Review Two: Authority and Experience

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 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 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 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 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 consciousness-raising 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).

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.

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 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).