Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory

Front matter

Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory

Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory

ROB STONES

Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix Preface x

What we should look for in television news 1 Contextual fields and social theory 27 What we do when we make sense of Borgen 59

A WN =

Preface

T: is primarily a book for audiences. It is a primer for people who wish to improve the quality of their engagement with news and current affairs. Much like books that are bought with a view to learning a foreign language, | can't guarantee that you will get through the book, or even the first chapter, although I've tried my best to write it in such a way that this will happen. I've no doubt that it will be demanding at times, and this can’t be helped; it’s in the nature of the beast. | can, however, promise that if you do get through the book, having read it attentively, rising to whatever challenges it poses without losing patience, then you will get a great deal more from news and current affairs accounts than you previously have. You will be better equipped to engage in considered, reasonable, judicious debate about the social and political issues of the day than you previously were.

The book aims to realize this promise by bringing the academic specialism of social theory into a sustained conversation with the ways in which educated, thoughtful, citizens view and read news and current affairs. My motivation as | started writing the book lay in the determination to test out a belief that had for too long remained an intuition. This intuitive belief was that social theory, with its sustained, systematic quest to think deeply about the nature of society and the many different ways in which it ticks along, should be able to make more inroads into public life than it seems to manage. It should have the potential to contribute much more to the quality of public understanding about social and political issues than it does.

Part of social theory's underperformance has to do with the chasm that exists between the language it uses and the language of the public sphere, including the various registers of news and current affairs. These are languages from different worlds, each with their own traditions and history. H social theorists are to carry their thoughts into the public sphere, to persuade citizens that they have something valuable to offer, then ways have to be found to mediate between the two linguistic worlds. The conditions have to be created in which exchange and dialogue is possible.

Social theorists have a particularly heightened awareness of the role that ideas and preconceptions play in what we make of social life. That is, a heightened awareness of their influence on the way we see the world, its people and

PREFACE xi its institutions, in the way social interaction takes place, and in the way we interpret what we encounter in the media. Because of this, theorists spend a lot of time thinking about these ideas and preconceptions, asking themselves how these ‘ways of seeing’ might affect the quality of our grasp of the social world. They recognize that poor preconceptions, inadequate ways of envisioning the social and political worlds, lead to poor understanding. Our preconceptions — our typified ways of seeing — naturally influence our judgements about how to identify such things as an abuse of power, unfitting behaviour, pitiless decision-making, or the immediate source of suffering. Such judgements are based on generalizing criteria, so that there is much about the skills required to, say, identify a cause of suffering, that can be transposed, carried, from one situation to another. It is important to remember this, that background ways of seeing are routinely transposed from one situation to another. We carry them with us across the borders of different situations and events, and then adapt them to the specific circumstances and details of the case at hand.

The quality of the background, transposable, ways of seeing we bring to these judgements needs to be good if we are to develop genuine understanding about important social events. There is also an onus on knowing how to combine these general preconceptions with the colour and details of varied, individual cases. There needs to be quality at both of these levels. This is as true with respect to how we approach news and current affairs accounts as it is in any other aspect of our social lives. If there is an absence of quality at either of these levels, then our ability to interpret particular news and current affairs accounts will be limited; our judgements about causes, morality and the best ways forward will lack authority.

Social theorists reflect constantly on both levels of quality relevant to understanding news and current affairs. They reflect, that is, on how to improve the general ways of seeing that we carry with us from one situation to another, and on how we should combine these with the details of particular events and processes. Because of the key role played by ways of seeing that are general and transposable, and hence separated at a certain point in the thinking process from the concrete details of real-world situations, social theorists are inevitably and necessarily drawn to concepts and abstractions. The specialist terms and language they develop tends to parallel this. The language reflects a way of thinking that gets used to extracting the general from the detailed particulars of everyday life, of pulling back from the fray. Discussions of distinct political and social issues in the public sphere, on the other hand, tend to be expressed in the language of the everyday worlds of the various institutions that make up societies. The overriding impulse here is not one of abstraction. Rather, it is that of getting down to immediate tasks, making it through the day successfully enough, interacting with flesh-andxii PREFACE blood people, following or breaking written or unwritten rules, striving to achieve broader goals, to solve problems, to help someone out or to give them their comeuppance. Here there is a natural tendency to the concrete, the situational, the empirical in the many small worlds that loom large for us at work, home and in other spheres of life. This is paralleled in significant part in the more overarching public sphere, in the world of social and political issues conveyed by the media in news and current affairs coverage.

The gulf between the two languages needs to be bridged somewhere in the middle. Social theorists can play their part by engaging more directly with the visual, oral and written languages used in the various genres of news and current affairs, working hard at bringing their concepts into contact with the stories that are told in these formats, thinking about forms of expression in which the two worlds can be spoken about in one breath. The citizen-audiences for news and current affairs, for their part, need to be building from the other shore, prepared to bring the familiar and the abstract together in their interpretations.

At present, there is very little dialogue, and the dialogue that does exist is severely impoverished. It is conducted primarily in the realm of numbers — too often cut off from careful reflection on concepts — or in the realm of abstract moral ideas. These are significant areas to be concerned with, but they are a huge distance away from being enough. They need to be combined with, integrated with, and framed by, much deeper ways of thinking about the in-situ processes of the social world itself. How should we think about the precise mechanisms at work in the social and political processes that we see on television news? What is an adequate way to link these mechanisms to their consequences? How should we combine a better understanding of such real-world causes and consequences with the abstract thought about morality produced in political and ethical philosophy? And, in the light of these reflections about causes and consequences, and about how action in the midst of such complexities should be judged in moral terms, how can we also find a responsible way to think about remedies, solutions, or of simply making a bad situation a little less so? Another way of couching the last point is to ask: How should we think about strategy and political will in particular circumstances, and about the role that values should play in formulating these?

The intellectual sophistication with which we approach literature and the arts in the public sphere, and which we have latterly begun to show to an understanding of the natural world with the rise of popular science, is missing from public engagement with social and political issues. Adoption of the approach | advocate in Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory could go some way to addressing this deficit. The strategy of the book focuses on improving the quality of the ‘ways of seeing’ audiences bring to news and current affairs. It begins by setting out just why it is essential for the

PREFACE xiii dramatic surface events and spectacles of current affairs, of the kinds that overwhelmingly populate television news bulletins, to be thought about within their wider context. Events can only be understood once they are envisaged as positioned within this context, which should be thought of as a network of social and material relations in which the events have been produced. It isn't possible to understand how these events have come about, to understand what causal sequences are responsible for producing them, unless an effort is made to think about how they have emerged from a particular set of relations and circumstances that stretch beyond the immediate moments and visual spectacles of the events themselves. The immediate events have a history that is now in the past and, in this age of extended, complex societies, they will have been affected by processes that are also spatially distant. It is necessary to understand these ‘absent’ or ‘invisible’ conditions in order to understand why and how the events have come about as they have, and what alternatives are possible. This means we need to develop ways of thinking, ways of seeing, that incorporate these absent conditions if we are to have a better grasp of news and current affairs. Another way of talking about the same thing, of referring to the networks of relations in which events and the people involved in them are embedded, is to talk about the ways in which social actors — people and organizations — and their actions are embedded in social structures. The key objectives of the book can be summed up as follows. First, it wants to give audiences a firm sense of how to locate news and current affairs events within a context of social structures and processes within which the events make sense. And secondly, it provides the conceptual tools for audiences to be able to judge just how much or how little knowledge of this structural context, and what goes on within it, has been provided by a given current affairs account. In doing these things, it aspires to radically increase audience capacity for genuine understanding and analysis.

This emphasis can be thought of most fruitfully in tandem with the kind of message promoted by Alain de Botton in his recent book The News: A User's Manual. As | was completing my own book, | went to listen to de Botton give a lecture on The News to 2,500 people in the Concert Hall of Sydney Opera House. Inescapably, | wanted to quell the anxiety that we'd not both written the same book, but more realistically | was intrigued to see how two approaches to roughly the same subject matter, written at roughly the same time, would compare. The lecture was enviably insightful and engaging, and my conclusion was that while these were two very different books, each approach could enrich the other. For while de Botton’s eloquent arguments were not directly concerned with social structure, or with the embedding of news events in contexts of relevant social networks, one of his central concerns is with how to get people to care sufficiently about news stories that they start to think seriously about them, and this is also of central importance for my own xiv PREFACE goals. De Botton writes of the need to expand the ways in which the news is told, venturing to broaden and develop the sensibilities of audiences. In search of these ends, he says, news stories should look to adopt some of the techniques of art and literature, including travel literature, whose neglect would be misguided. Journalists should seek out sensory, visual, empathetic ways of exciting our deeper interest in people and places, and their news organizations should encourage them to be unafraid of taking a distinctive perspective, of expressing a response with an individual voice and personality. Writing about world news, he declares that much less harm would be caused by such intrusions into neutrality than by those ‘reporters who, by their implicit denial of ever having a response to anything foreign, fatally undermine our desire to add to our knowledge of the world!

De Botton draws on George Eliot, the author of Middlemarch, that masterpiece of empathy with large lives lived in hidden, prosaic places, traversed and fettered by the large forces of history. He argues that writers such as Eliot have the ability to help us imagine what it feels like to be caught up in news events: to be a human being in the midst of war, famine and dictatorship, or to be at the receiving end of human rights’ abuses, or to be caught in the net of poverty, exploitation or corruption, or to find oneself at the mercy of a socio-natural catastrophe of the many kinds that continue to escape our capacity for prediction. Art, in its widest sense, said Eliot, is capable of helping us by ‘amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’. It stretches our imagination to the lives of others, extending our sympathies and our sensibilities: a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’.

This concern to awaken audiences to ‘the planet’s less obtrusive beauty and tragedy’, to get audiences to pay close attention to at least some of the news, some of the time, about others we don’t naturally have an interest in, is not something | address explicitly in this book. In this, my argument needs to be complemented by de Botton’s writing. However, the concern is there implicitly, and quite centrally, in my argument's key insistence. For the central contention of the book is that it isn’t possible to truly understand the experience and fate of individuals if one fails to grasp the network of relations in which those lives are enmeshed, which impose their demands, rewards and sanctions on those individuals, and which provide the substance of everything they care about 7 What is true for individuals is also true for the organizations and institutions in which they live their lives. To truly understand what is happening in news and current affairs events, to understand what has brought about these situations and predicaments, to be able to identify, who, if anyone, is responsible, and to responsibly suggest how things might change

PREFACE XV for the better, one needs the capacity to envisage the events as embedded in their relevant structural context. This capacity can provide imaginative empathy with added weight, with the ballast that grounds an individual within communities, social contexts and concrete networks of relations. Caring about the substance of news and current affairs, and about those caught up in its forces, can be brought about both by the expansion of sensibility aided by art and literature and by the depth of comprehension allowed by situating events within the social co-ordinates which have made them what they are. Social theory complements the literary and artistic imagination. It enables us to explore the causes of events in specific times and places; to think seriously about moral responsibility within complex networks of social relations; and to engage with issues of what can be done, feasibly and responsibly, from a position that has a considerable grasp of what it does and doesn’t know.

The arguments of the book are informed by the writings of a distinguished array of social thinkers. | have introduced some of these writers directly within the main text. However, for the sake of fluency and readability, in the body of the text | focus more on explaining the theoretical ideas and concepts relevant to the argument rather than spending too much time discussing their provenance. This gives readers the option of following the argument itself without having its flow disrupted by too many scholarly interruptions. On the other hand, I've used endnotes, numbered in the text, to reference all the theorists whose ideas are referred to, and to comment on these ideas where appropriate. This means that the book can also be read, with the aid of the endnotes, as an introduction to the underlying history and landscape of social theory, and also as a guide to which aspects of the work of given theorists are applicable to which aspects of real-world situations. References in the endnotes are both to short, introductory material and to more complex writings for those wanting to venture deeper into particular issues. For the introductory material, I've drawn heavily on my edited collection, Key Sociological Thinkers, which is a series of accessible 5,000-word chapters on prominent theorists written by leading commentators on their work

As will become clear in the course of Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory, | approach the work of social theorists in an ecumenical spirit, wanting to draw from as many approaches as seem to offer insights into whatever problem is at hand. Any theorist, however, will have their own set of predilections, and will automatically gravitate towards some abstract concepts and approaches rather than others. In my case, these are around ideas of social structure, agency, time, space, power, culture, norms and ethics, and my leanings towards these can be partly explained by the fact that I’ve found these notions the most useful for the topics and questions I've grappled with, and attempted to shed some light on, during my own intellectual life. Such reasons will also have figured in other theorists’ attraction to different xvi PREFACE concepts and ideas. As will also be seen in the course of the book, many seemingly disparate approaches are in fact compatible with each other, and my first instinct is always to look for ways of combining approaches so as to have the most powerful set of concepts to hand in seeking greater clarity about whatever part of the social world is beckoning.

Spectacle and excitement omething that frustrates many viewers of television news bulletins is the So on spectacle and excitement over and above explanation and understanding. How many times have we watched an item on the evening news and come away shocked and perturbed, but none the wiser about the events covered? Hard-boiled, unquestionably courageous, professional journalists — often motivated above everything else by high public principles — are sent hither and thither across a region of the globe to pick up and run with the latest story, quickly attempting to understand the basic gist of what’s been going on in order to be able to put together a 2- or 38-minute package. Some of these journalists will, in fact, have been covering a region for years on end and will have an in-depth background knowledge of their subject matter. Others have a more rudimentary knowledge, but have alternative skills valued by their networks, fluency perhaps, or screen presence. Even in the former case, one has a sense that the exigencies of the television news format radically constrain and channel the quality of information journalists are able to convey. Social theory can do little to directly affect many of the institutional, commercial, logistical and other pressures that create these constraints. It can, however, shed a good deal of light on the quality of the news and current affairs diet we are ultimately provided with. It can offer intellectual resources to strengthen the powers of interpretation and assessment available to audiences and to journalists, who may or may not have the autonomy to make use of them in their professional lives.

For the news channels themselves, conveying knowledge often seems to be less important than getting journalists and the cameras to where the action is, and, even more important, to have their journalists be seen to be where the action is. Sometimes it does matter where journalists are, when the authority we accord to what they tell us requires that we know they've witnessed something first hand, or that their presence in situ can in other ways assure us of the authority of their message. However, on many occasions it is by no means self-evident that their presence provides them with any special authority. At the extreme, we've all seen the rather forlorn, vaguely comic, pictures of a reporter, who is unable for one reason or another to be in the country he or she is talking about, speaking from just across the border in a neighbouring country, or from that second country’s capital city. The message is that they aren't exactly where the action is, which is implied to matter in and of itself, but they're pretty close. The unspoken assumption is that to unlock the secrets of a news story, to really grasp the essence of what is going on, one has to be there or thereabouts. News authenticity consequently means having feet on the ground, a familiar face speaking to camera, preferably out of breath and dishevelled, with the story’s ambient noises palpably present, whether these are the sounds of vehicles, the clamour of people scurrying, scuffling, marching, calling out their demands or their insults, or plaintively pleading for their plight to be recognized. There may also be the resonant rattle of gunfire, explosive reverberations from mortars, bombs and other killing devices, and, of course, the sights and the sounds of hardship, suffering and grief, often very hard to watch, all providing audiences back home with the vicarious sense-experience of being there. Sometimes, tragically, the journalists themselves become the victims.

Visually evocative background settings, also, are a deep-seated part of the news package. Settings are invoked in familiar tableaux: the desolate, boarded up shops and homes of an American mid-western automobile town; listless clusters of distracted men, at home in the middle of the day, set against billowing washing lines and the surrounding moorland of a Yorkshire mining village; the sight of saffron-robed monks on dusty tracks, standing out in sculpted relief against lush green tropical vegetation, as they demonstrate against the military junta in Burma; the intermittent lighting up of the sky in Baghdad, Belgrade or some other city, as it is attacked from the air; and the white and variously stained, sun-drenched, flat-roofed dwellings, palm trees, fences and checkpoints in Gaza or the West Bank. With the right treatment, such images can capture the imagination; they can potentially give a greater sense of what it feels like to suffer certain experiences, to be able to stand in the shoes of the people at the heart of a story.

But in reality, sounds, settings and suffering by themselves, and as palpable and intense as they are, are not enough to sustain anything more than a generic sense of fellow-feeling, coupled with a sense of having seen the same thing many times before. The fragmented, disembedded nature of what we are shown, and the speed with which one story flows into another, leaves us feeling disorientated, dizzy. Or it does if we continue to pay attention and try to make sense of it. History comes across as cyclical and unchangeable — what goes around comes around — and this typically engenders fatalism, an overwhelming sense that it would be futile to try and change the course of this interminable wheel of inevitable and homologous events.

There are two key, related reasons for these feelings of vertigo and fatalism. The first is the absence of co-ordinates to provide viewers with a sense of orientation, so that they can understand how the events on camera are related to the conditions and processes that surround those events, that led up to them, that played major roles in causing them to happen. This is the absence of what | will refer to throughout the book as a suitable contextual field. By this | mean the provision of contextualizing markers that would somehow manage to offer an adequate-enough map of the primary institutional and individual actors, networks, forces, pressures, dynamics and histories that are relevant to the moments of action we witness on our screens. Many aspects of this contextual field will not be visible in the action, in the events on screen, but without them the events would not have happened. They are the necessary conditions of existence of the events on camera, but for the most part their existence is elsewhere. These are conditions such as the decisions of corporate managements to close car factories or coal mines that are deemed to be uneconomic. They are sequences of networked conditions such as those created by the Burmese military dictatorship in the trade deals it negotiated with influential foreign powers, creating the financial conditions for its own survival, which, in turn, allowed it to continue its abuse of human rights and to curtail the freedom of speech of political dissenters. It is only the final stages of this latter sequence — the protests against these abuses and curtailments — that we see on camera. These influences on the events captured by television news might be at the other end of the city or on the other side of the globe, and so they are absent spatially from the events we see, but their various effects are transmitted to where the action is, and to what the action is. They thus have a presence in the events that are shown to us, even though they are not visible.

A key question to ask of any news story is consequently: What is its relevant contextual field? That is, in thinking about the what, where, when, who and how of the events that are spoken about or are captured on camera, we need to understand that there is more to understanding each of these things than what we see before our eyes. In the course of the book | shall argue that audiences need to initially try and map what they can of this field on the basis of the raw material provided in the story itself. The journalists producing the stories will be more or less helpful in facilitating and guiding such a process. The mapping needs to have a geographical, spatial dimension, providing a basic orientation as to how current institutions, individuals and forces — wielding variable powers — zone in from near and far to contribute their bit to the events in the field of vision. The mapping also needs a historical, temporal dimension, because the contextual field relevant to any event — the field relevant to the production of that event — will have its own history, and at its most palpable this history will have conveyed into the present such things as technology, infrastructure, hierarchies of power, distributions of wealth and so on. It will also have conveyed less tangible, but just as powerful, cultural elements such as memories, values, affiliations and grievances.

Precisely which parts of the contextual field will be relevant to a particular story will depend on that story's focus and claims, and we will return to this point through the book. The raw material that television news stories provide for mapping the contextual field will vary a good deal, both in terms of what a story actually covers and in terms of the degree of detail and precision with which it covers it. It is important for audiences to be highly attuned to this variability.

The second reason for the sense of dizziness and hopelessness news often conveys is that the absence of a contextual field is typically compounded by an additional absence. This is the lack of a genuine, empathetic engagement with the experience of the people that news accounts focus upon. Social theory calls this the ‘hermeneutic’ engagement.' Such engagement has the potentia to add ballast to the spinning-top of news, to slow it down, to allow one to focus for more than a split second on those involved. It requires imaginative sympathy with the characters in focus, such that concerted effort is made to understand something of their cultural worldviews, including such things as what they most care about in life,? what their memories, sensibilities and mental scars are, what they wish for — or wished for — and how any of these affect the ways in which they experience the events in focus. If it's the case that news can't provide any of this, and shouldn't be expected to, then we should be cognizant of this. Its absence should be emblazoned in lights within the interpretative schemes we bring to our readings; we would need to fully and clearly recognize the relative poverty of such accounts when compared to the enriching accounts of interior lives captured in other genres, from in-depth oral histories to the great novels of world literature.

If it is the case that there is a relative dearth of empathy and imaginative sympathy in television news, then a further element that is key to the uprooted quality of news follows from this. For without focused engagement on the subjectivity of the social actors who appear in news stories, it is logically impossible to look at the ways in which that subjectivity is inhabited by the socio-structural context in which it lives, and which it constantly negotiates. It is not possible to situate these interior worlds in relation to such things as the objective social networks of roles, duties and obligations that impinge upon them. It would be difficult to overemphasize this point, as it means that we can’t anchor the subjective viewpoints of actors in their own sense of the dynamic nexus of social forces, power relations, expectations, pressures, potential sanctions and rewards, risks and dangers that provides them with their context. Subjective viewpoints are indeed ‘subjective’ and part of subjectivity is a potential to look at things differently from the ways society expects, and to resist social injunctions to do things in a particular way. However, while actors are not entirely determined by social situation, their relationship to their social context is far from being completely arbitrary or wilful. Subjective points of view, and the socialization processes that help to produce them, are not formed in a vacuum, but in relation to a particular contextual field. What actors feel, do and say can only be understood once they are placed within this context.