Tuur Driesser
To give an example is always to give more than the example itself, to hint beyond the concrete at something larger, more general. Yet, there is no easy relationship between the example and that which it exemplifies. A single example cannot be generalized to the structure, theory, rule or argument without running into objections of external validity and academic rigour. Instead, as will be argued in this chapter, the example has its own logic, reworking established oppositions between the particular and the general, opening up new creative and imaginative relationships between them. Exemplifying, as a method, makes use of the capacity of the single instance to produce other forms of knowledge, by making intelligible complex contexts. It opens up its own space/time in which the part and the whole become known together. This essay will discuss this logic of exemplarity and the methodological implications of exemplifying. In doing so, it will consider how the example and the process of exemplifying relate to issues of interdisciplinarity.
Examples are controversial devices in conceptualizing the relationship between universality/ generality/whole on the one hand and particularity/singularity/part on the other. Their relationship to the general is complex and paradoxical: they at once produce and are governed by the rule that defines them. Likewise, the rule simultaneously exceeds and is defined by any concrete instances in the process of exemplification. Indeed, what is at stake in the process of exemplification, according to Lowrie and Lüdemann (2015: 2), is the unstable tension between ‘flat and hierarchical methods of ordering’. Too much towards the horizontal and the example loses its capacity to extend beyond itself; it is left on its own. Too much towards the vertical and the example becomes just an instance, generalizable, fully defined or governed by its rule. As Massumi (2002) describes, ‘the success of the example hinges on the details’, but at the same time, ‘at each new detail, the example runs the risk of falling apart, its unity of self-relation becoming a jumble’. Similarly, writing about the use of examples within anthropology, Højer and Bandak (2015: 6) argue that ‘the example does not invert the vertical analytical movement but rather points to a “lateral” rethinking of the relation between the particular and the general, ethnographic material and theoretical reflection’. Thus, ‘to give an example is a complex act’ (Agamben 2009: 18; see also Meskin and Shapiro 2014), that requires a balancing of the horizontal and the vertical, the flat and the hierarchical.
For Agamben (2009), too, the significance of the concept of the paradigm, used interchangeably with the notion of the example, lies in the value of a concrete case. As such, it must be considered within the whole trajectory of Agamben’s philosophy and his longstanding concern with dissolving the dichotomy between the universal and the particular, the general and the singular (Meskin and Shapiro 2014). The paradigm’s role within this trajectory is that it breaks with the ‘binary logic’ – the ‘total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference’ – and should be located more appropriately within a ‘force field traversed by polar tensions’, in a domain of analogy rather than of logic. In other words, the example does not so much abandon the distinction between the general and the singular, but rather their hierarchical dichotomy (see also Harvey 2002).
What is at stake then, according to Agamben, is not a question of the transformation of the particular into the general, of a case into a theory, but the relationship between ‘a singularity (which thus becomes a paradigm) and its exposition (its intelligibility)’ (2009: 23). This exposition – which should be understood in the sense of an exhibition, a demonstration, rather than an uncovering – of the case as paradigm involves the demonstration of the conditions under which it can come to be known as such. These conditions are not external to the case, where the question would be if the case meets the conditions to qualify as paradigm, but are ‘immanent’ (p. 31) to the example.
In the example’s force field, generalization is no longer of interest: ‘as in a magnetic field, we are dealing not with extensive and scalable magnitudes but with vectorial intensities’ (Agamben 2009: 20–21). Generalization presupposes a knowledge external and prior to the particular, against which the case in question can be measured. Højer and Bandak (2015: 11) describe this distinction between generalizability and intelligibility/knowability in terms of evidence and exemplification:
With exemplification, the question of veracity and validity – that is, of finding proof (‘What is this phenomenon proof of?’) – turns into a question of how to produce imagination and potentiality (‘What can this example evoke?’). The move from evidence to exemplification is thus a move from the passive provision of evidence from an already established viewpoint in a disciplinary tradition (‘We know what we are looking for but can we find it?’) to the active making of convincing connections from within the example (‘Can we find other things by (imaginatively) using what we have found?’).
With the example, attention turns to a concern with intelligibility, or knowability. While generalizability presupposes the existence of a general rule of which a particular case can be found more or less representative, for example, the rule ‘(if it is still possible to speak of rules here)’ (Agamben 2009: 21) does not exist outside of the instances that are governed by it.
The relation between the paradigm and its intelligibility is exhibited, exposed, through what Agamben has previously called the example’s ‘exclusive inclusion’ (Agamben 2002). This is where the ‘para’ comes in: the case is placed beside itself, beside the rule that decides what it is a case of: ‘it shows “beside itself” (para-deiknymi) both its own intelligibility and that of the class it constitutes’ (2009: 24). In this showing-beside, the phenomenon is temporarily suspended from its ‘normal function’ (ibid.), excluded from the class to which it belongs in order to make clear the grounds for its inclusion. In the process of exemplifying, the example ‘defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and which, at the same time, it constitutes’. It is this exclusive inclusion that makes possible the simultaneity or coincidence of the case with its class that distinguishes the paradigm’s intelligibility from both the representative case’s generalizability and the particular case’s uniqueness. That is, what is made intelligible does not precede the paradigm: it is produced at the very moment of the latter’s suspension; or more accurately, not the class as such, but the paradigm’s mode of belonging, its way of relating to it is what is ‘exposed’ (Meskin and Shapiro 2014: 428) by its exclusive inclusion, its being placed alongside.
The exclusive-inclusive character of the example also brings into view the temporal dimension of exemplifying. In response to Agamben, Weber draws attention to Benjamin’s concept of the ‘now of knowability’ (Weber, in Agamben 2002) – the moment, or time/space in which the example’s knowability is developed. This now, in its exclusive inclusion, its suspension of the normal function, is a ‘cut’ – a moment of separation in which ‘what is involved . .. is not so much the act of [knowing] as the virtuality of . .. becoming-[knowable]’ (paraphrasing Weber 2008: 50–51):
Such a now is an Augenblick, the glance of an eye whose sight is always split between what it is and what it sees. In such an instant, what becomes possible is not simply knowledge as reality, but knowability as ever-present possibility.
original emphasis
What is important for Weber is the distinction between knowability and knowledge, and the importance of the former in its own right.
Such ‘knowability’ is not, for Benjamin at least, simply a preface to its realization as full-fledged knowledge. It has its own dignity, precisely as potentiality, and above all, it has its distinctive structure. It is this structure alone – which is that of awakening as distinguished both from consciousness and from unconsciousness – that explains how and why knowability, whose manifestation is inseparable from its vanishing, cannot be reduced to the positive knowledge it both makes possible and relativizes.
2008: 168–169
The now of knowability – the exclusive inclusion, the suspension from normal function – is therefore not simply a snapshot, holding still the object of investigation. It is characterized by a structure of awakening, which should be understood, not in a revolutionary sense of becoming conscious, of waking up, but as a process of positioning, of gaining a sense of direction in both time and place in the world.
The temporality of the paradigmatic method, therefore, is not about the trajectory from example to knowledge, but about the now of knowability which has its own space and time; which has a movement of itself or rather, which is movement in itself. This is what Weber (2008: 171) writes about the spatial and temporal (‘the one conditions the other’) characteristics of awakening:
The (person) awakening never wakes up in general, but always in and with respect to a determinate place. The locality in turn is never closed upon itself or self-contained, but opened to further relationships by the iterations that take place ‘in’ it. To be sure, such iterations are never infinite, they will always stop, but that stopping will never amount to a conclusion or a closure. Rather, it will be more like an interruption or a suspension. A cut.
In everyday use, examples – if successful – are grasped instantly, with it being immediately understood what it is that the example exemplifies. If unsuccessful, the example might fall flat, failing to make anything intelligible, or (perhaps even worse) exemplifying something entirely different from what was initially intended. As a method, in contrast, the process of exemplifying is tasked with expanding the now of knowability. Paying attention to this now of knowability means asking not how the case makes known that which is interesting about it, but how, as a paradigm, it facilitates a particular mode of knowing – as a form of positioning, determining direction, an extension beyond itself. It is this now that seizes on the example’s ability to ‘pro-liferate, connect, and absorb’, in which ‘exemplification multiplies, makes connections, and evokes (the one becomes many)’ (Højer and Bandak 2015: 12).
The example might lack external validity in the traditional sense but, as a method, exemplifying has its own way of validating – one that is no less rigorous than that under the criteria of generalizability. With the rejection of the latter, and the focus on intelligibility or knowability, the example is never just out there to be found, but always has to be made. In response to a question about the limits of the paradigm, Agamben (2002) speaks of ‘the ability of the author to find and create the good paradigm’. Find and create – in other words, the giving of an example is about uncovering as much as it is about constructing. An example is not first defined before being analysed: ‘in the paradigm, intelligibility does not precede the phenomenon; it stands, so to speak, “beside” it’ (Agamben 2009: 27). Methodologically, an example is not selected to prove a particular point that is known in advance. It involves a somewhat messy or blurry process in which what is exemplified only becomes clear gradually. In exemplifying, both the general and the particular, are constructed, uncovered and exhibited together, slowly and iteratively. Indeed, the importance of the example is that it suspends and problematizes its relation to what it exemplifies, so that the unexpected, the incompatible and the unresolved can become of value to the researcher. This is a process of validation in which both that which needs to be validated and the criteria against which the validating will need to take place hang in the balance.
One way of conceptualizing the role of examples in the formation of disciplines is through Kuhn’s work on paradigms. Here, disciplines are established and develop through those ‘shared examples’ of ‘concrete problem-solutions’ that students and researchers find in textbooks, laboratories and scientific literature (Kuhn 1970: 187). Even in the absence of formal rules (i.e. vertical), these examples can still guide research by way of the lateral movements they enable. In the same vein, examples of interdisciplinary research, problem-solutions and problem-formulations can enable and inspire interdisciplinarity, even when formal rules are necessarily hard or maybe even impossible to articulate.
Another approach is suggested by Lowrie and Lüdemann (2015) who link different configurations of ‘flat and hierarchical methods of ordering’ to specifically disciplinary commitments. In other words, what defines a discipline is not so much, or not only, its shared examples, but also its mode of exemplification:
Many of the disputes in the history of thinking about examples turn on the competition between flat and hierarchical methods of ordering, depending on whether the radical singularity of the thing or person exemplified or its conceptual subsumption is privileged.
Lowrie and Lüdemann 2015: 2
The way in which this balancing is eventually played out, it is argued, differs per discipline, with each having a different preference towards the flat or the hierarchical. Therefore, while Højer and Bandak (2015) argue that exemplification is distinctly anthropological, it must be added that this is a specific mode of exemplification. In the same way that disciplines have different generalization strategies (Moriceau 2010), so too do they value different exemplification strategies. In this way, exemplification becomes another fault line along which disciplines can relate to or differentiate from one another.
Can interdisciplinarity develop its own mode of exemplifying? This seems unlikely, and probably even undesirable, as the endless possibilities of interdisciplinary constellations would defy any stable articulation of a specific mode of exemplifying. There is no one interdisciplinarity, no interdisciplinary discipline. But perhaps it is precisely because of this diversity that interdisciplinarity can draw inspiration from the example. For Harvey (2002: 209–214) the formulation of a theory of exemplarity is not only a methodological or philosophical project, but also a political one. Its complex reworking of the general/particular opposition undermines binary modes of thought which, she argues, are at the heart of the colonial/‘patriarchal’ system. Recuperating a logic of the example then serves to shatter the violence of binary oppositions that lies at the heart of the violence of the exclusions of otherness. In this framework, the example itself becomes an example for emancipatory modes of thought. Interdisciplinary research, too, can follow the example’s example of rejecting binary oppositions; not in a bid to dissolve all difference, but to enable movement across. Here, interdisciplinary research expands its own ‘now’ in which that allows disciplines to extend beyond themselves, for problem articulations and solutions to multiply and proliferate, facilitating new orientations, and provoking imaginative associations. In other words, the example itself as exemplary for interdisciplinarity.
Agamben, G. (2002, August). What is a Paradigm? (Transcribed by Max van Manen). Lecture, European Graduate School.
Agamben, G. (2009). The Signature of All Things: On Method. New York, NY: Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, distributed by the MIT Press.
Harvey, I. E. (2002). Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Højer, L. and Bandak, A. (2015). Introduction: the power of the example. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(S1): 1–17.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lowrie, M. and Lüdemann, S. (2015). Introduction. In M. Lowrie and S. Lüdemann (Eds.) Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature and Law (pp. 1–15). Oxon, UK: Routledge.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Meskin, J. and Shapiro, H. (2014). To give an example is a complex art: Agamben’s pedagogy on the paradigm. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(4): 421–440.
Moriceau, J. L. (2010). Generalizability. In A. J. Mills, G. Durepos and E. Wiebe (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Case Study Research (pp. 420–422). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Weber, S. (2008). Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.