The epistemic authority of cultural criticism: The role of emotionality and subjectivity
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Keynote speech at the conference, ‘From Ivory Tower to Twitter: Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture,’ November 22, 2018.
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The epistemic authority of cultural criticism: The role of emotionality and subjectivity
- 1. The epistemic authority of cultural criticism: The role of emotionality and subjectivity Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (@KarinWahlJ) Cardiff University ‘From Ivory Tower to Twitter: Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture’ Copenhagen, November 22-23, 2018
- 2. Overview • The epistemic authority of journalism • The strategic ritual of emotionality • Subjectivity and authority in award-winning cultural criticism
- 3. Epistemic authority of journalism • Epistemic authority: The power to ‘define, describe and explain bounded domains of reality’ (Gieryn, 1999: 1) • Journalistic authority never certain, but requires constant discursive maintenance through the construction of narratives (e.g. Carlson, 2017) • Journalistic authority as performative • News journalism as “fact-centred discursive practice” (Chalaby, 1999)
- 4. Epistemic authority of journalism • Authority of news journalism rests on its claims to provide a truthful account of reality (e.g. Hermida, 2015) • Genre of news report: Limited variation • Its “authoritativeness is a product of convention as much as it is an epistemological fact” (Carlson, 2017, p. 57) • Cultural criticism: Epistemic authority rests on providing credible conferral of judgment on culture • No clear genre conventions, leaving cultural criticism on feeble epistemological footing.
- 5. The epistemic authority of cultural criticism • Digital era: Challenges to the boundaries of journalism • The authority and legitimacy of the cultural critic becoming increasingly heterogeneous (Kristensen and From, 2015) • Challenges to journalistic authority from “the everyday amateur experts” (Kammer, 2015)
- 6. Cultural capital and epistemic authority • Exploring tension between emotion and ideal of objectivity • Cultural capital in the field of journalism: • “The specific form of economic and cultural capital varies within each field. Inside the journalistic field, economic capital is expressed via circulation, or advertising revenues, or audience ratings, whereas the “specific” cultural capital of the field is evident in those forms of journalistic excellence recognized by the U.S. Pulitzer Prizes and other prestigious professional or academic forums” (Benson, 2006, 189- 190) • Recognition of established epistemic authority
- 7. The strategic ritual of emotionality • Use of emotion in Pulitzer Prize winners 1995- 2017 in a range of news categories: – Explanatory – International – National – Investigative – Feature – Public service • .
- 8. The strategic ritual of emotionality • Ample evidence of emotional story-telling • Award-winning news stories pervaded by routinised emotional story-telling • Anecdotal leads, personalized story-telling and widespread use of emotion words.
- 9. 0 17.4 30.4 26.1 21.7 4.8 0 4.3 26.1 43.5 95.2 82.6 65.2 47.8 34.8 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Feature International National Public Service Investigative Award category by lead type Inverted pyramid Other Anecdotal
- 10. The outsourcing of emotional labour • Neat trick: “Outsourcing” emotional labour so that journalists observe, rather than personally experience emotions • Allows for adherence to ideal of objectivity • No examples of journalists discussing their own emotions – Instead: Those of groups and collectives (50.5%), story protagonists: 20.7%, other individuals (28.8%) • Sources expressing emotions: – Primarily their own (51.8% of cases) – But also discussing their own emotions as part of a collective (19.2%)
- 11. Epistemic authority and the strategic ritual of emotionality • News-related genres: Emotional storytelling as a source of epistemic authority • Cultural criticism premised on subjectivity • What are the narrative means for conferring judgement and maintaining epistemic authority? • Examining Pulitzer Prize winners in the “Criticism” category, 1995-2017
- 12. Epistemic authority and subjectivity in Pulitzer Prize winning criticism • Variety of narrative styles • No clear evidence of normalised genre conventions • No use of inverted pyramid style • Frequent use of modified form of anecdotal lead: • “Michelangelo was a terrible kvetch. His back forever ached; popes were slow with the paychecks; the local food was always an insult, a disgrace. No one worked half as hard as he did, and slacker artists made him nuts. “Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don’t waste time,” he scrawled on a sketch he gave to a lackadaisical young pupil and studio assistant, Antonio Mini, in 1524” (Holland Cotter, NYT, 2009)
- 13. Epistemic authority and subjectivity in Pulitzer Prize winning criticism • Variety of means of conferring judgement • Appraisal theory (Martin and Rose, 2003): Three main types of attitude communicated through appraisal: – Expressing emotion, – Judging character (judgment) – Valuing the worth of things (appreciation).
- 14. Epistemic authority and subjectivity in Pulitzer Prize winning criticism • Journalists discussing their own emotions frequently, but not always (17 of 22 cases): • “Rivers terrified me. Glamorous in her Oscar de la Renta dresses and her pouf of blond hair, she was the body cop who circled the flaws on every other powerful woman“ (Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker, 2016) • “I saw the most recent Broadway version, but I can't remember a thing about it except how good it made me feel “ (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post, 2003)
- 15. Appraisal: Judgement and appreciation • Judgement of character: – Review of Hotel Rwanda: “And for Rusesabagina, when his world was falling apart, a tie marked him as the man others would follow to safety” (Robin Givhan, Washington Post, 2006) • Appreciation of objects: – Review of compositions of Charles Ives: “This is great music in a number of ways. It is both consonant (the soft bedding of the string chorale) and abrasively dissonant (the "questions" and "answers" are naked and awkward)“ (Tim Page, Washington Post, 1997). – Review of BMW model: “Man, this thing is ugly. Yet from the driver's seat, the Phantom is a sensational automobile. There's magic and mystery here, fistfuls of romantic motoring. I could drive it to the crack of doom” (Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times, 2004)
- 16. Authority of award-winning cultural criticism • Variety of sources of epistemic authority • Shaped by institutional power relations and hierarchies • Some could be claimed by amateur and non-elite critics • Others predicated on elite professional status of award winners.
- 17. Sources of epistemic authority Source of epistemic authority Explicit in narratives Available to non-elite cultural critics Institutional authority No No Specialist expertise/writing skill No Yes Solidarity with audience Yes Yes Lived experience Yes Yes
- 18. Sources of epistemic authority • All types of cultural critics: • Need “to possess some kind of cultural knowledge, skill, or expertise in order to gain authority and legitimacy” • Need “the media displaying their knowledge and expertise, and supporting, reproducing, or reaffirming their authority as cultural critics” (Kristensen and From, 2015, p. 867)
- 20. Specialist expertise/writing skills • Compelling communication of complex information (including “facts”) Awards citations: • For her passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature. (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 1998) • For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise (Ina Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2014) • For his reviews that elucidated the strengths and weaknesses of film with rare insight, authority and wit (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal, 2005) • For his authoritative film criticism that is both intellectually rewarding and a pleasure to read (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post, 2003)
- 21. Specialist expertise/writing skills Descriptors: • Specialist expertise: Authority, knowledge, expertise • Writing skill: Passion, love, lucidity, intelligence, freshness, wit, humour, versatility, dramatic storytelling • Explicit signal of the importance of these markers of professionalism
- 22. Solidarity with audience • Use of first-person plural pronouns: – “For the rest of us, photography is a technology that threatens to destroy the ideal we have of ourselves. Hence camera shyness and the sense that the camera is stealing our spirit. We fear that the photograph will be imprinted in our minds. Do I really look like that? Why didn't somebody tell me my hair was a mess? Why are my eyes always closed in pictures?” (Henry Allen, Washington Post, 2000) – “We live our lives horizontally. What verticality we do know - via leap or stair, elevator or airline - is by comparison severely limited. We can rise, but for only so long. What goes up really must come down, especially when it's us. “ (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe, 2008) • Building community based on shared human experience • Distancing conferral of judgement to limit appearance of subjectivity
- 23. Lived experience • On composer: “Throughout much of the 1980s, I was the host of a radio program on New York's WNYC-FM that played a lot of contemporary music. One afternoon, however, I devoted an entire show to works by the 12th-century composer Perotin. […] The phone rang and I was confronted with a furious gentleman who claimed that I'd ruined his drive home (and, one might have surmised, his life as well). He promised he would never again contribute to public radio until we stopped playing what he called "all that damned new music"! “(Tim Page, New York Times, 1997) • Marker of “authentic devotion” (Kristensen and From, 2015) as affective commitment
- 24. Lived experience • On Millennium Bug: “Having had a laptop crash on me in the late '80s, then flicker back on with a wiped-out hard drive and a blinking notice -- "January 1, 1900" -- I didn't need much convincing about impending perils. “ (Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe, 2001) • Making explicit their subjectivity and embodiment
- 25. Conclusion • Fragile epistemic authority of award-winning cultural criticism • Dependent on established, but endangered sources of institutional authority • Some of these sources also available to non- elite critics • Pulitzer Prize as boundary work, maintaining privilege of elite news organisations
- 26. Conclusion • Strategic ritual of emotionality: Operates in distinctive way in cultural criticism – Frequent reference to journalist’s own emotions and lived experience – Universal use of various forms of appraisal – Use of distancing devices: first-person plural pronouns • Despite flexibility of genre conventions: Patterned use of emotionality and subjectivity
- 27. Big questions… • What is the role of subjectivity and lived experience in criticism? • How has the form of cultural criticism responded to the transformations of the digital, post-industrial age? • How do ”everyday amateur experts” establish epistemic authority? • How do the logics of the broader journalistic field shape those of cultural criticism when its boundaries are under threat?
Editor's Notes
- In taking on this subject, I want to state straight away that I’m not really a scholar of cultural criticism, although I have done some work in the area in the distant past. So, I approach this as a more generalist journalism scholar, and someone who for a very long time has been interested in forms of journalistic storytelling, specifically in how it is that journalism comes to be believed, how does it construct knowledge and establish and maintain authority. Informed in part by these questions, what has occupied me for the past several years is writing this book – Emotions, Media and Politics, just out from Polity. One of the things that interests me in the book has to do with how the best of journalism incorporates emotionality, and how it operates alongside conventional professional norms and practices, including the ideal of objectivity What I’m interested in for the purposes of today’s talk is to explore how award-winning cultural criticism constructs its authority through both its form and association with forms of institutional power and professionalism. This, I argue, includes a distinctive orientation towards the subjectivity of the cultural critic.
- In taking this approach, I go along with Gieryn’s widely used definition of epistemic authority as the power to define, describe and explain bounded domains of reality. As Carlson has reminded us, the authority of journalism is never certain, but requires constant discursive maintenance through the stories that journalism tells - stories which are crafted according to genre-specific norms. In that sense, journalistic authority is something which is performed, rather than inherently in the possession of particular individuals or institutions.. News journalism can meaningfully be understood as a fact-centred discursive practice.
- It gains its epistemic authority with reference to information gained from sources, and on that basis provide a truthful account of reality. Genre of news report: Limited variation Its “authoritativeness is a product of convention as much as it is an epistemological fact” (Carlson, 2017, p. 57) Cultural criticism s distinctive precisely because it’s not a fact-centred discursive practice. Rather, its claims to truth rest on providing a credible conferral of judgment on cultural practices, objects and texts. No clear genre conventions, leaving cultural criticism on feeble epistemological footing. If that is the case, how is this authority derived?
- This question has become all the more complicated in the context of challenges to the authority and the boundaries of journalism, including cultural criticism, in the digital age. With the rise of user-generated content, the democratisation of reviews and cultural criticism have meant that the authority and legitimacy of the cultural critic becoming increasingly heterogenous. With the growth of opportunities for what Aske Kammer has referred to as “everyday amateur experts” to contribute to cultural crisis, we have seen challenges to the authority of what has conventionally been seen as the “Ivory Tower” of cultural criticism.
- Against that conceptual backdrop, I want to look at how award-winning cultural criticism establishes its authority, using my work on what I call the strategic ritual of emotionality in journalism, and looking at how the authority of cultural criticism differs from that established in news-related genres. The reason why I’m interested in the role of emotion is that the emotion has been a sort of epistemological blind spot in journalism studies, and viewed as incompatible with objectivity. I chose to look at Pulitzer Prize winning journalism because, drawing on the work of Bourdieu as well as journalism scholars who have used his work to study the profession, I see major prestigious awards as a way of granting cultural capital in the journalistic field. US: Country most closely associated with the ideal of objectivity
- So, in my original research I looked at how emotion is incorporated into journalistic storytelling across a range of news genres for which Pulitzer Prizes are awarded. I examined a range of markers of emotionality, including the lead types, the use of personalised storytelling, and emotion words in the first listed story
- What I found in my original research is ample evidence of what I refer to as a strategic ritual of emotionality across categories of news journalism. Award-winning news stories pervaded by routinised emotional story-telling, demonstrating that emotional intelligence – knowing how to use emotion - is a salient form of capital in the journalistic field Dominance of anecdotal leads across all categories, personalised story-telling and widespread use of emotion words.
- So, for example, if you use clear quantitative measures – like looking at the presence of anecdotal leads, which tell personal stories, you can show their prevalence. From this accounted for anywhere between 95.2% (in the case of feature reporting) to 34.8% (in the case of investigative reporting) whereas the percentage of inverted pyramid leads ranged from none (0%) in the feature category to 30.4% in national reporting. Variations across genres of recording, but importance of anecdotal leads.
- Using anecdotal leads featuring personal stories is just one way in which journalistic storytelling incorporates emotion. Another key measure that I used was to look at the use of emotional language, or emotion words. What I found in my study was that there were no examples of journalists discussing their own emotions. This suggests that in news genres, journalistic story-telling outsources what we might call emotional labour – the responsibility for the emotion contained within the news stories, and the elicitation of emotions on the part of the audience. In this, the emotional story-telling of journalism is validated by the evidence provided by sources.
- So, how does this relate to questions of epistemic authority? Well, in news related genres, award-winning journalists appear to draw on emotional forms of storytelling as a source of epistemic authority. It’s not the only one but it’s one of a series of tools at their disposal as they craft narratives to establish and maintain authority. Cultural journalism, by contrast, is premised on the presence of subjectivity, including the expression of the journalists’ emotion. The question then becomes, what are the narrative means for conferring this subjective judgement and maintaining epistemic authority Looking at first listed story over the same period. The size of the sample I’m looking at – just 22 stories – means that I am focusing on a qualitative analysis, rather than quantitative, where such small numbers would not be significant.
- Award-winning cultural criticism uses a variety of styles there is no clear evidence of normalised genre conventions, other than the project of cultural criticism. We see not a single instance of the use of inverted pyramid style that characterises conventional hard news reporting There is however frequent use of a modified version of the anecdotal lead – an anecdote that differs from those used in other genres because it is not used as a “case study” to show how real people are affected by the big events described in the story, but rather serve to place you inside the story and engage the reader. No clear genre conventions
- What comes across is a variety of ways of conferring judgment on culture, and they’re ones which are not always emotional. Following on the work of discourse theorists who have developed the study of appraisal – or how we discursively express attitudes, we can distinguish between expression of emotion, judging character, and valuating the worth of things .
- Five cases where journalists do not discuss how they personally feel about the object they’re describing and analysing, whether expclicitly or implicitly But emotional expression on the part of the journalists is clearly not only allowed in the context of cultural criticism, but central to the genre’s storytelling
- The description of the emotion of other individuals is widespread, along with judgement of character and the appreciation or evaluation of objects. What marks out cultural criticism is that all of these appraisals, whether in the form of affect, judgment or appreciation, are those of the critic. So how do they derive their authority?
- What I would argue is that there is a variety of sources of epistemic authority in award-winning cultural criticism. But these sources of authority, as it the case with the basis of authority in journalism in general, is heavily shaped by institutional power relations. What I mean by that is that while some of these sources of authority might be claimed by amateur and non-elite critics – the hordes who are at the doors of established journalism – others are predicated on the elite professional status of award winners and their relative status in the journalistic field.
- I identify a series of sources of epistemic authority at work in the Pulitzer Prize winning works of cultural criticism, I will go over each in turn. These, I suspect, are probably not the only ones, so this is more of a suggestive list that invites us to look more carefully at the basis for claims to knowledge and authority in cultural criticism. This very basic typology suggets that while some sources of epistemic authority are associated with institutional power and professionalism, some sources of epistemic authority are made explicit and built into the narratives - that is not dependent on external factors, such as the professional affiliation of the journalist, To some extent, these are also available to non-elite cultural critics, including amateurs.
- When I say this, I’m drawing on the work of Kristensen and From, who argue that all types of cultural critics need to posses particular forms of knowledge, skill and expertise to gain authority and legitimacy, and also need the media displaying their knowledge and expertise, and supporting, reproducing or reaffirming their authority as cultural critics.
- In this respect, the institutional authority associated with working for an elite news organisation sets out Pulitzer Prize winners as distinctive. That is to say, a critic posesses cultural capital on the basis of working for the New Yorker, the LA Times or the Washington Post. And this institutional affilitation gives them authority to confer judgment. What is evident is that with respect to the Pulitzer Prizes, a very narrow range of media organisations dominate the field. Only nine different news organisations over time period, vast majority very elite ones NYT, WP, and BG accounting for five each Other, news related categories: Much more diverse in terms of news organisations, with local news making a significant appearance This anomaly may, in part, be due to the fact that it is mainly elite news organisations that maintain devoted cultural critics. But it also serves to reinforce the notion that carrying out cultural criticism is the privilege of a small minority of elite journalists, reinforcing professional boundaries and constituting definitional control over journalism, as Matt Carlson (2017) has pointed out. Winning a Pulitzer is, of course, in itself a way of gaining institutional authority.
- A second source of epistemic authority is related to how writers demonstrate professional skill, including specialist knowledge of the subject matter that their writing focuses on (e.g. automobiles, architecture, film) and how compelling their writing is. This epistemic authority is perhaps the least tangible and most dependent on external judgement – but it is also what is most explictly recognised by the awards citations.
- The most frequently mentioned qualities of the writing in awards citations has to do with specialist expertise, knowledge and authority (you can see some examples above). But citations also mention qualities of the writing, demonstrating the importance of the use of emotion in storytelling. This explicitly signals the importance of these forms of expertise, which could be seen as markers of professionalism.
- A third source of epistemic authority is one that is premised not on institutional authority or external recognition, but rather built into the narrative through discursive practices. That is the construction of solidarity with audience, by using first-person plural pronouns, including “we” and “us.” This strategy is a way of building a community based on shared human experiences – whether it has to do with our experience of being photographed or of living horizontally. At the same time, this device – which is very widely used across the Pulitzer Prize winners (to the extent that it also surprised me) serves as a way of making appraisals and describing emotions in a way that suggests that these appraisals and emotions are shared and universal, rather than based on the subjective judgement of the writer. In doing so, it could be seen as a neat trick which facilitates the conferral of judgement while, in a sense, removing the critic as a subjective individual from this judgement.
- A final way of discursively establishing authority is with reference to the lived experience of the critics, which makes frequent appearance in the award-winning articles (these are just a few of many examples). This might serve as a marker of what Kristensen and From refer to as “authentic devotion” (Kristensen and From, 2015) – in itself an explicitly affective commitment
- Likely serves a slightly different function in elite and non-elite criticism: In elite criticism, serves in part to show that critics are normal human beings, too, and to add a bit of colour, to place them in the story. At the same time, it is also making explicit their subjectivity and embodiment, in a sense counteracting other distancing devices and running counter to ideals of objectivity.