Experience+(Boisvert)


 * Overview:**

Defined, experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event.

In //Keywords//, cultural theorist, Raymond Williams summarizes the alternative uses of the term “experience” in the Anglo-American tradition:

"(i) knowledge gathered from past events, whether by conscious observation or by consideration and reflection; and (ii) a particular kind of consciousness, which can in some contexts be distinguished from reason or knowledge" (126). Until the early eighteenth century, he says, experience and experiment were closely connected terms, designating how knowledge was arrived at through testing and observation (here the visual metaphor is important). In the eighteenth century, experience still contained within it this notion of consideration or reflection on observed events, of lessons gained from the past, but it also referred to a particular kind of consciousness, This consciousness, in the twentieth century, has come to mean a "full, active awareness" including feeling as well as thought. The notion of experience as subjective witness, writes Williams, "is offered not only as truth, but as the most authentic kind of truth," as "the ground for all (subsequent) reasoning and analysis" (Williams, 128).

These descriptions are diverge from the common assumption that experience, as subjective testimony, is typically excepted as immediate, authentic, and true. Instead, individual identity is not the “naturalized” starting point, comprised of a set of given characteristics, from which experience unfolds, but rather a social construction, mediated by various social factors, environmental conditions and belief systems.

Menocchio, the protagonist in Carlos Ginzburg’s “Micro History,” //The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller,// who is condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, offers a telling portrait of such an iterative assemblage of self. A 16th c. Fruilian miller, whose education, based on the first and trial, consisted of a total of eleven texts: the Bible, Il Fioretto della Bibbia, Il Lucidario della Madonna, Il Lucendario de santi, Historia del giudicio, Il cavalier Zuanne de Mandavilla, Zampollo, Il supplimento della cronache, Lunario al modo di Italia calculato, the Decameron by Bocaccio, and an unidentified book, believed to be the Koran.

Ginzburg suggests that the way in which Menocchio read, interpreted, connected and experienced these books in the context of the society in which he lived, shaped his world view, which may have led to his execution for proselytizing heretical ideas against the Roman Catholic church.

“In my opinion, all was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed--just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels...and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.”


 * Non-Foundational History, Interpreting Knowledge Production Itself:**

In Joan W. Scott’s article, simply entitled “Experience,” from a collection of essays compiled in the book //Feminists Theorize the Political// edited by she and Judith Butler, Scott begins with a brief retelling of Samuel Delaney’s “experience” during his visit to the St. Mark’s bathhouse in 1963, whereupon he suddenly and acutely became aware of the “visibility,” the palpable emergence of gay identities as political power.

By documenting his subjective experience, in all its color and diversity, Scott suggests that Delaney hopes to render historical this previously unseen sub-culture. Knowledge, however, for Delaney, in this account, is gained solely through visual experience--through the privileging of ethnographic sight, rather than sensual subjective engagement.

For Scott, “[e]xperience is one of the foundations that have been reintroduced into historical writing in the wake of the critique of empiricism” (Scott, 26). She observes how historians, who are essentially interpreters of language, meaning and culture, are turning towards experience, because of the limitations presented by interpretation, and questions whether history can exist without foundations, without the over-reliance upon the naturalized categories of experience.

Scott’s stated goal for the essay is “to change the focus and the philosophy of our history from one bent on naturalizing experience through a belief in unmediated relationship between words and things, to one that takes all categories of representation and analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent” (Scott, 36).

By revisiting Delaney’s “discovery of truth” through the lens of literary critic Karen Swann who espouses historicizing experience, Scott dismisses her earlier reading of Delaney as a false “reflection of pre-discursive reality,” and rereads the event at the bathhouse as a “substitution of one interpretation for another.” In this interpretation (her own performance of substitution), Scott views Delaney’s description of the wavering blue light now as “a conversion experience, a clarifying moment, after which he sees differently” (Scott, 35). The refractive, distorting quality of the light on the water “permits a vision beyond the visible, a vision that contains fantastical projects,” witnessed in the exaggeration of millions of bodies, which becomes the basis, Scott claims, for political, rather than personal identification.

This shift to “[t]reating the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event is not,” she cautions, “to introduce a new form of linguistic determinism, nor to deprive subjects of agency. It is to refuse a separation between “ experience” and language, and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse” (Scott, 34). If subjects are constituted discursively, then unmediated experience is not possible, because experience is always already an interpretation. Thus, she concludes, “the personal and social are imbricated in one another and both are historically variable,” (Scott, 35) never self-evident, and therefore, always political.

The study of experience, she concludes, must call into question its “originary status” in historical explanations by forcing historians to “take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through [transferral] experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself” (Scott, 37). Such an analysis would constitute for Scott a non-foundational history; a history that retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories.


 * Unnaturalized Categories and Interested Disregard for Experience:**

In Chapter 6 of //Muddling Through: Pursuing Science in the 21st Century//, Fortun and Bernstein trace the conflicting interests surrounding the debate over the legitimacy of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCSD) disease. Because the symptoms of MCSD are typically invisible, and often contradictory, it resists easy categorization, and definition. Even once symptoms are identified, the tools for confirming its existence are inadequate. Thus, the inability to “name” MCSD consistently and confirm it empirically through visual evidence denies both the codification in either the CDC or DSM, and the experience of those who suffer from such exposure. The creation of a shared narrative of experience, a strong message frame, might help galvanize public opinion to fight corporate interests.


 * Related Terms:**

Tacit Knowledge Empirical Knowledge Experimentation Expert Shared Experience


 * References:**

Fortun, Mike and Herbert Bernstein. Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. Ginzburg, Carlos. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1992. Scott, Joan. "Experience,” from Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Joan Scott and Judith Butler. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.