Worrying Away at Intelligibility: The Journalist as Guardian of Historical Contingency

• In Event: Interventions in Media and Communication Studies Through Jacque Rancière

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of dissensus, defined by Jacques Rancière as disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It draws on fieldwork conducted in Cairo and Beirut that investigates the relationship between media practitioners' everyday experience of work routines and to-do lists, their imagined responsibilities to their audiences, and the wider social and political transformations unfolding around them. The research confirms the phenomenological claim that subjectivity is not clinched in specific, critical moments but worked at over time, usually in humdrum ways. One is generally not called upon to prove oneself - one's politics, one's humanity - in some all-or-nothing encounter; and on the other hand nor are we interpellated or called forth as a fully-determined subject of hegemonic structures. For these journalists there are real subjective stakes in how things play out in their personal and professional lives as well as in the world they inhabit and report on. This points to a potential reframing of the journalist's role as writer of the first draft of history, instead casting her as guardian of historical contingency. Rather than predicting how history will unfold, journalism is reconceived as a constant worrying away at the edges of intelligibility, a reminder of just how provisional our experience of the present is, and how much is at stake - for ourselves as well as the worlds we live in - in where things go from here. The paper concludes by drawing a connection between Rancière's dissensus and Simone de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity, arguing that for both the work of political engagement is temporal and rarely heroic, discontinuous and inevitably interspersed with failure - and that this is no bad thing.

Author

• Tim Markham, Birkbeck, U of London