Review Two: Authority and Experience
Leila Dawney, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London
October 1, 2011.
Introduction
“Experience just isn’t what it used to be” (Valverde 2004:68).
This review explores the relationship between authority and experience through the concept of
experiential knowledge. It argues that experience, and the value placed upon knowledge based on
life experience is one central way in which authority operates as a specific type of power. Here,
literature on the theme of experience and experiential knowledge is set out in order to begin to
think about how these concepts can be mobilised in theorising and researching immanent authority
and the making of community. In particular, the concept of experiential knowledge is discussed
through a review of literature discussing two settings: the self-help group and the feminist
consciousness-raising group. Through a consideration of Foucault’s writing on experience, however,
we assert that the binaries that produce experiential knowledge as an other to objective, rational
knowledge are unhelpful and dualist. They are also less useful for thinking about the hybrid ways
that knowledge is produced in spaces governed by neoliberal logics. As a result we position the
concept of experimentation as central to the understanding of how theoretical and empirical
techniques and interventions can mobilise specific knowledges and experiences in the production of
community.
What is experiential knowledge?
Authority, as a specific type of power, is intrinsically tied to knowledge. The force of authority has
been described by the 19th century thinker Theodor Mommsen as ‘more than advice and less than a
command, and advice which one may not safely ignore’ (quoted in Arendt 1977:125). The concept of
authority has been associated with knowledge- or wisdom-based forms of power and status since its
first recorded uses in English. Authority is a form of power that results from the collective agreement
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that some people are considered to ‘know better’ than other people by dint of particular status
positions, attributes, experiences or actions. Authority is respected because it is felt that those in
authority know more than others about a particular issue or topic, or more than others in general by
dint of their having lived longer, for example, or because they represent a system of collective
knowledge and decision making – an institution which collectively knows more about practical
concerns than any individual person could know. Concerns around the loss or decline of authority in
contemporary society are bound up with changes in knowledge practices, particularly the disruption
of traditional forms of knowledge and changes of attitude towards youth and age. Authority relies
on consensus around what counts as valid knowledge: for there to be authority amongst a group of
people, in a given context, there needs to be agreement upon the basis of real, valid, impartial,
objective knowledge. Inequalities in access to this knowledge then establish relationships and
experiences of authority. If these are called into question, then authoritative relationships are
destabilised and new forms may emerge.
The basis of authority on what we call “objective knowledge” (see below) is essential to the ethical,
open and just character of authority as a form of power (Blencowe, 2011). Making objective
knowledge the basis of power relationships means that all parties are bound by points of judgment
that are impartial and disinterested. Objective knowledge thus acts as an axis, or pivot point,
enabling relationships to be open and ethical. It is worth making a comment here about what is
meant by “objective”. Objective, here, refers to a particular type of knowledge which is positioned
(through its own immanent production – see Dawney, 2011c) as outside of what is debatable,
contestible, or personal. It is positioned as such through the various relations that produce and
valorise types of knowledge. In terms of thinking about authority, the concept of experiential
knowledge becomes important as it implies a difference in access to a shared external reality,
positioned as an “objectivity” that some are closer to than others by dint of specific life experiences
that they have undergone and are able to speak about. This is why authority has been classically
associated with age. Experience can be deliberately generated and fostered in numerous ways, for
example study, travel, and other techniques of the self. Authority figures, then, derive their
authority to some degree from experience, and this focus on experience ties the concept of
authority specifically to embodiment (Dawney 2011:3).
Phenomenology and lived experience
The concept of experience as a cultural construct encompasses a number of genealogies. Jay, in
particular, gives an account of some of the different ways in which experience has been addressed
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and written about in philosophical, literary, theological and other texts. His stated aim is to “step
back from experience as a lived reality and coolly examine its modal subtypes as cultural constructs”
(Jay 2005:5). In particular, experience has been a key, although highly contested and contentious,
concept in the critique of modernity in European and American sociology, philosophy, political
theory and art since the nineteenth century (Jay, 2005). Romanticism, vitalism, phenomenology,
pragmatism and humanist Marxism have all decried an loss of experience in modernity and
attempted to recover, liberate or create “authentic experience” which modern western rationality,
intellectualism, industrialisation or commodification have destroyed (Blencowe forthcoming 2011).
In sociology, the search for experience is generally associated with an ethos of humanism, an
emphasis upon the importance of the subject, and with qualitative methodologies, ethnography and
understanding. Experience, in these discourses, is seen as that which confers meaning upon, or
grants access to the meaningfulness of, the world. In these definitions, it comes to mean more than
just the sum total of sensory experience, and acquires a depth of meaning that renders it something
that can be lost. Some have celebrated mystic or religious experience as a special type of experience
which is irreducible to the sensible, or to scientific analysis, such as the mystics of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, or more recently thinkers such as Blake, who attempted to democratise
religious experience (Underhill 1961). Others have celebrated aesthetic experience (Kant 1951) and
the quest for pure experience such as William James (McDermott 1977:xxvii, 271).
The discipline of phenomenology, of course, despite having a number of divergent traditions, is
broadly based on the pursuit of understanding and attempting to write lived experience (Husserl
1958; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Merleau-Ponty 1968; Heidegger 1978; Steinbock 1999). Phenomenology,
as the study of experience, positions itself against empiricism and the pursuit of abstracted,
objective knowledge. Indeed, Husserl, in the introduction to the second edition of Logical
Investigations, writes that:
this phenomenology, like the more inclusive pure phenomenology of experiences in general, has,
as its exclusive concern, experiences intuitively seizable and analysable in the pure generality of
their essence, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts, as experiences of
human or animal experients in the phenomenal world that we posit as an empirical fact” (quoted
in Moran 2000:1).
Indeed, for Husserl’s philosophy, the primacy of experience is the “principle of principles” (Husserl
1958:24). In setting out the philosophical discipline during the first half of the twentieth century,
then, phenomenologists had a project of invigorating, of giving life to philosophy through situating it
in concrete human experience, to “capture life as it is lived” (Moran 2000:5). Husserl positions the
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phenomenological viewpoint against the scientific world view that leads to a “God’s eye
perspective”; a “view from nowhere”(Moran 2000:12).
More recent writers on embodiment have engaged with phenomenologists in their work on
embodied experience, particularly through the writings of Merleau-Ponty, whose concrete,
embodied approach to phenomenology has multiple implications for the production of social
scientific knowledge and the consideration of pain (Scarry 1985) difference and disability (French
1994; Davidson 2000), gender (Young 2005), spirituality (Slavin 2003) and embodiment and
experience more generally (Leder 1990; Leder 1990; Csordas 1993; Csordas 1994; Lyon and Barbalet
1994; Turner 1994). Phenomenology has been associated with qualitative, and particularly
autoethnographic methods, as researchers attempt to communicate the depth of experience that
they and their participants and informants have. Recently, too, this pursuit of experience has been
discussed and interrogated with reference to neuroscience (Connolly 2006; Ellis 2006; Ratcliffe
2009). Experience is associated with depth, dimensionality and a complexity of understanding.
Experience can be the repository of historical lessons, or a sense of connection to the world or the
beyond. As such, experience is a sort of knowledge associated with emotion, embodiment and
aesthetics.
A recurring trope in critical scholarship has also been the romantic notion of the loss of authentic
experience in modernity: a theme elaborated on by Agamben, Benjamin and Adorno in particular,
who relate experience to the conditions of its emergence and argue that modernity has made it
impossible (Benjamin 1969; Agamben 1993; Benjamin 1993; Adorno and Horkheimer 1997; Adorno
2001; Benjamin 2002; Benjamin 2002). Indeed, Agamben argues that experience is no longer
accessible to us. Benjamin is associated with the critique and history of experience in modernity,
with art, with technology and with the transformations in perception – including political and
aesthetic sensibilities – that are the outcome of the technological and architectural construction of
the modern, capitalist, world. This is perhaps most clearly laid out in Benjamin’s “experience and
poverty” (Benjamin 1999) and in Bürger’s The Decline of Modernism (Bürger 1992).
Whether or not the notion of the decline of experience in modernity is accepted, its recurrence as a
trope has certainly led to a widespread lamentation on the crisis of experience, nostalgia for the
humanist subject and for “authentic experience”. Indeed, as Valverde notes, “experience just isn’t
what it used to be” (Valverde 2004:68).
In the light of phenomenological methods, various groups have pursued the valorisation of
experiential, embodied knowledge as defined through this binary as a means of contesting dominant
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modes of knowledge that produce subjugated subjectivities. Two examples of this are discussed
below.
Feminist consciousness-raising through shared experience
Feminist thought often adopts a more embodied and experiential perspective for two reasons.
Firstly, the notion of the “personal as political” has been central to feminist projects since the
beginning of second-wave feminism (Hanisch 1969:204). This has accordingly led to an increase in
which practices and spaces are considered as suitable objects for social scientific investigation,
meaning that aspects of the private sphere, including marital and sexual relationships, domestic
labour and childbearing have become topics discussed in the social sciences. (Gavron 1966; Friedan
1971; Firestone 1972; Oakley 1976; Oakley 1979). As a result, the analysis of experience has been
important to thinking about how the minutiae of private and intimate life are both spheres through
which subjugation occurs and a political battlefield for feminist praxis. Secondly, women’s bodies are
central signifiers in their sexed subjectification: they have been subjected to symbolic and material
appropriation, exploitation and violence, and moreover have been associated with an essential
femininity through biological reductionism that the feminist project encounters at every turn. A
move towards thinking about gendered embodiment, then, provides a way to make this more
apparent.
During the second-wave feminist period, of the late 1960s and 1970s, the practice of consciousnessraising and the use of consciousness-raising groups were seen as a political tool in the undoing of
patriarchy. Consciousness-raising groups acted as sites for the production of experiential knowledge,
as sites for sharing experiences and testimonies (Hanisch 1969; Rowbotham 1973; Allen, Sanders et
al. 1974; Sarachild 1978; Brownmiller 1999). These groups would involve a sharing of personal
experience of particular aspects of women’s lives, such as husbands, abortion or childbirth, and take
place in a private house or public space, in a small group environment. In her autobiographical
history of the second-wave feminist movement, the journalist Susan Brownmiller describes how
consciousness raising groups involved “the free and simple technique of ‘going around the room and
speaking from your own experience’ on a given subject with no formal leader” (Brownmiller
1999:79-80). Consciousness-raising groups also led to more public sharing of experiential knowledge,
such as during the “public speak outs” organised by the Redstockings feminist group in the USA
(Brownmiller 1999:105-6).
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Kathie Sarachild wrote in her manifesto for consciousness-raising, printed in the periodical Feminist
Revolution:
We assume that our feelings are telling us something from which we can learn... that our feelings
mean something worth analyzing... that our feelings are saying something political, something
reflecting fear that something bad will happen to us or hope, desire, knowledge that something
good will happen to us. [...] In our groups, let's share our feelings and pool them. Let's let
ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to
actions (Sarachild 1978:202).
Clearly, then, embodied experience and feelings are being valorised as having the potential to
contain political messages and to rethink the way in which women relate to the world.
Referring to the Marxist concept of “false consciousness”, feminists involved in consciousness raising
practices participated in a sharing of experiences and a specific politicisation of those experiences
through the production of a shared feminist vocabulary, which named those experiences as
patriarchal. This would then lead to the production of a new “feminist consciousness” which would
overcome patriarchal “false consciousness” in order to reveal the truth of their conditions of
existence. In other words, then, consciousness-raising was about the making public of personal
experience in such an environment as to collectively produce feminist knowledge and discourse,
which would then lead to the production of a specifically feminist, and more “real” consciousness,
that has not been tainted and made false by patriarchal structures. As Stanley and Wise discuss,
‘feminist consciousness’ makes available to us a previously untapped store of knowledge about what
it is to be a woman, what the social world looks like to a women, how it is constructed and
negotiated by women. However, this knowledge is made available to us through feminism’s
insistence on the importance of the ‘personal’ (Stanley and Wise 1982:117). Marsha Rowe, an editor
of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, wrote that:
consciousness-raising is essentially a wider consciousness. It lifts the mysterious veils of
womanhood … it wriggles away from the notion that we have been free to become what we
will… we can understand the way our lives have been determined by our class and our sex (Rowe
1975:6).
The second-wave feminist practice of consciousness-raising, then, involves two things. Firstly, the
production of new, specifically feminist collective knowledges that contest dominant (patriarchal)
knowledges about aspects of women’s lives. Secondly, consciousness-raising constitutes a specific
practice of valorisation of experience and the production of legitimate and collective knowledge
based on embodied feelings and experience as counter to that produced through discursive
structures which are perceived to be oppressive and dominating.
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Experiential knowledge and user-led self-help groups
The American scholar Thomasina Borkman, in her research on self-help and mutual aid groups,
describes experiential knowledge in terms of a categorisation of embodied, affective knowledge
based on having undergone specific and affecting life experiences (Borkman 1976; Borkman 1984;
Katz 1985; Borkman 1990; Powell 1990; Borkman 1999; Jensen 2000; Munn-Giddings and McVicar
2006). Borkman distinguished between experiential knowledge, professional knowledge and lay
knowledge, arguing that experiential knowledge emerges from a group situation and is based on
“direct” experience, which is then reflected on and agreed on in a group environment. This form of
knowledge production, then, is “specialised knowledge, grounded in an
individual’s lived
experience” (Borkman 1990:3). While professional knowledge is understood as being university or
institution-based, and grounded in theory or scientific principles, experiential knowledge is seen as
concrete, grounded in lived experience and holistic (Borkman 1976). Referring to the civil rights
movements as one way in which experiential knowledge has “taken hold”, Borkman argued that
through these movements, and their basis in personal experience, “experiential authority” was
claimed, which gave those involved “power to take their own and their peers’ stories seriously. They
claimed cultural rights, along with civil and human rights”(Borkman 1990:7). Borkman describes
cultural rights in terms of the “right to name yourself” (Borkman 1990:7).
With regard to self-help movements in the US, Borkman charts the “experiential frame of reference”
amongst groups. She argues that the shared and collectively produced knowledge of the self-help
group “objectifies the subjective experiences of individuals as the commonly recognised experience
of a group” (Borkman 1990:9). As such, self-help groups are considered as “experiential learning
communities” (Borkman 1990:21) where templates are created for problems and their resolution,
and where raw experience is reflected upon. For Borkman, experiential knowledge is also distinctive
in terms of the weight given in its production to the emotions.
Similarly, the Foucauldian scholar Mariana Valverde’s work on Alcoholics Anonymous charts the
production of knowledges in the AA meeting and its surrounding discursive forms, such as books,
pamphlets and practices. As a non expert-led network, she argues, AA is highly successful due to its
“hybrid approach” and moreover this success challenges the authority of experts. Its success lies in
its practice based approach of “combining technologies for governing the self with techniques for
running democratic organisations” (Valverde and White-Mair 1999:407). She suggests that:
the absence of leaders and experts in AA has turned out to be integrally connected to the
implicit, quiet abolition of the usual ethical hierarchy of ‘means’ versus ‘ends’, lowly techniques
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of self versus high ethical values. In AA, not only is there no distinction between therapists or
pastors and clients; the same techniques that democratise the organisation also effect a radical
deconstruction of the whole Kantian tradition (Valverde and White-Mair 1999:407).
Here, then, authority is produced through the specific techniques and technologies of Alcoholics
Anonymous, and the recounting of lived experience is central to this. Munn-Giddings, who has
worked with self-help groups in the UK argues that the knowledges that are produced within the
setting of the self-help group does not replace existing services, but instead enable a “more
confident and appropriate use of existing services, as well as challenging them” (Munn-Giddings and
McVicar 2006:33).
What is clear from much of the literature on self-help groups is the way in which experiential
knowledge has emerged as a means through which the authority of professional knowledges can be
challenged through direct referral to the authority of experience. Other writers have discussed how
experiential knowledge takes place in other settings, alongside or contra to, other legitimised
knowledges, for example in thinking about nature conservation (Fazey, Fazey et al. 2006), or in
pregnancy and childbirth practices (Abel and Browner 1998). Experiential knowledge, then, is
positioned as a supplement for, or a counter to, formal, institutional knowledge that is the property
of professionals. As such, it is positioned as an other to scientific and professional knowledge.
Experts by experience contra scientific expertise
The above examples, as well as others from the philosophy of science and epistemology, suggest
that these types of knowledge are constructed discursively in order to produce an opposition
between experience and scientific knowledge. This, of course, is also true of debates between
positivists and interpretivists in social science methodology. However, it is clear that scientific
knowledge, as knowledge gained through empirical, observable means, is of course experiential as
well, given that it is based on an interaction between humans and technologies in the practices of its
production.
In his introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, also printed as “Life:
experience and science”, Michel Foucault identifies a cleavage in the history of thought and of
knowledge between those interested in experience, and those who are interested in the “concept”
(Foucault 1994). In the former category he places thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, on the
other Comte, Canguilhem and Bachelard among others. He traces this cleavage back further through
the 19th century to the 17th century rationalists, but specifically focuses on its importance to the
emergence of phenomenology through Husserl in particular. This cleavage separates knowledge,
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rationality and science from experience, subjectivity and meaning. The discipline of phenomenology,
then, can be seen to emerge from this split between rational, scientific knowledge on the one hand
and experiential, embodied knowledge on the other. The dualism implied in this split is central to an
understanding of the different values placed on experience and rational knowledge. Foucault also
draws attention to the way in which these different types of knowledge were perceived as “alive”
(experience) and “dead” (the concept). The framing of the opposition of experience versus the
objectivity of science was immensely problematic. In trying to challenge the dominance of scientific
knowledge, then, a dualism was set up in the context of phenomenology and feminism between
scientific and experiential kinds of knowledge. Scientific knowledge became tied to the objective,
and was opened up to critique in the emancipatory struggles of protest movements such as
feminism, gay rights and postcolonial struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Techniques such as
consciousness-raising, self-help groups, confessional writing and political speeches drew upon
stories and experiences to combat those claims to objectivity that masked oppressive social
relations, and in doing so, attempted to position experience as another objectivity through which to
claim authority of knowledge.
Arguably, in today’s neo-liberal context, whilst the problems identified by these movements endure,
the distinction between scientific knowledge and experiential knowledge has become less useful as a
critical tool. Indeed, spaces are far more hybridised; professionals who work on and in communities
draw upon their experiential knowledge and legitimise their authority through it, while community
members draw upon, and legitimise themselves through a multiplicity of technical and professional
knowledges that are in turn informed by various intersecting and inconsistent scientific discourses.
Similarly, many organisations such as health authorities formally recognise “experts by experience”
(Noorani 2011).But questions surrounding power relationships and types of knowledge persist.
The critique of the objective by the experiential may have been a useful approach for social
movements that were faced with authoritarian social structures, but we suggest that contemporary
research agendas that appreciate the positivity of authority in producing vibrant and connected
communities must appreciate the ‘scientisation’ or the ‘objectification’ of the experiential – that is,
their power as objective (in terms of the definition proposed above), not in opposition to the
objective. Scientific experiments are indeed one way in which experiential knowledge is achieved,
and this knowledge is very much tied to notions of objectivity through the institution of “science”.
Critiques of lived experience
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In the late twentieth century, the “linguistic turn” and the rise of poststructuralist theory has seen
various critiques of the humanist concept of experience. This is clear in Derrida’s critique of presence
which directly opposes itself to a Husserlian understanding of the self-presence of experience and
speech (Derrida 1976; Derrida 1978; Derrida 1982). The poststructuralist critique of the subject
specifically calls into question the possibility of positioning the subject, and his or her experience, as
an a priori, meaning that subjects and subjectivities have to be considered in terms of the conditions
through which they are produced. This then troubles both the notion of the subjective and the
objective (Foucault 1982).
Foucault’s writing on experience is central to the critique of subjectivity that this movement
embraces. He explicitly characterises his genealogical work as a history of experience (Foucault
1992:4; Foucault 2008:5-7), seeing experience itself, the process of experiencing – perceiving, seeing,
judging, feeling, knowing, being subject – as historical. Experience is not the seeing and feeling that
is done by a subject, the product of historical conditions that determine what is seeable, sayable and
feelable (see also Deleuze 1988:41-58). The history and politics of bodies, then, is the history and
politics of the formation of experience. Recently, other thinkers, including members of the ARN,
have been investigating the concept of experience without a subject (Dawney 2011; Blencowe
forthcoming 2011). This echoes the work of Martin Jay, who argues that the concept of experience is
interesting since it lies at the “nodal point of the intersection between public discourse and private
subjectivity” (Jay 2005:6)1.
In “Man and his doubles”, chapter nine of The Order of Things, Foucault critiques the concept of
lived experience as an a priori, arguing that the modes of experience and of the empirical are
interconnected: “what is given in experience and what renders experience possible correspond to
one another in an endless oscillation” (Foucault 1970:336). Experience and knowledge, for Foucault,
involve the historical production of what is visible and what is sayable: the production of limits to
experience and to knowledge, and to the experience of the body. In this way, the dualism between
experience and “the concept” becomes erased. Following Canguilhem, Foucault is interested in the
concept as an aspect of living, the “concept in life” (Foucault 1994:475). He writes:
Forming concepts is a way of living not of killing life; it is a way to live in relative mobility and not
a way to immobilize life; 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, 2000b: 475).
1
Gutting, G. (2002). "Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience." Boundary 2: 69-85, Rayner, T. (2003). "Between fiction and
reflection: Foucault and the experience book." Continental Philosophy Review 36: 27-43, Lemke, T. (2011). "Critique and
Experience in Foucault." Theory, Culture & Society 28(4): 26-48.
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For Foucault, this is not the opposite or alternative to theories, concepts or intellectualisation. Nor is
experience authentic “real life”, nor the radical particularity of “everyday life” or “lived experience”.
Forming concepts, and producing objectivities, is a practice of the ongoing production of the seeable
and the sayable. Dawney discusses the concept of the experiential field: the material conditions of
possibility through which the embodied production of experience through what she calls the
“embodied imagination” provides the limit points, the parameters, as well as the structuring
conditions for the specificities of the world as experienced affectively (Dawney 2011).
Poststructuralist thinkers argue, then, that experience is not and cannot be originary – it is produced
through particular material forces and relations that govern its possibility and potentiality. It is
historical and contingent. It moves above, below and alongside the subject. As such, experience is
called into question, and its quasi-mystical status as a special kind of knowledge which we should try
not to lose is also troubled in poststructuralist perspectives.
These challenges to the notion of experience, subjectivity and presence problematise the
classificatory structures through which types of knowledge are differentiated. For example, the
politics and practices of second-wave feminism has been critiqued by poststructural feminists in the
light of the “linguistic turn” and the displacing of the subject that is central to the concerns of
Foucault, Derrida and Butler, for example. This is clear in the feminist critique of identity politics
(Scott 1991; Downs 1993; Scott 1993; Butler, Cornell et al. 1998), and also in the relationship
between these practices and the critique of ideology , (Butler 1993; Benhabib, Butler et al. 1995;
Butler 1997; Boyne 1999; Butler 2006). The critique of experience is also apparent in literature on
trauma (Caruth 1995; Caruth 1996) and in work in geography under the banner of
nonrepresentational theory (Harrison 2007; Harrison 2007; Harrison 2007; Bissell 2010).
Clearly the opposition of scientific and experiential knowledge produced in the context of the selfhelp group and identified in the work of Borkman is another example of the historical separation of
these types of knowledges. Borkman and her interlocutors valorise the experiential over the
institutionalised, medicalised scientific modes of knowledge in order to produce a resistant, counterknowledge that empowers. However, in doing this, they fall foul of the false dualism that Foucault
finds running through the history of western thought.
In terms of social science methodology, this challenge includes James Clifford’s critique of
experiential knowledge production through his work on ethnographic experience and authority
(Clifford 1986; Clifford 1988), and also feminist critiques of the universal subject of experience, such
as Joan Scott’s questioning the possibility of historians reproducing lived experience (Scott 1991),
Young’s feminist account of embodied experience (Young 2005) and Butler’s critique of Merleau11
Ponty (Butler 1999). This position is summed up by Scott’s call to historians to focus their efforts
upon the “analysis of the production of knowledge itself” rather than the reconstruction and
communication of lived experience, stating that “it is not individuals who have experience, but
subjects who are constituted through experience” (Scott 1991:779, 797). Other poststructuralist
feminists in particular, have, through the critique of the valorising of experience, offered a critique of
identity politics and the authority to speak on behalf of the category of “women” or others by virtue
of representing an identity group (Butler 1988; Butler 2006).
Returns to experience in poststructuralist perspectives
Nonetheless, while the poststructuralist turn has recognised the impossibility of truth and the
impossibility of giving an account of pure experience (as practices of truth-telling and truthproduction), the techniques of the second-wave feminist movement do have much to offer us in
terms of a consideration of the ways in which knowledges are produced collectively through
experience, and this perspective has been acknowledged by recent poststructuralist thinkers.
Despite her critiques of consciousness-raising in her book Imaginary Bodies, the feminist scholar
Moira Gatens discusses how the activity of consciousness-raising was seen as a way to access a truth
outside of ideology – as a way of bringing about culture change through the sharing of embodied
knowledge and experience of living in a male dominated society and raising such knowledge to the
level of theory (Gatens 1996). From a Foucauldian perspective, Valverde discusses consciousnessraising as askesis, as a technology of the self, arguing for its role in subject production, where
“dialogical practices involving peer support, including support groups for women not run on a
feminist basis – constitute a site for askesis, or, to put it in Foucauldian terms, a venue for
developing and using certain technologies of the self”. She describes how the interface between the
personal and political was performed in the articulation of specific experiences thus:
first, the dialogic practices developed in peer-support groups and feminist consciousness-raising
create a strong link between individual stories and collective issues and political demands.
Second, the same practices also have effects that go in the opposite direction: they inscribe
larger political analyses into one’s own biography and even one’s very body (Valverde 2004:82).
Feminist truth-telling, then, can be considered in terms of a practice of community production
through experiential knowledge. As such, its validity as a practice does not necessarily have to rely
on a single, unquestionable truth. Instead, communities, truths and subjects are formed through the
practice of truth-telling itself: “the description of experiences construed by the speaker as
“gendered” ....is generally taken (by feminists) to lead to the discovery of a hitherto hidden
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experiential truth, a truth that has value not only for the speaker or her immediate audience but also
for the movement as a whole” (Valverde 2004:67). In other words, truths are produced through the
activity of truth telling.
Feminist truth-telling, I would argue, can help to construct a community united both through
shared memory and through common hopes. Or to put it in less poetic, more Foucauldian
language: the effectivity of the angel that incites us to remember the past and hope for the
future does not depend on its ontological status (Valverde 2004:74).
These forms of valorisation of experiential knowledge, then, do contribute to a pluralisation of
authoritative knowledges, and attempt to valorise experiential knowledge that is also happening in
other locations in contemporary western society (see Dawney 2011).
Experience and experimentation
The words “experience” and “experiment”, as well as “expert” have a common root “per”, meaning
peril. All three refer to the overcoming of perils. “To become an expert one must dare to confront
the perils of the new” (Tuan 1977:9). In French, the term experience means both to experience and
to experiment. This double meaning is expressly mobilised by Foucault in his analysis of experience.
Hence, O’Leary discusses the way in which Foucault uses the term both to describe dominant modes
of subjectivation and objectivation, at the same time as considering experience as a process of
pushing against historical limits. In his account of Foucault’s archaeology of experience, he describes
how:
the critical project aims not simply to understand the historical grounds of our experience, but to
see to what extent it would be possible to change that experience – to transform it, through a
critical work of thought upon itself (O'Leary 2008:14).
In Foucault, then, experience can be considered as a way of experimenting as well as a mode of
structuring our relations with the world: as a way in which to “interrogate and being interrogated by
the world” (Blencowe forthcoming 2011:273). Other writers have discussed this, such as Dewey,
who argues that the basis for scientific knowledge should be engagement with the world (Dewey
1926; Dewey 1929). The work of Gibson-Graham is a further example of the way in which knowledge
is produced through experimentation, where social projects are considered as experiments – as
things to learn from. The process of action research produces information about specific situations
which can then be used in order to work on, change and improve those situations (Gibson-Graham
2006; Gibson-Graham 2006).
Recently, William Connolly has tried to suture the division between subjective and objective
knowledge through a consideration of the relationship between phenomenology and neuroscience,
13
which he attempts to do without falling foul of biological or cultural reductionism. In thinking
through these problematics, he draws on the philosophy of Spinoza and his contemporary followers,
such as Stuart Hampshire and Gilles Deleuze, in order to consider how a parallelist conception of the
relationship between mind and body (Hampshire 1951:63; Spinoza 1996:35; Dawney 2011:66) can
help to rethink this binary.
Since Spinoza suggests that changes in thought correspond in some way to changes in the body,
Connolly positions corporeal techniques as essential for the altering of patters of thought, judgment
and feeling, arguing that “[for] Spinoza this sets the stage for modern encounters between
experiment and experience” (Connolly 2006:68). He goes on to suggest that:
it is through creative movement back and forth among experience, reflection upon it,
experimental observation, reflexive awareness of such experiments, and the cautious application
of specific techniques to individuals and groups that the most promising and dangerous
possibilities emerge (Connolly 2006:72).
Connolly draws attention to certain experiments in neuroscience, which can lead to an informed and
critical reflection on cultural experience, and in doing so, affect the way in which experience is
understood. Also, In his work on the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine”, he also discusses
how technologies of collective mobilization operate through nonconscious means of affective
capture, or grip, and advocates the development of “countertechniques of cultural-corporeal
infusion, tactics that work upon individuals and constituencies at the visceral level as they also
engage the higher intellectual registers” (Connolly 2006:74).
Mutual aid as experimental, experiential knowledge
A final approach for understanding the relationship between authority and experience is developed
in the context of action research, which aims to enable participants to produce knowledge through
exceptional practices, rather than to capture the existing experiences that people supposedly have.
Advocates of these methods, such as JK Gibson-Graham, aim to affirm and foster people’s capacities
as knowledge producers – not simply through giving people access to scientific knowledge but by
helping people to develop experiential knowledge as a hybrid, authoritative form of knowledge
production that is valorised within the research and experimental context. Blencowe argues that to
really connect communities with research on communities, in a fashion that fosters and does not
destroy authority, we need to affirm the multiplicity of objectivity and talk openly about the real,
objective, nature of different types of knowledge. In the final section, I consider the concept of
mutual aid and the participatory contexts in which this has been fostered in order to suggest that
14
community production based on mutual aid through experiential knowledge and skills can lead to
new forms of authority and cohesion REF.
Considering communities as knowledge-producers orients us towards the multiplicity of ways that
such knowledges are produced, and affirms the value of communities as projects of collective
inquiry. Writers on self-help groups have also emphasised the concept of mutual aid (Wenger 1993;
Borkman 1999; Williams and Windebank 2000; Munn-Giddings 2001), which is seen as a way of
performing and strengthening community.
Mutual aid is of interest here because it relies on the production and valorisation of specific types of
knowledge in the production of communities. While the concept of mutual aid in terms of building
communities can be associated with a rolling back of the state (what we might today consider a ‘big
society’ agenda) through the replacement of state welfare provision with informal welfare (Jordan
1998), this is not a necessary aspect of a mutual aid-led model of community production and indeed
mutual aid can run alongside more formal community-building agendas.
The concept of mutual aid is often claimed to originate with the work of the Russian thinker Peter
Kropotkin (1842-1921). The writings of Kropotkin, the “anarchist prince”, have influenced the
anarchist movement, particularly in Spain, and argued that the hierarchical structure of the state
actually stifles the development and capacity of mutual aid, since the State eliminates
communitarian institutions. Localised cooperation, however, can endure after the rise of
bureaucratic government. Kropotkin argued that the concept of reciprocity is central to this.
Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid (Kropotkin 2009) is often cited as an important influence on recent
work on mutual aid. Kropotkin argued that mutual aid and cooperation are central factors of human
evolution, arguing against the emphasis placed on competition by many social Darwinists at the
time.
The notion of mutual aid provides a way of thinking about the making of communities through
mutual support and the production of situated and experiential knowledges that can challenge those
knowledges produced by experts in particular. Williams and Windebank’s research on mutual aid in
a deprived area of Southampton specifically refers to the role of knowledge in mutual aid
involvement, noting that research participants who were in work, and hence had aspects to specific
technical knowledges through their work experience, participated in mutual aid more than those
who didn’t. They also identified barriers to mutual aid in terms of lack of equipment and transport as
well as lack of knowledge. They argue that mutual aid, rather than being considered as a barrier to
participation, should be considered as an alternative to participation in the formal economy, that it
15
acts as a “social cement”, that it paves the way for a wider definition of work that also takes into
account aspects of community work undertaken informally, that contribute to a:
society in which there is the provision of work (both employment, self-help and mutual aid) and
income in order to give citizens the means of satisfying their basic material needs and desires
(Williams and Windebank 2000:139).
In this formulation, mutual aid is a central practice of community, and practical knowledge, which is
both professional and experiential, is seen as a vital way in which community production through
mutual aid can occur. This view is also held by Gibson-Graham, whose action research is undertaken
as a way of empowering people by making them aware of how they contribute to the economy, and
in doing so fostering new practices of community such as community garden centres. (GibsonGraham 2006). In Gibson-Graham’s work, different types of transaction, labour, enterprise and the
distribution of surplus are surveyed in order to rethink the language of economy and to produce a
new language of the “diverse economy” (Gibson-Graham 2006:xii). Through action research, GibsonGraham work to deconstruct the discourse of capitalist globalisation and the binary of
market/nonmarket, and as such they are involved in a process of resignification, a development of
the concept of “community economy” as – an “ethical project of acknowledging relationships and
making connections” (Gibson-Graham 2006:xv). They work to perform community as an “ethical and
political space of decision, not a geographic or social commonality, and community is its outcome
rather than a ground” (Gibson-Graham 2006:xv). Their action research based approach to the
ambitious project of deconstructing and resignifying capitalist economics, then, involved a clear
participatory aspect whereby specific economic activities are recognised and valorised, through their
utterance in a practice similar to that described by those working in other truth-telling and
experiential knowledge settings such as the consciousness-raising group and the self-help group.
Gibson-Graham refer specifically to the production of embodied experience as a political and
methodological strategy:
if to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and if that relationship is always reciprocal, then
the project of history making is never a distant one, but always right here, on the borders of our
sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies (Gibson-Graham 2006:xvi).
In other words, the participatory action research strategies proposed and enacted by Gibson
Graham clearly contribute to the production of diffused experiential knowledge, and to the
production of specific modes of consciousness.
Conclusion
16
In this review, we have considered how writers have discussed the concept of experience and the
notion of experiential knowledge in a variety of contexts. Firstly, the review discusses the concept of
experience through the approaches of phenomenology and other disciplines. Here, we have shoewn
how in many cases the idea of experience and experiential knowledge is positioned in opposition to
rational objective knowledge. The review then focused on how certain politicised practices of
experiential knowledge production have firstly attempted to claim and valorise this type of
knowledge over more dominant forms, and secondly have, in doing so, reiterated the false binary
between experiential and objective knowledge. The review then goes to situate this binary
historically through the work of Foucault and his critique of phenomenology, and has also shown
how more recent writers have critiqued the possibility of experience after poststructuralism.
However, certain particularly feminist writers have sought to rethink and reclaim the notion of
experience and experiential knowledge as useful for specific political ends, while recognising the
plurality of objective truths and the impossibility of speaking from a position that lies outside of
social and cultural relations. By drawing attention to these debates, we have addressed the
relationship between authority and experience, showing how, through particular practices that
articulate life experience, such as the support group, the consciousness raising group and the
testimony, authority is granted to certain figures (Dawney 2011).
Finally, we turned to the etymological relationship between experience and experimentation,
discussing the homonymity of these terms in French and showing how some writers have used this
in order to think through how experimentation through the exposure of the self to different
scenarios and contexts, can lead to a consideration of authority production in research settings. In
particular, recent action researchers have sought to involve participants in practices and
experiments that enable them to reflect on their experiences and build and produce experiential
knowledge as a means of both critique and capacity building.
17
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