Retroactive causation and the temporal construction of news: contingency and necessity, content and form

ABSTRACT

This article affords particular attention to the relationship between memory, the narrativization of news and its linear construction, conceived as journalism’s ‘memory-work’. In elaborating upon this ‘work’, it is proposed that the Hegelian notion of retroactive causation (as used by Slavoj Žižek) can examine how analyses of news journalists ‘retroactively’ employ the past in the temporal construction of news. In fact, such retroactive (re)ordering directs attention to the ways in which journalists contingently select ‘a past’ to confer meaning on the present. With regard to current literature, it is noted that a retroactive analysis can highlight two important dialectics within the practice of news journalism: (1) the relation between contingency and necessity; and, (2) the relation between content and form. Indeed, it is argued that this theoretical account offers a novel approach to examining the significance of memory in news journalism as well as the inconsistencies which underscore journalism’s memory-work. It is in accordance with such inconsistency that broader reflections on time, temporality and our relations to the past can be made.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialectic
• Hegel
• media theory
• narrative
• retroaction
• Žižek
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notably, the authors do cite previous studies which have examined the importance of memory and the role of journalists in both contextualizing, precontextualizing and discursively manipulating temporality in news reports, but, these are only given passing reference (see Jaworski et al. 2003; Oddo 2013; Tennenboim-Weinblatt 2008, 2013).

2 The term has also been used in analyses of film, most notably, in the work of Elsaesser (2014).

3 We can see this same approach reflected in the ‘free choosing’ of a sexual identity, that, once chosen, temporally constitutes the necessary ‘always been’ of the subject’s identity (Žižek 2017).

4 Vighi and Feldner add that ‘In the Foucauldian universe there are no cracks, no loopholes, no extra-discursive platforms from where freedom could enter’ (Vighi and Feldner 2007, 153).

5 Žižek’s (2012, 2015) Hegelianism is revealed in a Hegelian reversal, whereby contingency and necessity are dialectically inscribed in themselves.

6 As noted in a previously referenced quote by Zandbwerg et al. journalists select from a ‘never-ending flow of occurrences, to place those events within a context, and to construct around them a meaningful continuum’ (Zandbwerg et al. 2012, 68)

7 In extending this argument, think of the strange ‘Holocaust Comedy’ genre in film. In films such as: The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin 1940) and Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni 1997), it is almost as if the excessive tragedy of the holocaust can only be made accessible through the form of comedy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Black

Jack Black is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. His research interests examine the interlinkages between culture and media studies, with particular attention given to cultural representation and ideology. Drawing upon ‘traditional' media forms as well as television and film studies, Jack's published research has appeared in a variety of international peer review journals, providing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of politics and power in both the media and popular culture. His forthcoming publication ‘Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy – A Psychoanalytic Persapective' (Routledge) critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism. By engaging with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, he argues that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates', free speech and the representation of ‘identity politics’.