On lIe Case

AulIov|s) Lauven BevIanl

Bevieved vovI|s)
Souvce CvilicaI Inquiv, VoI. 33, No. 4, On lIe CaseIveaI`/IveaI`Ediled I Lauven BevIanl
|Sunnev 2007), pp. 663-672
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Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007)
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663
Thanks to Bradin Cormack, Richard Neer, and TomMitchell for reading beyond compare.
Thanks also to Anat Benzvi, Burke Butler, Andrea Haslanger, Elizabeth Hutcheon, Jay Williams,
AndrewYale, and Abigail Zitin for their generous, creative, and rigorous editorial labor, without
which none of this work would appear.
1. Peter Galison argues against the na ve viewof the self-evidence of case-study knowledge and
the comparability of all case studies with each other in his Specic Theory, Critical Inquiry 30
(Winter 2004): 37983. Nonetheless, the surge of the singularity concept in some contemporary
humanist discussionsas that which resists being generalizableruns antagonistically into the
prevalence of case-study narrativity in scholarship, which mobilizes a whole variety of descriptive
and interpretive processes of determining likeness, generality, or patterning and whose interest in
typicationoften (incoherently) produces evidences of singularity as the optimistic moment of
excess or surplus to its very analytic activity. Mark Seltzer provides great analyses of the legal and
literary development of the situation of case logic in Serial Killers: Death and Life in Americas
Wound Culture (New York, 1998).
On the Case
Lauren Berlant
The case represents a problem-event that has animated some kind of
judgment. Any enigma could doa symptom, a crime, a causal variable, a
situation, a stranger, or any irritating obstacle to clarity.
1
What matters is
the idiomof the judgment. This varies tremendouslyacross disciplines, pro-
fessions, and ordinary life scenes: law, medicine, universities, sports bars,
chat shows, blogs, each domain with its vernacular and rule-basedconven-
tions for folding the singular into the general. Psychoanalysis mobilizedthe
case-study genre to worry at questions of obscured causality, intention, and
consent.
2
Biopower uses the case study as a primary instrument in its ma-
2. See In Doras Case: FreudHysteriaFeminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane
(New York, 1985), and John Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (NewYork, 1980)
and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge, 1990). It is worth
noting that case history tends to be what physicians take, while case study is what academics and
psychoanalysts write.
664 Lauren Berlant / On the Case
3. Foucault critiques the disciplinary consequences of case-study forms throughout his corpus,
while participating in the editing of at least two such studiesI, Pierre Rivie `re, Having Slaughtered
My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . .: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Frank Jellinek, ed. Michel Foucault (Lincoln, Nebr., 1975) and Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently
Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, ed.
Foucault (New York, 1980). He reads against the grain of normative closure in these legal and
medical cases to showthe consequences of the mobilizationand suppressionof their historical
and conceptual contradictions. For a more direct critique of the normativity of case making, see
Foucault, Spaces and Classes and Signs and Cases, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1989), An Introduction, vol. 1 of The
History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).
4. For an account of developments fromthe psychoanalytic case history to/through aesthetic
genres, see, for example, Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media
(New York, 1997). For an account of the shift across religious casuistry to the shaping of historical
situations in literary cases, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and
the Case of Romantic Historicism(Chicago, 1998). For an account of the detective story as a variant
of the case history, see Todd Herzog, Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case
History, Representations, no. 80 (Fall 2002): 3461.
5. See, for example, AndrewAbbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago, 2001),
especially the chapter What Do Cases Do? pp. 12960; What Is a Case?: Exploring the
Foundations of Social Inquiry, ed. Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker (Cambridge, 1992), and
John Gerring, What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For? American Political Science Review
98 (May 2004): 34154.
6. This is also the claimof the fabulous introductionwritten by Jean-Claude Passeron and
Jacques Revel to Penser par cas (Paris, 2005).
chinery for making individuals intonormative social units.
3
It tookaesthetic
form in documentary and cto-narrative genres (the detective story, the
ctional autobiography, the medical mystery, the still life) and then in in-
terpretive scholarship.
4
It became available as an ordinary mode of life ex-
planation, especially after the development of mass cultural norms of
inducing identication. It took shape in the social sciences and business as
a way of rationalizing and debating about how to manage singularity and
generalization in research design.
5
Those would be some of the dierent histories articulated in the concept
of the case. As genre, the case hovers about the singular, the general, and
the normative.
6
It organizes publics, however eeting. It expresses a relation
of expertise to a desire for shared knowledge. It could be casual expertise,
deliberately cultivated, licensed by trainingno matter; deciding what de-
nes the surplus to singularity is now the province of the expert, the expert
who makes the case. But who counts as expert is oftenaneect of the impact
Lauren Berlant is coeditor of Critical Inquiry, George M. Pullman Professor
of English, and director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for
Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. Her next book is The Female
Complaint (2008).
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 665
7. See Abbott, Time Matters, p. 130.
8. See Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
9. Gerring argues, frompolitical science, that scholars often disrespect the mediations of the
case-study method with the adjective mere while nonetheless using this framework of moving
froman intensive study of a single or singular unit with an aimto generalize or make
descriptive inferences about similarity (Gerring, What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good
For? pp. 342, 346, 352). Fromsociology, this problemhas been considered extensively by Stanley
Lieberson. I am grateful to himfor extensive conversations about how to frame the scene and issue
of caseness and must confess that by the end it was apparent that sometimes interdisciplinarity is
not possibleand that one way to assess what impedes it is to track fundamental disagreements
about the procedures for constructing case-style exemplarity. Yet our discussionproved what
Forrester argues too, that the case concept enables discussionto proceed in the absence of
agreement about the objects contours; when it is not assuming something like the structure of a
fetish, the case may be a version of the Agambenian whatever of discussionitself. See Stanley
Lieberson, Small Ns and Big Conclusions: An Examinationof the Reasoning in Comparative
Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases, in What Is a Case?, pp. 10518 and Einstein, Renoir,
and Greeley: Some Thoughts about Evidence in Sociology, American Sociological Review57, no. 1
(1992): 115. Agambens discussionof whatever/quodlibet as the condition of any belonging to a
set is in his The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, 1993).
of the case the expert makes. Therefore the case is always pedagogical, itself
an agent.
7
Yet, although any case of x promises to generate an account of a
situation that is recognizable enough that people can debate about it, one
cannot produce a predictive account of the case as a communicative action
except for this: as an expressive form of expertise and explanation the case
points to something bigger, too, an oering of an account of the event and
of the world.
The essays that follow address how certain norms of making a case got
to be that way in a given domain of expertise, what those norms mean for
the way we now encounter archives, exemplarity, and explanation in that
domain, and not only what the consequences of those histories are for dis-
ciplining knowledge but what phenomena and impacts get included in the
event of knowledge itself.
8
When it doesnt work to change the conditions
of exemplarity or explanation, something is deemed merely a case study,
remanded to banal particularity.
9
Whenit does, a personal or collectivesen-
sorium shifts.
The metacases in this special issue of Critical Inquiry, On the Case,
having redoubled reexivity, seemed to demand two numbers. This num-
ber, Making the Case, looks at changes in case normativity in law, med-
icine, university disciplines, state taxonomies, and aesthetic genres.
Missing Persons, the second number, focuses on cases of singled-out per-
sonhood in history, philosophy, art history, medicine, and a variety of me-
dia. In sum, a vast range of explanatory variations on the language, scene,
and event of case making has been generated, and yet neither number is as
comprehensive as I would like. No essay is writtenfromsociology (wetried)
666 Lauren Berlant / On the Case
10. This associationof the exemplar, the Kuhnian paradigm, and the case study is also pursued
by Bent Flyvbjergs comprehensive and synthetic Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study
Research, Qualitative Inquiry 12, no. 2 (2006): 21945.
11. As everyone who writes on cases notes, the word case comes fromthe Latin casus, fall,
chance, occurrence and cassus, void, hollow, as though a falling out of the fabric of things
produces an event that requires explanation. It befalls me to cite, for example, Jacques Derrida,
My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies, in Taking
Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and WilliamKerrigan
(Baltimore, 1984), pp. 132.
12. See Jeanne Dunning, Tom Thumb: Notes toward a Case History, www.diacenter.org/
dunning/toc.html
and there is just a glancing reection on the Harvard case-study method
(see Forrester and Goodrich). In these domains, procedures of case analysis
have been crucial to the reproduction of qualitative disciplinaryknowledge
and have themselves generated rich historical and institutional analyses of
how, why, and when certain things become imperatives for fresh study and
fresh narrative re-mediation.
This project presumes that to ask the question of what makes something
a case, and not a merely gestural instance, illustration, or example, is to
query the adequacy of an object to bear the weight of anexplanationworthy
of attending to and taking a lesson from; the case is actuarial. It raises ques-
tions of precedent and futurity, of canons of contextualization, of narrative
elucidation. This is whats disciplinary about the normativity of caseness.
Its operations are ethical, referencing the vicissitudes of conventionality, of
what kind of thing, event, or person has come to be associated with what
kind of exemplarity. To talk about someone or something as marked is to
suggest that it is remarkable in itself but also that it is already strongly
marked by exemplarity. Case almost closed: the marked subject is a walking
exemplar, a person trailing an already-known story. Not always, though
John Forresters essay on Thomas Kuhns concept of the paradigm argues
that the exemplar can provide a way of proceeding together to generate
knowledge in the absence of a theory.
10
He might not extend it this way, but
I would; the case can incite an opening, an altered way of feeling things out,
of falling out of line.
11
The contingencies of the experts ground are demonstrated beautifully inan
incomplete case that you will fail to see here, Jeanne Dunnings Tom Thumb:
Notes Toward a Case History.
12
Somewhat like a mix of a Freudian case his-
tory and a childrens admonitory tale, the narrator provides us a complete
and accurate account of the true history of Tom Thumb from birth through
the oral, anal, oral again, phallic, and Oedipal phases, with a little repetition
compulsion thrown in a few times for good eect. Charming illustrations from
six centuries of Tom Thumb books line the margins. There is also a bibliog-
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 667
raphy. Like much web art, this beautifully executed work demands to be
skimmed, seeming at once intelligible and giving no map or rules for the cursor-
pusher who is used to reading the case study as a demonstration of an enigma
and its resolution.
Inserted amidst the text, small lmed shadow puppets serve as rebuses (a
movie of a thumb substitutes for the word thumb, for instance). But as they
are lmed in slow, slow motion they interrupt reading time with gazing time
and drifting time. If you click on an image it usually just expands, except when
it moves, and you never know in advance. Sometimes it just pulsates. If, dis-
tracted, you leave your cursor on a rebus image for too long, frames pop up
signaling that you have choices to make about where to go. Sometimes the re-
buses open up into discontinuous narratives and other times into a repetition
of what youve already seen or read.
The ecient reader would never discover this andcanleave the storyquickly,
adorable anecdotes in hand about that naughty and unlucky TomThumb. But
one can browse dreamily in the image overlay and almost not get out, which
makes the artwork somewhat like the intestines Tom constantly enters (he is
almost eaten by his mother in a bowl of pudding made of intestines but instead
is later eaten by a cow and, later still, a man) or like the Queens vagina (tam-
ponlike, he seeks to take his pleasure; once discovered he is sentenced to be be-
headed but ends up dying of blood loss in the diaphanous intestine of a spiders
web).
Luckily, this is merely an aesthetic space from which you can detach when
Tom dies. Whats the point of all this? Tom Thumb lives impulsively and with-
out purpose, and the narrative energy depletes when he dies. Its a story about
the chaotic appetites and their consequences, if you want to read it that way.
In that model, expertise in the case form distances the reader from the inten-
sities (or intestines) of near and then completed death. If you dont read it
optimistically, if the genre of the Notes Toward is honored, you get to be an
amateur, appreciating Thumb as a little life drive whose story produces count-
less adaptations that are all sure that Tom Thumb is a caseof something.
A case, even a failed one, is dierent from the case study, and the case
study is dierent fromthe case-study methodusedinlawandbusiness. (Jim
Chandlers essay demonstrates Joseph Conrads almost comic play on this,
as butteries in a case ornament a room where anecdotal and legal versions
of Lord Jims case are discussed and then, as literary case study, renarrated.)
But it is instructive to see howvaried are the norms. InEnglishdepartments
there is often enacted a kind of gut disciplinarity, a Vaseline-lensed nor-
mativity about how knowing something happens; the opposite, as Jerey
Nealons theory toolbox marks sort of ironically, would threaten to make
reading merely instrumental andmechanical andnot anexercise of reexive
668 Lauren Berlant / On the Case
13. See Jerey T. Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the
New Humanities (Lanham, Md., 2003).
14. See Creswell and Gerring, What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For? for clarifying
discussions of the as opposed to what of the choice to use case-study modes of narration,
evidence, argument, and resolution. Additionally, see Ricca Edmondson, Rhetoric in Sociology
(London, 1984), and Gregor McLennan, Sociological Cultural Studies: The Question of
Explanation, Cultural Studies 16, no. 5 (2002): 63149.
15. See Michael Burawoy, The Extended Case Method, Sociological Theory 16 (Mar. 1998): 4
33. Burawoy would also describe the extended case work of Michael Taussig in Shamanism,
Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, 1987) more than, say, in
Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago, 2004), where the captioning model of contextualizationis
abandoned entirely to renditions of the episodic present-in-presence and the opening-out work of
reading that takes place in the reader rather than in the expert. They constitute two very dierent
Benjaminiannotions of the case, but both rely on the logic of the event that appears to ash up to
retemporalize experience.
self-cultivation.
13
Meanwhile, the internet, bookstores, and libraries are
brimming with social science and business versions of advice about howto
use the case study as a method for producing skills in ecient problem
solving, often involving collaborative work. The case-study method always
assumes the sociality of knowledge, the circulation of discourse as its con-
dition, and the clarifying obligation of analytic narrative.
Social science books that give accounts of the case study as anorganizing
genre impart voluminous advice about how to choose properly among dif-
ferent qualitative research paradigms.
14
Michael Burawoy has developed a
compelling argument for the extendedcase study. Focusingonproducing
work responsible to history and structural determination as well as to the
openness of a transferential engagement in the ethnographic situation, he
advances a project that is analogous to practices of transformative contex-
tualization evident in much case-based scholarship in the humanities to-
day.
15
At the same time, such a viewruns up against AndrewAbbotts caveat
against overamalgamating dierent procedures around the case. To read
Abbott is to be releasedintoa universe of small, hugelysignicant variations
in the object- and narrative-decision making that occurs in the construc-
tion of scholarly work in sociology. He feels the need to point out that he
is not judging but describing the improvisatory andoftenmethodologically
fuzzy practice of his estimable colleagues; nonetheless, for anyone, Abbotts
work is daunting and revelatory in its focus on the consequences of mixing
irreconcilable logics of generalization. I could go on. Most material that
advances case-study practices is instrumental, teachingreaders howtoavoid
pitfalls of faulty generalization and to mine the genre for the rich potential
it oers for understanding human life. Yet to many humanists, even the
most theoretical version of this work would seem too methodical a path to
whatever it is that humanists meanwhen they invoke the rubric of thinking.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 669
16. Abbott, Time Matters, p. 129.
17. See Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999).
But, as Abbott says, It is precisely in the reection about what x is a case
of that real theory arises.
16
Scholars often proceed as though their object demands a certainmethod,
which they follow. This happens a lot in this issueespecially, for some
reason, in the three essays most engaged with Marxist traditions of ac-
counting for aect. Contra Fredric Jamesons argument that history is a
tragic narrative, Christopher Nealons The Poetic Case closes withits own
poetic meditation on lyric form as a register of optimistic contemporary
historicism; Jessica Dubowadapts the Benjaminianversionof vitalizedsen-
sibility via The Arcades Project and W. G. Sebald; and my own piece shifts
style when it moves from obesity as a drama of sovereignty and labor to
focus on the appetites and lateral agency. As Harry Shaw has argued else-
where, the Foucauldian tradition of seeing literary detective and medical
genres as enactments of disciplinary and normative power is often tacitly
sympathetic to locating the real in tender singularities that deserved better
genres.
17
It is as though, when executed conventionally, the case study is a
claim about realism. The reworkings of the case study here instead seek to
make an opening within realism, suggesting where it might travel. This spe-
cial issue further proliferates kinds of case style. Pursuing the logics through
which torture is legitimated, Diana Taylor works across three of them, the
case (or exemplary) study, the limit case, and the scenario, . . . each with
its own specic relationto the empirical, evidential, andrhetorical(p. 716).
These varieties of the case study allowfor the confusionof the objective and
the phantasmatic, the empirical and the counterfactual, the grounded and
the dreamy. She shows howeasily andhorrically the case studyshuts things
down in opening them up. It can produce pseudo-thought in the guise of
thought, spray gas in the guise of brainstormingwhich is why, no doubt,
Peter Goodrich uses Harry Frankfurts On Bullshit to open his historical
analysis of the religious casuistry that shapes secular legal case norms.
There was a time, during the construction of this volume, when authors
seemed unable to write about anything without making reference to Guanta-
namo or Abu Ghraib. (At least four of the essays in Making the Case express
this tendency of the moment; so does Dolores Wilburs cover, withits desiccated,
peeled-away Chest sporting a pink nipple stacked over a bullet hole.) When I
write Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib I presume that you know what I mean,
operating as though there were a self-evidence to these names that marks them
out as concepts, concepts about which there is a consensus that includes us.
Whatever else they mean, when uttered with a certain tonality of outrage they
670 Lauren Berlant / On the Case
18. As I was writing this introduction, I ran into more evidence of frustrationat the impeded
destiny of these events to become what their genre dictates, transformative cases: see John Frows
acute and passionate The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies, Symplok 11, nos. 12
(2003): 6976.
communicate a view that a self-evident case has not been acknowledged ap-
propriately. Both, I would argue, now stand for a phrase like the case that
didnt matter.
18
Events of singular injustice to this person, that family, this
statute, that norm, or this population were supposed to have become beyond-
the-limit cases. Authors writing about the concept of the case seemed stunned
(though not surprised), and their repeated gestures toward the barred event
seemed to manifest disbelief that evidence had been gathered, arguments and
judgments made, but a corresponding metamorphosis not achieved. Disbelief
is an active political aect. The growing stock of new and better arguments
about what the revelations meant and meanis a tribute to the urgency tomain-
tain the information for a potentially transformative event. Otherwise, the case
will have been absorbed into the systemof failed goads, stockednext to Rosebud
in that imaginary warehouse of unrealized potentials. Closed case, a cold case.
In the previous paragraphs, the concept of case is used in many dierent
ways. It is an instance of something (violated law, failed informational im-
pact). It is a synonym for argument, as in making a case for. It is a genre
that organizes singularities into exemplary, intelligible patterns, enmeshing
realist claims (x really is exemplary in this way) with analytic aims (if we
make a pattern from x set of singularities we can derive y conclusions) and
makes claims for why it should be thus. It is a professional genre pointing
to the form information takes so that it can be judged: legal case, medical
case, a thing that merits interpretive recontextualization. It also signies
limit case, the case that serves as an index and horizon of development for
all other cases. Finally, the case reveals itself not fundamentally as a form
but as an event that takes shape.
The very thing that represents an enigma that requires argument is also
the very thing that represents anachievedtransparencyor anormativejudg-
ment. The case is always normative but also always a perturbation in the
normative. What, then, is the dierence between these two concepts, the
case and the event? One might say that a case is what an event can become.
Usually, when an event happens there are no outcomes; it fades into the
ordinary pulsations of living on undramatically, perhaps in memory, with-
out being memorable. When an event occurs out of which a case is con-
structed, it represents a situation in which people are compelled to take its
history, seek out precedent, write its narratives, adjudicate claims about it,
make a judgment, and le it somewhere: a sick body, a trac accident, a
phenomenon, instance, or detail that captures the interpretive eye. Most
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 671
19. Provoking debates about the terms of better (more ethical) normativity is the aiminvested
in case-study analysis by David Thacher, The Normative Case Study, American Journal of
Sociology 111 (May 2006): 163176.
often, the singularities of the event are adjudicated by normative expertise,
which makes them general through pattern recognitions. The event usually
becomes the kind of thing that would have been expected, perhaps creating
new precedents for future judgments, but usually not interestingly. At that
point the new event usually just plumps up conventions.
Sometimes, though, an event more than perturbs; it disturbs, creates a
louder noise that opens up the eld of debate about expertise, modes of
description, narration, evaluation, argument, and judgment.
19
Sometimes
you cant tell in advance. As Nasser Hussains essay argues, often the ex-
ceptionality of the event has already been so thoroughly stipulated that its
soon transformed into a banality thats experienced as a mere brush against
something rather than a movement toward change or a dissolution of ap-
propriateness.
Scandals aside, there was nothing manifestly urgent about the timing of
this special issue. I have been interested in the Freudian genre since I rst
encountered its canny negotiation of Doras singularity and Freuds claim
to be able to discern in her life exemplary patterns that warranted funda-
mental changes in howwe understand people generally. Thats a huge claim
to rest on one persons story. I have been interested inthe aesthetic andlegal
conjuncture of the case since reading Walter Scotts meditations on nov-
elistic history writing as the third stage of the shift from public hanging to
liberal legal discipline in The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Decades later, as teacher
and editor, I had become puzzled by the persistent claim-case-case-case-
conclusion-coda shape of so much scholarly work, a form repeated usually
without methodological reection on why the work took this narrative
shape given that archive.
Meanwhile, cultural studies and new forms of interdisciplinarity con-
tinue tofoment newnorms of exemplarity andsingularityinthehumanities
and the social sciences in ways that constantly force us at Critical Inquiry
toreconsider whether a saidknowledge object cansupport the general claim
being made about it. These editorial debates often evidence disciplinary
changes in what deserves signicance. To decide to publish something is to
conrm that it has made a case for its worthiness as knowledge. To decide
not to is not evidence of anything. At the same time, the phrase knowledge
object obscures how often debates about whether a topic or object is an
object or is worthy of becoming an absorbing and potentially transforma-
tive case-event are really about whether one can bear to have transference
672 Lauren Berlant / On the Case
with the low and the hot; professional life is generally so stable and so cool.
This is why the topic of the case matters: the conventions of the case, of the
fate of singularity in exemplifying narratives and expert commentary, are
honed by debates about consensus sensibility. Any time is a good time for
some reection on that, the emergence as a topic of case norms and their
relation to the kinds of judgment that reshape events in all (professional)
life.