Contingência e Necessidade

At a time when the unexpected has shaken the certainties of modernity based on science and technique, thinking about contingency and its opposite, necessity, is thinking about the possibility that something happens, doesn't happen, or happens in another way, in the confrontation between the unpredictable and the providential, between the indeterminable and the constant. To banish the contingent, natural or historical causality is introduced, which depends on probability – as if the real were ordered – as well as its constant monitoring and surveillance. What is certain is that the contingent breaks out again and again, because the greater the control, the more the contingent emerges in its most brutal forms, that of accident or catastrophe, or lighter, that of failure or breakdown. The game of contingency and its control is one of the characteristic features of modernity.


Mediations, mediatizations and immediacy – About media thinking

As an irruption of the unexpected and the unimaginable or the hardly imaginable, the Event breaks with the order of days, introducing unconceptualized and unspeakable dimensions that, paradoxically, lack narration. Routinely dealing with this daily life in which we only know what we recognize, the great machines of narrating the days, which we briefly know as the media, organize simplistic summaries that conventionalize the unconventional in multiple strategies of meaning that are convenient for them. and the spheres and powers where they are realized. Media prose as a modality of imposing a causal, necessary order on the disorders of the contingent is thus, by definition, doomed to deny itself in a double way. Either it domesticates the happening reality, neutralizing it as an event, or it is taken by the very happening that it is no longer able to narrate. Debating the media in some depth, without making the “pleonasm with the world” mentioned by Bourdieu after Mallarmé, implies, as Douglas Kelner or Raymond Williams remind us, the strategy of a neo-Gramstian “cultural materialism”, in which to think about the mediations, mediatizations and immediacy is to think about the current difficulties of thinking about (and in) our societies. That is the purpose of this conference.


Rui Pereira holds a PhD in Communication and Information Sociology from the University of Minho. He teaches at Universidade Lusófona do Porto, in the degrees in Communication Sciences, in the Master in Communication Networks and Technologies and in the PhD in Communication and Activism. He was a journalist for twenty years, the last thirteen for the weekly Expresso. In the field of journalism he was, among other distinctions, awarded the Gazeta de Revelation Prize. He is the author of scientific and academic publications, as well as several essays and reports, several of which have been published in, or translated into, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. His research area focuses on discourse analysis, especially with regard to the relationships between power systems and expanded communication devices.