In chapter 2 I discussed how much of the journalistic knowledge produced in Denmark relating to minorities (as well as other news) reverberates from a white Lutheran ‘master’ position, from the position of the ‘self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated…’ (Haraway 1991: 193). The solutions proposed in ways of thinking further about the journalistic role and relation to the other in a globalised world present us with ideas of cosmopolitanism as an overarching and governmental attitude as well as an approach going beyond the political and emphasising the ethical.
However, in order to give up the illusion of the unmarked, disembodied, and unmediated carrier of truth, which is implied in the fundamental journalistic concepts of objectivity and freedom of speech and which journalism shares with particular forms of cosmopolitanism, some groundedness is needed. Critchley and Gilroy emphasised such groundedness through political activism. In relation to the journalistic sphere the call for groundedness is not merely a call for the journalistic genre of Public Journalism in which the journalist is physically and socially living and working among the public about whom he or she writes. Rather it is a call for an ethical and ontological groundedness of embodied experience and body-based subjectivities. For the USVI journalists, my questions to them about their thoughts on relations between themselves and the community about and for which they are writing often spurred on a lot of ideas and thought activity. The questions provoked further thinking on the part of the journalists, both professional and personal. But the call for embodiedness and embeddedness goes beyond thinking and imagining and thus it holds the potential of becoming a methodological as well as an ethical experiment.
The discussions on cosmopolitanism in connection to journalistic practice have shown that decentring journalism is not enough, because of the risk of re-establishing a centre and the danger of representing false ‘authenticity’. Thus, grounding is needed in a networked reality of the media-scape. Networking applies a multilayered
dimension to journalistic practice in the shape of diversified editorial power positions and technological advancements. However, networking is not enough either, because it is merely a shift in power relations from the editorial power of the newsrooms to the dispersed power relations of the blogosphere, while power itself remains un-questioned. The concept of subjectivity as a process of becoming opens up a space of rethinking the power of the journalist-subject. In order to think of an experiment of (ex)change I want to argue for a shift in subjectivities, using Braidotti’s Deleuzian vocabulary, to a becoming-minoritarian or becoming-other. The distinction runs along qualitative lines of thinking (Braidotti 2006). It is a concept that falls between Gilroy’s embodied activism (though it can be that too) and Derrida’s ideal of unconditional hospitality (though this ideal is not excluded from the theory of becoming). Becoming minoritarian or other rests on a subject, who is ‘widening the gap between oneself and the norm’ (Patton 2000: 7). It is moreover ‘the invention of new forms of subjectivity and new forms of connections between deterritorialised elements of the social field’ (Patton 2000: 7-8). Thus, the concept is dealing with the proximate other that presents a possibility of connecting to distant others without assuming proximity or sameness (Ahmed 2006, Chouliaraki 2006). This places the ethical ‘burden’ on the journalist-subjects themselves to change from within their personal and professional practices and thus establish the conditions for a different mode of ethical interaction with others. The focus is on the structures of subjectivity as a technology of the self (Foucault 1982) and hence also the self-other relations.
3.3.1 Doing journalism with Deleuze
There are two modes in which I wish to engage with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, which I theorise in relation to cosmopolitanism. The first is that I want to suggest the terminology and concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ rather than
‘globalisation’. I think this shift emphasises the network or rhizomatic formation of subjectivities and inter-subjectivities. The concept of deterritorialisation in combination with becoming-minoritarian also achieves a re-negotiation of the master-position in a journalistic practice which is more becoming-normative (!) than becoming-minoritarian. It is the recurring question of not re-establishing or reterritorialising the relation to the other. According to Braidotti (2002, 2006) becoming-minoritarian is a very concrete practice, which draws on experience of exclusion or marginalisation. ‘It is [moreover] important to see the limitations of the
knowledge that comes from experience and not be confined to its authority’ (Braidotti 2006: 133). It is not the perspective of a physical and political minority alone. This perspective would ignore the power of the social imaginary and of the media moguls, which regulate the entries to a successful career in journalism (Gill 2007). It is rather a constant questioning, which does not require or acquire answers and in this sense it can be compared to some of Derrida’s work on differance and Gilroy’s
‘estrangement’. By extension this means that what empirical experience cannot supply, can be supplemented by learning efforts, consciousness-raising or knowledge practices (Braidotti 2006). It is thus a phenomenologically inspired theory.
Additionally, having been trained in the journalistic tradition of being the Fourth Estate and guardian of the modern nation-state and (un-reflected) freedom of speech, white Danish journalists – and their white, western colleagues – may have a hard time finding close at hand a referent of excluded subjectivity to identify with. In chapter 2 I referred briefly to a report from the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (2002) which states that the representation of ethnic minorities in the Danish journalistic workforce is scarce. Although some who are empirically the descendants of post-colonial subjects do live and work as journalists in Denmark as well, the power of the journalistic tradition of universal objectivity is pervasive and in order to enter the media job market some concessions have to be made (Gill 2007).
The empirical and experiencing other is therefore more likely to conform to the media and journalistic norm than to change it.
However, although for the journalists in the USVI the diversity of the community and the racial history and present of the society is ready-at-hand, this is no guarantee for reflexiveness. It is a singular practice in relation to others, undetermined by the community in which it is practised but always already affected by and embedded in it.
Deleuze and Guattari write that the minority may – but only as a possibility – have an advantaged position in the process of becomings. Thus it is not about the quantity of women, ethnic and religious minorities, but the quality of relations to others. The only way the majority position can become minoritarian or other is by ‘undoing its central position altogether’ (Braidotti 2002: 84) and that may be attempted through a recognition of the non-unity and the rhizomic connectedness of journalistic subjects.
In order to avoid re-establishing a centre the idea of a centre must be deconstructed.
Similarly, to the call for breaking up or out of the unitary journalistic subject, I further propose a methodological break. Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings. When a form is broken, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things.’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 28). This suggests an inseparability of content and expression. Journalism may be expressed in new forms which will help recognise the minor elements as well as propel the reader/viewer/listener into thinking, speaking, listening, and acting (Silverstone 2007). The aim of this journalistic method is then not communication alone, but to initiate, stimulate and provoke thought through which ruptures and change occur to create a community with ethical obligations.
What the theory of becomings is offering is a deterritorialised, political and collective-through-ethical-connections theory, which avoids the generalising universal morality.
Thinking through this suggestion of a new journalistic method with the Deleuzian concept of singular memory introduced and developed in chapter 2, journalistic subjectivity and method will be able to emphasise creative production and personal sensory affects. Singular memory theorises memory as a creative and productive notion of desire, which presupposes a future because it deals with the creative force of production in repetition in terms of difference (producing difference in repetition).
Deterritorialising journalistic subjectivity, which is thought of through singular memory in both spatial and temporal terms, moreover breaks apart the unitary notion of resistance in binary relation to hegemony, because it breaks with the geo-political schema of ‘western’ hegemony. Resistance and hegemony is no longer attached to class, racial, ethnic-national, or gendered identities, but can be challenged on the inter-subjective and singular level. That is, through cosmopolitanism from in-between in ways of creative production of memory and imagination as well as from below (Gilroy 2004). The breaking down of class, racial, ethnic-national, or gendered identities does not mean that they no longer hold significance – only that they are multiplied and made more complex.
3.3.2 Cosmo-journalism
The second way in which I find the concept of becoming-other or becoming-minoritarian helpful in ways of thinking about cosmopolitanism is in terms of becoming as an ethical relation. In their major work, A Thousand Plateaus (2004), Deleuze and Guattari draw out their cartography of the concept of becoming-intense,
becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible… From this very rich chapter I will focus on the Spinoza-inspired part, which speaks of the body as intensities of speed, slowness and affects. The body, to Deleuze and Guattari, is characterised not for the outer or inner qualities but by what it can do. In terms of journalistic practice in a cosmopolitan public realm, Chouliaraki’s mediated effective speech which ‘entails a view of action as establishing connectivities between people and forging relationships of responsibility’ (Chouliaraki 2006: 201) transfers and applies the notion of action onto a practice of mediation. The non-reciprocal commitment with the other initiates action which forges more or less empathy from the receiver of the news (Chouliaraki 2006). In Chouliaraki’s analysis the mediating function of the news constitutes the public as a ‘body of action’ while simultaneously presenting the receiver of news with the demand of the other (Chouliaraki 2006: 199) which demands approval and eventually action (Critchley 2007). The importance of activism and action, which Critchley and Gilroy also argued, is again pivotal in this ethical becomings. To Deleuze and Guattari, however, the body plays a major role and action alone cannot be transposed onto a representation or mediation of distant suffering (Chouliaraki 2006) which generates empathy. The body is relevant only in its affects and its affective connections to others. It is this composition of relation to others that constitutes the body’s becoming, understood as an intense symbiosis with the other that leaves neither unchanged by the relation. So, becoming is not acquiring the qualities of the other, or feeling sympathy for the other, but rather it is a feeling with the other from within the other – becoming (the) other. Simultaneously, becomings is an ability to allow the other to affect the body – allowing the particles of the other to enter and reconstitute the body and affect its acts and thoughts. In the Spinozist abstract thinking, each person is an infinite multiplicity of smaller or larger scale by virtue of the composition of the relation into which his or her parts enter (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 280). That is, we are the sum of our affects and affective connections.
However, these connections will always remain in excess. We will always be more than the sum of our parts because of relation. Ethical becoming is rather a morphed symbiosis and thus a metamorphosis of all implicated parties (Braidotti 2002, 2006).
It is a doing and undoing of the self by the other (Butler 2004) but without the reduction of fully understanding or knowing the other (Glissant 1997).
This way of thinking about the subject-relation to the other grants the opportunity to think a subjectivity always in process and always multiple thereby avoiding the scholarly standpoint on feminist and ‘race’ identity formation (Collins 1991, Harding 1991) and the binary self-other relation discussed in chapter 1. It is continuously affected and undone by the other. The other is proximate by virtue of being part of the self but does not have to have physical or mental similarities to the self – or be geographically close. For journalism this means not only to take the perspective of the other or to reflect upon the practice of journalistic power relations, but to let the other affect the self, the journalism and the practice – to become not-one. Journalism is a fairly traditional and slow-changing practice and a little change may go a long way.
But what I am proposing is a radical change of journalism because becoming-minoritarian or becoming-other is a dismantling of the journalistic objectivity and authoritative master-position of speaking the ‘truth’ for an undefined but unified ‘us’.
It is a dismantling of the modern, rational journalistic subject referring back to the unified nation-state citizens. It is an undoing of journalism – a journalism as becoming and as excess of relation.