Erik NeveuLouis QuéréLiz Libbrecht

The age of events. The spume of history - or an informationmaster-frame?In: Réseaux, 1997, volume 5 n°1. pp. 9-25.

AbstractSummary: This article provides an overview of the notion of an event, and suggests new research - perspectives. It highlights thespecific features of the event in contemporary thought and, in particular, its relationship with the media. Taking as their startingpoint the problematics of the social construction of events, the authors suggest that certain philosophical work might usefully betaken into account, and that false polarities such as that between sociological and semiological interpretations should betranscended, in order to gain greater insight into the process of the symbolic constitution of the event.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Neveu Erik, Quéré Louis, Libbrecht Liz. The age of events. The spume of history - or an information master-frame?. In:Réseaux, 1997, volume 5 n°1. pp. 9-25.

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/reso_0969-9864_1997_num_5_1_3320

THE AGE OF EVENTS

The spume of history - or an information

master-frame?

Erik NEVEU and Louis QUERE

Translated by Liz Libbrecht

Summary: This article provides an overview of the notion of an event,

and suggests new research -perspectives. It highlights the specific features

of the event in contemporary thought and, in particular, its relationship

with the media. Taking as their starting point the problematics of the social construction of events, the authors suggest that certain philosophical work might usefully be taken into account, and that false polarities such as that between sociological and semiological interpretations should

be transcended, in order to gain greater insight into the process of the

symbolic constitution of the event.

THE AGE OF EVENTS

1 THE AGE OF

EVENTS

The spume of history - or an information master-frame?

Erik NEVEU and Louis QUERE

In 1972 the journal Communications considered at length the question of the event. It featured, among others, the noteworthy article by Pierre

Nora entitled l'événement monstre ('the monstrous event'). In it Nora outlined a problematic which can still, today, serve as a starting point for reflection on events. Situating the appearance of the 'modern event' in the last third of the nineteenth century, Nora tried to define its status in the functioning of democratic societies.1

The modern event

If there is to be an event, the facts have to be known. This knowledge is henceforth provided by the media, which are the very condition of the existence of events in the type of événementicdtté characteristic of the past century. However, the media do not all fulfil this function in the same way. Each medium is at the origin of a particular type of event or presents particular affinities with it: some events are closely attached to

images, while others are linked more to radio or to the press. The result of this association of events with the media is that 'the mass media have made the event monstrous'. The very logic of their functioning makes them nurture an insatiable 'hunger for events'; they encourage the 'constant creation of newness', and have established a gigantic system to detect everything likely to hold the public's attention. There is a production of events by the media, although this does not mean that events are created 'artificially' by them.

An analysis of the relationship of the modern event with the media does not, however, suffice if we want to define its status. The metamorphosis of the event in democratic societies is far more profound. It produces what Nora calls an événementialité neuve. In democratic societies the event assumes forms which singularize it, and of which the features are condensed in the televised reports on current affairs. In its first metamorphosis, the modern event is no longer defined by its historical character, by its belonging to the past, its archetypal meaning, its value as a foundation or its function of edification; it has become far more similar to the brief news item. In this change, which has helped to 'project it into the lived experience of the masses' and to deliver it to the 'mass imagination', the event has lost its intellectual meaning and gained in 'emotional virtu- alities'. In the second metamorphosis, the event has been dramatized. The distinctive feature of the modern event', wrote Nora, 'is to take place on an immediately public stage, never to be without a reporter-spectator, to be seen in-the- making, and this "voyeurism" gives news both its specificity in relation to history and its historical flavour.' In the third

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Erik NEVEU and Louis QUERE

metamorphosis, democratic societies contrast with traditional societies which tended to rarefy the event and to deny it. For them it was synonymous with newness and rupture - they warded it off through rites and guaranteed a 'non- story' through a system of stories with no newness. Democratic societies 'secrete' the event and live under a system of 'inflation of events'; that is their way of warding off the newness and rupture brought by the event. They make newness 'to the limits of redundancy, the essence of the narrative message'. A final aspect is emphasized by Nora: this metamorphosis of the event attests to a transformation of the historical conscience and, perhaps, of the emergence of a possibility of 'contemporary history'. That is, for example, what is expressed by the intense collective work, witnessed daily, of immediate interpretation of events - an interpretation which Nora very rightly describes as being 'part of the event itself and its 'ultimate exorcism'.2

We could interpret in different ways the immense effort deployed by our democratic societies to 'secrete' events, to explore and decipher their 'news', to promote 'the immediate to the historical'. The fact remains, however, that 'the establishment of this vast system of events which constitutes news' represents 'a major event in our civilization', of which the meaning is still largely beyond our comprehension. That is why we have constantly to renew our questioning on this socio-historical creation, if necessary by relying on new conclusions produced by the social sciences.3

Glimpses of the theory of

events Nora revealed in his conclusion that 'the problematic of the event' was still to be

constructed. We are tempted to make the same observation almost a quarter of a century later. The judgement would, however, be somewhat harsh, for since the start of the 1970s reflection on events has been developed and deepened, as the volume of Raisons pratiques published in 1991 and edited by J. L. Petit indicates. On the one hand, we have reached the end of the debate launched by structuralism on relations between structures and events, between profound historical structures and superficial facts, and between the history of events and fundamental history. On the other hand, diverse currents of philosophy, episte- mology and social science have attempted to formulate and illuminate the main problems in a theory of events. Thus, for example, debate on the nature of events has been very lively for the past twenty years in analytical philosophy.4 It was renewed by Donald Davidson's research in the philosophy of action, in particular by his proposal to adopt an ontology of events (in which events would be the basic units of the world, on the same level as objects, properties and persons) or by his analysis of the conditions of individuation of events.5 Moreover, the question of the event has occupied a significant place in epistemological reflection on historiography - or, in other words, the philosophy of history - in particular with a number of authors who have analysed the structure of narrative phrases or the 'narrativization' of time and history. This reflection, which draws upon several traditions - philosophy of language, phenomenology, hermeneu- tics, literary critique - was adopted in France by Paul Ricoeur in the early 1980s. The hermeneutics of the account which he outlined in Temps et récit shed new light on, and criticized, the epistemological and ontological assumptions

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THE AGE OF EVENTS

attached to the common notion of an event. Incorporating into his work a part of the Anglo-Saxon 'narrativisť thesis, already introduced into France by Paul Veyne, Ricoeur bound event and account closely together by means of intrigue: 'an event has to be more than a singular occurrence. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of the intrigue.' Moreover, he based his work on the historical semantics of Reinhart Koselleck to elucidate the status of the event in a society which has temporalized history and historicized time.

These new problematics of the event are not unrelated to the constructivist approach which developed concurrently in the social sciences. At the start of the 1980s, Eliseo Veron entitled his excellent study on the Three-Mile-Island nuclear accident 'Constructing the Event'. He showed how this event had emerged on the public scene through the work of configuration of the media, via their informational devices and their discursive formats, by means of dispatches transmitted by news agencies. He thus followed in the footsteps, in a resolutely semiotic perspective, of numerous American studies from the 1970s on the production of 'news' and the constitution of the 'newsworthiness' of events. More recently Daniel Dayan, together with E. Katz, has studied a type of event characteristic of contemporary societies: major televized ceremonies. In particular, he examined the way in which a programmed event, broadcast live on television, 'retextualizes' the original event (Dayan and Katz, 1992; 1993). We can appropriately add to these two types of approach the research undertaken in recent years by M. Barthélémy, M. de Fornel and L. Quéré on 'public events', from an ethnomethodological point of

view and inspired largely by Goffman (Barthélémy, 1992; Barthélémy and Quéré, 1991; De Fornel, 1993).

Constructing the event The general idea in 'constructivist' research is that the media do not so much describe an objective reality existing in itself, as they construct it. The world configured by news is a constructed reality. The event is thus something more complex than a mere time-space occurrence; the latter in itself has no determined meaning, nor does it determine the description which could be made of it in the public arena. That is why one has to relate the form in which an event is presented by the media to a process of mise en forme, mise en scène and mise en sens of which they are the operators. More precisely, public events are the products or results of the activities, routine practices and strategies of numerous social actors interested, for one reason or another, in the shaping of events. This idea of a mediated or social construction of events is, however, falsely simple in many respects, and rarely truly conceptualized. It is always tempting either to take advantage of the polysemy of the words 'construction' and 'event' or to extend their meaning metaphorically, or else to reduce the process of symbolic constitution of events to media practices and devices only, which evidently 'construct' or 'produce* news. In what sense can one really say that the media 'construct' events?

While an introductory text is not intended to provide the answers, it can nevertheless suggest a few useful distinctions on the different aspects mentioned above: the idea of construction, the notion of the event and the symbolic constitution of events.

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The idea of construction

Several forms of constructivism are found in the social sciences. In general, constructivism contrasts with realism, and asserts that the world is not given but made - by a culture, a language, ways of constructing reality, etc. - or that objective reality, to which we refer or which we take for granted in our actions or our communication, is the product of a social construction. In the case of events made public by the media, this production can be viewed from various angles. Some would say that the media create events from scratch, which in itself could be interpreted in various ways. Apart from cases of outright lies, falsification or simulation, the most general idea is that, on the whole, the media select, from among those occurrences of which they are informed, the ones which they consider worthy of being brought to the public's awareness and of being turned into noteworthy facts. From a mere occurrence the media can thus, through the processes of grading and attribution of importance, value or relevance which it commands, produce a public event on which public attention can be focused. The status of a given public event is thus effectively in this sense the result of a construction by the media, and such a construction could perhaps be accounted for in purely strategic terms.

Nevertheless, this form of constructivism (which may be accusatory, disabusing or simply descriptive) is threatened by incoherence on a central aspect, since it tends to abandon the constructivist slant as soon as it has crossed the boundaries of the media world, and to confine itself to a realism with no ambition respect of everything preceding mediation. There is therefore a

tial risk of the emergence of a classical positivist conception which distinguishes raw facts from their interpretation. What goes into the media machine is then of the order of raw occurrences, already defined (we know, for example, what they are about) that the media will have only to select, classify, flesh out and interpret.

A body of recent studies, focused more on a problematic of the construction of 'public problems' than on the narrower category of the event, has however helped to avert this incoherence. On this point the analytical framework developed by S. Hilgartner and C. Bosk (1988) warrants special attention in so far as it is able both to encompass the conclusions of former studies (on 'symbolic crusades', the agenda effect, etc.) and to incorporate them into a broader questioning which inter -relates collective action, the media, and the role of cultural frames. We shall consider the notion of an 'operational network', in particular. Conceived as the medium through which 'problems' can have access to the media and to the consecration of the social status of the event, this notion denotes the existence of more or less institutionalized inter-relations between the specialists of a specific type of problem (health, ecology, etc.) within differentiated social arenas (press, administration, associations, firms, etc.). The use of this grid to account for the social conditions of the increase in ecology-related information and events in the media, for example, has proved to be particularly interesting.6 While such promotion owes something to episodes like Bhopal or Chernobyl, which have the most visible external features of what common sense associates with the notion of the event (unpredictability,

14

THE AGE OF EVENTS

dramatic and violent character, etc.), it is essentially the outcome of the gradual structuring of an operational network engendered by the professionalization of ecological associations, the institutional- ization of agencies responsible for these affairs, the emergence of specialized journalism, the appearance within diverse political enterprises who specialists to focus on these questions, and the gradual networking of these agents. From a different viewpoint, the contribution of P. Champagne and D. Marchetti (1994) to the analysis of the 'contaminated blood scandal' provides another stimulating element in a reflection on the social construction of the event which is not enclosed in a mediacentric problematic.

The metaphor of the production and construction of the event must, however, be subjected to further questioning. How does it transcend the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying the common notion of the event? How does it account (if at all) for the operations which reduce the indeterminacy and complexity of the event, making it an intelligible event in a social order, endowed with individuality and meaning? Can the meaning and individuality of an event be 'produced' in the same conditions as a manufactured object? Would it not be more appropriate to characterize these phenomena in different terms?

The notion of the event

The word 'event' has several meanings, and it is indeed tempting to take advantage of the vagueness which this polysemy allows. However, such vagueness is of no help in an analysis; hence, the usefulness of introducing a few simple distinctions.

Event and information First, not every news item is necessarily an event. Although a piece of information is usually an event (in the usual sense of 'something which happened') brought to the attention of an individual or a public, it may concern a situation, a state of affairs or the actions of a person or a group - facts and deeds concerning political office-holders, for example. Secondly, a piece of information may 'become an event' without concerning an event as such. For example, a government plan to change a law may hold the public's attention and be weighted with meaning or value which make it exceptional, without it being an event in the strict sense of the word (that is to say, a singular, unpredictable, non-repeatable occurrence); it is rather a noteworthy fact. A fact is not, however, strictly speaking an event.7

Occurrence and relevance Media events are often no more than noteworthy facts: occurrences, situations or actions brought to the public's attention because they have been credited with a certain importance, judged relevant in a framework of reference, and endowed with 'newsworthiness'.8 In this conception of the event the emphasis is shifted from the idea of something which happens unexpectedly to that of something which 'becomes an event', that is to say, which becomes remarkable, receives a degree of relevance, value and importance from a certain point of view, and becomes the focus of public attention. This idea probably constitutes the notion of an event since, as M. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 470) noted, the latter 'has no place in the objective world ... Events are sliced up by an observer in the time- space totality of the objective world ...

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Erik NEVEU and Louis QUERE

There are no events without someone to whom they are imputable and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.' But it provides us with no distinct criterion of the event, for importance or relevance are properties which can be attributed to different things: situations, actions, persons, facts, etc.

The temporal character of the event

What distinctive features of the event can be proposed? One usually hears, with reference to an event, about something which happened in the recent or fairly recent past. Its factuality or former reality is considered to be absolute (i. e. independent of our reconstructions), singular (an event is distinguished from any other event by its individual features), unrepeatable (an event does not occur twice) and contingent (it might have happened differently, or not at all). In this set of characteristics, we need to highlight those which attest to the temporal nature of the event (its relations to space are more indirect). This aspect of an event has the peculiarity not of existing, as an object for example, but of occurring, of taking place or of having happened, somewhere at a given moment and in terms of variable modalities (suddenness, pace, etc. ) which can be specified. This also implies that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, that one can witness it or follow it happening; in short, observe it. Yet its observability is of a peculiar nature, which makes the very idea of following the event 'live' problematical: there is no certainty that one can really say that one has witnessed an event.

Usually, when we refer to an event, we are referring to something that is over, something in the past, even if it is very recent. The event is then available as it was identified, determined post hoc. But we may also have witnessed the event, or

even taken part in it. In many cases it is fairly easy to identify what it is about, to consider what appears before our eyes to be such-and-such an event in a social order (a specific gathering is a demonstration, a procession or part of a carnival). But it frequently happens that in the moment in which it occurs - the fortuitous and unpredictable moment of its 'accident' - the event cannot be determined; it is not possible to grasp what is happening (the 'what' of the occurrence) or decide to which possibility it corresponds, although we know or can see that something is indeed happening. It is only afterwards that we can reduce the indeterminacy and complexity of the event (i. e. select one possibility among many and set it 'under a description'). This also holds for outstanding events such as major battles and important dates in history, which owe what they are to the work of time and of a post hoc valuation, as G. Duby showed in respect of the production of a 'legend' of Bou- vines. On this subject we can also mention the famous pages of La Chartreuse de Parme where, on the Waterloo battlefield, Fabrice discerns only a confused and fragmented mêlée, of which the immediate result is impossible to determine. Or the recent (and noisy) commemoration of the discovery of the Americas: the event of 1492, today defined as the 'discovery of the Americas', was experienced by Columbus himself as the identification of a new route to the East, whereas this initial act in a process which was to change the future of a continent had only limited spatial and symbolic repercussions among the indigenous peoples at the time.

A dialectic of knowledge and ignorance

The observability of the event in-the- making thus combines both knowledge

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THE AGE OF EVENTS

and ignorance. We know that something is happening but we do not know exactly what; we cannot really qualify the event. In a sense, we 'cannot be present at the event, neither as a subject nor as a witness', because 'the event is not presented to us when it occurs', 'the fact of it can only be discerned afterwards' (Sfez, 1991: 72-73). That is why we often talk of 'events', thereby admitting our ignorance as to the effective qualification of that which occurred, and our inability to choose a description among numerous possibilities; in short, to reduce the complexity of the event. Furthermore, another aspect of this complexity is the fact that often an event is a collection of occurrences and relatively heterogeneous elements, and its qualification requires a synthesis of these heterogeneous elements 'under a description' (categorization, narration, etc. ) which makes of it an intelligible totality.

This brief incursion into the ontology of the event enables us to see how we might remedy one of the limits of the prevailing conception of the media construction of events. The latter is not simply a question of mise en forme and míse en scène of raw facts and news selected by the media; it also comprises a process of individuation of the event, and of reduction of its indeterminacy, complexity and heterogeneity. As Meredith Kingston (1996) has shown, it is not merely a question of knowing how an event announced by a dispatch receives a certain value or importance in relation to a background of knowledge and know-how, and of habits and customs peculiar to the professionals in news agencies. It is also a question of understanding how the announcement 'A bomb exploded at Number Ten Downing Street this morning' becomes the

mation The IRA attacks Number Ten Downing Street'. From one to the other, additional qualifications were obtained. How? In the facts, it was the IRA claiming responsibility which reduced the indeterminacy of the event. From a formal point of view, it is however interesting to note that this reduction necessitated the conversion of an occurrence, individuated by its genre (an explosion of some kind) and its time- space co-ordinates, into a certain type of action (an attack) imputed to a well identified actor. It also implied its constitution as an event within an existing context, well known to the public.

The study of the 'social construction' of events thus requires descriptions on different levels. We have just identified a new one, different from that of the processes and procedures of selection and creation of events in the media, i. e. that of techniques and methods to reduce the indeterminacy and complexity of the event, which help to give it a social inscription, to make it an event of particular kind in a given social and cultural context, or an episode in an intrigue (unless it is its dénouement).

Symbolic constitution of the event

This brief elucidation underscores two significant, closely interlinked dimensions of the symbolic constitution of the event: the reduction of its indeterminacy and the attribution of a determined value or significance. Complex processes are involved, of which only parts are covered by empirical research on the media. While these studies have the advantage of being realistic - they identify practices, devices, interests, strategies, relationships of dependence and power, organizational systems, enunciatory formats, etc. - their fertility does not pre-

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Erik NEVEU and Louis QUERE

elude blind spots in the analysis. One of them concerns the formal structures of the symbolic constitution of events. What are we to understand by these formal structures? They essentially concern the underpinnings of the organization of processes of social indi- viduation of events in a given society, and comprise a certain conception of time, a type of historical awareness, a way of temporalizing the social sphere, and a determined temporal structure of individual and collective experience.9 Accounting for the symbolic constitution of events also requires us to take into consideration the resources and constraints involved in their configuration.

The field of investigation thus opened is vast. It concerns first the network of constraints formed by the organization of media institutions (cf. for example the processors /gatherers contrast proposed by Tunstall10) and by that which constitutes the infrastructure of discourse on events: enunciatory contracts and devices, informational formats, editorial genres, etc. But there are also resources and constraints which are purely conceptual or grammatical. Semantic constraints, for example, belong to this second category. Thus, as soon as an event has been identified under a particular description (a political attack, a strike, a riot, a stock market crash, etc. ), its explanation and interpretation are oriented and delimited by the semantic value of the terms used by this description; the latter makes the event analysable, it structures its analysability.

The difficulties of imagining this symbolic constitution of events can, to a large extent, in the French intellectual context, be ascribed to what resembles an impossible articulation between the semiotic and the sociological approaches. It is as if

the researcher were forced to choose sides: either to be confined to a science of signs and messages, most often indifferent to the social conditions of the production of rhetorical forms; or else to be restricted to a sociology of which the point of honour would be to relegate to the shadows of preciosity or epistemolog- ical naivety the entire legacy of linguistic, semantic and semiological research. Without opening a debate here on the posterity of Barthes, we cannot help being struck by the rapid desertion of the research projects that he attempted to open, through the hunt for 'myths' and their inscription in narrative and rhetorical forms in the media. These were projects which also made reference to the instant colonization of the event by social myths. There are surely 'good' reasons for the disappearance of this questioning. Its epistemological rigour was rarely on a par with its theoretical claims, and it embraced a self-evident literary disposition for the celebration of cultural works, even transposed onto more lowly objects. And yet the concepts re-vamped, the sometimes fuzzy intuitions which abound in Barthes' work, very often prove more apt in renewing perceptions and revealing the hidden, than do many dull and methodologically unanswerable contributions by sociologists or academic semiologists. Barthes's texts, such as Système de la mode, where he pays his compulsory dues to the rigours and coldness of a structuralism anxious to deploy the external signs of academic scien- tificity, have often failed to withstand the test of time (and are, quite frankly, soporific in retrospect). But the works in which Barthes criticizes prevailing culture and the incorporation of the spirit of the times into technological objects, the products of the culture de jlot (Flichy, 1980) and consumer goods, remain

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THE AGE OF EVENTS

profoundly relevant and stimulating. The living legacy of Barthes lies essentially in the invitation to think 'ideology', those symbolic schemes which make us perceive the world or an event by paying attention to forms, to narrative structures and to a rhetoric. The latter, he opportunely recalled - mobilizing ancient tradition (Barthes, 1970) - is not worn out in stylistic contrivance but organizes an art11 of targeting messages in relation to the tools of perception and the culture peculiar to a type of audience. While it seems appropriate, often in contradiction with semiological literature, to emphasize the socially differentiated modes of reception and decoding of messages, there seems little reason why this sociological vigilance should have to pay the price of renouncing any enterprise of constructing a grammar of messages and an inventory of social myths drawn from the semiology of the 1960s and 1970s, whether in Barthes' work or in that of Gérard Genette or Philippe Hamon. To be more precise, the intellectual mood of the 1980s and 1990s has replaced a sometimes obsessive or derisory build-up of 'critical' thinking by the claim for evidence from as many new doxas (those of the constraints of globalization and economic obligations, to name only two). It thereby gives all its meaning to the Barthian project of a mythoclastie, of a critical inventory of the ideological signified entwined in the fabric of the daily communications of the audio-visual media and advertising, and in the features of personalities considered to be symbols of the period. The efforts made in this sense by researchers or analysts who are still isolated, point to the fertility of this type of approach.12

It would probably be necessary, in order to explore more fully this symbolic

stitution of the event, to transcend the disciplinarian logic which forbids the cumulation of theoretical resources of the language sciences and sociology. This bias does not signify spineless eclecticism. It has to start from the warnings of sociology on the hazards of all autonomization of messages as regards their social conditions of production. To use P. Champagne's judicious expression, the symbolic dimension of messages can be a 'hermeneutic trap', the basis of a projec- tive test where what the semiological commentary gives as the compulsory programme of perception, contained objectively in the message, is nothing other than the socially constructed programme of perception of the exegete, which the latter universalizes with neither complex nor rigour. But the existence of the trap does not make falling into it inevitable. Without claiming to expropriate the language sciences, sociology can account for the differential social force of the modes of formalization of messages with their receivers. It can also help to demonstrate the weight of social frames in the origins of rhetorical forms, narrative registers and modes of translation of events into commentaries and reports. The studies, of Goffmanian inspiration, developed by W. Gamson and A. Modigliani (1989) on the way in which the media treat nuclear issues, provide a good illustration.

In this research, focused on thirty years of coverage of the civil nuclear file by the American press, Gamson and Modigliani try to reconstitute the narrative patterns, the limited play of interpretative frames made of metaphors, symbols, slogans, recurrent images, models of causality, and of grand principles, in which the media structure the presenta-

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tion of nuclear -related questions. Their work shows both how cultural models or cognitive frames limit the horizon of the thinkable and of the commentary on events, and how events or mobilization can contribute to introducing new interpretative frames, that is, to renewing the frameworks of perception of social facts. The celebration of expansion, the benefits of technical progress and the myth of American supremacy typical of the 'glorious' three decades of post- War prosperity, were thus to guarantee for twenty years the undivided reign of the interpretative frame 'Progress' which associates nuclear with modernity, considers its opposition as passé, and even makes journalists relatively insensitive to the gravity of certain accidents or incidents in the functioning of the electronuclear industry. It took the combination of the 'movement' in the 1960s, consumerism promoted by R. Nader and events such as the Three Mile Island accident for new interpretative frames baptized by the authors with names evoking 'alternative energies', 'Frankenstein',13 or 'social control' to emerge. The renewal of frames does not only alter the tone of the commentaries; it also spawns new criteria of permeability of the media, of conversion of the occurrence into an event.

In the French context, the work of Yves de la Haye - unfairly marginalized - also shows that a tendency to focus on the forms of journalistic writing is a condemnation neither to an autistic semiol- ogy nor to media-centrism. The typology of the repertoires of writing used by journalists, compiled by the Grenoble researcher, is not limited to an inventory of formats of articles and their formal properties. It outlines an historical origin of these narrative models and strives to link them to situations of interaction

between journalists and sources. It shows how the configuration of relations of interdependence, together with the nature of subjects treated, directs a type of information or event towards the mould of a format of writing. De la Haye also emphasizes the extent to which these narrative patterns are not only forms or techniques of writing, but conceal a relationship with the world, with events. He also shows how the 'dissertation' (of which the editorials of A. Fontaine in Le Monde formerly, and those of C. Imbert in Le Point today, provide a typical example) has the effect, by soliciting a rhetoric of complexity, of disqualifying the idea that there might exist clear and effective ways of weighing on a social order which is ever more complex than it appears. A structural property of the genre, the combination of assertions set against the invocation of good sense, erudite references and affectation of style, still function there as a tool of the doxical adhesion of a literate public to these visions of the world.

Without attempting to make a complete overview of such studies in a few lines, we note that Michael Schudson's contribution also warrants special attention. Through a body of articles and books on the social history of the American press, he shows the degree to which detailed analyses of the forms and categories of press writing can and must be related to a long-term consideration of the evolution of the social status of the press. In particular we are referred to the long developments through which he studies the emergence of the discourse of objectivity - a term largely foreign to the professional vocabulary of American journalists until after the First World War. This claim for the reproduction of the 'raw' event first appeared as a

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THE AGE OF EVENTS

strategy of demarcation of the socially elitist information press (the New York Times), as opposed to the model of the popular press of 'accounts' ('yellow press') focused on narrative registers and inspired by brief news items - illustrated in the 1890s by Pulitzer's New York World. The consecration of objectivity as a compulsory professional standard was to become the journalistic profession's set response to the progress of the strategies of sources (of which the 'professionalization' can be dated here to the period between the two World Wars). But in the political context of the 1920s and 1930s it can also be seen as the reflection of a disillusionment with the American democratic model, a feeling of futility and impotence in the definition of journalists as educators in democratic values. The analysis of modes of journalistic coverage of the 'event-rendezvous' constituted by the annual speech of the President of the United States on the State of the Union, provides another illustration of the fruitfulness of an approach which solicits the joint illumination of an analysis of narrative forms with that of their social conditions of possibility.14 The initial account limited itself, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to publishing the speech in extenso, most often without the slightest commentary. Schudson shows the gradual introduction, into the rendering of the event, of a dose of commentary which was to increase and to be extended as more and more attention was paid to the meta-event constituted by the reactions of Congress and other press reports. At the end of the process the presidential speech was condensed into selected bits and short sentences, enveloped by multiple layers of commentaries and exegesis on the meaning of the message and its reception. The

object of the analysis was to transcend the habitual positivism of 'press analyses', to replace these evolutions in a structure of social determinants in which we find the shifting place of the presidential institution, changes in the division of editorial tasks, modes of anticipating reader expectations, and the nature of relations between journalists and political agents.15

In short, if the symbolic constitution of the event is socially organized, writing and the formal properties of the languages which render this event are not next to or beyond this determination; they are directly subjected to its effects. Apart from writing, other dimensions of the social processes which weigh on the symbolic constitution of the event call for exploration. The first concerns the dimension of legitimization and the production of an account of the event which has social authority. Events often acquire their stable individuality after struggles and conflicts over their interpretation. The process is, moreover, never closed and the struggles may also focus on the reinterpretation of the event - as was demonstrated by the shift of interpretation managed by F. Furet and other historians (Furet & Ozouf, 1988) regarding the 'Revolution of 1789' event. These processes of legitimization, of fixing (in the photographic sense of the term) of meaning, are an invitation to work on the modes of production of legitimacy, on the conditions in which certain institutions dispose of a veritable power to tell the truth of an event (through the verdict of a court or the report on a news item by the police), but also on the counter-strategies through which institutions or groups strive to delegitimize these authorized narrations. We recall here the ephemeral invention

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of 'white helmets' during the student mobilization against the 'Devaquet Law' in 1986. The student demonstration included personalities endowed with a high level of symbolic or media prestige, responsible for witnessing, in the public arena, the morality of the demonstrations faced with the threat of diverse forms of provocation.

Finally, a skilful approach in the processes of symbolic constitution of the event also implies not describing the selection and interpretation of events as the result of a strategically controlled, even controllable, process. The article by Dorine Bregman (1996) on the case of the CSG illustrates the degree to which even an actor as richly endowed in resources as the prime minister, is unable to guarantee real control over the reception of a public policy, despite an almost complete control over the timing and framing of the event. The symbolic constitution of the event is based on a complex construction combining enunciatory devices, informational formats, technological systems for diffusing information, logics of 'agendas', competitive strategies among the media, and modalities of anticipation of readers' and audiences' expectations. In this interlinking, a significant share belongs to the routines of the professionals of information. The apparent coherence of a headline and a TV news broadcast as regards the grading of events must also be seen as an effect - rarely controlled from one end to the other by any of the protagonists - of the routines and practices of the 'profession', the interdependencies between protagonists, and the production of information.

Conclusion

'Events are like the foam of history; bubbles, whether large or small, pop on the

surface and their popping creates ripples which spread to a greater or lesser extent', said D. Duby, talking of Bou- vines. He added that 'only the traces it leaves make it exist; apart from them the event is nothing'. If the emphasis placed on the conflictual work of stabilization of the event in an interpretation, and of production of traces which index its meaning and lesson, remain relevant, then the contemporary status of the event cannot remain confined to that of raw material for society's lieux de mémoire.16

The inflation of events emphasized by Nora has modified the status of these 'bubbles'; it has given, in relation to the news provided by the media, something with an effervescent quality, a whirlpool of images, catastrophes, high moments which shift one another, without often having the possibility of being consolidated in traces. In the continuous jostling of events - media-events? - it is still the relationship between society and its memory, its capacity to thematize and structure collective stakes beyond a few brief news items, which is at stake. The investigation of events will remain on the social science agenda for a long time, a feature of the diversity of its findings.

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espace public : l'affaire Carpentras', QuodernU 18, p. 125-140.

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BARTHES, R. (1972): Mythologies, Paris, Le Seuil.

BREGMAN, D. (1996): 'Le cadrage du débat public : Le projet de la CSG', Réseaux, 75, p. 111-133.

CHAMPAGNE, P. (1989): 'Qui a gagné? Analyse interne et analyse externe des débats politiques à la télévision', Mots, 20, p. 5-22.

CHAMPAGNE P. and MARCHETn, D. (1994): 'L'information médicale sous contrainte'. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 101-2, p. 40-62.

DAVIDSON, D. (1980): Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

DAYAN, D. and KATZ, E. (1992): Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

DAYAN, D. and KATZ, E. (1993): 'Le spectacle du pouvoir', Les Annales, 1/2, p. 3-20.

DUBY, G. (1973): Le dimanche de Bouvines, Paris, Gallimard.

FLICHY, P. (1980): Les Industries de l'imaginaire. Presse Universitaire de Grenoble.

DE FORNEL, M. (1993): 'Violence, sport et discours médiatique : l'exemple de la tragédie du HeyseF, Réseaux, 57, p. 29-44.

FURET, F. and OZOUF, M. (Eds.) (1988): Dictionnaire critique de la révolution française, Paris, Flammarion.

GAMSON, W. and MODIGLIANI, A. (1989): 'Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power : a constructionist approach', American Journal of Sociology, 95, p. 1-37.

GIDDENS, A. (1994): Les conséquences de la modernité, Paris, L'Harmattan.

GUSFIELD, J. (1981): The Culture of Public Problems, Chicago, The Chicago University Press.

HILGARTNER, S. and BOSK, С. (1988): The rise and fall of social problems', American Journal of Sociology, 94, p. 53-78.

KINGSTON, M. (1996): 'Réduire à l'événement : La couverture de sujets irlandais par l'Agence France Presse', Réseaux, 75, p. 67-110.

KOSELLECK, R (1990): Le futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques. Paris, Editions de l'EHESS.

DE LA HAYE, Y. (1985): Journalisme, mode d'emploi, Grenoble, La pensée sauvage- Ellug.

LESTER, M. (1980): 'Generating newsworthiness : the interpretative construction of public events', American Sociological Review, 45, p. 984-994.

MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1945): Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard.

MOLINO, J. (1986): 'L'événement : de la logique à la sémiologie', in L'événement. Actes du Colloque du Centre Méridional d'Histoire Sociale, Aix-en-Provence, 1983. Aix, Publications de l'Université de Provence, p. 251-270.

NEVEU, E. (1993): 'Pages 'politique' ', Mots, 37, p. 6-27.

NORA, P. (1974): 'Le retour de l'événement' in J. Le Goff and P. Nora (eds. ), Faire de l'histoire, Paris, Gallimard, p. 210-228 (revised version of the article in Communications, 18, 1972, entitled 'L'événement monstre').

PADIOLEAU, J. -G. (1976): 'Systèmes d'interaction et rhétoriques journalistiques', Sociologie du travail, 18 (3), p. 252-282.

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Notes 1 We shall refer here to the revised version of this text published in 1974, entitled 'Le retour de l'événement'. 2 The social sciences also contribute to this exorcism, in different ways. In this respect the quasi-obligatory presence in television studios of the sociologist on duty, every time an important event occurs, immediately comes to mind. But their contribution also takes other forms. For example, since the event can be 'strategically' produced, its production may mobilize a certain amount of knowledge of the social world, demonstrated by the importance assigned in various 'communication' schools to classes sometimes called 'Management and Creation of Events'. Moreover, the sudden appearance of events considered threatening or undesirable by the authorities will give rise to public commissioning of research intended to clarify their meaning and mechanisms, and thus to subject them to manipulation by public policies. In this way, knowledge of the social world is constantly incorporated into the life-cycle of events. This knowledge contributes - and innovation is important - to fo

rmatting initiatives or 'medialities' apt to receive the consecration of the media. It also guides media professionals in their choice of facts worthy of being promoted to the rank of events (including the building up of expertise for the breaking down of skillful 'medialities'). Finally, it participates - but rarely in its most enlightening forms - in the attempts to immobilize the event in a web of interpretations which stabilize and domesticate it, assigning to it a meaning as opposed to the noise and fury of the unexpected or the inexplicable. 3 A number of issues would benefit from réintroduction into this questioning of the event. We have in mind, in particular, the theme of 'reflexivity', largely developed by different sociological currents, from A. Touraine to A. Giddens. Numerous studies, such as those of A. Desrosières, have also highlighted the multifarious work of collecting data and information on the social world, carried out by statistics offices and public agencies. The role of the social sciences in the mechanisms of definition of public policies and their incorporation into daily social practices, have also been more closely examined, as the following observation by A. Giddens (1994: 24) illustrates: 'On the one hand, sociological know-how develops by feeding on the concepts of uninitiated agents; on the other hand, the notions forged by the metalanguages of the social sciences are systematically reinvented in the world of the phenomena which they were initially supposed to describe or explain. But that does not immediately lead to a transparency of the social sphere. There is an exchange between the world of social life and sociological know-how, and in this process sociological know-how is shaped by and reshapes the social sphere. ' 4 It was already so in the 1920s, when White- head borrowed the notion of the event from the theory of relativity and attempted to establish it in philosophy. He was contested from a logical

point of view by Russell but also from a pragmatic point of view by G. H. Mead. The latter outlined a sociological theory of the event in his Cams Lectures in 1930, published in 1932 under the title The Philosophy of the Present 5 Cf. Davidson, 1980. 6 Cf. the volume of Media, Culture and Society on the environment, Vol. 13(4), 1991. 7 Cf. Vendler, 1967; Molino, 1986. In analytical philosophy, there is usually a logical distinction between 'fact' and 'event'. Vendler clarifies this distinction which can be traced back to the mathematician Ramsey (1931). A sentence which expresses an event ('Caesar died in 44 В. С ') and a sentence which expresses a fact ('It is a fact that Caesar died' or 'It is a fact that Caesar was assassinated') do not have the same profound semantic structure. The former affirms, in a referential usage of the language, the occurrence of an event of a certain kind, whereas the latter is a matter of the level of metalanguage: on the one hand it qualifies a proposition, which may be a particular description of an event ('the death of Caesar' and 'the assassination of Caesar' are two different descriptions of the same event); on the other hand, it can be paraphrased in the form: 'That Caesar was assassinated is true'. In this sense, from a logical point of view, a fact is not an event but a statement (if the statement is false the fact does not exist). Moreover, a fact corresponds to one among many possible descriptions of an event: 'Caesar was assassinated' and 'Caesar is dead' are two different facts, corresponding to the same event. 8 Cf. Lester, 1980. 9 Cf. Koselleck, 1990; Quéré, 1992. 10 Tunstall proposes a way of summa divisio between 'gatherers' and 'processors'. The former work above all to collect information; they focus primarily on the relationship with sources of information. The latter are more oriented towards the processing of information, its presentation, the allocation of editorial space, and the standardization of formats and styles; they are also more oriented towards the final audience and the coherence of content. This contrast partly corresponds to that which sometimes consists of comparing a 'sedentary journalist' and a journalist in the field. However, since it incorporates elements of functional specialization and hierarchical relations, it cannot be thus reduced (cf. Tunstall, 1971, especially p. 30-36 and p. 129-131). 11 An art or a science? The rationalization of communication practices from various sources, highlighted by P. Schlesinger, makes one more inclined to opt for the latter (cf. Schlesinger, 1992). The use of rhetorical categories [Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, in the Latin tradition) today transcends the frame of practical, pre-reflexive know-how, and takes the shape of a systematic implementation of communication techniques which incorporate the knowledge of the social sciences. 12 For example, the abrasive power of the chronicles of D. Schneiderman in Le Monde, and of his programme 'Arrêt sur images' on La 5. His approach, of neo-Barthian inspiration, con-

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tributes more often than many academic works to showing up media logics, by means of fragments of images from events taken from the televisual flow. 13 Runaway in the American text (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), but the latter recalls the myth of Frankenstein, as the metaphor of a technology over which its promoters lose control. 14 Cf. Schudson, 1982 15 In this strand of research on the media coverage of issues and events, we also note the work of J. G. Padioleau (1976) on journalists specializing in issues concerning education. The author explains the dominant 'choice' of a category which he qualifies as 'critical expertise' and which he shows as constituting the optimum compromise, given the imperatives of managing relations with sources and the range of constraints in which this specialization, initially dominated within press enterprises, developed. On the way in which the various editors of political journalism can also think of themselves as reliant on the degree of dependence on sources, and on phenomena of editorial hierarchies, see Neveu (1993). 16 Literally, 'places of memory'. Cf. Nora P. (ed) (1992): Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard.

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