ’. In a discussion document, Media Transformation, Ownership and Diversity, produced in preparation for its National General Council in September 2010, the ANC argued that the self-regulatory system of the media (the Press Council, the ombudsman and the Press Appeals Panel, with the press code governing the system) had become self-serving. The media appeals tribunal could be constituted by members of parliament, nearly two-thirds of whom are ANC members, or could be chosen by MPs, and could be an appeals structure, probably with strong punitive powers. In support of the media appeals tribunal, Jacob Zuma said that human rights were trampled on by the media, that the media invaded people’s privacy, and that the media ‘must behave like everybody else’. He declared that ‘ … this media that says it is the watchdog for democracy was not democratically elected’ (The Times: 12 August 2010).
The aim of the media appeals tribunal, according to ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu, was to halt journalists’ ‘excesses and waywardness’. ‘If you have to go to prison, let it be. If you pay millions for defamation, let it be. If journalists have to be fired because they don’t contribute to the South Africa we want, let it be’ (Mail & Guardian: 23-29 July 2010). Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who became the minister of higher education in 2009, supported the media appeals tribunal because ‘if there is one serious threat to our democracy, it is a media that is accountable to itself … we have no opposition other than the bourgeois media’ (The Times: 2 August 2010). Siphiwe Nyanda, a former general in the South African National Defence Force who was to become minister of communications (although he was fired in 2010), also supported the media appeals tribunal after he had endured criticism in the press for ‘high living’: ‘I do not understand how the purchase of cars and hotel stays amount to corruption. The media trivialises the matter by tagging as ‘corruption’ things done by politicians that they do not like’ (Sunday Times: 1 August 2010). Julius Malema said: ‘It is important that we need to fight this media which is ruling itself, the media which is now a law unto itself. These people, they can destroy the revolution. They think they are untouchable and they can write about anything they like … that time has come to an end … these people are dangerous’ (Sunday Times: 8 August 2010).
The above rhetoric has several implications. First, it is argued in this book that all those quoted above – Mthembu, Nyanda, Zuma, Nzimande and Malema – use ideological interpellations against an independent media, labelling and positioning the media as outsiders to democracy. The discourse suggests closures in society, and the proposed interventions – a media appeals tribunal and the Protection of State Information Bill – signalled an ideological social fantasy of the ANC: that, through political control of the media, it could cover up its own inadequacies, its own fractious nature and the disunity of society itself. Here, ‘fantasy’ refers to the way antagonism is masked; in Žižekean philosophical discourse, ideology is used to mask antagonism, and a social fantasy refers to disguising antagonism by altering perceptions and interpretations of reality.
The second implication of the ANC’s rhetoric is the attempted subjugation of the media via the Protection of State Information Bill. If enacted, in its present form its impact on the world of journalism would be severe: penalties for offences range from between three to twenty-five years in jail. Many stories would not be publishable. The Bill is draconian, a violation of media freedom and freedom of expression, one which would have had a chilling effect on the publication of matters of public interest and, further, one that would kill the free flow of information and transparency and finally, one which would not stand the test of constitutionality.4 For the state law advisor, Enver Daniels, however, the Protection of State Information Bill was meant to ‘balance’ the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000. He argued that the reactions by the press and civil society groupings (including Sanef, Print Media SA, FXI), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the ANC’s own alliance partner, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)) which had made submissions to Parliament, were ‘emotional and hysterical’ (The Star: 28 July 2010).
A third implication of this increasing intimidation of the free press arises from the arrest on 4 August 2010 of a Sunday Times investigative journalist, Mzilikazi wa Afrika, outside his newspaper offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg. While Sanef was engaged in a meeting with journalists (of whom I was one) to discuss the attempts at muzzling the media, the chairperson, Mondli Makhanya, asked what the commotion was outside. A few of us ran out and witnessed Wa Afrika being roughly handled by seven plain-clothes policeman who were escorting him to an awaiting police vehicle. The police said he was being arrested for ‘fraud’ and ‘defeating the ends of justice’ (Mail & Guardian: 13-19 August).5 It subsequently emerged that the ANC was unhappy about the exposures of divisions and fractures in the party’s leadership in Mpumalanga and the arrest was part of a strategy to stop Wa Afrika from his investigative reporting. The incident had a surreal quality about it, reminiscent of the dark old days of apartheid.
The deepening of South Africa’s democracy will depend upon acceptance and tolerance by the ANC and the government of media scrutiny of its performance. Pallo Jordan, who is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) and chairperson of the NEC subcommittee on communication, and has always been regarded as one of the organisation’s intellectuals, made this point too. He wrote that in the spirit of the Constitution the value we place on a free independent and outspoken press in democratic South Africa cannot be overstated, and he asserted that:‘The ANC has not and shall not wilt under criticism or close scrutiny’ (The Times: 20 August 2010). He also wrote that his argument was within the tradition of the ANC itself: ‘The ANC has a long track record of commitment to media freedom. In defending a free media, we are defending the ANC’s own rich heritage … ’ (ANC Today: 20-26 August 2010). However, a mere month later, Jordan did an about-turn. He announced at a press conference after the ANC’s National General Council (NGC) on 24 September 2010 that the media appeals tribunal, which the organisation had resolved to take forward, was an indication of the ‘ANC’s commitment to press freedom’ (Sunday Independent: 24 October 2010), and that the media did not reflect the transition to democracy. ‘When you read our print media you never get a sense that this country is moving from an authoritarian state to democracy.’ He became even less a champion of an independent press and an open society when he later stated that ‘there is no country that has no secrets. The purpose of the Bill is to protect the secrets of this country’ (Mail & Guardian: 29 October - 4 November 2010).
The ANC as an organisation is not ideologically united, nor had it been left unscarred by the reports of the scandals of corruption exposed in the print media. Could this be why its leaders, including Zuma, Nyanda, Malema, Nzimande and Mthembu, wanted a media appeals tribunal, which aimed ultimately at political control of the media? The graphic on the next page by artist John McCann (Mail & Guardian: 20-26 August 2010) showed the exposures of corruption in the print media by the above leaders: ‘Nyanda’s five-star hotel binge’; ‘Blade’s [Nzimande] high life’; ‘Zuma for sale’; ‘Malema’s new tax dodge’; and ‘ANC leader’s jailhouse rock’, referring to a story about Mthembu’s drinking and driving.
But what are the problems with the media and the self-regulation system? Many other critics of the media, such as Lumko Mtimde (ANC Today: 30 July-5 August 2010) and Essop Pahad (speech delivered to Wits University Colloquium on ‘Media Freedom and Regulation’. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 15 September 2010), have argued that the existing self-regulatory system did not give sufficient protection to those whose rights to dignity (also protected in the Constitution) have been violated; that the Press Council was toothless as it did not levy fines while the corrections and apologies are not commensurate in size and placement to the damage done by the offending article; and the Press Council is composed mainly of former journalists.
Franz Kruger said at the colloquium on the media and self-regulation that some of the arguments from critics of the media needed to be considered and there should be more self-examination by journalists. ‘Some house-cleaning needs to happen and journalists need to be more careful’. Some of the issues raised in this respect included: the view that leaks should be handled with more care as journalists were vulnerable to manipulation; apologies were not commensurate with mistakes made; there should be a clearer distinction between reporting and commenting; and that there were far too many headlines which do not reflect the actual text of the story. These criticisms pointed out by Kruger and others at the event showed that the media was not above criticism and that there was a need for greater self-examination of the way in which it operated.
In support of a free press
The aim of this book is to unravel the politics of the independent media and the ANC through looking at specific case studies after apartheid, theorising trends, contradictions and splits, observations and reflections, and to produce findings about the intersection between the independent media and democracy. My aim is to limit the focus to particular examples of political interference. While I am aware of arguments from its detractors about the media’s commercial imperatives and how they impact, my main focus is on the ANC and the media.
By combining Mouffe’s conception of a radical democracy with Butler’s theories of power and subjection (wherein concepts such as ‘reflexive turn’, ‘subjectivisation’, ‘passionate attachments’ and ‘resignifications’ are applied, together with the Žižekean conceptual tools of Master-Signifier and social fantasy), a discussion, reflection and analysis of events regarding the media and the ANC since 1994 ensues. In addition, I examine what ‘turn’ journalists made in response to subjectivisation, or subjugation, that had already taken place and what this means for democracy in South Africa. Were these reflexive turns, as in turns against themselves, or were they resignifications and a break from the past, as in loyalties to the ANC because it was the liberation party which freed South Africa from colonial and racist oppression? (Resignification here means to not reiterate oppressive norms of the past; to detach oneself from past signifiers – resignification is a form of resistance, as in not acknowledging the name-calling.)
I use several specific examples, or ‘case studies’, in as many different chapters, to investigate the expectations of the ANC regarding the media and how the ANC imagines the media, as well as how the media itself defines its role. I then proceed to explore how the independence of the media is under threat.
It must also be said at the outset that I use the terms ‘the ANC’ and ‘the media’ in an affirmative deconstructive way – that is, I use the terms and interrogate them at the same time. When I write ‘the ANC’ I do not mean that the ANC is one ideological entity. I constantly attempt to show various strands of the ANC through its various discourses, and to capture the ambiguities, nuances and ambivalences within the organisation. In the same way, ‘the media’ is not a monolithic bloc, and this too is shown in the different issues analysed in the different chapters. The theoretical concepts used will be discussed in the forthcoming sections of this chapter, and will be further elucidated in the rest of the book.
The fundamental reason for writing this book is to preserve the free press from political interference as there have been several interjections in discourse since the advent of democracy which show that there are threats. In South Africa’s less than 20-year-old democracy, the ANC’s perspective is that the media’s role needs to be clarified, contained, and directed toward the project of nation-building and transformation as it has defined these processes. Thus the ANC sees itself as engineering democracy, a democracy that is transitional, in a society which remains unequal along racial and class lines.6 Should the media in fact be free and independent from political interference? Or should its primary function be to enhance ‘nation-building’, development, and democracy in the manner defined by the former liberation movement? For many journalists, the latter would be a conflation with party political interests, and the national interest should be de-linked from party politics. Should the media take on the role of civic watchdog, forming part of the system of checks and balances on the misuse of political power and ensuring accountability for the actions of those in power, as is its role in conventional democratic states of the West? Should it simply be a mirror of the society in which it operates, reflecting the opinions of the ruling elite in a particular society? Or should journalists embrace the role of organic intellectuals, as did Gramsci?
The growing mistrust and miscommunication between the government on the one hand, and editors and journalists, on the other, since 1994 in South Africa led to a major indaba in June 2001 between the Cabinet and Sanef. The president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, remarked then that there was a need for interaction, dialogue and a process of engagement ‘so that we understand each other better’. ‘What is this national interest?’ Mbeki asked. It was interesting that Mbeki acknowledged that the term ‘national interest’ was a ‘troublesome one’, as we all come from ‘different angles, different histories and therefore respond in different ways’ (Mbeki 2001). What he did not add was that we all seem to have different understandings, not merely of what the ‘national interest’ is, but also of what ‘democracy’ is and of what a ‘free media’ means. This is the crux of the matter in this book, hence one of the key conceptualisations: democracy is a ‘floating signifier’ (open-ended in respect of its meaning).
One of the significant reasons for this book was to make a contribution such that journalists and the ANC, with their plurality of views, begin to understand one another better. Thus I offer a two-way gaze: the media on the ANC’s interventions and the ANC on the media’s interventions. Both appear to talk past each other in the way they understand press freedom, the role of the press and what the national interest is. In my understanding, it is in the national interest to expose abuse of power and corruption. This book shows how democracy is a free floating signifier in the eyes of journalists, but how the ruling tripartite alliance, primarily the ANC and the SACP, attempt to make its meaning rigid.
A postmodern, psychoanalytic approach to South African politics is apposite, for its usage shows how impossible it is to predict the twists and turns that democracy is taking and may continue to take, with the only a priori understanding being that the future path is undecided and unpredictable. As Anthony Giddens theorised, ‘Postmodernity is characterised by the fact that nothing can be known with any certainty’ (1990: 46). This lack of certainty describes the position in South Africa, post apartheid.
The idea of the politics of renewal, resignifications, critical intervention and the slipping and sliding nature of this kind of democracy provides a series of concepts that assist in analysing the reality of what is happening in the South African case. For example, the concept of resignifications is elucidated in how a populist left-wing coalition, which defeated Mbeki and brought Zuma to power, then itself began unravelling as alliances changed. Using the theories of Laclau from On Populist Reason, I have highlighted how democracy in South Africa is characterised by contingency. Through the examples of ‘Babygate’ and the Budget speech by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, I show how easily alliances can become unsettled, especially if heterogeneous demands are crystallised in one popular figure. In this case, demands were crystallised in the figure and the name ‘Zuma’ – a name which was beginning to prove an ‘empty signifier’ for the left.
Some useful concepts
Radical pluralism, agonism
This work is set within a radical democratic political framework through which I deploy and adapt Mouffe’s works, particularly The Democratic Paradox (2000) and On the Political: Thinking in Action (2006), which grew from her earlier groundbreaking and seminal work with Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Mouffe (1999) argued that within the rational consensualist model of democracy you become an enemy if you do not follow the rules of the game. In a radical democracy you can be conceptualised as a legitimate adversary. This research shows that in South Africa many journalists’ voices do not follow the rules of the game, that is to say the ANC’s game, or the voice of authority that attempts to interpellate.
In this argument for the importance of the plurality of political spaces, there is a distinction between legitimate adversaries. I show that the ANC sees voices in South Africa that are critical as ‘enemy’ rather than ‘adversary’. It would prefer unity with the press, which, in its view, would create social harmony and cover up the flaws of the unfolding democracy. It would prefer to fix the meaning, or tie it in a knot via the terms ‘developmental journalism’ and ‘transformation’, to the past liberation role of the ANC. In the book, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (1999), Mouffe dissected Schmitt’s argument for political unity, arguing instead that antagonisms do not disappear even with consensus. Schmitt feared the loss of common premises and consequent destruction of political unity and his thesis on consensus politics appears to have resonance with the views of the ANC on the media, as given voice by all three democratic presidents of the country, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. I argue, and show, that there is no unity in the media itself: it is not a fixed, definable, single ideological entity with a totalised identity, in the same way that Mouffe argued that society does not exist as a clearly defined single entity.
Enemies of the people, the gaze and social fantasy
Žižek’s works The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), The Ticklish Subject (2000a), Interrogating the Real (2006a), How to Read Lacan (2006b) and The Indivisible Remainder (2007), contain important theoretical foundations for this book’s conceptual, analytical approach. These texts are used to explain the analytical concepts constitutive of the theoretical framework and have been applied to this analysis. Particularly pertinent is The Sublime Object of Ideology because Žižek’s concepts of social fantasy, loyalty and the symbolic ‘big other’ seem to speak directly to the current tension between the South African press and the ruling party. Equally, his concepts of ‘enemies of the nation’, ‘the gaze’, ‘point de capiton’ the ‘rigid designator’ and ‘Che Vuoi’, are all apt in my examination of how the ANC, through its desire for a ‘development journalism’, actually aims at unifying society through an unprogressive hegemony around its own ideological structuring principles.
Che Vuoi
One of the most significant Žižekean concepts is the question that causes hysteria: Che Vuoi (1989: 87), meaning ‘what do you want?’ More than this, it means ‘what are you really aiming at?’ ‘You’re telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?’ It is experienced by the subject as an unbearable anxiety. In this book, both the media as subject, and the ANC as the subject of the media, experience anxiety. There is a split between demand and desire and this is what defines the hysterical subject (op cit: 111). This application is pertinent for the ANC’s hailing of the media as ‘hysterical’. Hence, the psychoanalytical theoretical works and analyses of Žižek have been important. Interrogating the Real (2006a) provided some of the key concepts I have used in my analysis, such as the Master-Signifier, object, subject and social fantasy. Similarly, The Ticklish Subject (2000) gives examples of what ‘surplus’ and ‘excess’ mean, which is pertinent to my analysis of the ANC’s reaction to the Sunday Times exposé of the former minister of health and the chapter on the discourse of the ANC on the media. By ‘surplus’, Žižek means what is attached to the object, more than the object itself. Herein lies the fantasy. Žižek is a devout Lacanian. For Lacan, himself a devout believer in psychoanalysis and a Freudian, the fantasy is a sort of magnet which will attract those memories to itself which suit it. According to Leader and Groves (1995: 128), ‘If you have only a few memories from your childhood you could ask yourself why you remember only those elements and not others’.
Žižek discussed the concept of the ‘unconscious social fantasy’ using the example of racism against Jews. In Nazi Germany anti-Semitism became a paranoid construction and ‘the Jew’ became a fetish and a social symptom. The ‘surplus’ and the ‘excess’ (something more seen in the object than the object itself, something that the object stands for) were evidenced in the discourse to describe the features of the Jew – greedy, sly, profiteer, corrupt (1989: 125) – who was then constructed as the ‘other’ and thus could not, by virtue of that identity and that difference, be part of society and must be expelled – indeed erased completely. I show how the media has become, in the discourse of the ANC, a paranoid construction, with a surplus and excess attached to it, labelled negatively to the point of a social fantasy: threat to democracy, anti-transformation, racist and enemies of the people.
According to Kay (2003: 163), by fantasy, Žižek does not mean that which is opposed to reality: ‘on the contrary, it is what structures that which we call reality, and determines the contours of desire. Likewise it is not escapist; rather it is shot through with the traumatic enjoyment which it helps to repress; thus fantasy shields us from the Real and transmits it.’ Two other Žižekean concepts used in this book are that of ‘the rigid designator’ and ‘the gaze’. In explaining the rigid designator, Žižek says it aims at what the object represents and when this becomes exaggerated it produces a signifying operation.
The term ‘gaze’ is used by Žižek in the sense of the gap that it creates. He gives the example of the gap in Brueghel’s paintings of idyllic scenes of peasant life, country festivity, reapers during midday rest, and so on. These paintings were removed from reality and any real plebeian attitude. ‘Their gaze is the external gaze of the aristocracy upon the peasants’ idyll, not the gaze of the peasants themselves upon their life’. In attempting to explain this conceptualisation of ‘the gaze’, Kay sees it as an object attached to the scopic drive. It is an imaginary construct but it has a strong attachment to the Real. For Žižek, she stresses: ‘the gaze does not involve my looking but my being looked at’. For the ANC, the media’s reaction to the proposals to curb its freedom is hysterical.7 Yet, actually, both parties are hysterical, with the ANC being more hysterical than journalists.
On political subjection
Butler’s theories in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) contain important theoretical positions which I have drawn on to understand the attempts to subject, or subjugate, critical media voices in South Africa through the idea of interpellation and, even more importantly, to reflect on what reflexive turns were made towards the voices of power, and why. I have used Butler’s concepts of ‘passionate attachments’, ‘reflexive turns’ and ‘resignifications’ to show how subjects can become attached to subjection and how an unpredictable turn can show resignifications or, if you like, detaching from past signifiers to permit liberation from the past. In his seminal work, The Ideological State Apparatuses (1984), Louis Althusser’s central thesis was that all ideology hails, or interpellates, concrete individuals as concrete subjects.
But ideology and hegemony cannot be conflated, for ideology ‘plays a crucial role in the construction of hegemony’, according to Torfing, whose book New Theories of Discourse provides a comprehensive coverage of the theories of Laclau, Mouffe, Butler and Žižek, as well as the philosophical debates and differences between them. Eagleton (1991) noted that we might define hegemony as a whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule and from which it legitimates subjugation. Explaining the Gramscian view of hegemony, he continued: ‘To win hegemony is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one’s own world view throughout the fabric of society as a whole, thus equating one’s own interests with the interests of society at large’. This Gramscian view of hegemony is a set of ideas by which the dominant group in society, the ANC, secures the consent of the groups below it to ensure its rule.
Passionate attachments, reflexive turns and resignifications
Butler’s theories of political subjectivisation, passionate attachments, reflexivity and resignifications (1997: 2-30) are used where the divisive role of the FBJ is explored. I scrutinise the organisation’s revival, within a non-racial, democratic South Africa, and then its quick implosion in the light of the majority of black journalists having stated that they saw no place for such a forum in a new South Africa. For them, race was not seen as Master-Signifier around which to unify, showing resignifications to past attachments. The comments of the journalists Justice Malala, Chris Bathemba, Phylicia Oppelt and Ferial Haffajee, who were not in favour of the blacks-only forum, showed a lack of reiteration to norms which oppress, for example singular, linear, race identity. For Butler, neither norms nor identities are fixed, and even within these reiterations there are possibilities that they will be repeated in unpredictable ways; that they will be re-appropriated, so to speak, showing resignifications. The case of those black journalists who did not give validity to the FBJ reflects the operation of Butler’s concept of resignifications. On the other side of the coin was Abbey Makoe (who initiated the revival of the FBJ) who embraced the very terms that injured him. He repeated the norms of racial oppression that simply returned him to a position of subjection, which reflects the operation of Butler’s passionate attachment. It is the radical dependency on norms and a reiteration of those norms that lead to subjection. Using Butler’s concepts of attachments and resignifications I show the circularity and reproduction of race-based subjection, as in the case of the FBJ. The example of journalists in South Africa with free floating, multiple (rather than fixed) identities also make the theories of Butler pertinent. Employing these concepts shows that the media is not one entity which is fixed. Nor is democracy a process that has an end point. It is continuously contested and reinvented – fluid, open-ended and always in a process of becoming.
Other works that I have utilised include Diane Macdonell’s elucidation of discourse theory (1986) which states that discourse has a social function. She explains the role of ideology, meaning, understanding and language in discourse, with the starting point that meanings of words and expressions are not intrinsic but, rather, dependent on the particular contexts in which they are articulated. I have also referred to Pecheux (1982) who explained the relationship between ideology and discourse. Pecheux’s view was that words, expressions and so on change their meanings according to the positions held by those who use them. Similarly, Torfing explains that there is always something that escapes processes of signification within discourse, partially fixing meaning, and this produces a surplus in meaning which escapes the logic of discourse (1999: 92). The field of irreducible surplus is the field of the discursive, a terrain that is undecidable, unfixed and in flux. This is discourse, in Laclau and Mouffe’s theories, which elucidates that no one signifier has a special status above all others: meaning is acquired through a particular signifier’s configuration and relationship with others. This is how I use the term discourse theoretically in this book.
Thus my theoretical underpinnings are a blend of radical democratic theory and psychoanalysis theory, interlaced with a postmodern approach. The theories elucidated are those which argue for a radical democracy within pluralism, as do Laclau and Mouffe, Žižek and Butler, theorists who have all grappled with, and continue to grapple with, the new globalised world and how to deal with what is often called a post-ideological world in which liberal democracy seems to be taken for granted as the only system to endorse. This capitalist liberal framework, however, has not brought about equality in the world. Quite the contrary, and for this reason I have sought to explore an alternative radical democratic theoretical framework – but I must say from the outset that the focus is on the contribution the media does make (albeit an imperfect one) to the democracy-in-process.
Radical democracy
One way to understand radical democracy is through a theoretically post-Marxist, poststructuralist perspective which challenges liberal democracy’s lack of inclusion of all sectors of civil society. It aims for a deeper and more expansive democracy than what is currently on the table in the western world. Radical democracy emerged in response to the crisis that affected western left wing thought in the second half of the twentieth century. These crises included dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the Marxist project and the rise of social movements which, according to Little and Lloyd (2009), included feminist struggles, gay and lesbian issues, and environmental concerns, among other particular micropolitics. Another way to understand radical democracy is through post-Marxism as defined by Iris Marion Young who averred that it was inspired by socialism and was critical of capitalist economic processes (2009). But this achievement of equality or true democracy can never be fully realised, is open-ended and conflictual by nature, always contested, and not open to final realisation or reconciliation. Civil society is important in radical democracy, as the various plural struggles and microstruggles contest unprogressive hegemonies. This book shows how contestations in South Africa between the ruling party’s understandings of democracy, developmental journalism and freedom of the press exemplify the conditions described above. It also elucidates the overlap between radical democracy, which is conditional, and a postmodern state of fluidity and lack of decidability. In my argument the media is precisely one such space, part of the public sphere. It is a pluralistic space in which different views can be expressed and where dynamic deliberations and contestations can and do take place. Why a ‘radical democracy’ framework rather than ‘liberal democracy’ framework or simply a ‘democracy’ framework? Because a radical democratic framework demands the acknowledgement of difference.
Postmodernism
By its very nature, the term postmodern appears to be more apt as the description of a process rather than of a fixed period. It describes the condition post the modern era which was characterised by rationalism and consensus politics. Postmodernism developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a breakaway from the universalism of the enlightenment, the rationalism of modernism and the class essentialism and reductionism of Marxism. There are different interpretations of postmodernism in politics. The key word in politics and postmodernism is ‘process’. In other words, postmodernism calls for a rejection of modern politics, a radically different politics, a rejection of essentialism and a celebration of difference and contingency. As David West (1996: 199) stated:
If the mood of post-modernity is defined in terms of incredulity towards meta-narratives, the politics of post-modernity is radically errant of grand projects and ambitious political programmes, which are a prominent feature of modern states and ideologies. Attempts to unify society artificially according to some grand, ‘totalising’ theory or ideology are no longer convincing.
These are really more akin to descriptions, rather than full definitions, of postmodernism. They mark what the postmodern condition entails, or is characterised by – fluidity, undecidability, multiple identities and dispersed identities, with no fixed signifier and a plurality of struggles within ‘the social’ – while acknowledging the split nature of society and the split nature of identities too.
Psychoanalysis
The theoretical framework is not a psychoanalytical one per se. It is rather the use of Žižek’s Lacanian tools that mark it as psychoanalytic. To be more precise, it is the use of terms such as social fantasy, gaze, surplus, excess, and hysteria that are drawn from psychoanalysis. Lacan’s psychoanalysis was itself a method of reading texts, oral or written. It is in this sense that I use the psychoanalytic.
The main use of Lacan’s psychoanalysis by Žižek is the understanding of transference, the belief in ‘the other’, as in the false belief that the analyst knows the meaning of his or her patient’s symptoms. This is a false belief at the start of the analysis process, but it is through this false belief that the work of analysis can proceed. Political power, I argue, is symbolic in nature and through the roles and the masks, and through interpellations (naming, hailing, labelling, subjecting, calling) ideological subjectivisation (subjugation) can take place. In this book, there are two important Lacanian theoretical concepts: subjects are always divided between what they consciously know and say, and their unconscious beliefs (Žižek 2006a: 2-21). For example, the media is a signifier without a signified. And, in the same way that Žižek has argued that no one knows precisely what they mean when they talk about ‘the nation’ or ‘the people’, I argue that the ANC does not know what it means when it talks about ‘the media’.
It is in Žižek’s use of Lacan’s conceptual tools of fantasy, gaze, rigid designator and jouissance that his radical departure emerges. According to Lacan, jouissance might mean enjoyment but its real meaning resides in that which is too much to bear, and so most of the time it is about suffering. It is linked to paranoia and to something outside or some agency external to it, for example television, which becomes ‘the other’, as Darien Leader and Judy Groves (1995) have explained. The argument developed in this book is that the ANC’s gaze on the media since democracy has been characterised by an excess and surplus enjoyment which is the last support of ideology. Kay suggests that in Žižek’s usage enjoyment is usually identifiable with what Lacan calls ‘surplus enjoyment’ (plus de jouissance/plus de jouir). In other words, ‘enjoyment’ comes in ‘the form of a surplus, or remainder that permeates all of our symbolic institutions as their obscene underside … ’ (2003: 161).
Is the ANC aware of what it is doing? Is the fantasy that the media is threatening democracy conscious or unconscious? If Žižek were writing this he might say, ‘yes, please’,8 which means both. In the same way, I argue that for the ANC its fantasy is both conscious and unconscious.
This book attempts to find answers about what is ‘really bugging’ the ANC. The qualitative data – the interviews with journalists and editors of some South African English language newspapers which are dispersed throughout the book – show that the ANC conflates ‘the people’ with ‘the ANC’, the consequence of which is that any criticism of the ruling party translates, conflates and collapses into a construction that the critic is anti-transformation and anti-democracy. This statement is further supported by evidence drawn from ‘Letters from the president’ in ANC Today, as well as other interpellations where the media is constructed as the enemy, for example in the discourse over the proposed media appeals tribunal. I show how the ANC desires consensus, harmony, or unity with the party. Through discourse analysis in the next chapter I show how all three post-apartheid presidents, Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma, have desired this unity and have attached an excess to the media, with an unconscious fantasy in operation. Discussions with various editors and journalists indicated that there is a conflation of the party and ‘the people’.
How I conducted the research
The research for this book hailed from my PhD in Political Studies with the topic ‘The role of the media in a democracy: Unravelling the politics between the media, the state and the ANC in South Africa’. The main research question 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.
7It was Essop Pahad, formerly minister in Mbeki’s presidency and subsequently publisher and editor of The Thinker, who said in a speech at a colloquium at Wits University, Media Freedom and Regulation, on 15 September 2010, that the ANC found the way ‘the Info Bill and the Media Tribunal was being linked is hysterical’.
8In Contingency, Hegemony and Universality Žižek explains the famous Marx brothers joke about ‘coffee or tea?’. ‘Yes, please!’ It is a refusal of choice.
