ON THE PERFORMATIVITY OF JOURNALISTIC IDENTITY

Abstract

The concept of “ritual” has played an important role in research within mass media and journalism studies in the last decades. Both ethnographic and anthropological research in media studies has devoted attention to an elaboration of its theoretical scope. However, as this paper argues, reading the concept in the perspective of Butler's theory of performativity can considerably deepen our understanding of the relation between rituals and journalistic identity. As such, the paper wishes to re-evaluate important work in the field of newsroom ethnography and aims to show to what extent rituals at the same time constitute the occupational values of journalists and may offer them a way of subverting the dominant journalistic paradigm.

Keywords:

• Butler
• journalistic identity
• performativity
• (strategic) ritual

Notes

1. As a result, the discursive values of journalism may be regarded as “empty signifiers”. This concept originated in Lacanian thought and found its way in discourse theory through the works of Laclau and Žižek, where it conveys a certain emptying out of the meaning of the privileged signifiers that make up a discourse. Rather than breaking down the coherence of a discourse, it is exactly this lack of meaning that accounts for the structural function of empty signifiers.

2. It is especially in his elaboration of the concept of “Techniques of the self” and the “hermeneutics of the self” in his later work that Foucault has elaborated a productive model of subjectivity that has had clear influence on the work of Butler.

3. For a valuable exchange between these authors see Butler et al. (2000).

4. Of course the degree to which these convictions influence the journalistic identity may be questioned. Even though a substantial part of the relevant literature testifies to the centrality of values in the journalistic identity, one may equally regard journalism as a “mere” trade in which case there would be a significant degree of skepticism toward occupational values. Despite this complication, it seems clear that the “official” presentation of journalists to their public emphasizes adherence to journalistic values.

5. This case revolved around the personal, “socialist” bias Kent MacDougall claimed to have brought to his work (using an alias for radical pieces) at various highly respected papers such as the Wall Street Journal. He made these claims both in his two-part memoirs “Boring from Within the Bourgeois Press” and in the socialist Monthly Review. These confessions caused a controversy and set in motion an entire apparatus of “paradigm repair” (cf. supra) needed to cope with the anomalous event. While editors approved of personal convictions as long as they were separated from the work delivered and they reasserted work routines to claim that no actual bias had appeared in published articles, MacDougall retorted that he had been able to fool his editors (see Reese, 1990).