Experience, madness theory, and politics

In this commentary, I would like to do three things: First, reflect on Voronka’s (2016) engagement with the critique of experience as a foundational concept and her answers to this; second, comment on how we, as both activists and user/survivor researchers, engage with other critical discourses emerging from excluded groups; and finally, offer some of my own perspectives and history as a user/survivor researcher and activist in the United Kingdom to illustrate the first two points.

Experience

I agree with much of what Voronka has to say about the risks of relying on ‘experience’ as an unquestioned category and how those risks are embodied today in the increasing reliance on terms such as ‘experts by experience’ and ‘people with lived experience.’ In the United Kingdom, where I write from, many research projects now have what are called Lived Experience Advisory Panels and Voronka’s arguments are timely, if equally rather unsettling, for this development.

Voronka engages extensively with Scott’s ‘The evidence of experience’ (1991). Rereading it 30 years on, I was struck by its relentless post-structuralism. However, I also remember that many were deeply offended when it appeared—how dare she attack the authenticity of our experience? So, we must be careful, as indeed Voronka is. Appeals to experience on the part of service users are fragile. Scott’s argument is that history, in particular, but also other critical discourses, rely on experience as a foundational category that naturalizes excluded groups and identities, whereas these should be historicized. Historicizing experience means recognizing that subjectivity is produced through discourse. That is, subjectivity is shaped by language, the concepts it embodies, and the social institutions that structure it. Importantly, discourse entails power and it is shared. This does not preclude agency, but it does preclude free will and unfettered choice and means we are not unproblematic individuals. This is where I have difficulties with where Voronka’s argument leads her. Her main point seems to be that using experience as a foundational category, even strategically, effaces the differences between us, renders them invisible and unspeakable—differences in response to distress and to the mental health system; ideological and epistemological differences; differences in respect of gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and so forth. Although in one sense these differences are important, the logical conclusion seems to me to be that we are all different as individuals and so individual (albeit constructed) experience in fact creeps back in. For all the references to the psy- disciplines and the state and to the activism that resists them, we arrive at a point where the collective disappears.

Is there a role for survivor academics to tackle this issue? I would argue that there are parallels with activism and user/survivor groups. These groups share, validate, collectivize, and thereby render more general the experiences that individuals bring to them. This is not to say that ‘individuals’ are ontologically prior to collectivities, but that the way madness is positioned encourages us to believe we are individually pathological and psychologically alone. Although not a post-structuralist, Harding (2008), writing about feminism and postcolonial studies, has a proposition that might be helpful. She suggests that academics can ‘study up’ (her quotation marks) the situations of women and racialized subjects, alongside political movements, to theorize those situations. They are situations of collectivities, albeit ones that contain differences. This concept of ‘studying up’ is to me a more productive move than an exclusive focus on the differences between us.

Critical Theory

The second issue for me is the engagement with critical discourses that have picked up and developed Scott’s critique of experience. These include feminism, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and disability studies. It is important to articulate our field with this theorizing, but I do not think we should underestimate how difficult it is. Texts in each of these bodies of work routinely invoke texts from the others—indeed, it is almost ritual. However, they hardly ever refer to madness. Madness simply does not figure. In his preface to The History of Madness (1967), Foucault wrote about how the mad had been...