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  • Experience, Problematization, and the Question of the Contemporary
  • Brad Elliott Stone

I begin by expressing thanks to Paul Rabinow. As a Foucault scholar, I am personally indebted to him for that wonderful book he wrote with Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structrualism and Hermeneutics, which served as my introduction to the Foucauldian philosophical enterprise. I am honored to respond to his Coss lecture on the philosophical methods of Foucault and Dewey that shape his work in philosophy and anthropology.

I begin by quoting two lengthy yet revealing passages—one from Foucault's "Life: Experience and Science" and the other from Dewey's "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy"—that will set the stage for this discussion:

Phenomenology expected "lived experience" to supply the originary meaning of every act of knowledge. But can we not or must we not look for it in the "living" itself? Through an elucidation of knowledge about life and of the concepts that articulated that knowledge, Canguilhem wishes to determine the situation of the concept in life. That is, of the concept insofar as it is one of the modes of that information which every living being takes from its environment. . . . Forming concepts is a way of living . . . it is a way to live in a relative mobility . . . it is to show, among those billions of living beings that inform their environment and inform themselves on the basis of it, an innovation that can be judged as one likes, tiny or substantial: a very special type of information.

(Foucault, "Life" 475)

Suppose we take seriously the contribution made to our idea of experience by biology—not that recent biological science discovered the facts, but that it has so emphasized them that there is no longer an excuse for ignoring them or treating them as negligible. Any account of experience must now fit into the consideration that experiencing means living—and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium, not in a [End Page 44] vacuum. Where there is experience, there is a living being. Where there is life, there is a double connection maintained with the environment. . . . Life is not possible without such direct support by the environment. . . . The human being has upon his hands the problem of responding to what is going on around him so that these changes will take one turn rather than another, namely, that required by its own future functioning. . . . Experience is no slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness.

(Dewey, "Need for Recovery" 48-49)

It is always useful to build bridges between American and Continental philosophy, but Foucault is perhaps the most useful figure to connect to the pragmatist tradition. There are several reasons for this. First, one can say that experience is the primary subject matter of Foucauldian analysis. Second, Foucauldian analysis analyzes experience in terms of practices. Third, Foucault's concept of problematization, as Rabinow argues, is a useful tool for inquiry. Foucault was taken up directly by contemporary "postanalytic" pragmatists like Richard Rorty and Cornel West, and there have been several fruitful essays on connecting Foucault with classical pragmatists like Peirce and Dewey.

Experience

At the heart of both Foucauldian analysis and pragmatism is experience. In similar fashion, both Foucualt and Dewey reject the prevalent understanding of "experience" of their respective peer group: phenomenology's notion of "lived experience" (Erlebnis, le vécu) and empiricism's reduction of experience to the passive receptivity of sense data. As Thomas Flynn states in his book on Foucault, "experience is not the 'primitive' that positivists and others were seeking" (172).

For Foucault, experience is "the correlation, in a culture, between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity" (Use of Pleasure 4-5). In Foucauldian terms, experience is what archaeology, genealogy, and ethics study: archaeology studies the experience of discourse, genealogy studies the experience of power, and the ethicist studies the experience of subjectivization. This should not be taken to mean that there are three different kinds of experiences, but instead that every experience is a combination of discursive, non-discursive, and ethical practices. By analyzing these practices together, one is able to see the formation of particular problematizations (to be...

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