I have attempted to develop a framework for journalistic subjectivity as embodied and embedded experience encompassing issues of difference and of power and I have confronted the journalistic practice with questions of ethics and experience. The axis around which the discussions have turned in this and in the preceding chapters has been one of the self-other relation as it is established through journalism and thus interdependently in the social imaginary through reiterations of journalistic cultural memories. I drew on practical journalistic angles on the subject through a summary and analyses of qualitative interviews with journalists from the USVI analysed in chapter 2, and I held the relationships introduced by the journalists up to the theoretical writings on cosmopolitanism. The reworking of cosmopolitan journalistic subjectivity would consist of a displacement and an estrangement from cultural and political hegemony while acknowledging that the journalist-subject always remains a part of this hegemony – which cannot be escaped but only questioned. It is a constant displacement, or decentring, which helps to multiply points of resistance and thus the journalistic subjectivity stays in constant process – differance or becoming. Through the latter concept I suggested that the concept of globalisation is reworked into a
deterritorialisation that allows for a breaking down of the binary positions of resistance versus hegemony, which is an unhelpful structure when it comes to doing journalism with Deleuze. It is however a structure I have already identified in chapters 1 and 2 when I argued against the identity politics of ethnic, sexualised, gendered, national etc. group formations. The relation of self-other is far more complex than that because subjectivity is always already becoming. Poster (2006) argues that the technological interface, in his words, the humachine, ‘constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium in a way different from oral or written or broadcast models of self constitution’ (Poster 2006: 41). However, whether communication is facilitated by technology or not, the other is never fully available to the self and so I want to allow for recognition of opaqueness in relation (Glissant 1997). I agree that technology makes a new construction of the subject possible and to some this particular interface may be determining to the subject formation in a given situation.
Nevertheless, relation is always a process of subjectivity in multiple ways, and for technology to be the determining factor in a (common) subject position of all internet users in the same way is untenable. Varying emphases and aspects of ethnic background, gender, ‘race’ and sexuality are not necessarily subordinated to technological interfaces, but may even be truncated through online networks, chat-rooms or blogging. Journalistic cosmopolitanism is deterritorialised, rather than being a wholesome unified and globally spanning morality or a dichotomised hegemony-resistance positioning. I furthermore investigated whether becoming could function as an ethical relation to the other and found that becoming-minoritarian enables political activism from the hegemonic position of journalism as well as allowing for an embodied and embedded journalistic subjectivity. I hope to have shown that theorising journalism through becoming-minoritarian can be used as a theory of the journalistic subject of relation and that it bridges the gap between the theory of journalistic craftsmanship and of cosmopolitanism and globalisation when related in an experimental vein to the practice of journalism.
3.4.1 The experiment of journalism
What I am tentatively proposing is a twofold experiment: Firstly the format and the models used by journalists to tell their stories – the training they have been given – needs to be challenged. Journalism needs new models that do not fix sources in
certain roles66 but allow for new stories to be told from new perspectives creating new kinds of singular memories rather than repeating cultural memories as argued in chapter 2. These new formats need furthermore to remain negotiable so as not to exchange one stagnated model for another. What is more, telling stories from a new perspective and using new models of narration will throw up the question of
‘objectivity’ and ‘fair reporting’. Secondly, journalists’ experiences need to be confronted with new realities – networks need to be expanded. Following Deleuze and Guattari, when the context of the journalistic practice changes journalism is forced to change too. The question of ‘objectivity’ and whose voice is being heard will be thrown into perspective by a change of journalistic scenery, online or offline. Online civic journalism is already challenging ‘old’ media roles and bloggers are contributing to national newsfeeds as well as publishing their own agendas online. In chapter 1 I referred to Vron Ware’s references to ‘white’ reporters’ and scholars’ experiences of being ‘white’ when they were confronted with the experience of being ‘black’. These reporters and scholars were trying to understand from within the workings of racism in the US as well as in Europe.
This phenomenological approach to understanding, or letting oneself be affected by, the experience of the other is a way of kick-starting the process of becoming. The embodied and embedded journalistic subjectivity and his or her relation to the other and the community are brought into focus and awareness. This would mean setting up a journalistic experimental lab of developing new practices and experiences. A journalistic experimental lab would take the form of a personal and professional challenge to the journalist-subject within a setting of academic and professional journalistic collaboration. It would aim at developing journalism as shared experience.
Experimenting with what journalism is or what forms are needed to tell a story journalistically challenges both the journalist and the receiver of the news story. The demand upon which this sort of experiencing journalism will call differs from that of the ethical demand of the suffering other only in the extra response it forges. The receiver of the news produced in an experimental vein can respond to this demand with political or charitable action (Chouliaraki 2006). Moreover an opening of a space for interaction and changing of the self as not-one is created. The response to the
66 See Andreassen (2007) for the consequences of Propp and Greimas’ actant models in TV journalism etc.
demand of the other is not outside the journalist-subject but rather always already a part of the subject in relation. It offers a possibility of metamorphosis and transposition (Braidotti 2002, 2006) of the ethical self-other relation through sharing embodied and embedded experience. I imagine such a lab to be developed within a framework of teaching journalism (and) through experiencing the other in contexts that differ from the singular journalist-subject’s ‘home’. I believe that setting up a journalistic experimental lab in which narrative models are challenged and developed through affective embodied and embedded experiences of the other culture, society or person is a way of dealing with the problems facing journalism in an age where the paradigms on which the trade is created no longer apply to the same degree as they did throughout the age of ‘old’ media and the way they used to when journalism as a practice was invented. I will return to the notion of the journalistic experimental lab in the conclusion to this dissertation.
In the following three case studies I identify the structures of self-other (of) relation discussed in this and the previous chapters and I challenge my findings with new approaches and ideas of collective relations and creative affirmations. In this way, the theories introduced in the first three chapters are allowed to develop further through analyses of the case studies.
3.4.2 Final words
My aim has been, firstly, to return the ethical accountability of journalistic practice to a journalistic subject-position. Secondly, I have aimed at transposing this self-other relation between subjectivities to an expanded mediated and global ethical relation. I have used the legacies of ‘race’, gender and postcolonial scholars’ work and the impact on phenomenological thinking of embodied experiences in order to critique egocentrism and universalisation of the white man’s experience of the world embedded in the modern conception of journalism and repeated through journalistic reiterations of cultural memories to sustain social imaginaries. Doing Deleuzian journalism would then, perhaps, mean posing an ethical challenge to journalistically sustained social imaginaries by reconfiguring ‘global’ networks into ethical and singular embedded and embodied self-other relation.
Relationships matter and are the foundation for networks and relations between entities on a wider ‘global’ scale. However, an ethical call must encompass solidarity and acknowledgement of power relations. It must turn on the axis of rootedness in the structure of rhizomes. And it must involve an understanding of the complicity in reconstructions of social imaginaries and the power structure that entails. Journalistic subjectivity is in this dissertation theorised as a process of such complexities embodied in the experiences and the affects of the journalist-subject and embedded in the journalistic cultural memories that are continuously reiterated. However, journalist-subjects are in ‘global’ connection to the citizens and the netizens whose input and newsfeed is incorporated, and virally spreading and mutating simultaneously. The cosmopolitan journalistic relation is singular and based in the subject position and in subjectivity. Rather than a professional working relationship which aims at communicating moral obligations ‘globally’, journalistic cosmopolitanism is a networked ethical and singular relation. This dissertation does not deal with relationships as networks of technological developments and advances, rather it deals with relation, a journalism of relation. Whereas relationships are one-to-one connections in networks of entities and power positions, relation is multiple, always moving and in flux, inter-lacings of subjectivities. Technological advances may change journalistic practices, but in ethical relations between journalist-subjects and other subjects the humachine (Poster 2006) is just one variant and factor in multiple subjectivities.
The following three case studies will illustrate how these concepts of journalistic cultural memories, social imaginaries and journalistic subjectivities produce a potentially creative and affirmative journalism of relation.
CASE STUDY 1: