Pt I, Stating

Examples are very cool things. They exhibit a number of properties that both challenge our received ways of thinking about things, and make us think differently about them. For one, the example typically does not obey the logic of the general and the particular: that is, examples are never simply an instance (or 'token') or a universal type or type, but on the contrary, are usually constitutive of the rule or type of which they are said to be examples 'of'. Typically, to give an example of a rule is to define that rule, by means of an example.

To speak of the constitutive role of the example is to speak of the immanence of the example to the rule: the example is not simply an indifferent element to be subsumed under an equally indifferent universality; on the contrary, there is an intimate connection between example and rule in which the one relies on the other for it's being and vice versa. Alessandro Ferrara, speaking of Kant's 'reflective judgement' (which operates according to the logic of the example), puts it like this: "Exemplary validity is best understood in terms of creating an example rather than applying an example — a difference that is captured by Kant’s distinction, recalled by Arendt, between “subsuming under a concept” and “bringing to a concept" (Ferrara, The Force of the Example).

This, in turn, follows from the fact that "the cogency of the example, differently than the cogency of a law or principle, is entirely self-referential, immanent to the subject matter." Here, then, we have two ways in which the example breaks the logic of the universal-particular: with respect to it's novelty, and with respect to it's immanence. Giorgio Agamben, another philosopher of exemplarity, draws the conclusion that the sheer existence of examples entails a "total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference." As he writes, "The rule... is not a generality preexisting the singular cases and applicable to them, nor is it something resulting from the exhaustive enumeration of specific cases. Instead, it is the exhibition alone of the paradigmatic case that constitutes a rule, which as such cannot be applied or stated" (Agamben, The Signature of All Things).

All of this is one way to make of sense Wittgenstein's enigmatic comment regarding the 'meter rule in Paris', for which, according to the famous line, "one can state neither that it is 1 metre long, nor that it is not 1 metre long." (Philosophical Investigations). The paradigmatic case of the meter rule - the meter rule in Paris by which all 'meters' (used to be) measured by - because constitutive of the 'meter rule' - cannot itself be understood to be either a meter long, nor not a meter long. Instead, what is at stake in the example is not quite a 'stating', but a showing -

Pt II,Showing

Agamben, deepening these reflections, notes that the particularity of the example derives from the way in which an example 'shows it's own signifying' or 'exhibits its own singularity' in a way that a particular does not. He gives the example(!) of the phrase "I love you", which, when taken as an example of a performative speech act, "cannot be understood as in a normal context and yet still must be treated as a real utterance in order for it to be taken as an example." In other words, to give the example, 'I love you' is not to state that I love you, but to put it to another use that does not, for all that, make it mean something else altogether.

The example, in other words, belongs properly to the sphere of para-dox: "What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it ... The example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is "shown beside," and a class can contain every thing except its own paradigm." (Agamben, Homo Sacer). Like Wittgenstein's meter rule, and like the barber who only shaves all those who do not shave themselves, the example or the paradigm occupies an 'undecidable' place within the general-particular schema: to the degree that the example is constitutive of the universal, it is neither just another particular, nor is it wholly outside of any such schema.

Agamben: "It is thus impossible to clearly separate an example's paradigmatic character - its standing for all cases - from the fact that it is one case among others.... The third is this indiscernibility, and if one tries to grasp it by means of bivalent caesurae, one necessarily runs up against an undecidable" (Signature). Or: the example is a stating that is at the same time a showing, one that does not, for all that, lack sense.

Ferrara, whom we spoke of earlier, utilities this paradoxical character of the example to ground a new kind of ethics, and subsequently, a new kind of politics - an ethics of exemplarity. As he notes, examples short-circuit the usual gap between is and ought, precisely because an example is precisely that which is as it should be. The exemplary "realizes and exhibits between the order of its own reality and the order of the normativity to which it responds." The exemplary offers a manner in which to think the 'force' of ethical normativity which does not bind because of indifferent, trans-contextual rule-application, but because it has the ability to compel (without the force of logical necessity). Without going into it too deep, it's these kinds of 'applications' which provide another reason why the exemplary is such an interesting category to think through.