I want to now broach the methodological developments in qualitative analysis that came out of an increasing awareness of the significance of culture generally and mass-mediated visual culture specifically from the 1960s onwards. Semiotics (Barthes), structuralism (de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Eco), post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Žižek), and postmodernism (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson) have all significantly enhanced our understanding of the funda-mental lessons of the qualitative paradigm already established by such social science methodologies as phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. Interactionist sociol-ogy, for example, treats the actions of actors as symbolically constructed signs in relative flux and requiring active interpretation by all participants. But where the object of analysis in symbolic interactionism is face-to-face interactions, verbal conversation and social role play, the ‘new’ qualitative methodologies constituted a
‘linguistic turn’, focusing above all on written language and visual (mass media) signs.
Interestingly, they also emphasized ‘structures’, displacing individual subjectivity just as the positivist macro-focused social sciences did. But unlike the positivist social sciences, here the ‘structures’ in question were the structures of language and meaning making itself, rather than social reality ‘out there’. Despite these differences between the social science qualitative methodologies and those of the linguistic turn, strong continuities remain. Locating and integrating these post-1960s methodologies as branches of a paradigm already established within the social sciences is useful DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 87
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because it may help to call into question the currently dominant understanding and self-constructed history within cultural studies that these methodologies represent a radical, fundamental and hitherto unexplored means of knowledge production.
Indeed, these are the methodologies that would be typically understood as the critical methodologies of our time (for example, see Easthope and McGowan 2004). But the word ‘critical’ tends to function merely as a convenient umbrella term for these methodologies and an implicit rebuke to either the humanist orientation of earlier qualitative methodologies and the more positivist or empiricist methodologies which assume that concepts, language and representations generally can have a more or less unproblematic correspondence to or reflection of the real world. But most of the main figures (given above) associated with the ‘linguistic turn’ have not explicitly characterized, discussed or defined their theories as ‘critical’ at all.
For all their undoubted strengths and contribution to developing our concep-tual apparatus for decoding signs, the new qualitative methodologies associated with the linguistic turn also share with their social science cousins a weakness that runs through all the methodologies in the qualitative paradigm: namely a tendency towards subjectivism (where the real world as a set of material forces shaping the values and perceptions of the subject disappears) and relativism (where one point of view, one set of values is as good as any other and there are no grounds for making evaluative judgements between different value systems and perspectives). If Errol Morris’s problematization of testimony and perspective had collapsed altogether into subjectivism and relativism in The Thin Blue Line, then in all probability, a wrongful conviction for murder would not have been overturned. Postmodernism, which is the logical culmination of this subjectivist and relativist trend, helped to so undermine our capacity to provide critiques of massive centres of power and propaganda that Christopher Norris was moved, shortly after the American-led attack on Iraq in 1991, to write a book called Uncritical Theory, Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (1992). Norris’ complaint was that subjectivism and relativism had so undercut the confidence of intellectuals to make truth statements about the world, that the arbitrary and deeply self-interested exertions of state power (and media representa-tions) involved in Gulf War I, were being given a free ride. With the consequences of Gulf War II (2003) still playing itself out (and the subject of a number of documenta-ries) it seems we need to look elsewhere if we are to get a proper handle on this term
‘critical’.
We could do worse than return to the tradition which first consciously worked out a research programme that was explicitly called ‘Critical Theory’. The Institute for Social Research (sometimes called the Frankfurt School because of where it was founded) was established in 1923. The School was influenced by a number of philosophers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, but above all by Marx. At least up until the late 1940s, it developed (first in Germany, later in American exile from Nazi Germany) an approach to social analysis and a definition of what constitutes Critical Theory from which we can extrapolate, at the risk of over-homogenizing what were inevitably different approaches, judgements and interests among the key personnel, four features:
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1. Critical Theory sought to overcome what it saw as a debilitating dichotomy between philosophy and science. Philosophy provided a history of thought
‘oriented to the potentialities of man lying beyond his factual status’
(Marcuse 1989: 66) but at the price of scholastic isolation from social reality as it was. Science, on the other hand, engaged in modern social, political and technological trends, but at the price of naturalizing society, treating science and its objects as neutral technical processes unconnected with ‘the social process as a whole’ (Horkheimer 1989: 54). For our purposes, it is easy enough to recast this dichotomy as the already discussed split between the positivist paradigm (with its tendency to take the social world as a given) and the interpretive paradigm, with the latter standing in for philosophy, as both place the emphasis on the realm of ideas, ideals, culture and the constructed meaning of action and behaviour. Among the methodologies of the linguistic turn, this emphasis is no longer grounded in the humanis-tic model of ‘man’, but instead projected into the very structure of language and signifying systems, but nevertheless, the emphasis remains on the process and construction of meaning making.
2. Critical Theory is also a reflexive theory, ‘critical of itself and of the social forces that make up its own basis’ (Marcuse 1989: 72). By contrast, although science is centrally concerned with ‘a knowledge of comprehensive rela-tionships’ within its own specialist field, ‘it has no realistic grasp of that comprehensive relationship upon which its own existence and the direc-tion of its work depend, namely society’ (Horkheimer 1989: 56).
3. The weakness of traditional theory (in both philosophy and science) against which Critical Theory defined itself was only one example of the impact of ideology, which is to be found as well in law, morality, religion and cultural institutions. ‘Every human way of acting which hides the true nature of society, built as it is on antagonisms, is ideological’ (Horkheimer 1989: 55).
Thus Critical Theory practises ideology critique, exposing the way antago-nisms generated by the dominant social interests of a capitalist society (capital and state) are concealed, displaced and rationalized.
4. The Critical Theorists followed (in theory) Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on the German philosopher Feuerbach, which noted that philosophers have only interpreted the world but that adequate knowledge of it meant that it must test and be tested by transformative action (i.e. to change the world).
Douglas Kellner has suggested that there is a ‘missed articulation’ between Critical Theory and cultural studies (2002). By contrast, and without making the mistake of suggesting that documentary research today is a full realization of the principles of Critical Theory, there are nevertheless some interesting points of contact and similarity.
1. I have already suggested that documentary practices sit (sometimes uneas-ily) at the intersection of, and can in some ways integrate, the approaches of positivism and the interpretive paradigm. When Morgan Spurlock vomits up a McDonald’s meal in Super Size Me, the link between that very particular incident, and visceral ‘abject’ image on the tarmac and a broader DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 89
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critique of how corporate junk food penetrates the body and makes an increasing number of people sick in a more long-term and potentially fatal sense, has been secured at least in part by something like the sort of synthesis between research methodologies that the Critical Theorists advo-cated. It should be noted that the methodologies of the linguistic turn have been singularly uninterested in integrating qualitative modes of analysis with the sort of large-scale empirical data generated by more positivist methodologies.
2. A reflexive understanding of the social conditions of knowledge production is also increasingly part of a broader popular understanding of the way the media operates in society. Rather than insisting that every documentary interrogate its own conditions of production, we ought to recognize the broader self-reflexive knowledge about media culture that is now in play.
The economic underpinnings of the news media, their closeness to the state, the limits in their repertoire of conventions, is in uneven, doubtless partial, but indisputable general circulation. Media criticism is in the mainstream. This is evident from both popular culture representations of the news media, from Hollywood films such as Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) all the way to Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1995) and beyond, television satires on television news and current affairs programming (the work of Chris Morris, for example) as well as documentaries themselves.
Brian Springer’s Spin (1995) utilized unbroadcast satellite feeds to reveal the disjuncture between off-air commentary and attitudes and on-air packaging of the finished product, while Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Mur-doch’s War on Journalism (2004) explored how the Fox news network in America is shaped around a strong right-wing agenda. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) about America’s gun culture, featured an extensive critique of local television news, with its alarmist and dispropor-tionate emphasis on crime, its racist reiteration of white victims and black perpetrators, and how a climate of fear nurses the sort of anxieties that help advertisers sell commodities that promise to make things better. This critique, in a film that broke box office records for a documentary within the US market, essentially mirrors academic criticism of US television news and brings it into the mainstream (see, for example, Klite, Bardwell and Salzman 1997). Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), the most successful docu-mentary ever in the US market, opens with unbroadcast footage of the principal protagonists’ or rogues gallery involved in propagating the war in Iraq. Here they are: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, all being prepared on separate occasions for the television cameras, prior to broad-cast; microphones are being clipped on, make-up applied, hair brushed, and so forth. It’s a series of shots over the credit sequence (including Bush making childish faces to the camera) that nicely makes the point about image displacing reality and the lack of critical interrogation of the pro-war case by the television networks. It should be noted that the qualitative methodologies of the linguistic turn, while they are reflexive within their own specialist field (the analysis of meaning making), have been in general 90 MIKE WAYNE
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as uncurious about their own broader social conditions of existence as the science that the Critical Theorists critiqued.
3. The emergence of feature film documentary as a prominent player within the sphere of public opinion formation has evidently crystallized around the great assault on corporate capitalism, consumerism and globalization of market relations that has been such a welcome feature of the recent political landscape. A list of such documentaries would include: Super Size Me, Mondovino, The Corporation (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, Joel Bakan, 2004), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004), Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Walmart, The High Cost of Low Price (2006) and Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), Czech Dream (Vít Klusák, Felip Remunda, 2004), The Yes Men (Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, 2003), Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005), A Social Suicide (Fern-ando Solanas, 2004), and The Take (Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, 2004). These documentaries are critical precisely in their interrogation (sometimes con-fused or partial no doubt) of the dominant assumptions of everyday life under capitalism and its various institutions. They constitute an audio-visual example of that current of critical journalism that Philo and Miller compare favourably with the writings of media and cultural studies aca-demics (Philo and Miller 2001: 74). In the field of cultural and media studies, the whole project of ideology critique (connecting ideas to social interests) has become progressively marginalizsed by the postmodernist critique of ‘grand narratives’ that have yet to catch up with the emergent story of the new anti-capitalist conjuncture.
4. Documentary belongs to the mass media (including today the Internet, which can be used for marketing, distribution and even fundraising) and speaks in a language that is generally less specialized and more open to lay publics than ‘philosophy’ or academia. The latter tend to be concerned largely with interpreting the world rather than changing it, as Marx put it.
By contrast, a number of the documentaries listed above have been produced and disseminated as products that self-consciously come out of social struggles and with the aim of amplifying the critiques of groups struggling for progressive social transformation, spreading awareness and knowledge and being used as resources for activist networks. In the Marxist tradition, the integration of theory and practice, which is an essential pre-condition of adequacy for both knowing and doing, is called praxis.