Experience

Chinese immigration “head tax”—as the general social understandings within which they all function have changed. One might say that the “prestige” of equality has risen in the past decades in Canada, particularly within the classes that have access to insti­ tutional influence, even while distressing and often racially based inequali­ ties have continued to be tolerated within public view. Most questions of equality have practical stakes in terms of such things as quality of housing, nutrition, social benefits, educational opportunities; others, however, have been mainly symbolic, such as the same-sex “marriage” question, or the question of whether Quebec’ s assembly should be called “provincial” or “national.” The curricular and research choices open to college and univer­ sity teachers are also mainly symbolic, although for living writers they can have some material effect on that person’ s grant applications and royalty income. As Bourdieu’s research has indicated, symbolic capital is not equally available nor in infinite supply. From a Bourdieuian perspective, canon-related arguments that appear based on fairness or equality may also be the familiar gambits for competitive positioning that occur whenever there are new entrants to a cultural field. However, symbolism can have important social and psychological consequences; equality and status are as much unlegislatable matters of respect and acceptance as they are ones of statute and regulation. Frank Davey University of Western Ontario Experience The entry “experience” in Keywords seems to me one of the more cryptic, even obscure ones in the collection. Williams’s technique of sketching an often confused word-history with just a few strokes is only partly respon­ sible for the impression this entry gives of shedding as much shadow as light on its topic. Nor is it just that Williams’ s writing shows here and there too little concern for the reader’s comfort by setting several demonstrative pronouns afloat in a small sea of possible antecedents, with the result that one is often left puzzling out exactly which “this,” literally, he is talking about. All of the entries are potentially affected by these same limitations, but few come out of the experience as badly as “experience.” Perhaps the simple wordplay just indulged in can give a hint as to why this should be the case. Differently from the examination ofother terms, the 24 | Kamuf effort to present the history of “experience”is hampered almost to the point of incoherence by the abstraction from any history of experience—that is, from shifts not only in the uses or meanings of this term, but in the very “thing” that it could be taken to name. To see how this might be a problem specific to “experience,”consider a contrast with the entry on “work,”a term that names a certain kind of experience. Here, Williams has little difficulty conveying, in a briefer essay concerned with a more ancient word, how the changing fortunes of the term index a change in material conditions and thus in the very experience so-named: work. When it comes to the more general and inclusive term, however, it is as if experience itself, the possibilities or impossibilities of experience, had no history to speak of. Unlike “work,” a word whose vagaries are shown to track the history hap­ pening to the thing, “experience” seems essentially, in Williams’s account, to have named the same experience since the late eighteenth century when it entered the language in its modern sense. To be more precise, things are not quite so simply described, of course. In fact, they are double. There are two modern senses of “experience” that, according to Williams, “from [the late eighteenth century], have in practice moved together, within a common historical situation” (127). Despite this allusion to movement, Williams draws the picture of a more or less stable context of use for the two senses. To refer to these two uses, he adopts the somewhat confusing shorthand of “experience past” and “experience present.”It is confusing because one might understand that a past meaning will be displaced by a present one, which is the sort ofdynamic most ofthe other entries are concerned to display. In “experience,” however, Williams dispenses quickly, in the first sentence, with...