From me to everybody

A student today made a claim regarding something everybody does (something about looking for information) and supported it with the claim that he does this and his friends do this. I've noticed a similar in move in articles that I review for journals and sometimes on blogposts: the author has just learned something new and then quickly claims that this new thing has been ignored for far too long. The underlying assumption is that nobody else knew this either. Again, one is generalizing from an "n" of one.

This seems a strange thing to do, yet it also seems a component of some kinds of theorizing, perhaps theory indebted to psychoanalysis or cultural studies or even a kind of critical theory as immanent critique. Sometimes when I write, I illustrate a point with something from my own life or from the lives of people I know. I want to think that it isn't exactly the same, that I'm illustrating a theory not attempting to prove a point with empirical evidence. But I have my doubts. The ring of truth seems too dependent on the illustration.

This would seem particularly methodologically problematic under conditions of the decline of symbolic efficiency. If the example rings true, then the decline isn't so great. At that point, then, one ends up in the odd position where the least plausible examples are the only ones that support the claim. Now, I actually don't think this. I actually think that there are tribes and pockets and discourses and practices and communities with weakly shared assumptions. My examples are supposed to appeal not to everyone but to some members of some tribes. But if that is the case, then one is just stating the obvious to people who already agree it. True, this restatement, like any repetition or copy, may and does bring with it a kind of newness and alteration ("oh, yes, of course, now that you put it that way"). But it still seems to rely on a set of identificatory moves that are more or less repressed or denied.

I don't really know how I got here. When I sat down to type, I was thinking more about the multiple, unavoidable, extensive commentaries on Obama and the election, on what progressives should do, on whether he is center-right or left or whatever. I was also thinking about the weakness of so much contemporary digital media theory, the challenges if not impossibility of real time theory or theory that attempts to keep up with technological developments. In each case, there is multiplicity without synthesis or meaning. Any analysis that seems appropriate, that rings true, is too obvious, mundane, uninteresting. Anything else seems premature, inappropriate, wrong, even stupid. Maybe this is just a condition of theory. But I don't think I buy that. I think it is more an attribute of where we are.

Or maybe just where I am.

Comments

[Richard Grusin]

You point, Jodi, to a problem that should be familiar to any of us who try to make sense of the moment we live in--whether in relation to digital media or politics or art or economics or whatever. We do invariably start with our own experiences, but the challenge is to be aware of what is individual and what is collective, as well as to acknowledge when one is making much ado about something that happened to oneself. That being said, I try to proceed methodologically towards writing a history of the present, which helps (I think) to defamiliarize and contextualize what we experience in real time. Yet I'm struggling with writing an invited essay for a collection on YouTube--precisely because I seem to find myself swerving again and again towards saying the obvious and having difficulty historicizing YouTube from its very midst. Sometimes makes me want to return to my roots in 19th-century American literature, where the methodological problems take different form.

[Lilah]

I think there's certainly a moment of arrogance happening in that statement of some issue having been ignored for too long. It's like an outrage that someone as 'important' and 'intelligent' and 'aware' as myself, for example, would have lived for however many years having not understood my new epiphany to be an accepted truth in the world.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways new media inherently comes packaged with some unpleasant consequences for theory. It's something I think I started to recognize (for myself! ha!) in feminist blogs, the damage done when holding off on responding to an issue is just not an option if you want to be relevant. Makes me nervous!

[Jim]

Thanks, interesting observation. Maybe when people invoke anecdotal evidence to support a claim ideology is at work. For example, when a racist claims "blacks are responsible for ", they are speaking out of an ideological bias that stems from their subject-position rather than objective statistics. (And it's Zizek who reminds us that even if the statement is true, it doesn't matter - a true statement can still be false, "lying in the guise of truth")

So when your student put forth an argument and justified it "with the claim that he does this and his friends do this", I think he is showing his hand a little bit, giving us a window into the ideology that is invisibly structuring his argumentation.