MEDIA CRITIQUE, AGONISTIC RESPECT AND THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF A “REALLY QUITE PRETENTIOUS” LIMINAL SPACE

Abstract

This essay reflects on the blogosphere reaction to a journal article of mine about the relationship between journalists and media academics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Much of the response reenacted the original essay's argument about journalistic antagonisms towards critical theoretical scholarship. I resituate the reaction in terms of the original essay's objectives, and discuss the chaotic nature of these academic field/journalistic field exchanges. I argue that it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the blogosphere attacks, because that would merely reinscribe my identity in the blind antagonistic frame I had originally critiqued. Instead, revisiting aspects of the original essay that were subsequently ignored, I elaborate on the implications of William Connolly's call for an ethos of “agonistic respect” both for the articulation of an engaged counter-response and the interrogation of political and cultural antagonisms more generally.

Keywords:

• academic field
• agonistic respect
• Aotearoa New Zealand blogosphere
• critical theory
• journalism education
• journalistic field

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank both reviewers for their thoughtful and engaged comments. Additional thanks to Tim Corballis, Lincoln Dahlberg, Bruce Edman, Ian Goodwin, Craig Prichard, and Verica Rupar for their feedback on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. See Connolly's (2005, p. 128) critique of how the charge of “performative contradiction” can be over-used as a “master tool” of critique.

2. Under the New Zealand Performance Based Research Fund, academics are expected to document the amount of “esteem” they have accumulated from their “peers”.

3. Glynos and Howarth (2007) describe the fantasmatic as a logic of ideological fantasy that explains an individual's affective (dis)identification with a particular discourse.