'Speaking truth to power' remains a hallmark of quality journalism reflecting two important elements of news discourse: an unshaken belief in the indexical relationship between news-truth and the world; and a desire to limit the influence of domination when putting forward these descriptions. But a genealogical critique of knowledge vis-a-vis Michel Foucault suggests that "truth" and knowledge are discursive outcomes whose circulation depends on the extent to which they reflect conditions of power. This dissertation makes the claim that journalism is engaged in the production of discursive (rather than indexical) "truth", and that news techniques obscure the epistemic enigma inherent in the production of discursive meanings through aesthetic strategies; that is, through categories of experience that encompass the non-rational and affective dimensions of cultural communication.;Through a reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's four moments of beauty in The Critique of Judgment, I propose a four-part framework for understanding the role of aesthetic experience in the production of discursive legitimacy. My study focuses on four examples of cultural production, the authors of which who engage aesthetic tactics to both challenge legitimacies of power and to assert alternatives within larger structures of public understanding. In each case (including a radical citizen's journalism project, a public art initiative, a sculpture/installation exhibited in a public art gallery and an experimental community), authors/creators asserted their own subjective integrities within competing structures of legitimacy (including hegemonic legitimacies) and identifiable through their expected audiences. Aesthetic experience was used tactically to challenge dominant structures of legitimacy -- their legibilities, the credibility of conditions giving rise to their instigation, and their appropriateness -- in ways that resisted outright condemnation as false or folly. These tactics suggest possibilities for new aesthetic practices within formal discourses of public knowledge such as journalism and possible techniques for culturally challenging conditions of power.
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