Fight for Democracy. Glenda Daniels

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СКАЧАТЬ press freedom. While this split might not be so obvious at this stage in the book, what is clear is that there was ambivalence.

      The ANC’s gaze on the media displays an ambivalence which also characterises the swings in Žižek’s theories. For example, in The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek argues, from a fairly liberal perspective, for freedom, while in his later work, Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? (2002a), he argues for more state intervention and control which limit democracy. His theoretical ambivalence reflects the lived experience of confusion and ambivalence reflected in the ANC’s approach to freedom of expression and democratic culture. A possible explanation for the ambivalence is the history of democratic centralism embedded both in Žižek’s theoretical background as an intellectual and in the ANC’s past as an underground organisation marked by Soviet Marxist influences. This is the undecided nature of the ANC today, as it is the undecided nature of Žižek’s theoretical framework – both with one foot in a Stalinist past and the other in liberal democracy. Before delving too deeply into psychoanalysis and exploring the relationship between the idea of democracy as a floating signifier (without fixed meaning to ‘democracy’) and an independent press in South Africa, we need first to turn to the origins of democracy and democratic theory in order to understand its varied manifestations historically.

       History of democracy

      David Held, tracing models of democracy, cited the political ideals of Athens as ‘equality among citizens, liberty, respect for the law and justice’ (1994: 16). The Athenian city state was ruled by citizen-governors, while citizens were at the same time subjects and creators of public rules and regulations. Citizens are intrinsic to democracy, but not all people are citizens and this was true for Athens as much as for modern forms of democracy. So Aristotle was not a citizen as he was from elsewhere. Women were not citizens either, nor were certain categories of ‘commoner’. Direct democracy, Held commented, encompassed the idea that citizens could fulfill themselves through involvement in the polis, a commitment to civic virtue towards the common good, in an intertwining of the public and the private, as he argued in a later work (2006).

      Still, not all were included in the original ‘democratic’ project. Women and slaves, for example, were excluded from citizenship. While some theorists still insist on dating democracy to the Athenians, and maintain that democracy is as old as the hills – over 2 500 years old – it was clearly not real democracy because of its exclusion of aspects of society, or its elitist and sexist nature. Women and slaves combined would have made up more than half the population during Athenian ‘democracy’. Democracy has travelled a significant journey towards greater inclusiveness since then, according to Dahl (1998: 43) but the journey is not over. For many post-structuralist theorists: Derrida, Mouffe, Laclau, Butler and Žižek, the journey can never end, hence this framework, which supports radical democracy.

      Mouffe elucidated in The Democratic Paradox that the commonest trend, and the most talked about model of democracy was the deliberative democratic model but, in her view, this was merely the revival of the fifth century Athenian model or a process of deliberation between free and equal citizens. She argued that the so-called ‘new’ paradigm was a model of deliberative democracy that had come full circle, ‘the revival of an old theme, not the emergence of a new one’.

      Antagonism, therefore, was ineradicable and pluralist democratic politics would never find a final solution. This was the democratic paradox. ‘What the deliberative democracy theory denied was the division of undecidability and ineradicability of antagonism which is constitutive of the political. A well-functioning democracy called for a vibrant clash of political positions’ Mouffe said in 2000. She argued that deliberative theorists negated the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism. She explained the meaning of ‘agonistic’ in her work: an agonistic approach acknowledges the real nature of democracy’s frontiers and the forms of exclusion entailed, instead of trying to disguise them under a veil of rationality or morality. Because there is the ever-present temptation in the deliberative model of democratic societies to essentialise identities, the radical democratic model is more receptive to the multiplicity of voices in contemporary pluralist societies. This argument is important in understanding the role of the media in South Africa’s democracy.

      Antagonism takes place between enemies, or persons who have no common symbolic space. Agonism, on the other hand, involves a relationship not between enemies but between adversaries or friendly enemies. They share a common symbolic space but they are also enemies because they want to organise this space in a different way. Thus, according to Mouffe, the radical pluralist democracy model advocates a positive status to differences and questions homogeneity. So, then, applying this argument, the media and the ANC have a common symbolic space, democracy, and this must be accepted. Within this space there is no room for labelling such as ‘enemies of the people’. Mouffe’s argument with deliberative theorists such as the liberal democratic theorists Rawls and Habermas is that their approach, far from being conducive to their aim of a more reconciled society, ends up in jeopardy because the struggle between adversaries becomes, rather, a struggle between enemies.

      The above distinction is pertinent to my analysis of the role of the media in democracy in South Africa, to show how the ANC seeks consensus with the media, how it attempts foreclosures, and how it exemplifies an unprogressive and narrow hegemony. There can be no rational consensus for a true democracy. However, for society to function there has to be some minimal consensus although, to avoid unnatural foreclosures, we should relinquish the very idea of rational consensus.

      In this argument, then, homogeneity and political unity as a condition of possibility for democracy constitute an unprogressive hegemony which applies to the unravelling of the relationship between the media, the ANC and democracy in South Africa. This point will be highlighted when I discuss what various journalists and editors in South Africa argued in relation to whether the independence of the media was contingent on a particular historical context – in this case, early stages of democracy in South Africa, or a transitional democracy.

      The argument for a radical democracy is helpful when I discuss the ANC’s use of ‘us and them’, as well as the ideological interpellations or labelling of the media as ‘enemies of the people’. Mouffe’s concept of an agonistic pluralist democratic project typifies this tension in South Africa where there is an inability to distinguish between adversaries and real enemies. Agonistic pluralism advocates viewing the ‘us and them’ in a different way, not as an enemy to be destroyed but as a legitimate opponent. Both Mouffe and Žižek would lean towards a Lacanian definition of democracy with a socio-political order in which ‘the people’ do not exist – certainly not as a unity. In this argument, which I incline towards and use in the forthcoming analyses, the radical differences in a democratic society are intrinsic. The opposite would be totalitarianism or the complete closing off of spaces. In this mode of thinking, totalitarianism, then, is an attempt to re-establish the unity of democracy. The argument for radical democracy, adapted from Mouffe and Žižek, is that because of the open character of society there will naturally be conflict and there cannot be a ‘unity of the people’.

      As Mouffe notes, ‘democracy is something uncertain and improbable and must never be taken for granted. It is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended as well as deepened’ (2006: 6). The empirical in the research leading to this book will show the fragile, contradictory and ambivalent nature of South Africa’s democracy – and, in fact, the fragile and ambivalent nature of the independence of the media. For example, even though a resolution was taken by the ANC to investigate a media appeals tribunal in December 2007, by 2010 there was still no certainty about it: whether it would indeed be implemented; and if it were to be, who would oversee it and what form would it take. But the threat remained, hanging over us like a black cloud of foreboding uncertainty. This remained the case in 2012.

       Transformation of the media in post-apartheid South Africa

      To the ANC and its alliance partners, transformation of СКАЧАТЬ