Multiple Modernities, the Question of "What If..."

In last class, Dan responded to my question about methods of storytelling in historicity and its ideological component by bringing up the "what if..." question to refer to a comparison between the ideological viewpoint of a Moslem versus that of a Christian religiosity in media portrayal of the Other. Afterward, I thought about the nature of hypothesis itself and the possibility of raising the "what if..." question in dealing with history versus theory. I guess I pose a question whether we can really talk about such hypothecization without the consideration of the relations of power and the hegemony of discourse? Moreover, I thought, the distinction between historicity and theoretization in matters of "what if..." makes quite a difference. How do we really know what if...? In this specific case, we are dealing with multiple modernities, for example, with vastly differing trajectories of power and hegemony of one over the other. Can we exclude the relations of power and reach to a comparative equilibrium? This makes me think of the overall discourse of humanities and media analysis and the resistance to more "ideological disciplines" (Edward Said's term) of social sciences in the study of cinema and visual mediation overall.

hadi