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

Author(s): Craig Ireland

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 52, Everyday Life (Autumn, 2002), pp. 86-107
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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THEAPPEALTO EXPERIENCE
AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES
ON A PERSISTENT
VARIATIONS THOMPSONIAN
THEME

Craig Ireland

L'hyper-concretest aussi abstrait que les generalites 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 misbe-
havior in Czechoslovakia, helped foster a Gramscian turn where con-
cerns 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 structural-
ism 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 sub-
jective 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,

CulturalCritique52-Fall 2002-Copyright 2002 Regents of the Universityof Minnesota

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 THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 87

where blows have been exchanged between those who debunk the
concept of experience as an ontotheological relic and those who, con-
versely, 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 coun-
terhistories 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 reha-
bilitate the viability of the term "experience" for subaltern historiog-
raphy 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 experi-
ence 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 experi-
ence as the stuff of an antiquated philosophy of consciousness
against those who argue that subaltern experience provides an en-
clave against strong structural determination. Lost in such debates,
however, have been the potential consequences of appeals to imme-
diate 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 unwit-
tingly 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

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88 | CRAIGIRELAND

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 para-academia-
so much so that experience has increasingly become the core concept
or key word of subaltern groups and the rallying call for what Craig
Calhoun calls the "new social movements" in which "experience is
made the pure ground of knowledge, the basis of an essentialized
standpoint of critical awareness" (468 n.64).
The consequences of such appeals to experience can best be
addressed not by individually considering disparate currents, but by
seeking their common denominator. And in this regard, E. P. Thomp-
son will occupy the foreground. It is safe to say that what started as
an altercation between Thompson and Althusser has since spawned
academic and para-academic "histories from below" and subaltern
cultural inquiries that, for all their differences, share the idea that the
identities and counterhistories of the disenfranchised can be but-
tressed by the specificity of a group's concrete experiences. Much
theorizing on experience by certain cultural and historiographical
trends, as many have already pointed out, has been but a variation
on a persistent Thompsonian theme in which Thompson's "kind of
use of experience has the same foundational status if we substitute
'women's' or 'black' or 'lesbian' or 'homosexual' for 'working class'"
(Scott, 786).
To retrace the steps in Thompson's formulation of his influential
notion of experience is to clarify some of the common presupposi-
tions behind current subaltern appeals to experience. It is also to
bring to the fore the potential sociopolitical consequences of such
appeals. More important still, such a reexamination of Thompsonian
experience lays the groundwork for raising a question that has yet to
be addressed, namely, why the term "experience," notoriously beset
as it is by semantic ambiguity and political ambivalence, continues to
this day to appeal to various disciplines in the humanities.

THE WAGER ON IMMEDIACY

If E. P. Thompson focused on experience, it was, as he himself made

clear, in order both to allow for the subject to reenter history-agency

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 89

was being considerably manhandled at the time by semiology and

structuralism-and to rehistoricize class rather than to write it off, as
Marxist structuralism was wont to do, as the mere hapless "effect of
an ulterior structure."' By the time Thompson set out to write his
history of the English working class, Althusser's version of struc-
turalism had turned ideology into so tentacular an entity that the
very possibility of agency became wishful thinking at best. It was
no longer sufficient to clamor for counterhistories and local cultures,
for as readily penetrable as these appeared to be by ideology, they
were unable to guarantee the specificity of group identity-a specifi-
city without which a group would hardly be in a position to differen-
tiate itself from other groups (such as those of the ruling class), let
alone articulate its own socioeconomic interests. Counterhistories,
moreover, had yet to be written, and subaltern cultures, when pre-
sent, were in need of reinvigoration.
In order to avoid the reduction of class to the passive effect of an
ulterior structure, while at the same time acknowledging the perva-
siveness of dominant cultural hegemony, Thompson argued that
class specificity resides in the specificity of its members' daily imme-
diate experiences-experiences that are determined by the position
of a class within a mode of production, and which are mediated
or "handled" (to use his expression) by the local culture of a par-
ticular class. It is through such a localized sharing and articulation
of experience, so Thompson tells us, that a class can achieve self-
consciousness, come to discern its socioeconomic interests, and thus
galvanize itself into concerted political action. By this, Thompson
hoped to allow for the possibility of agency and class consciousness
while avoiding both the Scylla of naive voluntarism and the Charybdis
of strong structural determinism. As he himself described what his
work attempted to achieve: "We have explored, both in theory and
in practice, those junction concepts (such as 'need,' 'class' and 'deter-
mine') by which, through the missing term 'experience,' structure is
transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters history" (Povertyof
Theory,170).
The expectations tied to the antihegemonic potential of experi-
ence were sanguine-to say the least. Echoing Thompson's position,
Peter Fuller tells us that "courageous, empirical fidelity to experi-
ence can, under certain circumstances at least, cut through ideology.

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90 I CRAIGIRELAND

Experience is not wholly determined by ideology: it is very often at

odds with it, causing constant ruptures and fissures within the ideo-
logical ice flows" (Fuller, 235). And Thompson's wager on experience
was hardly an isolated anomaly, reinforced as it was by the cultur-
alist current of British Marxism (with names such as Raymond
Williams, Paul Willis, and John Berger) and, later, by strands of sub-
altern studies and historians of difference. Just as for Thompson the
immediacy of experience, that "raw material" that consciousness
elaborates in "class ways" within a local culture, needed only to be
inserted within a counterhistory in order for class consciousness to
arise and agency to materialize, likewise certain later subaltern
endeavors call for a politics of experience, telling us, for example, as
does Messer-Davidow, that "we come to recognize that agencies and
perspectives are centred in our selves ... by grounding ourselves
in our experiences, politicizing them, and together constructing a
collective reality" (Messer-Davidow, 87). Much rides on experience,
in other words, and because it is perceived as a potential fissure in
an otherwise unassailable hegemonic order, it is imperative that it
not be distorted by dominant ideological mediation. One historian
of cultural studies in fact goes so far as to characterize Thompson's
life work as a "search for experience that has not been mediated"
(Davies, 100).
But if this search for unmediated experience eventually became
frenetic, it was because experience was increasingly seen as the last
vestige of an antiquated philosophy of consciousness, as so much
claptrap, in other words, which was hardly exempt from ideological
determination. Since the linguistic turn, the relation of experience to
language has indeed been seen in a different light: parole no longer
carried to verbal expression the prediscursive unsaid of experience,
and meaning was seen as appearing only with the signifier. Meaning
was not so much the meaning of experience-it was not, to phrase
it differently, the meaning experience would have had before its
expression-than it was instead the meaning experience can receive
in a discourse that articulates it within a system of signifying opposi-
tions. No longer conflated with its expression, experience alone
was no longer in a position to convey one's status as exploiter or
exploitee, as elite or subaltern, by the mere fact of belonging to some-
one so positioned in the structural whole of society. Because the very

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 91

consciousness of one's position is always already mediated by ideol-

ogy, discourse, and language, mechanisms of domination and repres-
sion are no longer to be deduced from one's structural position as
such: "By bringing to light the heterogeneity of the signifier to lived
experience [experiencevecue],"Vincent Descombes reminds us, "semi-
ology involved a political lesson. It showed how the hold of institu-
tions over individuals amounted to the domination of a language"
(129).2 And it is, of course, precisely on such a decalage between
experience and knowledge that Althusser's notion of ideology rests-
a notion according to which the rapport of lived experience to the real
conditions of existence is, at best, imaginary and certainly not an
epistemological access to the real. If it is true, as it is according to
Althusser, that ideology is the "imaginary relationship of individuals
to the real conditions in which they live" and that this ideology is
"identical with the 'lived' experience of human existence itself" (165),
then ideology is not to be bypassed by appeals to experience.
All of this spelled considerable trouble for those who had staked
the condition of possibility of agency on a dialectic of class conflict
that presupposed consciousness, or at least the possibility of con-
sciousness, of one's class position within a mode of production. In
fact, things did not fare well for any approach that hoped that the
mere fact of being positioned in the larger social whole, say as
woman or subaltern, was a sufficient condition of possibility for a
certain form of consciousness. Unlike the phenomenology of Merleau-
Ponty, which endowed subjectivity with a certain Spielraum,or room
to maneuver, by allowing for the cogito to be derived from the perci-
pio, or at least by considering equiprimordial both understanding
and affective situatedness (in the manner of pre-Kehre Heidegger's
Verstehen, Befindlichkeit,and Stimmung), structuralism underscored
the disjunction between experience and knowledge, and as a result it
doomed to failure any theory advocating that experiences specific to
a group could yield group consciousness or articulate group interests.

THE RETREATTO MATERIALITY

It was precisely in response to this turn of events that the culturalist

strain in British Marxism, as well as subsequent strands in subaltern

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92 I CRAIGIRELAND

studies, came to see experience as that which, by virtue of its pre-

discursive immediacy, radically demarcates itself from and there-
fore evades discursive or ideological mediation and determination.
Because the imposition of state ideology, as Thompson saw it, "can-
not succeed unless there is congruence between the imposed rules
and view of life and the necessary business of living in a given mode
of production" (Poverty of Theory,367), something was needed that
might sabotage such a congruence and, in so doing, bypass strong
structural determination. Of the possible candidates, the perceived
nonmediatedness, or immediacy, of experience proved to be particu-
larly seductive. Indeed, because of its seemingly immediate, that is,
its nondiscursive or nonideological contact with environing social
being, experience represented just that sort of untainted "raw mater-
ial" (to use Thompson's expression) that, in order to congeal into
class or group self-consciousness and agency, needed but to be artic-
ulated by a regionalized culture sufficiently specific to those sharing
particular experiences. Experience, in short, represented the stuff (in
the sense of its Germanic cognate, Stoff, that is, resistant material)
that, impervious as it appeared to be to ideological tampering, might
furnish the material building blocks from which counterhistories
could be constructed and subaltern cultures reinforced.
Such perceptions of the counterhegemonic potential of experi-
ence were encouraged by the connotations the word had acquired
in the Anglo-American world. From a term that from the seventeenth
to the early eighteenth century implied knowledge gained through
both a reliance on the past as well as through observation untainted,
as Francis Bacon would say, by church dogma, superstition, and
other obscurantist idols, the concept of experience semantically
shifted by the mid- to late eighteenth century not only to that which
opposed reason, but also to that which is "full and active awareness"
of both feeling and thought and, as such, assumed an aura of authen-
ticity with which reasoning and ideas could not dispense (Williams,
126). The German equivalents of experience, whether as Erfahrung
or as the early nineteenth-century neologism Erlebnis, are likewise
informed by a conceptual and etymological history that encouraged
the association of experience with notions of counterhegemonic resis-
tance, as can be seen in the recourse to Erfahrung,by certain members
of the Frankfurt School and by certain phenomenologists as a means

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 THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 93

of countering given or dominant horizons of understanding and, as

can also be seen in the recourse by Lebensphilosophieto Erlebnis, as a
means of opposing the mediacy of abstract reason with the immedi-
acy of the concretely lived.
Thompson's notion of experience, however, does not seek to
rehabilitate the "other" of reason in the manner that Erlebnis had
in certain popularizations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Lebensphilosophie;instead, it wagers on the "other" of the
perceived immateriality of signification-the immediacy of experience
is opposed to the mediacy of ideology as the material is to the imma-
terial. If experience plays a central role in certain theories hoping
to vindicate subaltern agency, it is because of its assumed unmedi-
ated proximity with materiality. Because of its corporeal resistance to
external tampering, materiality appears as less malleable and thus
less amenable to ideological mediation, much as for Locke the quali-
ties of material spatial extension, lending themselves as they do to
palpable verification and thus less prone to perceptual distortion, are
seen as qualities more primary than the pliable and fickle secondary
qualities of sight or sound. It is true that, in order to avoid both naive
empirical positivism and strong structural determinism, Thompson
proposed that experience be understood less as binarily opposed to
structure than as a mediating third term between "conditioning" and
"agency" and at the "intersection between determination and self
activity" (Poverty of Theory, 225, 228); it nevertheless remains that
his notion of experience is imbued with material properties: "Thus
change takes place in social being which then gives rise to change in
experience," Thompson explains, "... and this experience exerts pres-
sure on existent social consciousness, raises questions, and furnishes
the material for intellectual elaboration" (200; my emphasis). As raw
material and in the manner of a Gegenstand, Thompson's notion of
experience stands against and exerts pressure on consciousness, and
although dependent on its retrospective mediation within a local cul-
ture, this experience nevertheless has all the makings of the spatially
extended solidity of matter-matter that, by presumably circumvent-
ing ideological determination, can serve as the ground from which
resistance can be mustered and alternative sociability constructed.
This Thompsonian notion of experience, as many have already
pointed out, has found its way in numerous strains of Anglo-American

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94 | CRAIGIRELAND

feminist epistemologies and subaltern studies. And rooted as it is in

prediscursive materiality, it is hardly surprising that it should have
lately migrated to what is considered by many to be the last enclave
of resistance against ideological contamination-the perceived nondis-
cursive material immediacy of the body itself. Certain North Ameri-
can feminist strands propose "experience, qua women's experience
of alienation from their own bodies, as the evidence of difference"
(Bellamy and Leontis, 167); while others, by contending that the
materiality of social practice somehow institutes a disruptive fissure
within dominant discursive regimes, have retreated, as Joan W. Scott
notes, to "the biological or physical 'experience' of the body" itself
(787-88). Others have gone so far as to see the body as the last enclave
of resistance where the nonmediated specificity of experience is
"registered" or "inscribed," in the manner of Kafka's penal colony, as
so many body piercings testifying to the irreducibly singular, telling
us, as does Chantal Maille, that "our body is becoming a new locus
of struggle, which lays claim to its difference through actions such
as body piercing" (quoted in Houde, 6).
Such a stance is, of course, beset by numerous problems that
have already been repeatedly pointed out by others and that need
not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say, as does Fredric Jameson, that
"we must be very suspicious of the reference to the body as an appeal
to immediacy (the warning goes back to the very first chapter of
Hegel's Phenomenology);even Foucault's medical and penal work
can be read as an account of the construction of the body which
rebukes premature immediacy" ("On 'Cultural Studies,"' 44). The
recent obsession with the material body is, of course, hardly in a posi-
tion to vindicate the historical materialism with which, as if to
appease Bourdieu, it often fancies itself allied-"Materialism is
scarcely achieved by a litany of the body," Jameson rightly notes, and
the materialism of the body "should not be confused with a historical
materialism that turns on praxis and on the mode of production"
(ibid.). But at stake in the recent obsession with the materiality of
bodily experience is not just an attempt to redeem historical, let alone
dialectical, materialism-something that an exclusive reliance on
immediate material experience, bodily or otherwise, is hardly in a
position to accomplish anyway; at stake is instead the condition of
possibility of an active subject and of a ground from which can be

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 95

erected strategies of resistance (to use the jargon of the 1980s) and a
politics of identity (to use the slogan of the 1990s) that might evade
the hegemony, as current parlance phrases it, of dominant discursive
formations. It is in the name of agency and cultural specificity that, to
this day, appeals are made to immediate and materially grounded
experience by those currents in subaltern studies that presuppose a
nonmediated homology or correlation between one's structural posi-
tion, one's socioeconomic interests, one's propensity for certain types
of experiences, and certain forms of consciousness or awareness.
It is, of course, unlikely that Thompson would endorse some
of the uses to which his notion of experience has been put. But that
is beside the point. Regardless of Thompson's motivations, this turn
to the material immediacy of bodily experiences is but the logical
unfolding of his argument that, for all its cautious disclaimers,
attempts to ground group specificity and agency in the nondiscursive
and the immediate. Since for the Thompsonian notion of experience
all forms of mediation are considered fair game for ideological pene-
tration, the turn to the immediate is to be expected, and the migration
toward material immediacy is but an extrapolation of such a turn.
But what are the potential consequences of such a turn?

THE SPECTER OF NEOETHNICTRIBALISM

More is involved here than some epistemological blunder. In their

bid to circumvent ideological mediation by turning to the presumed
immediacy of experience, Thompsonian experience-oriented theories
advance an argument that is not so much theoretically specious as
it is potentially dangerous: there is nothing within the logic of such
an argument that precludes the hypostatization of other nondiscur-
sive bases for group membership and specificity-bases that can as
readily be those of a group's immediate experiences as they can be
those of a group's presumed materially immediate biological charac-
teristics or physical markers of ethnicity and sexuality. If the criterion
for the disruptive antihegemonic potential of experience is its imme-
diacy, and if, as we have just seen, such a criterion can readily lead to
a fetishization of the material body itself, then what starts out as an
attempt to account for a nonmediated locus of resistance and agency

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96 | CRAIGIRELAND

can end up as a surenchereof immediacy that by but a nudge of a clus-

ter of circumstances can propel toward what Michael Piore's Beyond
Individualismcalls "biologism"-an increasingly common trend where-
by "a person's entire identity resides in a single physical character-
istic, whether it be of blackness, of deafness or of homosexuality"
(quoted in Gitlin, 6). Blut und Boden seem but a step away.
The step from a wager on immediate experience, whether from
theories hoping to account for agency or from groups struggling for
cultural recognition, to rabid neoethnic fundamentalisms is only a
possible step and not a necessary one; and the link between these two
trends is certainly not one of affinity, and still less one of causality.
What the parallelism between the two does suggest, however, is that
in spite of their divergent motivations and means, they both attempt
to ground group specificity by appealing to immediacy-by appeal-
ing, in other words, to something that is less a historical product or a
mediated construct than it is an immediately given natural entity,
whether it be the essence of a Volk, as in current tribalisms, or the
essence of material experiences specific to groups, as in strains of
Alltagsgeschichte and certain subaltern endeavors. If a potential for
biologism and the specter of neoethnic tribalism are close at hand
in certain cultural theories and social movements, it is because the
recourse to immediate experience opens the back door to what was
booted out the front door-it inadvertently naturalizes what it ini-
tially set out to historicize.
The tendency in appeals to experience toward naturalizing the
historical have already been repeatedly pointed out by those most
sympathetic to the motivations behind such appeals. Joan W. Scott-
hardly an antisubaltern historian-has argued, as have Nancy Fraser,
Rita Felski, and others, that it is precisely by predicating identity and
agency on shared nonmediated experiences that certain historians of
difference and cultural theorists in fact "locate resistance outside
its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute
of individuals"-a move that, when pushed to its logical conclusion,
"naturalizes categories such as woman, black, white, heterosexual
and homosexual by treating them as given characteristics of individ-
uals" (Scott, 777). Although such a tendency within experience-
oriented theories is rarely thematized, and rarer still is it intended, it
nevertheless logically follows from the argument according to which

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 97

group identity, specificity, and concerted political action have as their

condition of possibility the nonmediated experiences that bind or are
shared by their members. On the basis of such a stance, it is hardly
surprising that currents of gay identity politics (to take but one of the
more recent examples) should treat homosexuality, as Nancy Fraser
has noted, "as a substantive, cultural, identificatory positivity, much
like an ethnicity" (83).
It may seem unfair to impute to certain experience-oriented the-
ories an argument that, when carried to its logical conclusion, can as
readily foster an emancipatory politics of identity as it can neoethnic
tribalism. The potential for biologism hardly represents the inten-
tions of experience-oriented theories; these, after all, focus on the im-
mediacy of experience, rather than on the essence of a group, in order
to avoid strong structural determination on the one hand, and the
naturalizing of class or subaltern groups on the other. But if there can-
not be a discursive differentiation of one experience from another-the
counterhegemonic potential of experience is predicated on its pre-
discursive immediacy, and mediation is relegated to a supplemental
and retrospective operation-and if a nondiscursive or ideologically
uncontaminated common ground becomes the guarantor of group
authenticity, then the criterion for group specificiy must be those ele-
ments that unite groups in nondiscursive ways. And such elements
can as readily be those of a group's shared nonmediated experi-
ence, such as oppression, as they can be those of a group's biological
characteristics. At best, "the evidence of experience," Scott notes,
"becomes the evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way
of exploring how differences are established" (796); at worst, the
wager on the immediacy of experience fosters tribalistic reflexes that
need but a little prodding before turning into those rabid, neoethnic
"micro fascisms" against which Felix Guattari warned in his last
essay before his death (26-27).
Some have tried to counter this charge by appealing to the
heuristic or "strategic" use of essentialism in the manner advocated
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who tells us that the mere fact of
self-consciously or vigilantly resorting to naturalization or "essential-
ist discourse" is a sufficient immunization against its abuse, and
that a naturalized subaltern consciousness and subject position can
in fact prove to be provisionally emancipatory if, so Spivak argues,

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98 I CRAIGIRELAND

"knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically non-viable, the

historian then breaks this theory in a scrupulously delineated politi-
cal interest" (207). But not only does this position imply that such
potentially dangerous "strategic" tools be kept away from the un-
couth hands of the academically untrained, but it also forgets that
if the back door is left as wide-open to an emancipatory politics of
identity as it is to any demagogic premiervenu, then the very political
justification for, let alone the usefulness of, the alibi of strategic essen-
tialism becomes questionable, to say the least.3
But the tendency toward naturalizing at hand in certain experi-
ence-oriented theories stems not from any intended attempt to estab-
lish the essence of any particular group as such; this tendency instead
follows from the displacement of an "essentializing impulse" (to use
Bellamy and Leontis's phrase) from groups to the experiencesof those
groups-a move that merely reproduces elsewhere the problem that
was supposed to be addressed. When Thompson tells us that "class
experiences are determined by the productive relations into which
men are born-or enter involuntarily" and that "class consciousness
is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms"
(Making of the English WorkingClass, 10), he is not appealing to an
essence of the working class that alone allows for certain forms of
experience, nor is he proposing an essence of the working class
lurking in some shadowy recess and in need of but a nudge for it to
blossom into self-awareness; he is claiming that a class is structurally
positioned so as to expose its members to specific immediate mate-
rial experiences, and that the judicious retrospective mediation of
these experiences within a local culture helps consolidate a sense of
class specificity that can in turn be harnessed for concerted political
action. What is naturalized, then, is not so much the "experiencers"
than it is the experiences.Yet, because these experiences are them-
selves considered unmediated and given, the very category of expe-
rience, by means of which Thompson hoped to rehistoricize class and
re-endow it with agency (and, in so doing, counter what he saw as
the orthodox Marxist essentializing of class as well as the Althusser-
ian reduction of class to a structurally determined variable), turns
out to be that category through which the ahistorical naturalization
he sought to avoid reenters through the back door: class is tentatively
denaturalized, but the price paid is that class experience is now

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 99

naturalized. Although less visible than when couched in the more

traditional terms of a philosophy of consciousness, the dehistoricized
naturalization of class is shifted about only in order to resurface
elsewhere. The result, Scott notes in her assessment of the Thomp-
sonian appeal to experience, is that "working-class experience is now
the ontological foundation of working-class identity, politics, and
identity" (786).

THINK LOCALLY,ACT GLOBALLY?

What is surprising about the Thomsponian model of class or subal-

tern identity and culture is that, for all its glaring shortcomings, it
should continue to seduce numerous academic and para-academic
subaltern endeavors to this day. Part of the explanation for this lies
in the other arguments it makes in conjunction with its appeal to
immediate experience. One such complementary argument tells us
that the specter of neoethnic tribalism, while an admittedly potential
consequence of appeals to immediate experience, can nonetheless be
contained insofar as group experience is retrospectively articulated
or mediated by the micro-recitof a local culture. Because of its prox-
imity to those sharing experiences specific or natural to a particular
subaltern group, such a local culture-so the argument runs-not
only retrospectively articulates subaltern experience in terms other
than those established in advance by the dominant cultural order; but
it is also not tempted, because of its regional or local character, by the
somber totalitarian ways of metanarratives and other pretensions to
universality. As such, so the argument continues, a local culture is
less prone toward the repression of difference.
Although Thompsonian-inspired theories of experience do aim
less at the universalization than at the sharp demarcation and differ-
entiation of a group's experiences, and in so doing they do in fact
cultivate difference rather than smother it, they do not necessarily
guarantee a course of political action, or even a politics of identity,
any kinder and gentler than those metanarrative machinations they
hoped to supplant. Mechanisms of exclusion are no less present just
because they have been regionalized. In fact, the cultural model pro-
posed by Thompsonian experience-oriented theories entails less that

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100 I CRAIGIRELAND

differencesbe cultivated within groups than that they be evacuated, or

cleansed, so as to prevent the contamination of group specificity. It is
on a culture's proximity to or affinity with a group (as opposed to a
culture either imposed from above or imported from elsewhere) that
is predicated the efficiency with which a local culture can heed the
specificity of a group's nonmediated experiences, articulate these
in terms of the group's local mores and interests, and harness them
for counterhegemonic political action. A group's "difference," in
other words, is sustainable only if it bothbypasses its absorption into
dominant ideology-lest appropriation ensue-and avoids its dissi-
pation into groups and cultures different from itself-lest there
follow entropy and therefore a weakening of resistance.
The very fact of a group's difference, after all, is predicated on its
differentiation from and not its fusion with or dissolution into other
adjoining groups, however subaltern and marginal these might also
be. Thompson repeatedly emphasizes that the materialization of class
consciousness hinges on a culture specific to it where values and
norms are consolidated rather than dispersed. As he tells us, "class
happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inher-
ited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as
between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are differ-
ent from (and usually opposedto) theirs" (Making of the English Working
Class, 9; my emphasis). That Thompson should define a group's iden-
tity and interests as necessarily different from (and only as "usually,"
not necessarily, opposed to) those of other groups is no mere hap-
penstance but, on the contrary, a consequence of the "local culture"
argument: although Thompson meant "as against other men" in
the Hegelian sense that there cannot be slaves without masters or, as
he put it, "nor deference without squires and labourers" (9), there
is nothing within the logic of his argument that guarantees that the
differentiation of which he speaks cannot as readily apply horizon-
tally to adjacent groups as it can apply vertically to dominant ideol-
ogy. Just as there is nothing in Thompson's theory of experience or
its subsequent incarnations that precludes a migration toward bio-
logism, likewise there is nothing in the complementary "local cul-
ture" argument that prevents a group from shifting to neoethnic
entrenchment in the name of its specificity instead of inciting to
broad intergroup coalitions a la Mouffe/Laclau. While the "local

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 101

culture" argument does not intend nor necessarily lead to neoethnic

tribalism where differences are to be purged and cleansed as though
they were foreign bodies, neither is it necessarily conducive to the
peaceful dialogical coexistence of tolerant microgroups within some
playfully pluralistic carnival. As Jameson rightly suggests, "the ide-
ology of groups and difference does not really strike a blow, either
philosophically or politically, against tyranny" (Postmodernism,340).
To think locally does not necessarily entail that one will act globally.
By stripping the concept of class of all teleological, structural,
and universalizing elements, Thompson helped steer critical thought
and historiography from the temptation of both economic and struc-
tural determinism, and in so doing he has bequeathed what has been
rightly regarded as a brilliant study of the English working class; but
by predicating class specificity on some local cultural "handling" of
presumed immediate subaltern experiences, Thompson unwittingly
ends up with an entity whose raison d'etre risks becoming the fact of
its difference. If pushed to its limits while remaining within the terms
of its own logic, Thompson's use of experience assists not so much in
the making of the English working class, or of any other class for that
matter, than it does in the unmaking of that class into a proliferation
of microgroups-a situation that can as readily foster intergroup
alliances as it can exacerbate the competition among microgroups
for cultural and legal recognition, as well as for the general popu-
lation's dwindling access to material resources. With good reason
Hansen points out how the "'proliferation of subaltern counter-
publics' (Nancy Fraser) does not necessarily lead to a multiplication
of forces," for "the oppositional energy of individual groups and sub-
cultures is more often neutralized in the marketplace of multicultural
pluralism or polarized in a reductive competition of victimizations"
(xxxvii). Finally, it is not without a certain ironical twist of fate that
the very concept of experience deployed by Thompson to rehistori-
cize class and to re-endow it with a modicum of agency should come
back to haunt him and turn against him: in the current wave of what
Jameson calls "the immense movement of demarxification," where
scare quotes have become de rigueur when economic issues, let alone
class issues, are so much as mentioned in the humanities, the resur-
rection of class issues is simply not de bon ton, and particularly so
for those very experience-oriented theories and social movements

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102 | CRAIGIRELAND

directly or indirectly spawned by the work of the History Workshops

of the 1970s-those very movements to which are attributed or that
frequently lay claim to a Marxist lineage, yet for which, as Jameson
put it, "the denunciation of the concept of class has become an oblig-
atory gesture today, as though we all know that race, gender and eth-
nicity were more satisfactory concepts or more fundamental, prior,
concrete, existential experiences" ("Marx's Purloined Letter," 92).
All of this is not to suggest that determinism or pantextualism
is to have the last word, or that agency is unlikely and ought not to
be theorized. What is suggested is that because the most common
academic and para-academic recourse to experience, along with its
corollary, the local cultural articulation of subaltern experience, as
readily lend themselves to the dangerous derapagesexposed earlier
in this essay as they do to what can be deemed an emancipatory poli-
tics of identity, then a more thorough consideration of experience
warrants our attention with a certain urgency.

THE RESILIENCE OF AN AMBIGUOUS CATEGORY

Theories hoping to account for agency and group specificity by

invoking the immediacy of experience have incurred scathing cri-
tiques, and these have come not only from Althusserians, who have
always had a healthy distrust toward premature or bad immediacy,
but also from poststructuralists (for whom the term experience,like
so many other modernist categories, is but a "nostalgic yearning
for presence") as well as from post-Gadamerian hermeneuts, who tell
us that the anticipatory structure of understanding precludes any
recourse to immediacy, let alone to the immediacy of experience. But
while it is true that appeals to immediate experience leave strains
of subaltern and cultural theory open to easy attack, the Thompson-
ian appeal to experience is not alone in incurring the charge of being
politically dangerous or philosophically suspect. Such ambiguity no
less besets the other uses to which experience has been put: experi-
ence as Erlebnis, or experiencevecue (lived experience), imbued as it
has frequently been with a sense of immediacy and prediscursive
irrationalism, has, for example, been rightly decried by the Frankfurt
School and others as a regressive aesthetic category, if not-if the

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 THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCES| 103

later Lukacs is to be believed-as a forerunner of the late nineteenth-

century vitalist neoromantic anticapitalism that was to inspire
National Socialist and fascist ideology. Yet the very notion of experi-
ence proposed as a corrective to the vitalist irrationalism of Erlebnis-
the mediated, temporally extended, and critically worked-through
Erfahrung advanced by various Rezeptionsasthetiker,phenomenolo-
gists, and critical theorists-has itself come under poststructuralist
scrutiny and been critiqued as but a perpetuation of a "metaphysics
of presence" that disqualifies Erfahrung from its presumed role as
the opponent of instrumental reason or the subverter of given hori-
zons of understanding. If punctual and immediate experience has
been decried as naively empiricist or irrationally vitalist, temporally
extended and mediated experience has been charged with participat-
ing in ontotheology. The semantic and political ambiguity surround-
ing the concept of experience is, to say the least, notorious.
What is most striking about the category of experience, then, is
that beset as it is by ambivalent political ramifications and semantic
ambiguity, it should continue to be used in the first place. Yet used it
persistently continues to be, not only by currents in Anglo-American
cultural, feminist, and subaltern studies, but also by sociocultural
analyses from Fredric Jameson on the cultural logic of late capitalism
and the revived interest in the Benjaminian distinction between Erleb-
nis and Erfahrung,to recent preoccupations with post-traumatic stress
disorder or trauma, as well as problems of political and historical rep-
resentation.4 Martin Jay has furthermore uncovered the subterranean
persistence of the problem of experience in some of the emblematic
figures of those very schools of thought that see as but a perpetuation
of logocentrism the notion of experience, whether as immediate, in
the empiricist vein, or as mediated in the Gadamerian (and thus
implicitly Hegelian) vein (Jay).5Even when the notion of experience
is subjected to sustained critical inquiry, as it has been, for example,
in the attempt since the mid-1980s to marshal that concept for a new
anthropology, Clifford Geertz, himself known for advocating a return
to experience within an essentially Diltheyan framework, acknowl-
edges in his afterword to an anthology specifically dedicated to this
matter that the "elusive master concept of experience" is "one that
none of the authors seems entirely happy with, and none feels able to
do without" (374).

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104 | CRAIGIRELAND

This ambivalence toward experience is nowhere more flagrant

than in the work of those very critics who run roughshod over the
Thompsonian concept of experience. Most striking in this regard is that
such staunch critics-the historian Scott and the neo-Althusserians
Bellamy and Leontis can stand here as exemplars-should falter in
their otherwise relentless critiques precisely at that point when the
matter of whether the very notion of experience ought to be alto-
gether jettisoned is raised. In an unexpected volte-face whose incon-
clusiveness stands in stark contrast with the resolve of her rigorously
constructed case against experience, Scott adds as an afterthought
that "experience is a word that we cannot do without, although,
given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is
tempting to abandon it altogether. But experience is so much a part
of our everyday language, so imbricated in our narratives that it
seems futile to argue for its expulsion" (797). These are epistemolog-
ically timid times, and Scott's reservations, reiterated by many, may
be but a precautionary measure, or perhaps a concession to some
logophobic distaste for closure or to some other methodological
imperative. But at hand here is not so much a lapse in fortitude as it
is a Freudian slip-a slip that, uttered only in passing by Scott and
relegated to an inconspicuous footnote by Bellamy and Leontis, is
symptomatic, as is also the very virulence with which the notion of
experience persists in other schools of thought, of a problem that goes
beyond some obsessive concern with semantic or conceptual recti-
tude. That Scott's reservations about dismissing experience should
have been formulated on the shoddiest of grounds (the retention of a
concept can hardly be justified by the mere fact of its ubiquity within
"everyday language"), that this afterthought should be the only
vague element marring an otherwise rigorous and influential study,
in other words, that this argument should waver precisely when by
its own logic it renders imminent the rejection of experience-all this
suggests that experience testifies to a certain insistence that is more
than merely semantic or conceptual. If experience were merely a
concept or theoretical construct whose deconstruction might dispel
false problems, then the problem of the very stridency of academic
and para-academic debates on experience remains itself unad-
dressed, as do also the questions raised (yet tellingly left unan-
swered) by Bellamy and Leontis that ask us "why the temptation to

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 THE APPEALTO EXPERIENCEAND ITS CONSEQUENCESI 105

retain experience as a valid referent lingers in this postmodern era,"

and why the "privileging of experience thrives in a climate otherwise
hostile to such essentializing impulses" (163-64).
That heated debates on experience, on a term marred by both
political ineffectiveness and semantic ambiguity, should persist to
this day in certain academic and para-academic inquiries into agency
and identity, that this term should even still be deployed, as it con-
tinues to be, by various strands in aesthetics and sociocultural cri-
tique-all this suggests that the insistence of experience cannot be
entirely due to the ubiquity of a mere concept among others within
a history of ideas. The question that most needs to be addressed is
not whether the concept of experience, under its various guises, is or
is not an antiquated trinket to be unceremoniously escorted to the
proverbial trash can of history, nor whether it has been blessed with
a somewhat resilient Wirkungsgeschichtethat ought to be dispassion-
ately reviewed; of import instead is that of which Thompsonian
appeals to experience are themselves a symptom. And to this end is
required not only that the insistence on experience be critiqued, but
also that the insistence of experience be diagnosed. After all, the very
insistence with which the term experienceis bandied about and the
very stridency of the academic and para-academic debates it arouses
suggest that experience, far from being merely a matter of academic
squabbling, may very well refer us to interrelated sociohistorical
issues that, until addressed, will continue to operate clandestinely
behind our backs. Experience may well have, as Adorno would put
it, a truth content. And it is this truth content that is perhaps most in
need of examination.

Notes

I would like to thank F. R. Ankersmit, David Carvounas, Amaryll Chanady, and

Martin Jay for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously funding my
research.

1. Povertyof Theory,238. Such a stress on ordinary experience was also a

response to Leavis's undeniably elitist use of experience as an aesthetically tran-
scendent category (see, for example, Leavis, TheCommonPursuit);nevertheless, it
is in response to the more menacing ramificationsof structuralismthat Thompson
and others turned to experience with a sense of urgency.

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106 | CRAIGIRELAND

2. My translation. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

3. To be fair to Spivak, it should be added here that because "strategic
essentialism," as she herself put it, has served more often than not as a "certain
alibi to essentialism," Spivak was later to revise her position (if not recant alto-
gether) regarding the benefits to be reaped from such theoretical maneuvering.
See the discussion on this issue in Chay.
4. See, for example, Caygill; Ziarek;and Caruth.
5. Martin Jay is currently working on a book, Songs of Experience,which
will deal with such issues in more detail.

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