The Mystery of Movie Stardom Robert B. Ray (bio) “Social Sequence Theory” and the Need for Memorable Examples “Remember,” Amherst College professor Theodore Baird once cheerfully confided to a colleague, “education doesn’t work.”1 Baird reached that conclusion by teaching English for over forty years at one of America’s best colleges, but his remark has wider implications for learning and thinking, activities that require a continual negotiation between specific details and general concepts. In effect, Baird proposed the classroom as a lab where experiments in learning and thinking take place, and any teacher can tell stories about how students will surprise you, and not always in a good way. Recently, while grading an exam question about Italian scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini’s analogy for Neorealism, I kept encountering the baffling phrase, social sequence theory. The light dawned when I realized that the class and I had been engaged in a version of Chinese Whispers, the old parlor game where a message initiated at one end of the table comes back unrecognizable after making the rounds of the guests. In a discussion about Neorealism, I had suggested that Zavattini had modeled his ideas on social science; one student seems to have written this phrase down as social sequence theory, and the others who borrowed his notes simply fell in line, accepting it without question. The mistake is instructive: it indicates that (1) in certain situations, most of us will readily—indeed eagerly—offer as “an answer” something that we ourselves don’t understand; and (2) we remember details far better than ideas, especially, even almost exclusively, ones singled out for notice. All but the best students have trouble defining the general issue posed by a leading question. Even the least industrious, however, can supply detailed descriptions of the particular scenes considered in class. In effect, many students, and indeed, most people, resemble the elderly Thomas Hardy, who once admitted that he had “no philosophy—merely a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show.”2 Is this situation really so surprising? Nearly a century ago, Proust began showing us how our memories organize themselves around concrete sensations—tastes, smells, sounds. T. S. Eliot noticed the same thing: Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on [End Page 175] a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.3 Eliot’s memories resemble striking film scenes; Wittgenstein would deploy such scenes for philosophy, in an activity he called “assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”4 Denying that he had any “philosophical theses” to offer, Wittgenstein insisted that “What I invent are new similes,”5 which took shape as concrete images: a safe that needs unlocking, a hair on the tongue that eludes your grasp, a man imprisoned in a room. “We now demonstrate a method, by examples,” Wittgenstein remarked, “and the series of examples can be broken off.”6 In a similar vein, Stanley Cavell has drawn attention to the philosopher J. L. Austin’s reliance on stories and examples, whose role, Cavell suggests, “is a topic of inexaggeratable importance.”7 Elaborating on the value of such examples, Cavell has described his own particular fondness for a story of Austin’s that distinguishes between doing something “by mistake” and doing something “by accident”:8 You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the donkey falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim, and find to my horror that it is your donkey . . . [for Cavell, a mistake] Then again, I go...