Torfing said that we must accept a world of politics full of antagonism. Once we accept this, we need to then envisage how it is possible under those conditions to create or maintain a pluralistic democratic order, with a distinction between ‘enemy’ and ‘adversary’ (1999: 121). One of my main premises is that ‘democracy’ is secured precisely through its resistance to perfect or final realisation, and it is characterised ultimately by indeterminacy. My conceptual starting point, then, is that the tension between the media and the ANC is internal to democracy itself. One of my conclusions is that, through populist interventions such as ideological labelling, disparate antagonisms are condensed into one figure, ‘the media’. Antagonistic interpellations against the media include that it is a body which is anti-transformation, that it lacks diversity, is profitdriven, is an enemy of the people, lacks ubuntu and is hysterical. In trying to control the media in South Africa, the ANC and some of its alliance partners have not accepted that a fractured society cannot exist without contestations or that there is a distinction between enemy and adversary in a pluralistic democratic order. The ideological labelling is a case of obfuscation.

My argument throughout this book is that the independent media is an agonistic, adversarial space and journalists are legitimate adversaries who have a significant role to play in the creation of, and the deepening of, a pluralistic democratic order. It is therefore inappropriate, but also unfair, to gaze on them as enemies, anti-transformation and unpatriotic. To constitute the media as an ‘us and them’ is to make it an outsider to the democratic space. Through the use of psychoanalytical concepts of ideological interpellation, Master- Signifiers and floating signifiers, social fantasy, and the gaze, I suggest that the ANC is unmasked as having regressive tendencies, and through its paranoia and hysteria is itself, rather than the media, blocking transformation. The ANC has turned the issue around to brand the media as the regressive force, indulging in ideological interpellation of critical voices in the media, hailing them through the performative of naming. It has summoned the intervention of a media appeals tribunal as a means of control.