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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 135

line with a linear or ‘natural’ order of time. This function is mainly fulfilled by media,
whether in documentary or fictional genres. But narrative is also crucial for the medi-
ated representation of the present. For example, media news requires a narrative
mode in order to be comprehensible. Although this mode may be rudimentary –
possibly promoting a fragmented view of reality – it is always present in mediated
displays of news, up to the point where newspapers, tabloids or television channels
promise to disclose ‘the full story’ to the public.
‘We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being
narrated,’ writes Ricoeur. 20 According to Ricoeur the relationship between time and
narrative is circular and accomplished by a threefold mimetic process of prefiguration
(mimesis I), configuration (mimesis II) and refiguration (mimesis III), in which a
prefigured time ‘becomes a refigured time through the mediation of a configured
21
time’. The key to narrative refiguration of time is the ‘emplotment’ – the opening
of the world of the plot – constitutive to the second moment (configuration in
mimesis II) of the transfiguration. The refiguration of time results from the plot’s
capability to organize dispersed actions and events into a unified course and thereby
transgress the order of ‘natural’ or ‘real’ time. In this way, a creative process of
mimesis is at the heart of the perception of time, where the prefigured understanding
of the world and the composition of a work are confronted with a reader, whose
reading is a refiguration of the configured work.
All temporalities represented in contemporary media are in one way or another
mediated by narratives. In this sense mediated time, that is, the temporalities repre-
sented in the media, becomes an instant of the historical time Ricoeur designates as
a ‘third time’ and a bridge between lived and universal time. 22 Historical time
‘cosmologizes lived time and humanizes cosmic time’ and thereby re-inscribes ‘the
time of narrative into the time of the world’. 23
The past must be mediated if it is to become history. Ricoeur mentions the
calendar, the successions of generations, archives, documents and traces as ‘connec-
tors of lived and universal time’, mediating and refiguring the past into history.
Calendars, archives and documents are clearly media for the storage of time. But also
human bodies function as media in the transmittance of memories of the past to
ever-new generations, while traces of the past in monuments and ruins also work as
mediating signs for something that has existed, but no longer is.
Media constantly contribute to create and maintain ‘the third time’ of history as a
bridge between concrete (lived) and abstract (universal) time in modernity, on the
one hand by their capability to store information, and on the other hand by being
major vehicles for narratives. Both these capacities are in turn dependent on and
change with the historical development of the media themselves. One important trait
of this development is that the degree of reproducibility that media allow has
increased considerably since the nineteenth century. This increase has had far-
reaching implications, not only for the commodification and opening of new
consumer markets for symbolic goods, but also for the reproduction of the past in
the present and thus for the mediation of history.

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