Creation of Reality

Bernhard Poerksen

Description

Constructivism has been traded as a new paradigm by its advocates, and criticised by its opponents as legitimating deceit and lies, as justifying a trendy post-modern "Anything goes".In this book, Bernhard Poerksen draws up a new rationale for constructivist thinking and charts out directions for the imaginative examination of personal certainties and the certainties of others, of ideologies great and small. The focus of the debate is on the author's thesis that our understanding of journalism and, in particular, the education and training of journalists, would profit substantially from constructivist insights. These insights instigate, the claim is, an original kind of scepticism; they provide the underpinnings of a modern type of didactics oriented by the autonomy of learners; and they supply the sustaining arguments for a radical ethic of responsibility in journalism.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845404710
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
The Creation of Reality
A Constructivist Epistemology of Journalism and Journalism Education
Bernhard Poerksen
Translated by
Alison Rosemary Koeck and Wolfram Karl Koeck



Copyright page
Copyright © Bernhard Poerksen, 2011
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
The German original was first published under the title Die Beobachtung des Beobachters, Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2006.
English translation by Alison Rosemary Koeck and Wolfram Karl Koeck
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Dedication
For Jörg Hennig



Preliminary Note
The words making up the title of this book, The Creation of Reality , play on a polarity. On the one hand, reality is held to be what is given, what is encountered directly, what exists, as we usually say, independently of an observer, of a knowing subject. On the other hand, the concept of creation suggests a contrary impression: what we are dealing with is not something encountered directly, something given, but something made, fabricated, manufactured. Proponents of this position assume that reality does not exist in itself, but is created, constructed, by the observer.
One might now be tempted to get rid of this toying with differing or contrary connotations in favour of only one, the definitive interpretation, to set up a mono-perspective as the only and absolutely adequate one, and to affirm as a result: reality is the point of reference of all efforts of knowing, which exists independently of us. Or in reverse order and with comparable force: what we call reality is merely a construct, a more or less arbitrary emanation of the mind.
However, such a rigidly dogmatic position and a corresponding commitment to a realist, constructivist, or some other, orthodoxy would militate against the central concern of this book. The book much rather seeks to promote a style of thinking that involves changes of perspectives and modes of observation and may thus help to keep twisting and turning so-called certainties, ultimate truths, big and small ideologies until their edges become fuzzy, until we are able to see more than before. The creation of reality and the construction of certainties are the core topics and the key problems of constructivism that will here be applied—with the intention of the practice-related application of an epistemology—to journalism, journalism studies, and university didactics. My central thesis is that our understanding of journalism and, in particular, the education and training of journalists, can profit from the insights provided by constructivism. These insights instigate an original kind of scepticism; they provide the underpinnings of a modern kind of didactics oriented by the autonomy of the learners, and they provide the sustaining arguments for a radical ethic of responsibility in journalism.
Among my academic dreams is the wish that scholarly books might perhaps lose the character of a more or less sterile monologue at some stage after their publication and instead turn into a source of stimulation for others and for the author so as to improve ideas and theses through disputation and dialogue.
Bernhard Poerksen
Tübingen, April 2010



Introduction
The Practice of Parody
Two of my students were among the first to demonstrate to me that constructivism can directly stimulate the didactic imagination and that it is, therefore, perfectly suited—at least in the halls of a university—to serve as an irritation theory in the education and training of journalists. The two students had put their names down for a presentation in a seminar on practices of the media, and were supposed to talk about the stylistic characteristics of a squib, to elucidate the defining differences between commentary and squib, and finally to link their presentation with the critical discussion of a text that had been distributed to the participants a week before. They did none of these things or, if at all, then only in a very indirect way. At the time they were expected to start their presentation, they walked up front busying themselves with slips of paper; one of them wordlessly installed a cassette recorder, then sat down on the floor and thus rendered himself invisible to the audience for as long as the seminar lasted. The other student pushed the button that moved the blinds up and down. The room went dark. All one could still see in the brief flash of light allowed in by the opening door was the student leaving the room with his slips of paper in his hands. Brief nervous laughter in the darkness, the ringing of a mobile phone that was not switched off by anyone. The lecturer in charge of the seminar, I myself at the time, decided to wait and see what might happen. After a few minutes, the actual presenter re-emerged. He began, with skilled dilettantism, to handle the overhead projector, dazzled the audience intermittently, and then—operating with increasing speed but still wordlessly—placed transparencies of some sort on the projector glass, which were practically illegible and some of which had obviously been copied the wrong way round. In the meantime, the partner sitting on the floor had switched on the cassette recorder. One could hear a monotonously delivered presentation: ‘The squib is a special form of commentary; it works with the instruments of parody, of travesty, and of alienation. Among its central characteristics belongs the fact that the squib is funny, that it exhilarates and shocks.’ After that, the endless loop of a repetition: ‘The squib is a special form of commentary…’ The mobile phone rang again. Nobody switched it off. Transparencies kept emerging, which were at least legible. They carried messages from another reality: ‘Ever more!’, ‘We are the best!’, ‘What is your reality?’, ‘We are the presentation!’ Exceptionally beautiful the transparency with the inscription: ‘It cannot be that you leave here without taking something with you.’ At the end—in place of the customary summary—the transparency master served a question in capital letters: ‘Did you feel the squib?’ This signalled the end of the presentation and he again disappeared. 43 dumbfounded students and a speechless lecturer remained behind sitting in darkness.
Sceptically minded readers might well ask themselves at this point why I have decided to select this particular example for introducing both a heuristically designed theory of journalists’ education and training, and an epistemology of journalism studies. The answer is: this performance by an artistic talent—and that is what the presentation actually was—realises an approach and an attitude that will be the topic of discussion here. What happened in this seminar can certainly never be repeated in the same way; it is, however, of exemplary significance. It cannot directly be turned into a recipe but it nevertheless appears to be the expression of a particular attitude that merits a closer look. The two students played with entrenched patterns of communication in a highly intelligent way; they copied the contents of their presentation onto the media of their performance and translated the theory of the squib into the practice of parody, all at the risk of total failure. The motto of their action could have been taken from a piece of work by Niklas Luhmann: ‘Irritation is precious’ [1] , he is supposed to have said once. This is to mean: Irritation brings about a new dynamics, opens up opportunities of understanding and appreciating new perspectives, as long as it does not lead to annoyance and rejection; it encourages intellectual flexibility, it is basically anti-dogmatic, it creates sensibility for the ineluctable contingency of any experience of reality. In one word, irritation must be exploited as a productive force in university didactics, particularly in the preparation for a profession that is essentially characterised, or should so be characterised, by scepticism and curiosity, quick and undogmatic thinking, and the permanent confrontation with ever unfolding new realities. It is the profession of journalism that can profit greatly by such systematic kinds of irritation. The academic discipline, the study of journalism, may correspondingly be conceived of as a kind of study by means of irritation. [2]
Obviously, this raises the fundamental question as to how irritation and the stimulation of intellectual creativity can be given a systematic place within an ideal-type study of journalism. How could one, to return once again to the two students, make the best use of their hazardous presentation for the purpose of stimulation? How can one inspire lecturers in journalism studies or, better still, how can one help them to inspire themselves so as to exploit the truly strange fact that university teaching is not taught at all and can and must be turned into an occasion and an opportunity for realising imaginative curricular and didactic conceptions? Questions of this kind, which do indeed express a somewhat strange desire to seek and find a recipe for creativity, aim towards a different attitude with regard to university teaching that would lend contours to concrete action and simultaneously direct such action in an unobtrusive way. The goal can be neither the ultimate recipe nor a rigid method. It ought to be the furthering of a procedure that allows for the adequate adaptation to changing situations; the goal is an attit