The Media and Moi: Anecdotal Evidence

Poststructuralism, at least as popularized in academic discourse, has given little credence to the personal. In some circles it has been imperative (and in certain contexts entirely reasonable) to present the personal as suspect, overdetermined, almost laughably unconscious of the complex forces that construct and fashion its supposed singularity. Against myriad and multiform currents of power—those vital and compelling cultural energies that have their way with every body, every psyche—the hypermanipulated personal doesn’t seem to make much of a show. Again and again it appears as the ignorant dupe of history, its claims and demands not its own. In popular post-structuralist models, the personal bears a remarkable resemblance to Miss Piggy’s moi—it is oblivious, essentialist, and more than a little silly.

In post-poststructuralist academic writing, a discourse that is now emerging alongside further applications of popular poststructuralist models, the personal seems a little less ridiculous, a little less likely to be automatically discounted as inauthentic and pregiven. Or, rather, its inauthenticity and pregivenness do not automatically invalidate it as a potential site of successful resistance/transformation/interest. If personal expressions are simply illusions, composites generated by the various and mutable pressures of cultural relations, so are popular academic models. So why privilege the latter? We have allowed the models to interrogate the moi—why not allow the moi to interrogate the models? In so doing, of course, we risk looking a bit silly. But why not take the risk of silliness, the risk of questioning discourses that discourage questions by making the questioners look hopelessly foolish or reactionary or identitarian or naive?

This issue of Wide Angle presents a variety of essays that in some way address the relations of human beings to what we term “the media.” All speak to the experiences of the individual person. All, through language or image, offer what the scientific community calls “anecdotal evidence”—untested, unproven, possibly unreproducible, but reportable results—about personal interactions with film or television. Some of the essays make specific or general claims; others do not. Some call attention to their relation to popular poststructuralism; most do not. Some are scholarly; some, sentimental; some are wonderfully funny. None, I think, presents itself as an account of originary experience. None is so blindly about moi as to render itself useless to readers who are interested in thinking about collective, as well as individual, relations to media, or in trying to imagine what post-poststructuralist categories would look like. And all of the essays have something to offer nonacademic readers.

As guest editor of this issue, I have enjoyed working with the writers and artists featured here, each of whom has stimulated my thinking about the personal. Their patience with the editing process is much appreciated. I would also like to thank Ruth Bradley, Editor of Wide Angle, for her continuing support and guidance, and for her ongoing achievement in this time of diminishing budgets and institutional duress.