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Some years ago I was told of an anti-malaria initiative in which public health officials showed a video of the anopheles mosquito to a group of villagers, hoping to help them identify the mosquito as the malaria vector. Returning to the village months later, the officials discovered that their video had done no good. Villagers concluded that the mosquito they saw on the video was much, much larger than any they had ever seen in their midst and therefore that the video had no pertinence.
Though apparently laughable, this sequence seems to me to perfectly expose a fundamental problem associated with using an example—the video here, yes, but more generally, any illustration, staged, recorded, or recounted, no matter how verbatim, no matter how apparently fitting—as a means of educating. An example achieves its educative intention only if the earlier moment it represents matches the present-day moment toward which it has been forwarded—when that-there-then replicates this-here-now.
The video's failure to achieve its aim, then, might usefully be thought of as a successful example of examples' general tendency to fail. After all, the particulars of any exemplary image from the past will never perfectly correspond to the particulars required by its receiving present. The point of contact between the present-day object and its exemplary predecessor will always leave a gap. No matter the example, we are all, I think, in the position of the villagers—it never quite fits. Our pathogenic mosquito is not exactly like the one represented in the example.
We might all wish it were otherwise. At the point of contact, we can, in fact, nearly feel each element—the immediate present and the exported