BETWEEN EMPIRICISM AND INTELLECTUALISM: CHARLES TAYLOR’S ANSWER TO THE ‘MEDIA WARS’ Marc Anthony Caldwell Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. Durban, December 2008 Declaration I declare this dissertation is my own unaided work. It is being submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Science, in the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university. Marc Anthony Caldwell December, 2008 ii Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………… iv Abstract ………………………………………………………………. v Introduction …………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Science Wars, Post-Marxism, Taylor ………………………….. 18 Chapter Two: Journalism and the Media Wars ……………………………….. 48 Chapter Three: Taylor’s philosophical anthropology ……………………………. 78 Chapter Four: Taylor and the New Left ………………………………………. 119 Chapter Five: Merleau-Ponty’s influence on Taylor’s reading Marx …………. 159 Chapter Six: Taylor’s anti-epistemology …………………………………. 191 Conclusion …………………………………………………………… 227 References …………………………………………………………… 247 iii Acknowledgements My thanks go to my ‘thesis-widowed’ wife, Adi, who patiently read through the final drafts. Thanks too, to my supervisor, Professor Keyan Tomaselli, for remaining confident that despite its multiple versions, a final version of this thesis would eventually emerge. iv Abstract When the Media Wars broke out in Australian universities in the mid-1990s, journalism educator Keith Winschuttle accused cultural studies of teaching theory that contradicted the realist and empirical worldview of journalism practice. He labeled cultural studies as a form of linguistic idealism. His own worldview is decidedly empiricist. The thesis brings to Windschuttle’s empiricist-idealist dualism a type of transcendental argument that uses Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s understanding of modernity as a paradox between the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions. Taylor was an instrumental member of the New Left movement (beginning in 1956) while he was a student at Oxford. Together with Stuart Hall, he edited a journal that became a precursor to New Left Review. While at Oxford, Taylor went to Paris to study with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Upon his return he brought back a copy of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, which he translated into English for his colleagues. Taylor was instrumental in introducing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology there. Hall mentions in recent interviews his debt to Taylor for their discussions on Marx and Hegel. Taylor’s approach to post-Marxism and his critique of positivist social science derives significantly from his reading of Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception (1962) rejects both empiricism and intellectualism (idealism) for their sharing a Cartesian model of subjectivity. British Cultural Studies began (Hall says in 1956) with a rejection of the economism of classical Marxism, and sought a more plausible theory of agency than what Marxism offered at that time. The correspondence between the debates in early cultural studies and Taylor’s extensive writing on this matter, together with his overall critique of modernity, appear too close to be coincidental. Furthermore, these debates were driven by an attempt to steer between the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, thus embracing in their own intellectual practices Marx’s (and Hegel’s) dialectical method. Drawing upon the correspondences between Taylor’s and cultural studies’ attempts to resolve the paradoxes of modernity, it becomes clear that Windschuttle’s dualism can be absorbed within the problematic of cultural studies. Furthermore, drawing on Taylor’s use of the humanist Marx, Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, Windschuttle’s empiricist paradigm can be shown to fail to provide a plausible (and therefore ethical) model of agency. A study of Taylor’s philosophical anthropology provides the basis by which this failure can be addressed. Taylor’s philosophy is equally useful in addressing this lacuna in postmodern cultural studies. v Introduction When Australian historian Keith Windschuttle1 (1997a; 1998a; 1998b) accused cultural studies scholars in journalism education of misrepresenting the subject and corrupting aspirant student journalists, those same scholars responded that their critic had misrepresented their field (see Hartley 1999; Bacon 1999; Turner 2000). Windschuttlefirst put his case in a paper, Poverty of Media Theory, delivered at the Journalism Education Association’s annual conference held in Aukland, New Zealand, in December 1995. The paper was republished in various forms (Windschuttle 1997a; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 1999; 2000), and as the content of these articles is very similar, reading any one of them provides the gist of them all. Each version argues that a journalism education programme should uphold three principles: (1) a realist outlook and an empirical methodology committed to reporting the truth; (2) an ethical attitude towards one’s audiences; and (3) good writing in the plain style. Each paper holds that ‘media theory’ (in cultural studies) has no place in professional education on grounds that it contradicts each of these principles and is intellectually incoherent. When describing the events ‘down under’, one is easily given to hyperbole and satire. Mandy Oakham (2002) sets the scene, in “the dark galaxy of Australian education,” where at the dawn of a new era symbolized by the ‘modern, corporate university’ there was an “evil Empire run by government intent on slashing university funding,” causing a ripple effect of interdisciplinary struggles and “Vive Chancellors fighting for funding, student load, research points and ultimately for survival” (Oakham 2002: 265). In the corporate university students became customers wanting certificates that could be ‘cashed in’ on the job market. Education had to become vocationally relevant. Graduates had to be able to do something with their degrees. 1 David Row (2004), who teaches journalism and media studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia, introduces Windschuttle thus: “erstwhile left-wing university lecturer in Media Studies and Social History turned private media educator and, later, right-wing provocateur” (Rowe 2004: 43). 1 Journalism education and cultural studies made the vocational versus the liberal arts distinction palpably concrete. It was not long before there was trouble. The opening shots of the Media Wars, as they were dubbed in Australia, were fired in 1995. As always in every great battle there were the conscripts forced into confrontation by virtue of their location within the perceived journalistic ranks. Some conscripts found themselves in “no-mans land” and this was a battle fought out in mostly masculine territory with the loudest wails coming from pierced egos. The great battle down under was fought out between the forces of the Republic, the Jedi Knights of Journalism flashing their lasers of factual empiricism against the massing dark forces of the Federation, some disguised as media studies exponents, but most were wearing their eclectic uniforms of cultural studies flashing their own light [sabers] of radical contextualism and other sinister linguistic devices. These dark forces were led by the biggest Darth Vader of them all … John Hartley (Oakham 2002: 266). Evidently, Hartley (1995) fired the first shot that ‘rang around the world’ of journalism education. But he should have ‘checked his facts’, as Windschuttle points out (2000: 152-153).2 “It should have been enough to point out the inaccuracies and move on,” says Oakham, but “Windschuttle, who owns and operates his own journalism training centre, Macleay College in Sydney, declared all-out war” (Oakham 2002: 267). At the Aukland conference that same year, WIndschuttle “thundered that there should be ‘no more theory’ in the teaching of journalism” (Oakham 2002: 267). The matter did not stop there, and Hartley (1999) and others (Tomaselli and Shepperson 1999) committed further fuel to the flames. From Hartley’s description of “young [newsroom] cadets [who] have the crap kicked out of them by overbearing and unsympathetic supervisors whose job is to prepare them for the factory system of new production,” Oakham adds: It is alleged that Hartley in an earlier, pre-academic life, spent a short time as a cadet on a newspaper. Clearly he did not find it a pleasurable experience (Oakham 2002: 269). A conference was held by cultural studies scholars in 1998, to which they invited Windschuttle and a representative number of journalism educators were 2 Windschuttle (2000) calls into question Hartley’s (1995: 26) description of journalists as “petty- bourgeois, self-employed white collar workers.” The description, Windschuttle shows, derives directly from Nicos Poulantzas’s repeating Louis Althusser’s earlier “claim that the press, radio and television are ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state and that those who work for the media are therefore members of the class that supports this state…. Of course, this was all theorized nonsense when Poulantzas wrote it in the 1970s and, in the hands of Hartley in the 1990s, it has not improved with age” (Windschuttle 2000: 154). 2 invited in a bed to settle the matter.3 Windschuttle, they complained, had reduced cultural studies to the linguistic idealism that characterized postmodern literary criticism, and