The Value of Content Analysis

Content analysis allows the substitution of representative data for impressionistic judgements. By examining newspapers systematically and subjecting our observations to the discipline of a coding scheme, changes which might remain invisible or contested are able to be charted more precisely and certainly. Sometimes content analysis is able to anchor arguments by providing incontrovertible data which all participants must acknowledge. Sometimes the discipline of coding provides insights that would not otherwise emerge.

An example of an illuminating content analysis is found in Table 2.1. It was conducted by one of the pioneers of the methodology Ole Holsti (1965). While most content analyses are of the media, Holsti studied Cabinet and Foreign Office documents of the major powers in the lead-up to World War I. The first two data columns in the table refer to how the governments saw the past actions of themselves and their enemies, while the final two refer to their perceptions of future options.

It is excellent research because it reveals a compelling and important insight into perceptions and misperceptions in a conflict situation. Participants on both sides tended to perceive their own actions as having been necessary, while thinking that their adversaries had much freer choices, and so saw unwelcome actions by the other side as deliberately provocative and hostile, but did not see how their own actions might be seen by the other side as such. Similarly, when they were considering future actions, they regarded their own options as very constrained, but thought their enemies had much more choice.

The bottom two rows, which consolidate all the individual country data into percentages, show that countries thought they had had a choice only 13 per cent of the time. Conversely, in a direct mirror image, they thought their enemies had acted out of choice 87 per cent of the time. The consideration of future options is not quite as lopsided but still very much in the same direction. They thought their enemies had choices 84 per cent of the time, while they themselves only had options 38 per cent of the time.

There is no doubt that Karl Jaspers was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. This statement seems uncontroversial, at least among all those not beholden to the belief that the analytical tradition is the only valid embodiment of professional philosophy. During that period of postwar history when “existential philosophy” dominated intellectual and cultural life in Europe and beyond, Jaspers's name cropped up constantly, together with those of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, as the most important and certainly most prominent contemporary thinkers. At the time, his influence on the general reading public and on up-and-coming figures was enormous. Two members of this younger cohort stand out, namely Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. The first two books published by Ricoeur—soon after his liberation from a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he had spent several years—were on Jaspers; the complex balancing act between philosophical thinking and religious faith that we find in Jaspers became crucial to Ricoeur's entire intellectual development and to the way he articulated his opposition to the atheist “existentialism” of Sartre. Again and again, Ricoeur stated that, like Jaspers, for him philosophy and faith have to be seen as engaged in a “loving struggle.” Although he disagreed with Jaspers in crucial respects and was clearly more of a Christian than Jaspers himself, he emulated the latter's characteristic efforts to mediate between seemingly contradictory positions. “Cette via media, c’est Jaspers,” he wrote in the last paragraph of his first book.

The other budding talent, Jürgen Habermas, completed his doctoral dissertation on Schelling in 1954, and when Jaspers's monograph on the same thinker appeared in 1955, he reviewed it in Germany's leading daily. Further newspaper articles on Jaspers followed, and in his late masterpiece, which foregrounds the relationship between philosophy and religion in European intellectual history, Habermas found himself returning to Jaspers's work. Beyond this, it is plainly apparent that Habermas's fascination with the phenomena of “communicative action” owes much to Jaspers's illuminating analyses.

The Comparatist ‘Traveler’ and Suits: Introductory Reflections on Method and Content

The idea of pushing the gaze beyond the traditional boundaries of comparative law to try to understand the scope and implications of the ‘representation of legal traditions in pop culture’ has a specific, twofold meaning: it is not only a demonstration of the importance, for the jurist, of tapping into the ‘marketplace of ideas’ referred to in the historical lesson of the Canadian Supreme Court, as well as its implications for the method in and of comparative law. It is, above all, the avant-garde inversion of the role of the contemporary comparatist: who is, or must be, par excellence, a real ‘traveller of the theory and practice of the legal universe’. And furthermore, not only of the legal universe, but of everything that, in terms of interdisciplinarity, can serve as a ‘shortcut to understanding the world’. Thus, also ‘beyond law’.

‘Life is like this’ (in the scene, the main character indicates one level with his hand); ‘I like it like this’ (indicating a much higher level). ‘I don't have dreams, I have goals’. These cult phrases delineate the thread of the interaction between pop culture and legal culture. For their scenic-argumentative power, some other expressions will be used to qualify the eclecticism and ambition of the protagonist of the New York lawyer Harvey Specter, thus capturing the same interaction in terms of method and law in action. What influence does pop culture have today, and how much does it contribute to the understanding of a legal system and of profession practicing in that area? How much does the televised representation of the cultural identity of this profession influence public opinion? What is the impact of pop culture on the global practice of professional law? Which practices – or expressions – of behaviour reproduced in the legal drama contribute – do or do not contribute – to a more realistic understanding of the role of the lawyer as the nexus of the network of actors operating in the legal field? To what extent does Specter's murderous, edgy and ruthless attitude represent the ideal of professional acuity and success, and to what extent do his relationships (with clients and with his associate Mike Ross – young and enterprising, but whose professional profile is based on a lie) reveal the need for a scientific study of the dichotomy between legal culture and pop culture?

I

Today the struggle between different faiths which Weber described in his famous diagnosis of the times has acquired the directly political form of a clash of cultures. This current world situation lends surprising relevance to a theme which is of central importance in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. In the foreword to a work written at the end of his life, Philosophical Faith and Revelation (Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung), which appeared in 1962, Jaspers states:

The program on which the United Nations was founded after the catastrophes of World War II promised the international triumph of human rights and democracy. This politics of human rights has aroused the suspicion that it is merely a veil for the hegemonic ambitions and naked predominance of Western culture. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of a polarization of the world, which seemed to reflect a conflict of basic social policies, conflicts are increasingly defined from a cultural standpoint. They are viewed as conflicts of peoples and cultures whose self-understanding has been shaped by the traditions of opposing world religions. In this situation, we Europeans are faced with the task of achieving an intercultural understanding between the world of Islam and the Judeo-Christian West.

Jaspers is convinced that philosophy can foster a way of thinking which could secure religious peace for a second time—this time on a worldwide basis. He even puts his own philosophical work at the service of a form of communication which might at least tame the tension between antagonistic beliefs and transform it into a discursive conflict, even if it cannot entirely dissolve it.

Karl Jaspers is not a well-known political thinker despite his undeniably powerful impact on postwar German politics. Indeed, a whole range of Jaspers's postwar interventions—his response to the question of German guilt, his active commitment to European integration and liberal values as well as his call for radical democracy in domestic affairs—are indicative of the direct and indirect ways in which Jaspers has shaped political culture in the Federal Republic of Germany and beyond. Yet, these interventions took place when Jaspers was already in his sixties. Before he penned political treatises and delivered radio lectures as one of Germany's most prominent postwar public intellectuals, Jaspers was recognized chiefly in two different roles: as an inadvertent pioneer of German existentialism alongside Martin Heidegger, and as a staunch defender of Max Weber's legacy against the dominant school of neo-Kantianism. His engagement with politics, and even more so with political economy, had been minimal in his writings. Trained as a psychiatrist, his ill health precluded a medical career, prompting him to shift to philosophy. Within that framework, he distinguished himself as a phenomenological psychologist and metaphysician, an existentialist philosopher with a markedly Kantian inflection, and a scholar of religion.

Initially, Jaspers did not think of himself as a political thinker either. Born in Bismarck's Germany in 1883, it was only as he endured the pain and suffering caused by decades of war, the failure of Germany's intellectual and political elite as well as personal adversities, above all the imminent threat to his Jewish wife and to their personal survival in Heidelberg, that he returned to Weber in a distinct political key. This shift also came in response to longstanding critiques from friends and colleagues, such as Dolf Sternberger, Herbert Marcuse and Georg Lukács, who reproached his existential philosophy for its ahistorical and bourgeois individualism. Now, after World War II had come to an end, Jaspers changed course. He faulted himself for having mistakenly “put thinking in the place of action” and asserted that philosophy can only prove itself in politics.

In the 50 years between 1956 and 2006, Australian newspapers grew and changed in three fundamental ways.

• • Their size increased dramatically.

• • Advertising decreased as a proportion of the total space.

• • Newspapers increased their segmentation, with more specialised sections, many of them with distinctive advertising appeals.

These changes are related. As newspaper size increased, segmentation made it easier for readers to find what most interested them. It also, as we shall see, allowed advertising to be more attractively displayed and strategically placed.

Newspapers survive first and foremost as commodities that consumers purchase and which must be financially viable to continue. Charting changes in size and format gives insight into the product available to the reader, how newspapers have sought commercial viability by enhancing their value and appeal, and how this coexists with the amount and nature of their advertising.

The data on the size of newspapers also provides a context against which changes in content can be better understood. If the size of the newspaper has doubled, and the proportion of one type of news has remained constant, then there is double the amount of that news available to readers. Sometimes a proportion has declined, and that tells us about priorities, but there may still be more in total than there used to be because of the increased size of the paper.

In the years leading up to 2006, although there was growing foreboding about the future of newspapers and their role, the trend over the whole period was still one of increasing size and scope. In the years since, the digital revolution has severely hit the viability of newspapers. The final section of the chapter traces the shrinkage in the printed editions of two of the papers.

Size

The first and most basic change is the growth in size. On average in 2006, the papers had more than four times as many pages as in 1956 (Table 3.1). The number of pages increased steadily over each decade in nearly all papers. With only two exceptions (the Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph between 1966 and 1976), all newspapers increased their number of pages in every decade. The biggest proportional jump was between 1976 and 1986. Even in the last decade, 1996–2006, when pessimism about the future of the press was already widespread, the newspapers increased their size substantially, by over 30 pages on average, from 96.7 to 128.9.

Jaspers's view of the relationship between philosophy and religion is neatly conveyed by the following sentence from the first volume of his Philosophie (English translation: Philosophy) of 1932: “The philosophical-religious tension is absolute; a genuinely religious person may become a theologian, but without an inner break he cannot become a philosopher, and the philosopher as such cannot without such a break become a religious person.” Jaspers maintains this view into his later writings. Toward the end of his last great work, Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (English translation: Philosophical Faith and Revelation) of 1962, he quotes a statement by Arthur Schopenhauer in his handwritten papers, which was probably the model for the sentence just quoted from Philosophy: “No one who is religious comes to philosophy; he does not need it. No one who really philosophizes is religious; he walks without leading strings, dangerously, but in freedom.” From this point of view, it is in a certain way understandable that theologians usually react quite “allergically” to Jaspers and prefer to turn to Heidegger, whose “methodical atheism” is less objectionable to theology.

Thus, although philosophy and religion are, according to Jaspers, mutually exclusive, he repeatedly dealt with them in his work in the context of the “philosophical faith” he developed. In his “Philosophische Autobiographie” (English translation: “Philosophical Autobiography”) he explains this as follows: “When I began to philosophize, it never occurred to me that I could ever become interested in theology.” Growing up in a Protestant family that ignored the church, Jaspers developed little relationship with church religion. However, he soon realized that the reality of the church and theology cannot be neglected in philosophizing. In this context, he recounts a strange experience:

Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1884 novel À rebours is concerned with chance and the struggle to navigate it—indeed, to control it outright. My aim in this chapter will be to explore the relationship between chance and control, and the extent to which each might play into aesthetic experience, by way of what I consider the novel's curated moments. This difficult and oddly structured novel follows the life of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, a reclusive misanthrope who has fled society to an aesthetic palace of his own making. There, he indulges in countless aesthetic fantasies, which is what we—the readers—receive, in painstaking detail, as the makeup of the text. Thus, in terms of genre conventions, the novel lies somewhere between decadent literature (with its disdain for nature and its fetishization of excess and the artificial) and naturalism (with its extreme, at times exhausting, reliance on description). The result is a hallucinatory, and at times tedious, cataloging of des Esseintes's various ritualistic aesthetic activities, which range from overviews of literature and paintings to bizarre architectural innovations within his home.

In terms of its chapter-by-chapter makeup, the novel does not follow a linear plot in a conventional way. David Mickelsen suggests that the novel is “orange-structured,” structured spatially rather than temporally, with “temporal change, though present, [having] no functional role in the action.” For Mickelsen, this means that “a number of similar episodes and chapters are arranged spherically, and therefore “[p]ortrait, not plot, is paramount.” Gail Finney disagrees and argues that “[c]ontrary to what many critics have claimed, A Rebours does have a plot. It is the plot of countless nineteenthcentury novels […] that of ‘lost illusions.’ “ Rodolphe Gasché points out that, because of its adherence to naturalist principles, “Against Nature should border on historicity; however, the almost plotless novel seems to contradict such a conclusion.” Ellis Hanson writes that “Huysmans’ meandering plotlessness, broken up by conversations, mired down by endless disgorgements of obscure information from his library, leaves us with a fin de siècle sensation of paralysis, of winding down or of getting wound up in the tangle of a text, the tangle of text upon text, as they come apart at the seams.”

This book begins with a deceptively simple question, one stemming mainly from philosophy: what is aesthetic experience? What warrants the designation of aesthetic experience, and how do we recognize it? In the philosophical tradition, the aesthetic has often been discussed in terms of judgment (i.e., I pronounce the aesthetically grounded judgment that this rose is beautiful), and in common parlance, it is often discussed in terms of style (i.e., somebody or something has this or that “aesthetic”). In each case, therefore, the realm of aesthetics and/or the aesthetic tends to be located somewhere on the binary of subject and object. If we consider the standpoint of judgment, we are thrust into a subjective expression of will and discernment, even when the subject strives for a certain objectivity; if we take up the idea of style, we think mainly of artistic characteristics and effects, “looks” that we can often identify with the eye (or with the organ relevant to the medium in question). Rather than cleave to either side of this binary—which would leave a critical middle ground untouched, namely, a lived fact of our engagement with our surroundings—this book will argue for an understanding of aesthetic experience as depending just as much on subjective attunement as it does on any object out in the world. In this way, it is possible to address the paradox inherent in aesthetic experience: the necessity of disinterestedness on the one hand, and the likelihood of interest in aesthetic experience itself on the other hand. This is especially a problem on the subjective level and can affect a subject's relationship to canonical aesthetic objects, as well as objects encountered privately or individually. Part and parcel of this issue, as we will see, is the tendency to mistake the object as the cause of aesthetic experience, which in turn obfuscates the gap between subject and object, the way that the subject experiences that object.

This vital encounter with the world, as I will argue here through close readings of works by four literary authors, is aesthetic experience. Christopher Prendergast has recently remarked that “the terms of the affirmation of ‘literature’ and ‘art’ are continuous with what from the eighteenth century onwards was to become ‘aesthetics’ as a branch of theoretical inquiry, but whose principal object (aesthetic experience) lies below the threshold of rational cognition and abstraction, in the immediacy of the ‘lived.’ “

The writings of British author Tom McCarthy, including his fiction and his essays, focus above all on violence. And while the novels are by no means short on acts of physical violence—for example, the many acts of political violence depicted in his 2007 novel Men in Space, or the violence of World War I in his 2010 novel C—McCarthy is also concerned with violence in an expanded sense that will take center stage in this chapter. In a 2010 essay on the fiction of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, McCarthy connects violence to another of his long-standing obsessions: the movements, positions, and relations of things in physical space. McCarthy names a moment in Toussaint's 1985 novel La Salle de bain [The Bathroom] where the narrator throws a dart into his lover's forehead as an example of “space being brought into its own, made present in the only true way possible: through acts of violence.” With several references throughout this essay to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, McCarthy makes it clear that violence in its expanded sense can take the form of a kind of repetition and geometry of shifting viewpoints that often create an alienating reading experience, occasionally doubled by literal physical violence as if it were the culmination of the strange reading effect of spatial repetition. Indeed, in a short and incidental 2018 text, McCarthy begins by stating that “death is a question of geometry.” He goes on to discuss the forensic practice of drawing outlines not only around the body but also around any object in its immediate proximity, a practice that will show up in his 2005 novel Remainder to great effect. In doing so, he asks us to consider the possibility that the geometry of this procedure always already exists—that is, that the trace of violence is always there, so to speak, even before the occurrence of the act: “what if the forensic overlay, its lines, sectors, segments, angles, intervals, were there already, prior to the fatal event (not overlay but underlay)?”

Comics, Politics and Law

In a viral interview with Syfy.com, comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick addressed fan criticism regarding the alleged ‘woke’ political turns in her comics: ‘I’m sorry to break it to you, but Captain America is a social justice warrior. I understand you mean that as an insult, but that's exactly what he is.’

The topic is not brand new. We live in highly polarised times, and comics make no exceptions. Some people are calling for greater diversity and inclusion, urging a ‘cultural awakening’ in society to address social justice, inequity and systemic discrimination. Grounded in academic studies like Critical Race Theory, terms such as ‘woke culture’ or ‘wokeness’ have become familiar in public discourse and media. The term originally emerged in the early twentieth century to describe an awareness of the sociopolitical challenges facing Black Americans. However, in recent decades, it has evolved significantly, gaining broader meaning and influence, impacting journalism, advertising and visual arts. Entertainment companies sometimes actively promote this message, integrating it directly into their movies or TV shows. As highlighted by the Disney website, ‘stories matter’ because they ‘shape how we see ourselves and everyone around us. So as storytellers, we have the power and responsibility to not only uplift and inspire, but also consciously, purposefully and relentlessly champion the spectrum of voices and perspectives in our world’.

According to proponents, this policy could lead to a new form of storytelling that challenges conventional norms and highlights the struggles of under-represented communities. In comics, for example, it has recently altered the narratives of traditional and beloved characters such as Superman, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man and Captain America, changing aspects of their origins, race or gender. However, especially in the United States, this shift has sparked strong reactions from more traditional segments of society, fuelling what some describe as a ‘culture of complaint’, which deepens societal tribalism. While some advocate for greater diversity in comics, others express concern, arguing that such changes could lead to the desecration of traditional heroes. Sometimes, this clash also leads to social campaigns aimed at boycotting or ostracising specific companies, with some fans expressing frustration by asking, ‘Would you please get your politics out of my comic books?’