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.