American Idiots?
It has been fashionable for some time on youtube (and even on late night television) to make a mockery out of people by testing them on matters that they should know something about. For example, on the late night television show Jimmy Kimmel Live! there was a segment in which average American citizens were asked to locate particular places on a map (such as Canada, or even their own country, USA). When they failed, or when they demonstrated to the interviewer and to the audience that they didn’t know what they should know, we all laugh. We all receive a jolt of stimulus.
Similarly, there is a popular youtube sensation called “Debate Me” or “Change My Mind,” where average citizens are asked to challenge the intelligence of the interviewer him or herself. Once again the point is to demonstrate that one knows better than the interviewee.
We can find numerous examples of this sort of entertainment. For example, there are many youtube videos which interview students at Ivy League American Universities. In every case, it seems that there is entertainment value — stimulation — in the fact that others can be exposed for not knowing what they should know very well. I cannot put this in any other way: there is an ethical imperative that one know what everybody is presumed to know. Yet, isn’t it the case that, at the same time, paradoxically, we presume nonetheless that the average American is an idiot. It is the interviewer, and the audience vicariously through the interviewer, that is always made to appear as if he or she or they know very well what the other should have already known.
This demonstrates something essential about American epistemology. First of all, knowledge is always reducible to ‘chunks’ or factoids rather than rigorous qualitative thick descriptions. These chunks of knowledge to which we are all made to subscribe function as the measure of one’s basic humanity. Yet, as members of that same humanity, we disclose through our viewing and interviewing questions that we also suffer from the inability to know it all about what we should already know. It is a basic feature of the human experience to be radically ignorant about something that everybody should know and yet we stubbornly act as if this is not the case by displacing this responsibility onto the Other.
There is, of course, a famous psychoanaytic joke about this type of displacement. A man who believed himself to be a grain of corn about to be eaten by a giant chicken seeks help from his psychoanalyst. After months he is cured. Yet, months later he returns again: “help me, help me!” The psychoanalyst responds: “I thought you were cured, you no longer believe yourself to be a grain of corn?” The patient responds: “I know that stupid! But the giant chicken doesn’t know it!” In the same way, we could say that we all know that the Other is stupid, but, unfortunately, the Other doesn’t himself know it yet.
There persists an expectation that the Other should know something that everybody should already know and this is demonstrated precisely in the very question posed to the Other. It is posed in the form of a demand. The Other, whether he be a protestor (interrogated by a political opponent in the streets) or an average citizen, is demanded to account for himself through the confines of the factoid. He is issued the demand to answer a question which everybody supposedly already knows the answer. The subject (e.g., the interviewer and audience) is therefore relieved of the burden of having to account for himself because that knowledge has already been previously secured. One asks the questions because one already knows the answer.
Put another way, when one asks another to locate Canada on a map or to spell the word “spontaneous” in front of an audience, one is not in actuality perversely exposing only the ignorance of the Other. Rather, one is exposing the ignorance of oneself vis-a-vis the Other: it is us, as subject, as interviewer and audience, who demand too much from the Other. And it is in and through this demand — in and through this eroticization of knowledge — that we secure for ourselves some enjoyment: we enjoy positioning ourselves within the register of knowledge so that we can avoid altogether the belief that it is us who do not know what everybody should anyway already know.
If the Other were to respond favourably to our demand — there is no expectation that he or she will — then we would have to experience the devastating truth: that the Other knows something and that therefore we do not know it all ourselves. This is the pitfall of knowledge today in the entertainment world. Whereas the television game show Jeopardy once demonstrated the status of factoid knowledge within American culture, today that function of knowledge has been accelerated. Knowledge today cannot anymore be consistent, it must occur in trivia-based chunks, and, moreover, it must forever be related to the production of subjectivity: it operates as a quick-fix against the anxiety of not knowing what should be known.
