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Cultural Critique 52 (2002) 86-107



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The Appeal to Experience and Its Consequences
Variations on a Persistent Thompsonian Theme

Craig Ireland


L'hyper-concret est aussi abstrait que les généralités philosophiques.

—Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne

The Appeal to Experience

By the late 1960s, the excessive zeal with which certain strands in Western Marxist theory continued to dichotomize social structures into an infra/suprastructural opposition, along with Soviet misbehavior in Czechoslovakia, helped foster a Gramscian turn where concerns over cultural hegemony and counterhegemony overshadowed issues of economic determinism. Such concerns, as one observer put it, encouraged such questions as: "If culture was essentially that which was experienced, then a central issue was who did the experiencing and how was the experiencing in part masterminded by those who claimed a more lofty experience than others?" (Davies, 121). And such concerns were soon to find their most influential expression in E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory, which sought to counter the perceived determinism of Althusserian structuralism by appealing to the subversive specificity of English working-class experience. Adherents to "histories from below" and the Alltaggeschichte of the 1980s continued this trend by opposing the dominant historiographical emphasis on national political history with what one historian describes as "a quest to recapture the subjective experience of everyday life in the past at a regional, local or even individual level" (Evans, 763). And throughout the 1990s, a series of debates have appeared in such journals as New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and Yale Journal of Criticism, [End Page 86] where blows have been exchanged between those who debunk the concept of experience as an ontotheological relic and those who, conversely, call for its retention as a viable methodological category for cultural theory or subaltern historiography.

Once an arcane philosophical term, experience over the last three decades has become a general buzzword. By the 1970s, experience spilled over into the streets, so to speak, and it has since then become the stuff of programmatic manifestos and has been enlisted as the ground from which microstrategies of resistance and subaltern counterhistories can be erected. But for all the blows and counterblows that have carried on for over three decades between those who appeal to the counterhegemonic potential of experience and those who see such appeals as naive voluntarism, such debates show no signs of abating. On the contrary, they have become yet more strident, as can be seen by Michael Pickering's recent attempt to rehabilitate the viability of the term "experience" for subaltern historiography by turning to E. P. Thompson and Dilthey and, more recently still, by Sonia Kruks's polemical defense of experience for subaltern inquiry by way of a reminder that poststructuralist critics of experience owe much to those very thinkers, from Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, whom they have debunked as if in oedipal rebellion against their begetters.

Such debates over experience have so far gravitated around issues of epistemology and agency, pitting those who debunk experience as the stuff of an antiquated philosophy of consciousness against those who argue that subaltern experience provides an enclave against strong structural determination. Lost in such debates, however, have been the potential consequences of appeals to immediate experience as a ground for subaltern agency and specificity. And it is just such potential consequences that will be examined here.

These indeed demand our attention, for more is at stake in the appeal to experience than some epistemological faux pas. By so wagering on the perceived immediacy of experience as the evidence for subaltern specificity and counterhegemonic action, appeals to immediate experience, however laudable their goal, end up unwittingly naturalizing what is in fact historical, and, in so doing, they leave the door as wide-open to a progressive politics of identity as to a retreat to neoethnic tribalism. Most alarming about such appeals to [End Page 87] experience is not some failure of epistemological nerve—it is instead their ambiguous political and social ramifications. And these have reverberated beyond academia and found an echo in...

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