Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels
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,