1 - Swerve, Trope, Peripety: Turning Points in Cultural Criticism and Theory

Summary

In their broadcasts of professional ice hockey games, The Sports Network (TSN for short), a Canadian cable television network, would identify and feature highlights of what the announcers would refer to as the “TSN Turning Point.” That is, in any given hockey game, the turning point in question was some event—often a goal or a great save, but perhaps also an untimely penalty, a key injury, or even a fight—that could in retrospect be marked as the discrete point at which the “game” turned in favor of the eventual victor. Notably, the turning point is not necessarily, or even ever, the gamewinning goal, which is to say the particular event that is proven to have assured victory by definition. No, that would be a rather uninspired choice. Instead, it might be the event that swung the momentum, that deflated the eventual losing side or energized the winning side, often well before the actual gamewinner is scored. As such, it has a certain ineffable quality in the moment. Players, coaches, commentators, and fans may be able to sense when such a momentous occurrence is taking place, and they can certainly speculate as to whether this or that play might be the point at which things will prove to have turned the winner’s way, but it is clear that the true TSN Turning Point cannot be ascertained until the game is over, until all the play has ended, and we are able to look back on the game in its totality to find the moment or moments when everything changed. In the midst of things, those experiencing or witnessing what may later be recognized as the turning point cannot be certain of the meaning of the situation. Only from a perspective made available sometime later can we may look back upon the game to discover the turning point, which is to say the most significant moment in the narrative we must retrospectively produce about the events that were occurring in real time. Although he was not thinking about it with respect to hockey, this is in part what Hegel meant by his evocative line about the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk. The turning point, like the narrative in which it functions, cannot be known in the moment of its happening, but only afterwards.