Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (review)

Martin Jay is known mostly for insightful analyses of topics which later often either turn out to be the harbingers of new theoretical interests or have coincided with discussions that unfolded simultaneously with the publication of his works. Such was the case with his pathbreaking book Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (1973), his Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (1984), as well as with Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993). In each of these well-documented, detailed, and thorough presentations, Jay gave us an historical unfolding of a certain problématique: of one of the esssential kernels of Western Marxism, of the main notions of Hegelian (and hence of much of Western) Marxism, and of the anti-ocularcentrism inherent to much of French theory of the previous century. In each of these volumes the author offered an important new facet of intellectual history. Although he may have sometimes given the semblance of a detached bystander, it was nonetheless obvious that in his writings could be discerned the "imperative not merely to turn contexts into texts, but also to see in texts the shadows of contexts," as well as the fact that, "the presentation of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea."¹

Jay's points of interest, then, coincided with the great themes of theoretical and philosophical discussions of the last decades. Although they had often originated in Europe, many of them were echoed or were developed further also in the United States. Martin Jay's writings helped forge this transatlantic philosophical link. This work commenced with the prewar German emigrés (such as Adorno, Marcuse or Löwenthal) and was continued by the postwar French intellectuals (such as Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard) who occasionally visited the U. S. A. to further sow the seeds of "continental" influence. Jay and some other writers theoretically digested and developed these theories in an American setting and then offered to the international academic world a relevant and influential theory from America, but one with a decidedly "continental" flavor.

It is because of this historical context that the topic of Songs of Experience comes somewhat as a surprise: the notion of experience, although bursting with practical as well as theoretical and philosophical meanings and implications, is in the English language burdened by a conflation that has been avoided in the German language (as well as in many others, my Slovenian, for example). In English, experience thus designates Erfahrung (empirical knowledge) as well as Erlebnis (lived, personal experience). In the English language these two notions are thus conflated—with this conflation, as Jay points out, even possessing some merits: "Because it can encompass what is being experienced as well as the subjective process of experiencing it, the word can sometimes function as an umbrella term to overcome the epistemological split between subject and object; the American pragmatists were especially fond of using it in this way" (12).

The notion of experience is a pivotal one among the adherents of phenomenology and also analytic philosophers, so the reader unfamiliar with Jay's previous endeavors might have expected the author to focus mainly on these. However, Jay remains mostly within his "traditional" referential framework —although he also discusses authors that until now he has not written about. He thus doesn't write about the analytic tradition, and mostly criticizes phenomenology or, rather, offers views (by Foucault and others) who have, at best, regarded it with ambivalence.

Jay pursues research of those "British, French, German, and American thinkers [from the past three centuries] from many different disciplines for whom 'experience' has been an especially potent term" (5). He begins with the Greeks, continues with Montaigne and Bacon, and then proceeds through Religious Experience (ch. 3), Aesthetic Experience (ch...