Sick Stuff: A Case Study of Controversy in a Constitutive Attitude

Abstract

Journalists contribute in many routine ways to public controversies, ways that are often overlooked in traditional criticism. They have tended to be overlooked in part because of the agonistic argument dialogue that functions as a tacit, a priori location for controversy, and in part because of the tendency of traditional critics to treat news texts as reflections of controversy rather than contributions to it. This essay examines in detail journalists' entextualization and recontextualization of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's discourse from a press conference on September 22, 1999 in order to explain one way that they contributed to the Brooklyn Museum controversy. The analysis adopts a constitutive attitude toward controversy, asking how our habits of talking and writing contribute to our impressions of a controversy as an autonomous cultural phenomenon.

Notes

¹I use the term “agonist” here and elsewhere in this article to indicate someone who aims to intervene in, to advance a standpoint in, or to otherwise resolve a controversy. This level of specificity is necessitated by a larger problem involving participation in the analysis of controversy (Cramer, “Recruiting”). In traditional accounts, “agonist” and “participant” tend to be used somewhat synonymously; the problem with this is that there are many participants in public controversies, such as news reporters, who carefully avoid the role of agonist. The term allows me to distinguish those who are actively arguing and defending positions in public controversies from participants who are playing other roles. On the other hand, the term is also useful as an umbrella for the various kinds of people and roles who might be involved in advancing standpoints and seeking resolution. Rupert Crawshay-Williams refers to specific “advocates and opponents” along with “protagonists,” for instance (3). All of these roles of advocacy and opposition, heroic or otherwise, are meant to be covered by my term.

²This term comes from the work of A.L. Becker and Barbara Johnstone. Becker explains how prior text, rather than logical deep structure, is “the real source, the real a priori of speaking” (26). Johnstone makes prior text and prior discourse a central part of her heuristic for discovery in discourse analysis methodology (Discourse Analysis 10).

³This term comes from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who explains how every utterance participates in a history of prior utterances. Speakers and writers shape their texts both in ways that reiterate traditional and authorized patterns meant to confirm expectations and in ways that innovate against or diverge from these. The first he terms “centripetal forces” and the second “centrifugal forces” (272–273).

⁴This is the date of the first local print reporting on the Brooklyn controversy, but not the first on the exhibit. The New York Times, for example, published a story by Carol Vogel on April 8, 1999 entitled “British Outrage Heads for Brooklyn.” The story previews the planned exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and in doing so predicts controversy, warning that those who attend the exhibit “may be in for a shock” and recounting the divisive reactions from museum-goers in London and Berlin, the two cities where the exhibit had been mounted previously. Another story was published by the New York Times on September 1, 1999, this one less an act of news reporting and more an act of art criticism. In “A Light Look At the World In ‘New Art’ At the Tate,” published with a London dateline, Alan Riding assesses the art scene in the United Kingdom in light of an exhibit, “Abracadabra: International Contemporary Art,” which, according to Riding, challenges the then recent preference of movers in the British art world for home-grown products by presenting work by artists primarily from Continental Europe. In an effort to provide background for his review of this exhibit and to provide evidence for the recent trends in British art, Riding mentions the crowds that came out to see “Sensation” in London in 1997 and later in Berlin, and notes that it “will soon open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.”

⁵Chapin was the Commissioner of Department of Cultural Affairs for New York City in 1999.

⁶I have attempted to obtain an audio recording or transcript of this press conference, along with others from New York City Hall from September and October of 1999, in order to learn more about the particular location of “sick stuff” within the rest of the discourse from that event. Librarians and archivists at the New York City Municipal Archives have placed requests on my behalf with the Winthrop Group, Inc., the private company hired by the Giuliani administration at the end of his tenure as Mayor to house the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs, the repository of his papers. After many months there has been no response to these requests and the librarians and archivists at the Municipal Archives have explained to me that this is typical and that they rarely receive any response or materials from the Winthrop Group when they place requests. The decision by the Giuliani administration to archive its papers with a private company, rather than the public archives of the City of New York is itself an interesting controversy that was covered by news outlets (Herszenhorn, “City Agrees to Private Control of Giuliani's Mayoral Papers”; Herszenhorn, “Giuliani's Papers Go to Private Group, Not City”; Rogers).

⁷I include the text from these programs here having consulted written transcripts rather than having seen and heard video recordings. For this reason, I cannot be completely sure that the broadcast quotations of Giuliani's talk are from video records; however, the notes in the transcripts indicating that Sciutto's and Koppel's narrations surrounding the quotations are voiceovers lead me to conclude that it is likely that the clip of Giuliani talking was being presented in the broadcast as both aural and visual.

⁸Lawyers use direct reported speech for some of the same reasons. They tend to reserve it for discourse that is considered evidence that is directly relevant to the legal charges in question; the discourse presented as direct quotation is often treated as if it is particularly reliable and certain, and it is often used as a foregrounding device (Philips 162). Lawyers are able to use cultural assumptions about direct reported speech—that it is more exact than other kinds of writing and speaking, that it represents discourse accurately recalled by a witness, that it presents especially salient information—to build their cases and move juries (Philips 169).