Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy 9780773572140

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T H E S U B A L T E R N A P P E A L T O E X P E R IE N C E

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McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis 2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press 3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain

9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris 10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800 A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn

5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt

12 Paine and Cobbett The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson

6 Beyond Liberty and Property The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn

13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls

7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding

14 Greek Scepticism Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe

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16 Form and Transformation A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c.1300–1600 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton

24 Kierkegaard as Theologian Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland Anne Skoczylas

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32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy Plural Values and Political Power Frederick M. Barnard

35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History Frederick M. Barnard 36 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland

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THE SUBALTERN APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy

Craig Ireland

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004 isbn 0-7735-2755-9 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2799-0 (paper) Legal deposit third quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Ireland, Craig, 1963The subaltern appeal to experience: self-identity, late modernity and the politics of immediacy / Craig Ireland. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 36) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2755-9 (bnd) isbn 0-7735-2799-0 (pbk) 1. Experience.

i. Title.

d16.9.i74 2004

128′.4

ii. Series. c2003-907412-9

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville.

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For Walter, Amaryll, and Roxanne

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 The Appeal of Immediate Experience 2 The Mediacy of Experience

3

27

3 Experience and the Prospective Gaze to the Future 4 Experience and the Retrospective Glance to the Past 5 Experience and the Temporal Logic of Late Modernity 6 Reassessing Experience

Bibliography 187 Index

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57 95 139

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Acknowledgments

For their unfailing intellectual and institutional support I would like thank Walter Moser, Amaryll Chanady, and Roxanne Rimstead, to whom this book is warmly dedicated. I would also like to thank Frank Ankersmit, Daniel Dumouchel, and Martin Jay, as well as the two anonymous readers at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for their numerous helpful suggestions and constructive criticism of earlier versions of this manuscript. Even as they were writing their own books on experience, Martin Jay (Songs of Experience, University of California Press 2004) and Frank Ankersmit (Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford University Press 2004) were intellectually generous when sharing their ideas with me. I also owe much to Elizabeth Burns, whose perfect mastery of French and English has helped me avoid numerous gallicisms. Thanks also go to Executive Director Philip Cercone, Assistant Editor Brenda Prince, Coordinating Editor Joan McGilvray, and copyeditor Ron Curtis and others at McGill-Queen’s University Press for their unfailing support – working with this press has been not only an honour but also a pleasure. Finally, I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously funding my research and the Université de Sherbrooke for providing institutional support. A shorter version of the first chapter initially appeared in Cultural Critique 52 (fall 2002), and I am grateful to the University of Minnesota for allowing me to use a revised and expanded version of this article for the present work. It is to my friend, colleague, and kindred spirit, David Carvounas, however, that I am most in debt. To borrow from this book’s central leitmotif about historical preconditions, David Carvounas has provided the intellectual, political, and ethical preconditions for this study. Without his unwavering critical assessment of this manuscript from its inception

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to its completion and without his steadfast friendship spanning the last two decades – from the camaraderie of our Berkeley/ucla days to our flight, some fourteen years ago, from the United States to the haven of Canada – it is extremely doubtful that this book would have seen the light of day.

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Introduction Si, avons-nous beau monter sur des échasses, car sur des échasses encore faut-il marcher de nos jambes. Et au plus élevé trône du monde, si nous ne sommes assis que sus notre cul. Michel de Montaigne, “De l’expérience”

Over the last few decades, the term “experience” has persistently preoccupied certain strands in cultural, subaltern, and aesthetic inquiry concerned with issues of agency, identity formation or counterhegemonic resistance. This preoccupation with experience has also sparked a series of skirmishes since the 1970s between those who debunk experience as the stuff of an antiquated philosophy of consciousness and those who, on the contrary, seek its rehabilitation by resurrecting Dilthey or Dewey. Heated and protracted exchanges on experience take place to this day in such journals as the New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and the Yale Journal of Criticism, and to a large extent they perpetuate the no less strident debates of the 1970s that opposed E.P. Thompson and the History Workshops to Althusserian structuralism. But for all the blows and counterblows that have now carried on for over three decades, no settlement seems in sight and no dialogue has ensued – except perhaps a dialogue de sourds – and positions have been entrenched, not breached. Polemical critiques of the subaltern appeal to experience continue to regard such appeals as a dubious theoretical warrant for historical populism.1 Such critiques, in turn, continue to arouse no less polemical ripostes, from manifestos rehabilitating E.P. Thompson by way of a refurbished Diltheyan notion of Erlebnis to recent defenses of experience by way of a reminder that post- or neostructuralists owe much to those very thinkers – from Sartre to Merleau-Ponty – whom they have so readily debunked, as if in oedipal rebellion against their begetters.2 1 Meiskins Wood, “The Politics of Theory,” 47. 2 See, for example, Kruks, Retrieving Experience, and Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies.

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The virulence of these debates no doubt owes much to the notorious political ambivalence that besets appeals to experience. Whereas certain schools of thought see experience as a counterhegemonic enclave potentially resistant to the contaminating ways of everything from bourgeois ideology and capitalist commodification to the logophilia of phallo- or albinocratic discourse, others scathingly critique such appeals to immediate experience as well-intentioned but short-sighted. The latter have indeed repeatedly pointed out that to wager on the perceived immediacy of experience in a bid to foster subaltern specificity and foil dominant ideological mediation, however laudable such a goal might be, is to fob off as anthropologically (if not biologically) innate that which is actually culturally determined – it is in other words to naturalize elements of identity formation that are in fact historical. And such naturalizing, as Joan W. Scott, Rita Felski, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and others remind us, can leave the door as widely open to a progressive politics of identity as to a retreat to neoethnic tribalism. The political ambivalence of the term experience in cultural and aesthetic inquiry is not new. It can already be seen in Dilthey’s vitalist notion of experience (Erlebnis), which was later to be prized by Lebensphilosophie and variants of pre-Gadamerian hermeneutics as a means for collapsing historical and cultural difference by dint of a judicious dose of unmediated, or immediate, Einfühlung. The response from Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin and others, who had always been wary of appeals to premature immediacy, was to consign such notions as immediate Erlebnis and vitalist Einfühlung to the irrationalist claptrap that eventually facilitated Germany’s march to National Socialism. Yet the very antidote proposed by Adorno and Benjamin to the bad immediacy of Erlebnis – the temporally extended, dialectical, and mediated notion of Erfarhung – has itself been attacked by poststructuralists as an incorrigible “desire for presence” and as so much ontotheological hoodwinking. Whether it is seen as immediate or as mediated, experience remains to this day a politically charged and semantically ambiguous term that arouses as much passion as it does suspicion. Experience, then, has had its share of “crises” – to use an overused expression. But unlike most concepts or practices that have aroused similar controversy, the term experience has yet to be subjected to sustained historical inquiry, let alone historicized. This is all the more surprising as this category has been most courted precisely by currents in cultural and aesthetic theory that profess to be not only politically motivated but also historically minded, from German Rezeptionsästhetik and the British His-

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tory Workshops of the 1970s to the Alltagsgeschichte and cultural studies of the 1980s and the subaltern historiography of the 1990s, as well as the recent interest in trauma theory, which often seeks to historicize Freudian categories by way of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. This failure to consider experience historically stems largely from the one-sidedness of dealings with this term. By so focusing on the methodological viability of this concept for cultural, aesthetic, or subaltern inquiry, debates on experience have excluded from their horizon of inquiry the very sociohistorical developments that helped the term experience gain currency in the first place in both academic discourse and daily practices. The historians and neo-Althusserians who have recently most castigated appeals to experience in subaltern historiography have merely pleaded for a better understanding of this concept’s epistemological shortcomings, not for a consideration of its sociohistorical emergence as a problem. Even in the earlier inquiry of Adorno and Benjamin, which came closest to a historical consideration of experience, the status of contemporary experience is merely diagnosed and accordingly lamented for being in crisis or impoverished, but not for being a problematic category to begin with. Even as it continues to inform various aesthetic and cultural theories, experience remains a notoriously ambiguous concept that has yet to be historically situated. It is just such a lacuna that this book proposes to fill. But instead of rehearsing and perpetuating recent debates on the viability of experience for cultural, subaltern, or aesthetic inquiry, this book ventures into uncharted territory: it shows how experience, whether as a thematized problem or some actual process – and regardless of its apparent contemporary importance for recent cultural inquiry – must first be considered in terms of its sociohistorical conditions of possibility before it can be either debunked or rehabilitated, let alone put to political, cultural, or aesthetic use. Only such a historical resituating of experience, this book argues, can help explain how by the 1970s experience became a buzz word in certain schools of thought in the humanities, why experience to this day arouses such heated debates, and what such debates symptomatically reveal. So although this book takes as its point of departure the last three decades, it inevitably ends up backtracking to the turn of the eighteenth century. It is here that experience first gains a certain semantic consistency that informs its present use. Indeed, as is the case with most cultural concepts and processes that govern our current self-understanding, from the idea of the nation and progress to the notion of the self as an expressively unfold-

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ing dynamic, experience as used to this day in the humanities is rooted in mid- to late-eighteenth-century social, cultural, and economic developments. It is at the turn of the eighteenth century that most cultural phenomena and concepts assume the meanings attributed to them to this day, that they become contemporary for us. It is at this time that they in other words first become modern, if we consider the advent of modernity, as do Koselleck, Habermas, Foucault, Luhmann, and others, to be that interstitial period at the turn of the eighteenth century – or Sattelzeit, to use Koselleck’s term – during which was initially formulated much of what informs our current self-understanding. It is to this formative period, then, that we must turn if we are to understand how and why the term experience would later arouse the strident debates that have punctuated the intellectual landscape of the humanities over the last three decades. Such issues can indeed be better addressed if we first consider that historical period, some two centuries ago, during which the concept of experience assumed a meaning that persists to this day. As Norbert Elias once put it, “to remember an epoch when what is almost self-evident today still has the lustre and freshness of unfamiliarity throws into sharper relief some features of our own basic conceptions of ourselves and the world, conceptions which, through familiarity, normally remain below the threshold of clear consciousness.”3 As Elias was well aware, intellectual history alone cannot denaturalize the term experience, however. It is of course always tempting to limit the sociohistorical forces at work in the formation of concepts to the speculations of a few influential thinkers within some histoire des mentalités. But if by the seventeenth century subjectivity is increasingly considered “centered,” it is not because Descartes woke up one day and decided to oppose res extensa to res cogitans, and if by the nineteenth century the dialectical dynamic of everything from history to consciousness becomes an idée reçue, it is not because Hegel felt like expounding his views on the vagaries of some Geist. Semantic shifts in concepts, let alone the emergence of new epistemological configurations, testify to more than the influences of a handful of thinkers on one another within a self-contained history of ideas, or, as Foucault once derisively put it, a history of opinions. Concepts instead testify, however residually, to the larger sociohistorical issues within which they are imbricated, yet which they also help shape. Instead of providing a comprehensive survey of opinions on experience, then, this book approaches the concept of experience from two 3 Elias, The Society of Individuals, 97.

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different but interdependent angles. The first stresses the importance of historicizing central categories of modernity such as experience. This entails more than a consideration of the shifting semantic sedimentations at work in the conceptual history of experience; it also entails an examination of the historical conditions of possibility for various understandings of experience. By historically resituating experience in this manner, this approach shows how our contemporary notions of experience tally with structural changes that took place by the late eighteenth century. Of these, the most prominent are, on the one hand, the consolidation of what Koselleck, Luhmann, and others call the open future of modernity – a temporality marked by a growing rift between past, present, and future – and, on the other hand, the closely related issue of how identity- or self-formation can be maintained in the face of such increased temporal divergence and complexity. It indeed turns out that when deployed by inquiries other than empiricist, various notions of experience over the last two centuries – and even more so over the last three decades – have gravitated around the manner by which self-formation is to be temporally carried out and agency diachronically sustained, whether this be in terms of the idealist unfolding of subjectivity, Rezeptionsästhetiker aesthetic horizons, individual biographical itineraries, collective narratives, or subaltern counterhistories. In the light of the findings of this historicizing approach to experience, the second approach, in a more diagnostic spirit, argues that while the term experience may have assumed its contemporary meaning by the turn of the eighteenth century and while this term continues to this day to gravitate around issues of self- or identity-formation and agency, something nevertheless distinguishes the last three decades from the preceding two centuries. When it comes to experience, what indeed sets the last three decades apart is the stridency of the debates, and not the debates themselves. For all the issues it has raised, from Kant’s Humean awakening to Dewey’s aesthetics, experience was not itself at the centre of strident debates before the 1970s. If debates on experience there were, they focused on relegating experience to its befitting place within a larger scheme of things – whether because experience was to be the locus of legitimate self-knowledge or a mere byproduct of some all-encompassing theodicy, whether it was to be seen as incarnating the dialectical unfolding of Geist or as a mere bundle of sense data from which predictable habits could be extrapolated. Experience remained confined to specialized philosophical inquiry or essayist speculations and was hardly the stuff of heated controversies – it was at best but one arcane philosophical term among others.

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This starkly contrasts with the last three decades, at which point debates on experience seem to have struck a sensitive nerve that has yet to be named or tamed – particularly in certain disciplines in the humanities concerned with issues of agency and identity-formation. Not only have vitriolic debates on experience taken place in the humanities, from cultural studies to currents of feminism, where the perceived immediacy of a group’s experience has been seen as an enclave impervious to strong structural determination; these debates have also spilled over from academia into the public sphere, where various social groups often appeal to immediate experience as a basis for counterhegemonic identity-formation. What is intriguing about the concept of experience over the last three decades is not only the stridency of the academic debates it has aroused but also the echo such debates have found in paraacademic politics of identity. If, as the historicizing approach of this study shows, experience became increasingly associated with issues of self-formation some two centuries ago, then why is it only over the last three decades that this term has sparked vitriolic debates when issues of identity and agency have been at stake? To what does the recent insistence on experience testify? Associated as experience has been with issues of self-formation and agency, it may well be that the persistent appeals to experience in recent cultural inquiry testify more to the historical status of a particular mode of modern self-formation than to the influence of a particular modern concept. If the last three decades, in contrast with the last two centuries, have been beset by what a German historian once called a “hunger for experience,” this is not because experience is a given – it is because it has become a problem. And this problem points to more than the semantic misadventures of a particular concept; it points also to the historical developments behind the misadventures of this concept. Only by ascertaining the continuing presence or, conversely, the gradual waning of such historical developments will it be possible to speculate on the extent to which experience may or may not be, or rather, may have been but may no longer be, a constitutive element of self-identity or a viable category for aesthetic, historiographical, and cultural theory. And returning to how experience historically became associated with issues of self-formation may make it possible to diagnose whether current appeals to experience over the last three decades testify to the persistence or, conversely, the demise of how a sense of self and temporality have been construed over the last two centuries.

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Neither the diagnostic nor the historicizing approach to experience proposed here, then, can be considered a mere propaedeutic to the other; they are, on the contrary, interdependent and mutually reinforcing. After all, it is when processes and concepts become problems that they egregiously stand out, lose their aura of ahistorical givenness, and send us scurrying into understanding their historical origins. Minerva’s proverbial owl indeed spread its wings only at dusk. Conversely, it is only when an initial sense of historicity is at hand that what appears given can lend itself, in the first place, to sustained critical inquiry. To address experience historically is to focus on a nebulous term in order to take the pulse of some of the larger historical problems to which this term testifies. It is to historicize certain current cultural formations in terms of the socio-historical conditions producing them – it is, in other words, to contribute to what the early Frankfurt School would call a protohistory of the present. And such a diagnostic protohistory is not to be taken lightly: the very insistence with which the term experience is bandied about and the very stridency of the academic and para-academic debates it arouses suggest that this notoriously ambiguous concept, far from being merely a matter of academic squabbling, instead refers us to interrelated sociohistorical issues that, until they are addressed, will continue to operate clandestinely behind our backs. On the other hand, to fail to consider experience historically is to allow this term to become something of an idée reçue whose critical potential, like such terms as difference, otherness, resistance, power, and a litany of other concepts (which Fredric Jameson once amusingly suggested ought to be collected in a sequel to Flaubert’s dictionary of commonplaces), retains as much preciseness and acumen as do the outworn features of those over-circulated tessera of which spoke Nietzsche.

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T H E S U B A L T E R N A P P E A L T O E X P E R IE N C E

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1

The Appeal of Immediate Experience L’hyper-concret est aussi abstrait que les généralités philosophiques. Henri Lefèbvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne

th e h u n g e r f o r e x p e r i e n c e : striking a sensitive chord The concept of experience has elicited the interest of various academic disciplines for at least the last two centuries. But only the last three decades can rightly be called, to borrow Michael Rutschky’s expression, decades of Erfahrungshunger.1 Unlike in earlier decades, where it had remained largely within the confines of academia, by the 1970s the concept of experience had frequently become the stuff of programmatic manifestos, and it was enlisted as the ground from which it was (and still is) believed could be erected microstrategies of resistance, subaltern counterhistories, and a politics of identity. Experience spilled over into the streets, so to speak. German proponents of Alltagsgeschichte, many of whom were peripheral to academic settings, reacted against the dominant historiographical emphasis on national political history by embarking on what one historian describes as “a quest to recapture the subjective experience of everyday life in the past at a regional, local or even individual level.”2 And the budding interest in the genesis and prospects of the counter public sphere (Gegenöffentlichkeit), inaugurated by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s influential 1972 study, did much, “for better or for worse,” as Miriam Hansen notes, “to turn an esoteric concept [Erfahrung] into a keyword for cultural practices, such as non-academic research projects on everyday life in the History Workshops, the revival of the gay 1 Rutschky, Erfahrungshunger. 2 Evans, “The New Nationalism,” 763. See also Samuel, “People’s History,” for more on the Anglo-American version of Alltagsgeschichte and, more specifically, for more on how “the main thrust of people’s history in recent years has been towards the recovery of subjective experience” (xviii).

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The Subaltern Appeal to Experience

and lesbian movement, or environmental and anti-nuclear campaigns (leading to the formation of the Green Party).”3 Likewise, in the AngloAmerican world the excessive zeal with which certain strands in Western Marxist theory continued to dichotomize social structures into an infra/ suprastructural opposition, along with Soviet misbehaviour in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, helped foster a Gramscian turn where cultural concerns over 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?”4 Such a line of questioning eventually culminated by the late 1970s and early 1980s in a series of debates on the perceived opposition of concrete experience to abstract structure, on the possibility of local resistance to dominant ideological or cultural formations. Of these debates, the most memorable one was initiated by the publication of E.P. Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, which questioned the relevance of Althusserian structuralism for a history of the English working class. But what started as an altercation between Thompson and Althusser has spawned a proliferation of academic and para-academic “histories from below” and subaltern cultural inquiries that, in spite of their differences, share the notion that the identities and counterhistories of the voiceless and disenfranchised can be buttressed by the specificity of a group’s concrete experiences. Whether these disparate theories and new social movements justify such a move by invoking the need to resist the cultural logic of late capitalism or the phallocratic structure of language, a common thread nevertheless runs through what might otherwise appear to be unrelated trends in historiography and cultural theory, namely, the axiom according to which, as Martin Jay puts it, “lived experience is pitted against the imposition of a theoretical scheme allegedly alien to it.”5 Not only have these latter debates on experience, which Thompson’s skirmish with Althusser played a great part in fomenting, been the most

3 Hansen, foreword to Public Sphere and Experience. 4 Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond, 121. 5 Jay, “Songs of Experience,” 38.

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Immediate Experience

5

strident, but they have continued unabated to this day.6 Other exchanges on experience have of course punctuated the intellectual landscape of the Erfahrunshunger decades: there has, for example, been considerable speculation on the disruptive potential of experience, whether aesthetic or aestheticized, and whether mediated or immediate, and this not just by a handful of German Rezeptionsästhetiker and hermeneuts such as Hans-Robert Jauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer but also by theorists from divergent disciplines and stances such as Christoph Menke-Eggers, Victor Turner, Richard Shusterman, Krzysztof Ziarek, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Foucault.7 But questions regarding the status of aesthetic experience and whether it is to be reinserted into daily praxis or, conversely, preserved from external contamination, and issues dealing with the subversive potential of experience as an event (in the Heideggerian sense of Ereignis)8 or as some “intensity” beyond assimilation by, say, generalized instrumentality, an Oedipal libidinal economy, or ontotheology, while they have certainly helped bring to the fore arguably important issues, they have not exactly sparked vitriolic debates – something that cannot be said of those heated exchanges initiated by Thompson and the History Workshops. Not only have they latter debates on experience, agency, and resistance continued to rage, 6 As Martin Jay notes, the opposition of concrete, lived experience to abstract structures and theoretical schemes “has been no less evident in the running controversy between American feminists, who often seek to recapture women’s experience, and their French counterparts, who theoretically question the putative subject of that experience. And it is currently being rehearsed in the spirited debate over the relationship between black literature, the experience of its authors and readers, and a literary theory that is imported from the outside, which has set scholars like Joyce A. Joyce and Barbara Christian against Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston Baker” (“Songs of Experience,” 38). Little has changed in the ten years since Jay wrote this essay, as can be seen in the recent altercations between Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott. See, for example, Varikas, “Gender, Experience and Subjectivity,” 89–101, as well the debates between Barbara Smith and Deborah G. Chay (their heated exchanges appeared in New Literary History 24 (1993): 635–56). More recently still, Michael Pickering countercritiques the poststructuralist and neo-Althusserian critiques of experience in his History, Experience and Cultural Studies, while Sonia Kruks defends experience by turning to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in Retrieving Experience. 7 See Menke-Eggers, Die Souveränität der Kunst; Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama”; Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience”; Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience; Lacoue-Labarthe, La Poésie comme expérience. For more on the extent to which experience has been of central concern to Foucault, see Jay, “The Limits of Limit Experience.” 8 For a recent insightful attempt to link the Heideggerian notion of Ereignis with the notion of experience as “excessive in relation to its representation,” see Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 15–21.

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but they have reverberated beyond academia and found an echo in para-academia – so much so that experience has increasingly become the core concept or keyword 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.”9 What is peculiar, in other words, about the Erfahrungshunger decades of which we are still part is the manner by which a once arcane philosophical term has now become a generalized buzz word. By thus spilling over from academia into the public sphere, the appeal to experience as a ground for cultural and political action seems to testify to a problem that is more than academic. Of what is such an insistence on experience symptomatic? “Experience” is of course a term fraught with a convoluted conceptual history, and with good reason Michael Oakeshott noted some sixtyfive years ago in an observation that is even more applicable today that “‘experience,’ of all words in the philosophic dictionary, is the most difficult to manage; and it must be the ambition of every writer reckless enough to use the word to escape the ambiguities it contains.”10 But however notorious the semantic ambiguity of the term experience, it is still possible to address the insistence on experience of the Erfahrungshunger decades – only this is best achieved not by panoramically surveying how experience has been theorized throughout the ages, but by plunging instead in medias res, by turning in other words to those theories of experience that over the last three decades have not only informed vitriolic academic debates but have also found an echo in various para-academic concerns. Best suited for this purpose are certain strands in subaltern inquiry – in particular those variants of social history known as Alltagsgeschichte and “histories of difference” or “histories from below” – that have appealed to experience as the ground or, to use Joan W. Scott’s expression, the “evidence,” from which agency and a politics of identity can be mustered and deployed. It is indeed just these theorizations on experience that have apparently struck a sensitive

9 Calhoun, “Social Theory and the Public Sphere,” 468n64. Such a concern for experience in certain social movements can be seen in what both Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth have diagnosed as the politics of recognition – what is more generally known as the “politics of identity.” For more on the link between recognition and issues of identity formation, see Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, and Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. 10 Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, 10.

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chord that reverberates to this day. And it is thus such theorizations on experience that best provide a point of departure for diagnosing what the insistence on experience might be all about. This insistence on experience can best be addressed not by considering disparate currents individually but instead by seeking their common denominator. And in this regard E.P. Thompson will occupy the foreground. Indeed, 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 buttressed 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.›11 The point here, then, is not to present a history of opinions on an issue still highly charged nor to debunk a trend in historiographical and cultural theory on purely epistemological grounds, as has already been repeatedly done by poststructuralists and hermeneuts alike; the point here is instead to suggest that there is a certain urgency to diagnosing the insistence on experience. More is involved 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 agency, appeals to immediate experience, however laudable their goal, end up unwittingly naturalizing what is in fact historical, and in so doing, they can as readily foster progressive subaltern politicking as they can exacerbate regressive, convulsive tribalism. But if correlation there is between emancipatory and reactionary appeals to experience, this correlation stems not from causality or homology; it stems instead from similar responses to a common problem. And it is this common problem that must be addressed. To retrace the steps in Thompson’s formulation of his influential notion of experience is to clarify some of the common presuppositions behind current subaltern appeals to experience. It is also to bring to the 11 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 786. For more on the persistence of the Thompsonian notion of experience in recent feminist and subaltern inquiry, see also Trimberger, “E.P. Thompson,” 238–41, and chapter 7 of Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies.

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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.

th e a p p e a l to e x p e r i e n c e : wa g e r i n g o n p r e d i s c u r s i v e i m m e d i a c y If E.P. Thompson focused on experience, it was, as he himself made clear, in order both to allow the subject to reenter history – agency was indeed 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.”12 By the time Thompson set out to write his history of the English working class, Althusser’s version of structuralism 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 clamour for counterhistories and local cultures, for readily penetrable as these appeared to be by ideology, they were unable to guarantee the specificity of group identity – a specificity without which a group would hardly be in a position to differentiate 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 present, 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 pervasiveness of dominant cultural hegemony, Thompson argued that class specificity resides in the specificity of its members’ daily immediate experiences – experiences that are determined by the position of a class within a mode of production and that are mediated or “handled” (to use his expression) by 12 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 238. By the late 1960s the New Left had splintered into what Stuart Hall calls the two paradigms of culturalism (initiated in Great Britain by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Thompson) and of structuralism (advocated by Lévi-Strauss and Althusser). It ought to be added here that although it is true that the “culturalist” stress on ordinary experience was also a response to Leavis’s undeniably elitist use of experience as an aesthetically transcendent category (see, for example, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)), it is nevertheless in response to the more menacing ramifications of structuralism that Thompson and others turned to experience with a sense of urgency.

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the local culture of a particular 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. With this argument 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 ‘determine’) by which, through the missing term ‘experience,’ structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters history.”13 The expectations tied to the antihegemonic potential of experience, then, were sanguine – to say the least. Echoing Thompson’s position, Peter Fuller contends that “courageous, empirical fidelity to experience can, under certain circumstances at least, cut through ideology. Experience is not wholly determined by ideology: it is very often at odds with it, causing constant ruptures and fissures within the ideological ice flows.”14 And Thompson’s wager on experience was hardly an isolated anomaly, reinforced as it was by the culturalist current of British Marxism (with names such as Raymond Williams, Paul Willis, and John Berger) and, later, by strands of feminism, subaltern studies, and histories of difference. Just as for Thompson the immediacy of experience, that “raw material” that consciousness elaborates in “class ways” within a local culture, needs only to be inserted within a counterhistory in order for class consciousness to arise and agency to materialize, likewise certain feminist and subaltern endeavours call for a politics of experience, telling us, for example, as Messer-Davidow does, 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.”15 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.”16 13 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 170. 14 Fuller, Beyond the Crisis in Art, 235. 15 Messer-Davidow, “Feminist Literary Criticisms,” 87. For more on the controversies raised by such a stance and for more on the long-standing debate between such “experiential” feminism and poststructuralist feminism, see Rimstead, Remnants of Nation, 123–6. 16 Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond, 100.

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But if this search for unmediated experience eventually became frenetic, it was because after Althusser, experience itself was increasingly seen as the last vestige of an antiquated philosophy of consciousness, as so much claptrap, in other words, that was hardly sheltered 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 – as it was instead the meaning experience can receive in a discourse that articulates it within a system of signifying oppositions. 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 someone so positioned in the structural whole of society. Because the very consciousness of one’s position is always already mediated by ideology, discourse, and language, mechanisms of domination and repression 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 [expérience vécue],” Vincent Descombes reminds us, “semiology involved a political lesson. It showed how the hold of institutions over individuals amounted to the domination of a language.”17 And it is of course precisely on such a décalage 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,”18 and that this ideology is “identical with the ‘lived’ experience of human existence itself,”19 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 consciousness, of

17 Descombes, Le Même et l’autre, 129; my emphasis and translation. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 18 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 165. 19 Cited in Bellamy and Leontis, “A Genealogy of Experience,” 173.

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one’s class position within a mode of production.20 In fact, things did not fare well for any approach that hoped that the mere fact of being positioned in the larger social whole as a subaltern was a sufficient condition of possibility for a certain form of consciousness. Unlike the phenomenology, say, of Merleau-Ponty, which endowed subjectivity with a certain Spielraum, or room for manoeuver, by allowing for the cogito to be derived from the percipio or at least by considering equiprimordial both understanding and affective situatedness (in the manner of pre-Kehre Heidegger’s 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. It was precisely in response to this turn of events that the culturalist strain in British Marxism, as well subsequent strands in subaltern studies, came to see experience as that which, by virtue of its prediscursive immediacy, radically demarcates itself from and therefore evades discursive or ideological mediation and determination. Because the imposition of state ideology, as Thompson saw it, “cannot 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,”21 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 particularly seductive. Indeed, because of its seemingly immediate – that is, its nondiscursive or nonideological – contact with environing social being, experience represented just that sort of ideologically untainted “raw material” (to use Thompson’s expression) that, in order to congeal into class or group self-consciousness and agency, merely needed to be articulated within a regionalized culture 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,

20 This was particularly troublesome for certain strands in Marxism. As Descombes puts it in reference to existentialist Marxism, “The truth of Marxist theses about class struggle and the necessity of revolution rested on the experience of the individual who was conscious of existing as either exploited or exploiting” (Le Même et l’autre, 141). For more on the Althusserian challenge to the British culturalist assumption of a homology or necessary correspondence between experience, cultural practices, and class position, see Grossberg, “The Formations of Cultural Studies,” 26–9. 21 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 367.

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might furnish the material building blocks from which counterhistories could be constructed and subaltern cultures reinforced. Such perceptions of the counterhegemonic potential of experience 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 both through 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 opposes reason but also to that which is “full and active awareness” of both feeling and thought and which, as such, assumed an aura of authenticity with which reasoning and ideas could not dispense.22 But it was not only in the AngloAmerican world that experience was to be associated, particularly after the late eighteenth century, with notions of resistance, if not of materiality, without which the given remains unopposed: Kant’s precritical work likewise saw experience, which is the precondition for knowledge, as involving something occupying some space (i.e., something material) which resists attempts at moving it.23 As we shall see in the next chapter, the German equivalents of experience, whether as Erfahrung or as the early-nineteenth-century neologism Erlebnis, are informed no less than are their English counterparts by a conceptual and etymological history that encouraged the association of experience with notions of counterhegemonic resistance, as can be seen in the recourse by certain phenomenologists and members of the Frankfurt School to Erfahrung as a means of countering given or dominant horizons of understanding and as can also be seen in the recourse by Lebensphilosophie to Erlebnis as a means of opposing the mediacy of abstract reason with the immediacy 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; it instead wagers on the “other” of what is perceived as the immateriality of signification – the immediacy of experience is opposed to the mediacy of ideology, as the material is to the immaterial. If experi22 Williams, Keywords, 126. If the semantic history of the term experience has been a long one in the Anglo-American world, where empiricism itself has travelled a long journey, it follows a more convoluted trajectory in Germany, where it forks into Erlebnis and Erfahrung by the end of the eighteenth century. This trajectory will be dealt with at length in subsequent chapters . 23 Beiser, German Idealism, 34–5.

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ence plays a central role in certain theories hoping to vindicate subaltern agency, it is because of its assumed unmediated proximity with materiality. Because of its corporeal resistance to external tampering, materiality indeed appears as less malleable and thus less amenable to ideological mediation, much as for Locke the qualities of material spatial extension, lending themselves as they do to palpable verification and thus being 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 inserted into the “dialogue between social being and social consciousness” and into the interaction between “conditioning”and “agency” at the “intersection between determination and self activity.”24 Nevertheless, his notion of experience, with its presumed nonmediated contact with the real (which he calls “social being”), is itself 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 pressure on existent social consciousness, raises questions, and furnishes the material for intellectual elaboration.”25 As “raw material” and in the manner of a Gegenstand, Thompson’s notion of experience stands against and exerts pressure upon consciousness; and although dependent on its retrospective mediation within a local culture, this experience nevertheless has all the makings of the spatially extended solidity of matter – matter that, by presumably circumventing ideological determination, can serve as the ground from which resistance can be mustered and alternative sociability constructed. This Thompsonian notion of experience has found its way into numerous strands of histories of difference 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 material immediacy of the body itself. Certain North American feminists propose “experience, qua women’s experience of alienation from their own bodies, as the evidence of difference,”26 while others, by contending that the very materiality of social practice somehow institutes a

24 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 224, 225, 228. 25 Ibid., 200. My emphasis. 26 Bellamy and Leontis, “A Genealogy of Experience,” 167.

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disruptive fissure within dominant discursive regimes, have retreated, as Joan W. Scott notes, to “the biological or physical ‘experience’ of the body” itself.27 Others still 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 that “our body is becoming a new locus of struggle, which lays claim to its difference through actions such as body piercing.”28 Such a stance is of course beset by numerous epistemological problems that have already been repeatedly pointed out by others and that need not be rehearsed here. Suffice 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.”29 The recent obsession with the material body, moreover, is hardly in a position to vindicate the historical materialism with which, as

27 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 787–8. Scott also notes here that such a shift to immediate bodily experience follows (for example) from Christine Stansell’s “insistence that ‘social practices,’ in all their ‘immediacy and entirety’ constitute a domain of ‘sensuous experience’ (a prediscursive reality directly felt, seen, and known) that cannot be subsumed by language.” 28 Houde, “Les Booms et l’echo,” 6. There are of course, numerous other attempts to capitalize on the female body in the name of counterhegemonic agency. And the most vitriolic critiques against such attempts have come from feminists themselves. One such attempt tells us that resistance to dominant ideology or “discursive regimes” can be mustered by the immediate bodily experience of oppression, as if the immediate experience of oppression were itself somehow the source of resistance to it. Such a proposal has drawn the ire of Rita Felski, who reminds us that the problem with such proposals is that they assume “some kind of necessary relationship between subordination and critical opposition to it” and that they thus fail to understand that “being oppressed is no guarantee of clarity of vision or possession of truth.” Furthermore, in “assuming some common denominator of female experience as an authenticating foundation of feminist politics, they fail to recognize that the relationship between female subordination and feminist resistance is a contingent one, that there is no a priori antagonism of masculinity and femininity through which women are constituted as appositional political subjects” (“Feminism, Postmodernism,” 39–41). Felski deals with such issues more comprehensively in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. 29 Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies,› 44. My emphasis. See also Harvey, Spaces of Hope, chap. 6, for a more recent critique of the “return to the human body as the fount of all experience” (100).

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if to appease Bourdieu, it often fancies itself allied.30 But at stake in the recent obsession with the materiality of immediate bodily experience is not just an attempt to redeem historical, let alone dialectical, materialism – something that an exclusive reliance on immediate experience, bodily or otherwise, is hardly in a position to accomplish anyway; at stake instead is the condition of possibility of an active subject and of a ground from which can be 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. And to this day, it is in the name of agency and cultural specificity that appeals are made to immediate experience by those currents in subaltern studies that presuppose a nonmediated homology or correlation between one’s structural position, 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, which, 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 penetration, the turn to the immediate is to be expected, and the migration towards material immediacy is but an extrapolation of such a turn. But what are the potential consequences of such a turn? More is involved here than some epistemological blunder. In their bid to circumvent ideological mediation by turning to the immediacy of experience, Thompsonian experience-oriented theories advance an argument that is not so much specious as it is potentially dangerous: there is nothing within the logic of such an argument that precludes the hypostatization of other nondiscursive bases for group membership and specificity – bases that can as readily be those of a group’s immediate experiences as they can be those, say, of a group’s presumed materially immediate biological characteristics or physical markers of ethnicity and sexuality. If, indeed, the criterion for the disruptive antihegemonic 30 “Materialism is scarcely achieved by a litany of the body,” as Jameson reminds us, and the materialism of the body “should not be confused with a historical materialism that turns on praxis and on the mode of production” (“On ‘Cultural Studies,› 44).

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potential of experience is its immediacy 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 can end up as a surenchère of immediacy that a mere nudge by a cluster of circumstances can propel towards what Michael Piore has termed “biologism”31 – an increasingly common trend whereby “a person’s entire identity resides in a single physical characteristic, whether it be of blackness, of deafness or of homosexuality.”32 Blut und Boden seems but a step away.

th e insistence on experience: t h e s p e c t r e o f n e o - e t h n i c tr i b a l i s m For theories hoping to account for agency and for groups struggling for cultural recognition, such a step from a wager on immediate experience to rabid neo-ethnic fundamentalisms is only a possible step and not a necessary one, and any link between appeals to immediate experience and neo-ethnic tribalism 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 appealing, 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 other subaltern endeavours.33 If a potential for biologism and the spectre of neo-ethnic tribalism seem close at hand in certain cultural theories and social movements, it is because the re-

31 See Piore, Beyond Individualism. 32 Gitlin, “La Droite américaine,” 6. 33 The tendency to naturalize what is historically contingent and culturally constructed is of course not limited to the aforementioned trends. It has also found its way into current neoliberal, or monetarist, economic policy and political discourse, where the laws of the Market have now assumed the transtemporal stature of natural law. Such a tendency is even more flagrantly evident in the trend towards naturalizing and justifying social inequities through a new form of social Darwinism thinly disguised as genetics (as in the “New Bell Curve”) that is as ideologically charged as and no less coarse than its nineteenth-century homologue, phrenology, which did much to legitimize each individual’s socioeconomic lot by naturalizing sociopathology and social standing in terms of cranial protuberances. For an assesment of the neophrenological ideology at work in recently proposed security uses of electroencephalograms, see Davie, “Identifier les tueurs-nés,” 31.

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course to immediate experience opens the back door to what was booted out the front door – it inadvertently naturalizes what it initially set out to historicize. The tendency in appeals to experience towards naturalizing the historical have already been repeatedly pointed out precisely by those most sympathetic to the motivations behind such appeals. Joan W. Scott – hardly an antisubaltern historian – has indeed argued, as have Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, that it is 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 individuals.”34 Although such a tendency within experience-oriented theories is of course rarely thematized, and more rarely still is it intended, it nevertheless logically follows from the argument according to which 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 gayidentity 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.”35 It may seem unfair to impute to certain experience-oriented theories an argument that, when pushed to its logical conclusion, can as readily foster an “emancipatory” politics of identity as it can neo-ethnic tribalism.36 The potential for biologism hardly represents the intentions of experience-oriented theories – after all, such theories focus on the immediacy of experience, rather than on the essence of a group, in order to avoid both strong structural determination and the naturalizing of class or subaltern groups. But if, as these theories tell us, the counterhegemonic potential of experience resides in its prediscursive immediacy and if mediation is thus relegated to a parasitical, supplemental, and 34 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 777. 35 Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” 83. 36 The scare quotes around “emancipatory” are intended not as derisive but rather as a reminder that, demographically speaking, few have been liberated by a tinkering with language and culture alone and that cultural determinism is no less one-sided than economic determinism. Although cultural issues are undeniably crucial for the righting of wrongs, economic issues are no less important. For more on this, see Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?” 748.

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retrospective operation and if, finally, a nondiscursive or ideologically uncontaminated common ground constitutes a guarantee of group authenticity, it then inevitably follows that experiences cannot be discursively differentiated from one another and, as a result, the criteria for group specificity end up being those elements that unite groups in nondiscursive ways. And such nondiscursive elements, in turn, can as readily be those of a group’s shared nonmediated experience, say, of 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;”37 at its worst, the wager on immediate experience fosters tribalistic reflexes that need but a little prodding before turning into those rabid neo-ethnic “micro fascisms” against which Félix Guattari warned in his last essay before his death.38 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. Spivak tells us that naturalizing, or “essentialist,” discourse, when self-consciously or “vigilantly” deployed, can immunize one against eventual abuses and that a naturalized subaltern consciousness and subject position can in fact prove to be provisionally emancipatory if, “knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically non-viable, the historian then breaks this theory in a scrupulously delineated political interest.”39 Such a stance, however, not only implies that such potentially dangerous “strategic” tools be kept away from the uncouth hands of the academically untrained; it also forgets that if the back door is left as widely open to an emancipatory politics of identity as it is to any demagogic premier venu, then the very political justification for, let alone the usefulness of, the alibi of strategic essentialism becomes questionable, to say the least.40 But the tendency towards naturalizing at hand in certain experienceoriented theories stems not from any intended attempt to establish the essence of any particular group as such; this tendency instead follows from the displacement of an “essentializing impulse” (to use Bellamy’s 37 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 796. 38 Guattari, “Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales,” 26–7. 39 Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 207. 40 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,” she was later to revise her position (if not recant altogether) regarding the benefits to be reaped from such theoretical maneuvering. See the discussion on this issue in Chay, “Re-reading Barbara Smith,” 642.

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and Leontis’ apt phrase) from groups to the experiences of 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,”41 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 waiting to be nudged into self-awareness; he is instead claiming that a class is so structurally positioned as to expose its members to specific immediate material experiences and that the judicious 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, in other words, is not so much the “experiencers” as it is the experiences themselves. Yet because these experiences are themselves considered unmediated and given, the very category of experience by means of which Thompson hoped to rehistoricize class and reendow it with agency (and, in so doing, counter what he saw as the orthodox Marxist essentializing of class as well as the Althusserian reduction of class to a structurally determined variable) turns out to be that category through which the naturalization he sought to avoid reenters through the back door. Indeed, class may well be tentatively denaturalized – but the price paid is that class experience is now 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 Thompsonian appeal to experience, is that “working-class experience is now the ontological foundation of working-class identity.”42 What is surprising about the Thompsonian model of class or subaltern identity and culture is that, for all its glaring shortcomings, it should continue to seduce numerous academic and para-academic subaltern endeavours to this day. Part of the explanation lies in the other arguments it makes in conjunction with its appeal to immediate experience. One such complementary argument tells us that the spectre of neo-ethnic 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-récit of a 41 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 10. 42 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 786.

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local culture. Because of its proximity to those sharing experiences specific or natural to a particular subaltern group, not only does such a local culture – so the argument runs – articulate 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 sombre totalitarian ways of metanarratives and other pretensions to universality. As such, so the argument continues, a local culture is less prone to the repression of difference. Although Thompson-inspired theories of experience do aim less at the universalization than at the sharp demarcation and differentiation of a group’s experiences and although 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, that is 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 proposed by Thompsonian experience-oriented theories entails less that differences be cultivated within groups than that they be evacuated, or cleansed, so as to prevent the contamination of group specificity. It is after all upon 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” is, in other words, sustainable only if it both bypasses its absorption into dominant ideology – lest appropriation ensue – and avoids its dissipation 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 themselves might also be. Thompson indeed repeatedly emphasizes that the materialization of class consciousness hinges upon 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 (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”43 That Thompson here should define 43 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9. My emphasis.

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a group’s identity and interests as necessarily different from (and only as “usually,” not necessarily, opposed to) those of other groups is no mere happenstance 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,”44 there is nothing within the logic of his argument that guarantees that the differentiation of which he speaks cannot as readily apply horizontally to adjacent subaltern groups as it can apply vertically to dominant ideology. Just as there is nothing in Thompson’s theory of experience or its subsequent incarnations that precludes a migration towards biologism, likewise is there nothing in the complementary “local culture” argument that prevents a group from shifting to neo-ethnic entrenchment in the name of its specificity instead of inciting to broad intergroup coalitions à la Mouffe/Laclau.45 The “local culture” argument does not intend or necessarily lead to neo-ethnic tribalism where differences are to be purged and cleansed as though they were so many foreign bodies; yet neither is it necessarily conducive to the peaceful dialogical coexistence of tolerant microgroups within some playfully pluralistic carnival.46 As Jameson rightly suggests, “the ideology of groups and difference does not really strike a blow, either philosophically or politically, against tyranny.”47 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 structural 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 upon some local cultural “handling” of presumed immediate subaltern experiences, Thompson unwittingly ends up with an entity whose raison d’être 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, as it does in the 44 Ibid., 9. It is of course ironic that Thompson, who shuns anything remotely smacking of idealism, should actually refer, if obliquely, to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in order to buttress his views on the mechanisms involved in cultural differentiation. 45 See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 46 With good reason Laura Lee Downs notes that “identity politics has merely inverted the hierarchy of categories and identities handed down by the very conservative politics it seeks to subvert” (“Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject,” 7–8). 47 Jameson, Postmodernism, 340.

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unmaking of that class into a proliferation of microgroups – a situation that can as readily foster intergroup alliances as it can exacerbate the competition amongst microgroups for cultural and legal recognition, as well as for the general population’s dwindling access to material resources. With good reason Miriam Hansen reminds us that “the oppositional energy of individual groups and subcultures is more often neutralized in the marketplace of multicultural pluralism or polarized in a reductive competition of victimizations.”48 All of this is not to suggest that determinism, pantextualism, or the philosophy of language are to have the last word, that passive resignation is our preassigned lot or, in a gloomier Adornian mood, that hibernation is the best and only policy. The question is not whether agency is or is not to be had or whether attempts to endow the subject with a modicum of agency are misguided. What is suggested here 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 lends itself to the dangerous dérapages exposed above as it does to what some deem to be an emancipatory politics of identity, then a more thorough consideration of experience warrants our attention with a certain urgency.

th e i n s i s t e n c e o f e x p e r i e n c e : th e resilienc e of an ambiguo us categ ory Theories hoping to account for agency and group specificity by invoking the immediacy of experience have of course incurred scathing critiques. These have come not only from Althusserians, who have always had a healthy distrust of 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,”49 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 subaltern appeals to immediate experience are vulnerable to easy attack, they are not alone in incurring the charge of being politically dangerous or philosophically suspect. Such ambiguity no less besets the other uses to 48 Hansen, foreword to Public Sphere and Experience, xxxvii. My emphasis. 49 As Derrida put it in Of Grammatology: ‹experience’ has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not.” Cited in Bellamy and Leontis, “A Genealogy of Experience,” 182.

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which experience has been put: experience as Erlebnis, or expérience vécue (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 later Lukács is to be believed – as a forerunner of the late-nineteenth-century vitalist neoromantic anticapitalism that was to inspire National Socialist and fascist ideology.50 Yet the very notion of experience proposed as a corrective to the vitalist irrationalism of Erlebnis – the mediated, temporally extended, and critically workedthrough Erfahrung advanced by various Rezeptionsästhetiker, phenomenologists, 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 horizons 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 participating in ontotheology. The semantic and political ambiguity surrounding the concept of experience is, to say the least, notorious. What is most striking about the category of experience, then, is that, notoriously beset as it is by ambivalent political ramifications and semantic ambiguity, by an oscillation between rejection and embrace, it should continue to be used in the first place. Yet used it persistently continues to be, and not only by currents in Anglo-American cultural and subaltern inquiry but also by sociocultural analyses from Fredric Jameson on the cultural logic of late capitalism and the revived interest in the Benjaminian distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung 51 to recent preoccupations with posttraumatic stress disorder or trauma, as well as problems of political and historical representation.52 Jay has furthermore uncovered the subterranean persistence of the problem of experience in some of 50 A concise outline of this issue can be found in Hohendahl’s “Neoromantic Anticapitalism.” For a counterargument that contends that the Frühromantiker on the contrary harboured progressive sociopolitical ramifications that would only later yield to irrationalist vitalism, see Schulte-Sasse, “The Concept of Literary Criticism.” 51 The literature on Walter Benjamin’s notion of experience is vast and growing. For a sample of the debates, see some of the texts in Benjamin and Osborne, eds., Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy. For a general synopsis of the Benjaminian distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, see Rochlitz, Le Désenchantement de l’art, 211–54; Caygill, Walter Benjamin; and Jay, “Experience without a Subject.” 52 See, for example, Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, and Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, as well as F.R. Ankersmit’s two forthcoming books at Stanford University Press on political and historical representation.

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the emblematic figures of those very schools of thought that see the notion of experience as but a perpetuation of logocentrism, whether as immediate, in the empiricist vein, or as mediated, say, in the Gadamerian (and thus implicitly Hegelian) vein.53 Even 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 marshall that concept for a new anthropology,54 the “elusive master concept of experience” is “one that none of the authors seems entirely happy with, and none feels able to do without,”as Clifford Geertz, himself known for advocating a return to experience within an essentially Diltheyan framework,55 acknowledges in his afterword to an anthology specifically dedicated to this matter.56 This ambivalence towards 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-Althusserian Bellamy and Leontis can stand here as exemplars – should falter in their otherwise relentless critiques precisely when the matter of whether the very notion of experience ought to be altogether jettisoned is raised. In an unexpected volte-face whose inconclusiveness 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

53 Those French and Anglo-American thinkers whom one can tentatively group under the umbrella term of “poststructuralism” indeed fault the notion of experience not only when used (as it is by subaltern historiography) as a form of immediacy but also when used in a more dialectical manner (as it is by Gadamer in particular, and hermeneutics and phenomenology in general). For more on this, see Jay, “The Limits of Limit Experience,” 170n10. The next chapter will deal with this opposition between the mediacy and immediacy of experience, which of course informs the opposition between the Hegelian-inspired dialectical notion of experience and Locke’s Anglo-Saxon empiricist paradigm of experience. 54 A representative collection of such attempts can be found in Turner and Bruner, eds., The Anthropology of Experience. 55 In this regard, see Geertz, “Deep Play,” 412–53. From the 1970s to this day, such turns to Dilthey in the hope of salvaging the category of experience from oblivion have been quite common in anthropology, ethnography, and cultural studies. For a recent case, see Pickering, History, Experience, and Cultural Studies. With regard to aesthetic inquiry into experience, Anglo-Americans have turned instead to Dewey (e.g., Richard Shustermann), and Germans to Gadamer (e.g., Martin Seel, Jauss). 56 Geertz, “Making Experiences,” 374.

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that it seems futile to argue for its expulsion.”57 True, these are epistemologically 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 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 virulent persistence of the notion of experience in various schools of thought, of a problem that goes beyond some obsessive concern with semantic or conceptual rectitude. Indeed, 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, that this argument, in other words, 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 indeed merely a “word” (as Scott puts it), a concept, or even the organizing principle of some Zeitgeist, it would hardly be worthy of retention on the basis of its ubiquity alone. The terminological repertoire, say, of geocentric theories of the solar system was indeed no less ubiquitous in the “everyday language” of its time, yet its validity was hardly defensible on this basis alone – unless of course, in the face of growing counterevidence one was willing, as many indeed were after Copernicus, to resort to a system of Ptolemaic cycles and epicycles so arcane and complex as to make geocentric cosmology appear comical even to its contemporaries. Furthermore, 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 would remain itself unaddressed, as would also the questions raised (yet tellingly left unanswered) by Bellamy and Leontis that ask us “why the temptation to 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.”58 57 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 797. Far from rejecting the concept of experience she so relentlessly critiques, Scott later goes on to redefine the concept. See Scott, ‹Experience,› 22–40. 58 Bellamy and Leontis, “A Genealogy of Experience,” 163–4.

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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 continues to be, by various strands in aesthetics and sociocultural critique, and that the very critics who most castigate hasty appeals to this ambiguous term should falter and recoil, as we have seen, at the very prospect of altogether dispensing with it – all this suggests that the insistence of experience cannot be entirely due to its ubiquity as 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 trashcan of history or whether it has been blessed with a somewhat resilient Wirkungsgeschichte that ought to be dispassionately reviewed, or even whether it has somehow been implicated in a reprehensible history of metaphysics and ought accordingly to be deconstructed. Of import instead is that of which subaltern appeals to experience are themselves a symptom and that to which the Erfahrungshunger decades are themselves a response. What is required is not only that the insistence on experience be critiqued but also that the insistence of experience be diagnosed.

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The Mediacy of Experience Die vorgeblich unmittelbare Erfahrung ihrerseits von einem Moment, das über reine Unmittelbarkeit hinausgeht. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie

experience and the disr uptiveness of the unexpected In their bid to preserve agency or at least a means of resistance against strong structural determination, strands in cultural and subaltern theory, then, have wagered on the perceived counterhegemonic immediacy of experience. As to why such a venture should find immediate experience so seductive, poststructuralist critiques of presence in general and of immediate experience in particular tell us little that has not already been told by Adorno, if not by Hegel: “In schools of philosophy that make emphatic use of the concept of experience, in the tradition of Hume, the character of immediacy – immediacy in relation to the subject – is itself the criterion of that concept. Experience is supposed to be something immediately present, immediately given, free, as it were, of any admixture of thought and therefore indubitable. Hegel’s philosophy, however, challenges this concept of immediacy, and with it the customary concept of experience. ‘What is unmediated is often held to be superior, the mediated being thought of as dependent.›1 The insistence on immediate experience, retreating as it does to the perceived immediacy of the material, seems to paint itself into an empiricist corner, and thus leaves itself open to easy attack; yet we have seen that such a retreat is less a premise than a consequence of the Thompsonian notion of experience – in fact, we shall see in a later chapter that it is symptomatic of a more encompassing sociohistorical and temporal problem.

1 Adorno, Hegel, 57.

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It turns out that for all its apparent attempts to find refuge in material immediacy, the Thompsonian notion of experience is in fact not that of the Lockean variety, whereby stimuli impinging upon a tabula rasa, after exhibiting minimal regularity, might in Humean fashion lead to a constellation of habits from which might be extrapolated the specificity of the worker or of the subaltern. After all, Thompson himself repeatedly made clear in The Poverty of Theory that he had no intention of trading in the determinism of structuralism for the yet more pernicious determinism of empiricism, and he hardly needed to be reminded of the pitfalls besetting those who would inductively construct consciousness, let alone class consciousness, from the immediate brute data of sense-perception. The problem of horizon, of how consciousness is always already imbricated within structures of signification, on the contrary, looms large in cultural and subaltern inquiry – hegemonic méta-récits are indeed to be combated with counterhegemonic micro-récits, not with neurophysiological stimuli. Moreover, since the whole point of experience-oriented theories of the Thompsonian vein is to provide the hapless subject with a modicum of agency, it is unlikely that they should turn to Locke or Hume, who, after all, propose a “concept of experience of empiricism, of receptivity, of the recognition of the given, of ‘merely contemplative materialism,› as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge put it, that “attempts to dispose of the subject as a distorting intermediary.”2 If the Thompsonian appeal to experience cannot be readily dismissed as naive empiricism, it might seem objectionable, on the other hand, as a misguided populist appeal to irrationalist vitalism. With their insistence on countering the abstract with the concrete and the mediate with the immediate, Thompsonian experience-oriented theories indeed appear to be but crude vitalist versions of Bergsonism or of Lebensphilosophie. But a closer look at the subaltern appeal to experience reveals that the counterhegemonic or “subversive” component of experience does not lie in some vitalist opposition of lived, authentic experience to the machinations of conceptuality or to the schemes of discursive mediation as such. If anything, the second part of the Thompsonian equation, the local culture argument examined earlier, actually reinforces the need for conceptualization and mediation, stressing as it does the role of local cultures in the articulation of subaltern experience – a crucial second move without which experience could hardly be expected to consolidate into anything beyond a rhapsody of disparate perceptions, let alone into class consciousness or subaltern specificity. More is involved in the appeal to im2 Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 5. My emphasis.

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mediate experience, then, than a mere attempt to wrest from distorting mediation the irreducible certainty of either empiricist or vitalist immediacy. Thompsonian experience is neither entirely subsumed by prior discursive or mediating schemes nor hypostatized as the “other” of mediation as such. In an excessive reaction to structuralism and, later, to neostructuralist pantextualism, the Thompson-inspired insistence on immediate experience undeniably gravitates around the idea that mediation is always already ideologically laden and that the disruptive aspect of experience can be imputed to its affinity with nondiscursive materiality; but at hand in such an argument is not some quest for ideologically untainted brute reality or for the immediately lived beyond the reach of distorting mediation. Indeed, Thompson-inspired notions of experience, wager as they may on immediacy, are actually predicated upon the disjunction between, on the one hand, the expectations fostered by dominant discursive practices or ideology and, on the other hand, that to which the subaltern is exposed by virtue of his or her structural position in the social whole.3 It is to just such a disjunction that Thompson obliquely alludes when he tells us that dominant ideology “cannot 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.”4 The appeal to immediate experience actually capitalizes less on the assumed proximity of experience to prediscursive materiality than it capitalizes instead on the disruption of a congruence – on the incongruence in other words – between the expectations fostered by dominant ideology and the subaltern’s “necessary business of living.” As Axel Honneth observes in his recent work on the politics of recognition, expectations indeed play a crucial role in Thompson’s influential work on the English working class: “Thompson took his lead from the idea that social rebellion can never be merely a direct expression of experiences of economic hardship and deprivation. Rather, what counts as an unbearable level of economic provision is to be measured in terms of the moral expectations that people consensually bring to the organization of the community. Hence, practical protest and resistance typically arise when a change in the economic situation is experienced as a violation of this

3 For the sake of brevity, pronouns that modify abstract nouns will henceforth be restricted to the masculine form, although I intend the masculine form in such instances to refer no less emphatically to the feminine. 4 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 367. My emphasis.

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tacit but effective consensus.”5 It is the incongruent or unexpected, and not some encounter with prediscursive material reality, that prods the subaltern into forging and consolidating alternative and presumably subversive modes of cultural mediation in terms of which the incongruent can be dealt with and accounted for. At hand in the Thompsonian appeal to experience is the hope that something might somehow so unexpectedly disrupt dominant ideology that the subaltern will be galvanized into forging or reinforcing counterhistories and oppositional ideology. Although appeals to immediate experience equate this “something” with the prediscursive, it is in fact the idea of disruption that informs such appeals. The disruptive potential of experience upon which Thompsonian theories of experience hope to capitalize, then, stems not from a predilection for the prediscursive as such; it stems instead from the manner by which a violation of expectations, where something turns out to be different than had originally been supposed, does not leave one unchanged. The appeal to immediate experience, in other words, involves the unexpected – that which, precisely because it cannot be accommodated by or accounted for by prevalent mediating schemes, disruptively and egregiously stands out, draws attention to itself, thereby underscoring the need for its thematization and its working-through (as opposed to its absorption within dominant ideology and routinized perceptions) and thereby potentially giving rise to alternate modes of mediation. As Michael Pickering puts it in his recent attempt to rehabilitate the Thompsonian recourse to experience, “experiences can, on occasion, disturb us out of our set precepts and predispositions, upset our routinized social conduct, jolt us into glimpses of alternative directions into the unpredestined future.”6 Wager as they may on the apparent immediacy of experience, Thompsonian appeals to experience are in fact informed by a dialectic of disruption (of dominant discursive formations) and reintegration (via counterhegemonic, alternative, or local cultural articulation). This is what Thompson tried to evoke when, as we saw earlier, he referred to experience as less binarily opposed to structure than as a third term inserted between “agency” and “conditioning.”

5 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 166–7. Within his own theory of recognition, Honneth goes so far as to trace all “motives for social resistance and rebellion” to “the violation of deeply rooted expectations regarding recognition” (163). The notion that only a violation of expectations can galvanize discontent into concerted resistance is not new. See, for example, Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 183–5. 6 Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 126.

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This implied reliance on experience as the unexpected that induces a change of orientation or perspective, however, is not specific to those who would appeal to immediate experience in the name of subaltern resistance or agency. It is also a common denominator of those theories, whether partial to immediate or mediated experience, whether anthropological or aesthetic, whether hailing from Popperian critical rationalism, systems theory, or hermeneutics, that consider experience in terms other than those, more narrow or specialized, of empiricist methodology.7 If strains of anthropological theory since the late 1980s have sought to make experience a central category, it has not been at the behest of the mid-twentieth-century conflation of what James Clifford describes as the fusion of “general theory and empirical research” that sanctions “an authority both scientifically validated and based on an unique personal experience.”8 For Victor Turner and other anthropologists, experiences are instead elements of a transformative process dialogically imbricated within cultural mediation that “erupt from or disrupt routinized, repetitive behaviour” and induce an “anxious need to find meaning in what has disconcerted us.”9 Strands of ethnography have likewise turned to experience in the hope that the ethnographer himself, upon “being surprised” by unexpected ethnographic evidence can reach “knowledge not prefigured in one’s starting paradigm.”10 And within entirely different spheres of inquiry such as that, say, of the Rezeptionästhetiker of the 1970s and 1980s, aesthetic experience is not a revisitation of late-nineteenth-century Erlebnisästhetik but instead represents that which, by violating a literary horizon of expectations, “can liberate one from adaptations, prejudices and predicaments of a lived praxis in that it compels one to a new perception of things.”11 Karl Popper himself, unfairly labelled a positivist following his infamous dispute with Adorno in the 1960s,12 discusses what he calls the “prescientific experience of daily praxis” in terms of a disappointment of expectations, comparing it 7 Regarding empiricist methodology, it could actually be argued (as it has been by Habermas, for example) that it too relies on unexpectedness in its notion of experience. As David Held puts it in his paraphrase of Habermas’s critique of Peirce in Knowledge and Human Interests, “Empirical-analytical science is the necessary outcome of disturbances or disruptions in routinized discourse with nature; it aims to eliminate problematic situations which emerge from disappointed expectations” (Introduction to Critical Theory, 305). 8 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture, 26. 9 Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama,” 35–7. My emphasis. 10 Willis, “Notes on Method,” 90. 11 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 41. 12 The debates themselves can be found in Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in Germany. A concise survey of these issues is offered by Holub, Jürgen Habermas, 20–48.

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to “the experience of a blind person, who runs into an obstacle and thereby experiences its existence,” adding that “through the falsification of our assumptions we actually make contact with ‘reality.›13 In a similar vein, but from the standpoint of systems theory, Niklas Luhmann tells us that “experience [Erfahrung] is an ongoing reconstruction of meaningfully constituted reality brought about by dealing with unfulfilled expectations.”14 And from an entirely different philosophical stance, Gadamer likewise sees experience (Erfahrung) as that which, by conflicting with, or rather, by disappointing or violating expectations, “does not leave unchanged those undergoing it.”15 More recently, the historian Martin Jay, who has written extensively on the conceptual history of experience in a series of articles spanning the last two decades, tells us that a fundamental aspect of experience involves “an encounter with the new and the other, which moves us beyond where we, as subjects, were before the experience began.”16 As a recalcitrant unexpectedness that perturbs the given and incites to changed orientations, the Thompsonian notion of experience is not exactly an isolated anomaly; it is, on the contrary, a persistent theme that runs through an array of theoretical positions with little else in common, whether these positions regard experience as an aesthetic process or as an anthropological constant, as immediate or as mediated. It is indeed precisely upon this disruptive and transformative aspect of experience that various cultural, historiographical, aesthetic, and sociological theories have tried to capitalize in order to account for and cultivate the possibility of perspectival change or of expanding horizons of signification. Where strains of subaltern and cultural inquiry do demarcate themselves from other experience-oriented theories, however, is in their hasty conflation of the recalcitrance of experience with its supposed immediacy, in their transposition of a problem of counterhegemony into an issue of prediscursivity, and in their naturalization, paradoxically

13 Popper, “Naturgesetze und theoretische Systeme,” 41. 14 Luhmann, “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” in Essays on Self-Reference, 31. 15 Gadamer, Hermeneutik, 106. This latter view was of course earlier expounded (although with a different purpose in mind) by Heidegger, who tells us that “to undergo an experience with something – be it a thing, a person, or a god – means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us and transforms us” (On the Way to Language, 57). 16 Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis?” 24–5.

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enough, of precisely that subaltern specificity or difference that they had originally set out to historicize. Nevertheless, their insistence on immediate experience is informed by a disruptive aspect imputed to experience upon which they are not alone in trying to capitalize. And as can be gathered – as we shall see shortly – from the etymological and conceptual history of the term experience, this disruptive aspect does not stray far from the semantic sedimentations of the term experience, of its German equivalent, Erfahrung, and of the early-nineteenth-century neologism Erlebnis. More important still, this notion of experience as the unexpected that does not leave us unchanged concords with what, as Heidegger put it, “experience [Erfahrung] means generally, prior to its terminological use in philosophy.”17 Contrary to what certain critics of Thompsonian cultural theory would have us believe, more seems to be at stake, then, in the subaltern appeal to experience than a mere opposition between immediacy and mediation, between the lived and the abstract, or between a nostalgic yearning for presence and Nietzschean yea-saying to the Heraclitean. As but a particular embodiment of what “experience means generally,”18 Thompsonian experience-oriented theories may well turn out to be more than a case of sloppy theorizing or wishful thinking – they may in fact harbour, as Adorno would put it, a truth content. So before verdicts can be reached or diagnoses pronounced with regard to the appeal to experience of the Erfahrungshunger decades, a more sustained consideration of experience is in order. At hand in certain currents in subaltern and cultural inquiry may indeed be not so much the insistence on experience as the insistence of experience.

tw o g e n e r a l m e a n i n g s o f e x p e r i e n c e Heidegger has shown how the various meanings of experience, both in philosophy and in daily discourse, essentially fall into two broad groups. In the first group, experience refers to “the immediate demonstration of an opinion or a knowledge by way of returning to things in the broadest sense of the term, i.e., by seeking recourse in the intuition of some

17 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 19. My emphasis. 18 By “general use,” Heidegger means that which is prior to or prevalent in spite of specific philosophical appropriations.

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thing as the means of its confirmation.”19 It is to this group, where experience involves “experimenting in the sense of demonstrating and proving an opinion about something with recourse to sense-perception of that thing itself,” that Heidegger consigns the Naturwissenschaftliche notion of experience, as well as Husserl’s particular version of phenomenological experience.20 In the second group of meanings of experience, on the other hand, experience “does not focus exclusively on the element of seeing for oneself” but instead denotes, “both negatively and positively, undergoing experience with something in such a way that this something is verified, experiencing it as not being what it first seemed to be, but being truly otherwise.” It is to this second group that expressions such as “to undergo experiences with something,” “to have become richer by certain experiences” belong – expressions that, Heidegger adds, “indicate a certain sense of having been disappointed and surprised because things turned out otherwise than expected.”21 Heidegger is not alone in dividing the various uses of experience into these two general groups. Along similar lines, Negt and Kluge divide experience (Erfahrung) into two camps, each of which has received its respective paradigmatic formulation by Hume and Hegel and both of which resemble Wilhem Wundt’s distinction between “internal” and 19 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 19. Although such an intuition or apprehension of things is most recognizable, as Heidegger is of course aware and as Martin Seel has further noted, in the classical paradigm of the meaning of the term experience, which extends it to the perception of objects and events in external nature, such an apprehending need not be merely sensory or empirical; it can also extend to interpretative activity in a more general sense. For more on this, see Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 79–91. 20 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 20. Even though Husserl’s notion of retention and protention may seem to have paved the way for Gadamerian hermeneutics, where experience is dialectical rather than empiricist, and even though, as Gadamer has shown, Husserl had hoped for a “genealogy of experience that, as an experience of the life world [Lebenswelt], remains anterior to the idealisation operated by the sciences,” Husserl nevertheless projects the empiricist and scientific notion of experience onto the very originary experience of the world he tried to elaborate. As Gadamer sums it up, he “makes perception, as the exterior perception oriented towards corporeality alone, the basis of all experience” (Wahrheit und Methode, 353). To cite the Husserl cited by Gadamer: “Even if, on the basis of sensible presence, it [Erfahrung] immediately captures our practical or spiritual interest, even if it immediately gives itself as that which can serve us, attract us or repulse us – all of this is founded on the fact that it is a substrate whose qualities can simply be grasped by the senses and towards which the path of a possible interpretation always leads” (Wahrheit und Methode, 353). With good reason Heidegger likewise points out that such a notion of experience is in keeping with Husserl’s conviction that “phenomenology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood” (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 20). 21 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 19–20. My emphasis.

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“external” experience.22 Likewise, Jay distinguishes between, on the one hand, experience understood as in opposition to all mediating or discursive operations and, on the other hand, experience understood as a dialectical process whereby the unexpected leads to a rectification of earlier perspectives.23 Martin Seel, who has written perhaps the most comprehensive recent study since Dewey on experience and its relation to aesthetic practices, also resorts to such a distinction: “As opposed to a concept of experience centered on the direct ascertaining of facts, I defend … an alternative notion, which to me seems more productive, according to which to undergo an experience refers to the realization, always singular, of a changed orientation in given domains of comportment [Verhaltensbereichen].”24 Such a division of experience into two general groups of meanings is of course not without some occasional overlapping. For example, insofar as Dilthey’s concept of Erlebnis involves the connection of disparate events into a unit of meaning that unexpectedly stands out from the otherwise undifferentiated flux of life, and insofar as Erlebnis is not passively received but instead actively transforms those undergoing it by spurring them to creative and expressive objectification, it is to the second group outlined by Heidegger that this concept belongs; but Dilthey’s concept of Erlebnis also has an apparent affinity with the first group insofar as it becomes for the Geisteswissenschaften what the sense-datum has been for the Naturwissenschaften, namely, the indubitably given from which knowledge can be inductively erected.25 A similar ambiguity can be seen in Victor Turner, who invokes Dilthey and Dewey in order to champion experience as the unexpected that transformatively reorients, yet who in passing describes experience in behaviourist metaphors, referring to the 22 Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 5. See also Wundt, Grundriβ der Psychologie. 23 Jay, “Songs of Experience,” 38–9. 24 Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 77–8. 25 It is true that in his attempt to justify the objective validity of the Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey’s recourse to Erlebnis ends up mimicking the Naturwissenschaften. Dilthey nevertheless preserves to a certain extent the specificity of the Geisteswissenschaften by basing their modus operandi on the manner by which Erlebnis, as a nondecomposable minimal unit of intelligibility and signification, puts a halt to any positivist retreat to the brute sense datum. I will not deal here, however, with such questions as whether Dilthey oscillates between a pantheistic and positivist tendency (Gadamer’s contention), whether Dilthey is a precursor to Gadamerian hermeneutics (Richard Palmer’s position in Hermeneutics, 121–3) or whether Dilthey is but a crypto-Hegelian who differs from Hegel only because for “Dilthey the spirit (Geist) is embraced by life, whereas for Hegel life is a deficient mode of spirit” (Herbert Schnädelbach’s position; see his Philosophy in Germany, 56).

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“shocks of pain or pleasure” by which experience, much in the manner of a salivating Pavlovian dog, conjures past associations and conditions future behaviour.26 And we earlier saw a similar situation in various strains of cultural and subaltern studies where, on the one hand, the thrust of the argument is predicated upon a disjunction or incongruence between prevalent ideology and that to which the subaltern is exposed, yet where, on the other hand, the logic of their argument occasions a quasi-empiricist retreat to brute material immediacy. In each of these cases, however – and there are others – experience in the first general sense outlined by Heidegger, as a recourse to the intuition of the objectively given, whether as Dilthey’s datum of minimal intelligibility or as Thompson’s “raw material,” does not furnish the ground for such arguments; instead, this first sense of experience is either the byproduct of a response to an external concern (such as Dilthey’s defensive justification of the objective validity of the Geisteswissenschaften or the Thompsonian rejection of strong structural determination) or a careless non sequitur to the main argument (as is the case with the isolated incident of Turner’s odd behaviourist metaphor). And this strongly contrasts, as we saw earlier (for example) in Thompsonian subaltern theories, with the manner by which the second general sense of experience, that is, experience as the unexpected that entails a reorientation, is presupposed by their central arguments – and this regardless of whether this presupposition is explicitly thematized or implicitly endorsed. It could in fact be argued that experience in this second sense turns out to be experience’s more fundamental way of being, that it is in other words ontologically prior to, or the condition of possibility of, experience as the intuition of the objective. To put it in the Heideggerian terms of Sein und Zeit, experience as the intuition of things may be to experience as the unexpected what Vorhandenheit is to Zuhandenheit – the derivative of a more fundamental way of how things present themselves to us. A thing or event must indeed first stand out from or unexpectedly disrupt the otherwise seamlessly integrated totality of one’s horizon of possible signification before it can become the actual object of further inquiry – empiricist, positivist, or otherwise. Even in the case of Bacon’s notion of experience, which most histories of ideas consider a forerunner of empiricist and inductive methodology, Gadamer has convincingly shown how such a notion must be reconsidered in the more general manner by which experience presents itself to us: “Experience in this sense on the contrary necessarily presupposes the manifold disappoint26 Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey and Drama,” 35–6.

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ment of expectations [Enttäuschung von Erwartungen], for it is only in this way that experience is acquired … As Bacon well knew, it is only through negative instances that experience is to be had.”27 And one need not convert to Gadamerian hermeneutics in order to argue along these lines. It is in this vein that, say, the critical rationalist Popper discusses the extent to which science itself is anchored in what he calls the “pre-scientific experience of lived praxis” and the extent to which the forging of hypotheses – scientific or otherwise – itself presupposes the “disappointment of expectations.”28 From the standpoint of systems theory, Luhmann likewise argues that even when thematized as a scientific or methodological confirmation of hypotheses through an intuition of the things or situations themselves, “experience [Erfahrung] is never the pure unmodified arrival of what was expected,” but is instead “made scientific by increasing its information value” through a process of negation, “and not by the confirmation of existing expectations or opinions.”29 If we backtrack to some of the earliest formulations of experience, such as Aristotle’s, we find that although experience is of interest only insofar as it inductively leads from singular observations to universal concepts, experience is nevertheless depicted by metaphors suggesting the unexpected disruption of a prior stable state. With good reason Gadamer sees in Aristotle’s Analytica posteriora a testimony to what he calls “the decisive moment in the essence of experience” – a decisive moment often overlooked because experience is usually considered in terms of its results and as a fait accompli, rather than in terms of how it is acquired to begin with.30 The two general meanings of experience, then, point less to two different varieties of experience than to two different stages of the same phenomenon. And the distinction between the two groups proposed by Heidegger as well as by a wide spectrum of otherwise incompatible schools of thought, from phenomenology and systems theory to critical rationalism and pragmatism, all point to a distinction not between two unrelated tendencies within experience but instead between experience 27 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 362. 28 Popper, Theorie und Realität, 91. 29 Luhmann, “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” 31–2. My emphasis. 30 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 359. Gadamer’s reading of Aristotle’s notion of experience must of course be seen in the context of his genealogical backtracking to the origins of our notions of experience – that is, to experience before it began to play, as Gadamer put it, so “determining a role in the logic of induction for the natural sciences that it has been subdued by the theory of knowledge to a schematisation which, to me, seems to mutilate the original content [ursprünglichen Gehalt]” (ibid., 352).

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as a process whereby the unexpected leads to a reorientation and experience as an acquired product of this process whereby the unexpected is contained within the bounds of verification and corroboration.31 The issue regarding which of the two general senses of experience is the condition of possibility of the other need not be addressed here. But what must be retained is that although there is indeed a difference between having experience and undergoing an experience, between experience as a product and experience as a process, it is experience in this latter sense that prevails insofar as experience, instead of being subjected to strictly inductive methodological imperatives, on the contrary gravitates around problems of self-formation, self-identity, and agency (whether as a Luhmanian psychic subsystem in relation to its environment, as G.H. Mead’s intersubjectivley constituted self in relation to concrete and generalized otherness, or as a Heideggerian temporally ek-static Dasein within a Welt) or problems of the transgressive status of aesthetics within daily praxis (whether because experience is always already aesthetic or, conversely, in need of aestheticization). Uses of experience within such lines of inquiry indeed stress precisely that which is not seamlessly integrated within prevalent discursive schemes, routinized practices or expectations – they stress in other words that which disruptively stands out from and perturbs current horizons of signification and established practices. It is to this latter sense of experience that the following chapters will refer. Of interest here is indeed that of which the insistence on experience since the 1970s may be a symptom – an insistence at work precisely in those theories that, in their dealings with issues of agency and selfformation, presuppose the second sense of experience outlined by Heidegger. Beyond various sectarian definitions, then, experience can be (and for our purposes will henceforth be) generalized not so much 31 Studies that divide experience into two categories similar to those sketched by Heidegger are too numerous to be enumerated here. Suffice it to say that we find this tendency no less in Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes (where although Oakeshott addresses experience “as a whole,” he nevertheless acknowledges a distinction between “experiencing” and “what is experienced,” or between experience as a process and experience as a product (Experience and Its Modes, 9–10)) than it is in Pickering’s recent work, where experience as a “process from which experiential knowledge emanates” is distinguished from experience as product or “congealed knowledge” (History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 92–3). Scott, who otherwise harbours little sympathy for the Thomsponian or subaltern appeal to experience, likewise tells us that “experience can both confirm what is already known (we see what we have learned to see) and upset what has been taken for granted (when different meanings are in conflict we readjust our vision to take account of the conflict or to resolve it)” (“The Evidence of Experience,” 793).

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as an accumulation of cognitively processed information or as a repertoire of normatively thematized problems – these are instead some of the potential products of undergoing experience – than as that which, by not seamlessly integrating itself within given horizons of expectation, perturbs routinized perceptions and fosters changed orientations. Experience here, then, will not refer to the result of having undergone experience, at which point the issue would revolve around confirming the given; it will instead refer to a process one undergoes, at which point the problem becomes one of disrupting the given. Experience in this latter sense has perhaps been best articulated by Seel, whose definition accords with Heidegger’s, yet whose terminology – unlike Heidegger’s – has the advantage of being as applicable to pragmatism and systems theory as to hermeneutics and phenomenology and which thus evades the parochialism of any particular school of thought. As Seel puts it, we “undergo experience when the expected confirmation is lacking, when what was once self-evident becomes problematic, and when the familiar becomes strange,” and “unlike what happens when one has experiences [Erfahrungen, die wir haben], one undergoes experience when the presupposed hierarchies of relevance upon which one has heretofore relied lose their orienting value. To ‘undergo an experience’ [eine Erfahrung machen] means to discover an anticipatory attitude in the face of problematic circumstances due to a transformation of the original attitude that these circumstances put into question – circumstances whose disturbing character alone is capable of imposing a situation as a situation of experience.”32 It is on just such a notion of experience, which stresses disruptive unexpectedness and changed perspectives, that various theories hope to capitalize in order to vindicate, say, class consciousness, subaltern agency, the active role of the aesthetic upon environing social practices, or the active role of understanding in forging horizons. Unlike the first sense of experience, which essentially amounts to a passive submission to external sense-perception or to a resigned endurance of the given within predetermined parameters, experience in the second sense, in contrast, stresses the active engagement of those to whom it befalls and the changed orientations that it engenders. At this point it should be added that a sensation of strangeness following a confrontation with unexpectedness is in itself only a necessary, and not a sufficient, condition of possibility of experience. Experience is indeed not to be equated with unexpectedness as such; it also involves a lasting change, however imperceptible, of earlier orientations or horizons of 32 Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 80, 88–9.

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understanding. I may very well be seized by a sense of strangeness when confronted, say, by the unexpected bankruptcy sign plastered on the boarded windows of my favorite café that I had last visited just the day before, but should I merely shrug off and forget this unexpected event (I could merely choose without further ado to frequent a different café), then I would not have actually undergone an experience. Should this event instead represent more than a quickly forgotten inconvenience and should it leave a lasting imprint on my routine activities by arousing a new and prolonged awareness, say, of the macroeconomic factors behind the demise of this café, then this unexpected event would have incited me into a reaction that would not have left me unchanged – and at this point an experience could be said to have taken place.33 The reorientation induced by experience, moreover, is not a mere cumulative addition of new perspectives to prior opinions or projects or a mere switching among attitudes or dispositions within a repertoire ready at hand. To switch from a conciliating to an authoritarian tone because one’s interlocutor proves to be more refractory than expected does not as such constitute an experience. Rather than propose various dispositions that are merely to be tacked on to those already at one’s disposal, experience instead entails that the unexpected transform or revise prior perspectives or attitudes. Experiences “grow out of the alteration or falsification of that which is already ours,” for “the acquisition of experience is not a matter of adding on– it is a restructuring of what we already possess”34 – or, to put it in Luhmanian terms, “experience (Erfahrung) is surprising information that is structurally relevant and leads to a restructuring of the meaningful premises of experience processing.”35 And such restructuring need not be fundamental or revolutionary; it can also be – and usually tends to be – but a weakening or strengthening of a particular position or disposition, or an accentuating mise en relief of what otherwise might remain automated or routinized. In short, the essential matter at hand in experience is that, as a result of it, one is not left unchanged. It is hardly surprising, then, that experience should insistently surface in subaltern and cultural theories concerned with counterhegemonic 33 This is why Seel adds to his definition of experience that “to undergo or have an experience does not mean to merely accept something that we hadn’t acknowledged earlier, but to integrate it in the framework that until then defined for us the real and the possible,” for involved in experience is “a transformation of the vision of things, or of certain things, on which had been founded the comportment of he who undergoes experience” ( ibid., 83, 79). 34 Iser, The Act of Reading, 131–2. My emphasis. 35 Luhmann, “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” 31. My emphasis.

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agency and active change, or in theories dealing with the genesis and future prospects (and not merely the results) of scientific praxis, or in theories from Dilthey to Dewey that hope to reassert the role of the aesthetic in the forging of new horizons of meaning. If, indeed, experience as a process disrupts prior meaning, this negativity also produces meaning: the negation of the given is not just left at that but, on the contrary, incites to the active production of new meaning and orientations that, by thus trying to account for the unexpected, restructure earlier dispositions. Experience in this sense is both destructive and productive of meaning, for what distinguishes experience from the inconsequential, as Seel notes, is that those “engaged by [experience] position themselves towards the state of affairs that has astonished them, and this in such a way that their earlier established comportment and expectations are replaced by a different projection that takes into account new realities.”36

experience: a dialectical affair Experience, then, seems to favour the innovative as opposed to the habitual, discontinuity at the expense of continuity, the contingency of an open future as opposed to the stability of a self-contained past or the immobility of a self-perpetuating present. But although experience, as we shall later see, is decisively imbricated within an open future that allows for the new, the surprising, and the unexpected to occasion a remue ménage within given horizons and practices, experience does not involve the outright rejection of an earlier horizon of possible signification. If experience is not the inconsequentiality of the routine, neither is it the inconsequentiality of unadulterated discontinuity. Unless they are reworked within the continuity of the horizon they perturb, the brute traumatisms of the discontinuous remain just that – mere shocks that, by failing to penetrate the purview of a horizon, are hardly in a position to disturb its economy beyond a fleeting unsettling, let alone lead to consequential changes in one’s orientation. Beyond the disruption of the unexpected, experience indeed also demands that this disruption be addressed. The unexpected leads to experience only insofar as it provokes a further reaction whereby it is neither dismissed outright nor entirely assimilated by the familiar but is instead reintegrated into the horizon it disrupts – and this in such a way that this horizon changes in the process of accommodating it. This is what 36 Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 83.

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Seel means when he says that experience itself comes about only after an eventful constraint forces one to enter into a reinterpretative process of one’s experience and perceptual schemas.37 As a process that involves the disruption as well as the resumption of continuity, experience is hardly a one-sided incarnation of discontinuity; it instead involves a dialectic of disruption and reintegration, or what anti-Hegelians selfconsciously prefer to call an “oppositional play between confrontation and assimilation”38 – a dialectic that, if the specific variables involved in various formulations are bracketed (variables such as experience as a dialectic of innovation vs. the habitual, of hegemony vs counterhistory, of mediacy vs immediacy), can be generalized as a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. Such a dialectic can, of course, hardly take place if the unexpected, without further ado, merely galvanizes towards a reckless headlong rush towards the perpetually renewed advent of the new or if it merely consecrates generalized discontinuity for its own sake. Required instead is a reflexive turning back upon, and not the outright displacement of, precisely those horizons and orientations that have been disrupted. It is, after all, within such horizons that the unexpected is worked upon, and not in their vacated seat that the unexpected is articulated ex nihilo. This reflexive “returning to,” which Heidegger and Gadamer call an Umkehrung and which Kristeva similarly calls a retournement,39 is in fact presupposed by theories wagering on the counterhegemonic or transgressive aspect of experience. The disruptiveness of experience resides not in the punctual intensity as such of unexpectedness (or the sublime or nonidentity or the “incommensurable”), as if discursive mediation were somehow inherently evil; it resides instead in the juxtaposition of the unexpected with the familiar, in the salience of their incongruence, in the tension, in other words, between disruptive unexpectedness and normalizing familiarity. And this stress on the salience of incongruence is no less present in the subaltern appeal to experience, as we have just seen, than it is in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – originally subtitled “The Science of the Experience of Consciousness” – which was the first system37 Ibid., 82. Note that “eventful” should be understood here in the Lyotardian sense of événementiel, that is to say, as Readings put it, that which “disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be represented or understood,” and the “the fact or case that something happens after which nothing will ever be the same again” (Introducing Lyotard, xxxi). 38 Ibid., 83. 39 Heidegger, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” in Holzwege, 105–92; Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 359–65; and Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, 173–6.

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atic formulation of the dialectical aspect of experience and which essentially tells us the story about how consciousness, in the face of its unexpected incapacity to account for an object, proceeds to a higher stage, not by rushing to some other object in its experience, but by working through the unexpected incongruence between its object and its conception of that object. It is precisely because the unexpected and the incongruent are reintegrated within the very practices and horizons they perturb that horizons are not left unchanged, that subaltern counterhistories can be constructed, that Rezeptionsästhetiker literary horizons can be rearranged, or that Luhmanian social and psychic systems can be sustained. In the case of Thompsonian experience-oriented theories, we have seen how their appeal to the disruptive potential of experience is entwined with an appeal to the coordination of these experiences within a counterhistory or a subaltern culture – the whole point of appealing to experience is after all not to jettison the past but instead to return to it so as to reconstruct it differently, so as to salvage the subaltern, woman or worker, as Thompson phrases it, “from the condescension of posterity.” Since “a people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history,”40 agency is to be salvaged by consolidating experiences into a counterhistory, not by dispersing them into a multiplicity of fickle micronarratives from which one constantly shifts following each unexpected event. So while the unexpected does unsettle, it does not annihilate those undergoing it; it instead leads to experience insofar as it fosters the reconstructing of one’s past history or the revising of one’s biographical narratives. Experience, then, does not entail a rush to the unexpectedness of an open future at the complete expense of the predictability of a foreclosed past, at which point discontinuity would become generalized; but neither does experience involve, conversely, the complete assimilation of the new by the familiar, at which point the continuity of a horizon would not even be breached. At hand in experience is, instead, a process whereby the continuity of a horizon, upon disruption, resumes again in such a way that the unexpected is included and worked into it, and this with the result that one emerges changed, while at the same time keeping a foothold on what one once was. If to undergo an experience means that something turns out differently than originally supposed, Heidegger also reminds us that “what proves to be different will 40 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 33.

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not be thrown aside. Rather, the appearance in such and such a way [das So-Scheinen] belongs precisely to that which is experienced and is included in that which makes the experience richer.”41 This is why the results of having undergone experience are qualified, whether by the most complex of philosophical treatises (such as Hegel’s) or by everyday proverbs or maxims, not with superlatives boasting of radical metamorphoses and new beginnings but instead with comparative adjectives indicating that the experience has made a difference that both constructs upon what happened before and that in turn will be constructed upon by what follows. Maxims tell us that from experience one emerges wiser, richer, than before – one is taught lessons that one will not forget and that will better prepare us for further experiences. Experience is not a disparate punctual shock that leaves no consequential traces behind; it is a confrontation with unexpectedness that induces a dialectically informed and future-oriented developmental process. It is just this sort of process that informs the appeal to experience at hand in strands of theory from subaltern inquiry to aesthetic endeavours. Subaltern experience-oriented theories tell us that the subaltern is to be saved from the condescension of posterity by consolidating and expanding a counterhistory. Likewise, trends in aesthetic inquiry that rely on experience and for which Jauss’s discussion of Bakhtin can serve here as an exemplar tell us that “to experience art is an excellent way in which to experience the alien ‘you’ in its otherness, and, thereby, in turn to have an enriched experience of one’s own ‘I›42 – a position echoed by Albrecht Wellmer, for whom modern aesthetic experience is not so much the production of disruptive intensity for its own 43 as it is a dialectic between two moments that he calls energetic (non-meaning that disrupts) and semiotic (meaning made available to the subject), a dialectic that “expands the boundaries of meaning – and … in doing so it also expands the boundaries of the world and of the subject.”44 The notion that experience leads to expansion and enrichment is not limited to certain philosophical stances, to everyday maxims, to issues of agency, or to aesthetic practices: it is even to be found, so Dewey tells us 41 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 21. 42 Jauss,“Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” in Question and Answer, 216. 43 This in the manner (for example) of Lyotard’s “energetics,” as outlined in his Économie libidinale and according to which intensity is the result of an eventful presentification of the unrepresentable – a presumably subversive way of circumventing the evils of commodification and semiotics. 44 Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since Adorno,” in The Persistence of Modernity, 53.

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in his more speculative moods, at a biological level where nonhuman organisms are likewise enriched by successfully passing through states of disparity and resistance. Regardless, however, of the legitimacy of Dewey’s transposition into the biological of a notion of experience usually considered in terms of mediation and signification, the point here remains that when deployed by theories reckoning with the relation between the self and its environment (whether aesthetic or social) or even with the interaction of the biological organism with its physical surroundings, experience points to the idea of passing through states of disparity and resistance, of overcoming adversity, of undergoing an ordeal or passing a test, only in the end to emerge changed and enriched within a re-established continuity. Such a dynamic, moreover, informs not only the conceptual but also the etymological history of experience and Erfahrung. The semantic sedimentations embedded in the etymological history of these terms indeed strikingly converge with the manner by which experience has been both theorized and generally understood. Experience, after all, derives from the Latin experiri (to put to the test) and periculum (danger, ordeal), which themselves stem from the Greek perao, which relates experience to the idea of “passing through,” with implications of rites of passage. A further etymological backtracking also shows us that experience actually derives from the Indo-European base per, “to attempt, venture, risk,” which connotes ideas of a journey and an ordeal that one undergoes. Such an etymology likewise holds for the Germanic languages, since p becomes f by Grimm’s Law, and thus the German cognates of per relate experience to “fare,” “fear,” and “ferry,” while Erfahrung itself can be retraced to the Old High German fara (ordeal), which gives rise to Gefahr and gefährden.45 Etymologically and semantically linked as they are to the notion of ordeal and initiation, experience and Erfahrung entail not that one altogether annihilate earlier orientations and horizons or a diachronically extended sense of self-identity – to do so would be to suffer self-destruction and thus to fail an ordeal; instead, they entail that one successfully negotiate and “pass through” the unexpected, so as to receive confirmation, as in any test, while at the same time emerging wiser, enriched, or 45 For more on this, see Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey and Drama,” 35. To this it ought to be added that there is of course a close etymological and conceptual link between experience and experiment. But as Pickering shows, “while experiment became more directly just the test itself, experience came to refer to a consciousness of the results of such a practical test, and by extension to a consciousness of an effect or state” (History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 92).

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otherwise fortified. Earlier horizons of signification and earlier routinized perceptions are not altogether jettisoned – they are merely interrupted, tested, and reorganized differently. Although one does not emerge unscathed, neither is one entirely metamorphosed. The danger of undergoing ordeals and the risks involved in confronting unexpectedness are sought not for their own sake but instead as that through which one successfully passes yet which one withstands. Whether deployed by anthropology, aesthetic theory, subaltern historiography, or postGadamerian hermeneutics and whether it is explicitly addressed or implicitly relied upon, experience follows from the incremental transformation, not the outright evacuation, of the familiar, the habitual, and the past by the unexpected, the surprising, and the new. Michael Oakeshott sums it up well when he tells us that “in experience the given is simultaneously conserved and transformed.”46 Experience, in short, is a dialectical affair – so much so that Giorgio Agamben points out with good reason that even contemporary dialectics, which has gone beyond a strictly Hegelian project, finds its roots in this conception of experience marked by negativity.47

e r l e b n i s : a pa r a - a c a d e m i c d i a l e c t i c a l a f f a i r If experience appears imbued with a dialectical dynamic throughout its long etymological and conceptual history, it is only with Hegel that such a dynamic receives its first systematic formulation – it is in fact from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that both Heidegger and Gadamer glean the second general meaning of experience. Experience, however, is not a strictly academic issue. Just as the Erfahrungshunger decades have witnessed the para-academic duplication of an issue thought to be purely academic, likewise in the early nineteenth century did the dialectical aspect of experience go beyond strictly philosophical debates: under the guise of the early-nineteenth-century neologism Erlebnis – an initially nonacademic term that had to wait for Dilthey before its codification as a philosophical and aesthetic concept – the dialectical aspect of experience indeed permeated certain forms of early-nineteenth-century German popular fiction and biographical literature. Erlebnis, usually translated as “lived experience,” hardly seems at first glance to embody a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. If by the late nineteenth century Erlebnis was in vogue in such fields as aesthetics, 46 Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, 37. 47 See chapter 3 of Agamben, Infancy and History.

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anthropology, and psychology48 and if it became what René Welleck calls “the shibboleth of German poetic theory,”49 by the 1920s it had become so broad a term as to become essentially meaningless. At best, Erlebnis vaguely retained references to only one of its original aspects, namely, the manner by which the intensity of the immediately lived dispenses with the need for external authentification, reasoned justification, mediating interpretations, or other antics of “alienating” and “lifedenying” reason. It is of course this vitalistic aspect of Erlebnis that has been rightly decried by Western Marxism, beginning with the Frankfurt School, as the potentially dangerous stuff of charlatanism or, to use Adorno’s apt phrase, as the “jargon of authenticity” spewed forth by mountebanks, the appeal of which can be gauged by the popularity of vulgarized Lebensphilosophie (for which Ernst Jünger’s Kampf als innere Erlebnis (1922) can stand as an emblematic exemplar) and the association of which with the more unpalatable of twentieth century sociopolitical movements, now again on the rise in industrialized, nonindustrialized, and deindustrialized nations alike, is hardly a mystery. Associated as it became by the 1920s with vitalist immediacy and prediscursive irrationalism, Erlebnis has of course also incurred the scathing critiques of those schools of thought, from Wittgenstein and Voloshinov to Gadamerian hermeneutics and poststructuralism, that have always cast a suspicious eye on psychologism and romantic pantheism as a ground for explaining processes of signification. With such a recent conceptual history, where vitalist Einfühlung and punctual immediacy are the order of the day, Erlebnis would hardly seem to have much affinity with – in fact, since the Frankfurt school in general and Walter Benjamin in particular, it would seem diametrically opposed to – the more dialectically oriented and temporally extended notion of Erfahrung. The early conceptual history of Erlebnis, however, shows how this term was initially imbued with the same dialectical dimension that we saw at work in experience and Erfahrung. Although various hasty appropriations of Dilthey have encouraged the association of Erlebnis with vitalist immediacy, Dilthey’s own notion of Erlebnis nevertheless points to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. Indeed, not only does Dilthey’s concept involve the coalescing of disparate events and strands of meanings into a unit of intelligibility and not only does it intensely stand out from and starkly contrast with the otherwise morose undifferentiated flow of life; it also demands that its disruptiveness be reinserted in the 48 Cramer, “Erleben, Erlebnis,” 708. 49 Welleck, “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis,” in Discriminations, 251.

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very life course that it perturbs – a crucial move that by fostering a reinterpretation of the life course, leaves a lasting imprint on those undergoing it. Such a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity becomes particularly evident in Dilthey’s frequent recourse to the hermeneutic circle as an illustration of the dialectical imbrication of experience within the larger context of a life course: by disrupting a life course but by also requiring that this life course accommodate rather than assimilate such a disruption, Dilthey’s Erlebnis impinges upon and restructures the very whole to which it owes its articulation, and this in the manner of a whole that both determines and is determined by its constitutive elements. The dialectical aspect of Erlebnis, however, is not confined to Dilthey’s particular use of this term. If Dilthey was the first to systematically formulate the concept of Erlebnis that various vitalist currents would later abuse, it is important to remember that “the real phenomenon that took place in the very life of language merely deposited itself in the richness of the technical acceptance which the word [Erlebnis] receives with Dilthey.”50 A dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, indeed, no less informs the term Erlebnis as it was initially deployed in various forms of German popular fiction in the 1840s, and this before any specific appropriation of the term Erlebnis by philosophy, Lebensphilosophie, hermeneutics, or academic discourse in general.51 It is true that the association of Erlebnis with immediacy seems yet stronger in the pre-Diltheyan use of this term: after all, even as it began to consistently appear in the biographical literature and popular fiction of mid-nineteenth-century Germany,52 Erlebnis was endowed, as Gadamer has shown, with “a striking immediacy which eschews all thinking of its signification.”53 And as that which thus disrupts the given and the mediated, the “striking immediacy” of Erlebnis has been seen – and this in an association that Sauerland traces back to Carl Rosenkranz’s Skizze of 1842 (yet which persists to this day) – as that which surprises, disturbs, or is otherwise unsettling (erschütternd).54 But this undeniable link 50 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 67. 51 Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 4–6. 52 According to Gadamer, it is only in the biographical literature of the 1870s that Erlebnis gains currency; Sauerland’s more thorough study of the concept of Erlebnis, however, shows how, although this term proliferated in book titles and enjoyed considerable popularity as early as the 1850s, it is to the 1840s that can be traced the meanings currently attributed to it. See Wahrheit und Methode, 66–75, and Sauerland Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 3–7. 53 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 72 . 54 Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 3n17.

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between Erlebnis, immediacy, and “unsettling” is only half the story: if, from its initial appearance in early- nineteenth-century fiction to its later use and abuse by later nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theory and aestheticized theorizing, Erlebnis is characterized by an Erschütterung that follows from a confrontation with or immediate access to the prediscursive, such a frisson is nevertheless not limited to an ephemeral or punctual shock bereft of further consequences; the frisson of Erlebnis must on the contrary lend itself to a reintegration within the very totality (such as that of a particular Leben) that it disrupts, and this in such a manner that one is changed in a lasting manner. The conceptual history of Erlebnis, particularly as it began to appear with increasing frequency by the mid-nineteenth century, is indeed characterized by a double-sidedness, or what Gadamer calls a Doppelseitigkeit, whereby Erlebnis refers both to the “immediacy prior to any interpretation, elaboration or mediation … as well as to its import, the result which lasts.”55 This double-sidedness can in fact already be traced to the semantic history of the two terms from which Erlebnis was coined in the early nineteenth century – erleben, which “stresses the immediacy with which one grasps something real,” and das Erlebte, which is the result of experience that has “obtained duration, weight and importance.”56 But it is the word “adventure” (Abenteuer), with which Erlebnis has been most often compared – from its initial popularisation in the 1840s to Simmel’s work57 – which best shows how Erlebnis is less a wager on immediacy than it is a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. After sifting though literary sources of the 1840s, where Erlebnis begins to assume a certain semantic consistency, Sauerland concludes that it is during this period that Erlebnis acquires the various meanings attributed to it to this day,58 the most prevalent of which has been that of adventure: “Here 55 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 73, 67. 56 Ibid., 66. Konrad Cramer likewise notes that Erlebnis stems from the fusion of two semantic strands – erleben (which by the 1850s shifted from the idea of “being alive when something happens” to connotations of the immediacy with which something happens) and das Erlebte (which designates that which “in the flow of the immediately lived, and which as a product of this flow, gains enduring meaning for the whole context of a life” (“Erleben, Erlebnis,” 702–3). 57 Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 5–7. 58 Indeed, Gadamer notes that such a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity can be seen in the manner by which Erlebnis was to operate in aesthetics a century later: here, aesthetic experience (ästhetische Erlebnis) is not merely something that is “extracted from any real context,” but means instead that “the power of the work of art tears he who experiences it from the context of his life and yet at the same time reconnects him to the totality of this existence” (Wahrheit und Methode, 75–6).

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Erlebnis has more the meaning of adventure [Abenteuer]. The habitual life course is interrupted, all connections with the familiar world are loosened, and it is the unknown and uncertain that henceforth constitute the element within which the hero must move. Should the hero not only succeed in withstanding the extraordinary, his adventure, but also return from it to the everyday more experienced and enriched, then this interruption of the hero’s life course will be designated as an unforgettable Erlebnis that will not remain without influence on his later living.”59 Unlike the mere episode, which only provisionally delays the course of things before being quickly glossed over as this course resumes unchanged, adventure, in contrast, leaves behind a lasting imprint on the course it interrupts. The adventure, unlike the episode, does not merely interrupt; it must also “relate itself in a positive and very significant manner to the continuity it interrupts.” As Gadamer further reminds us, “adventure is aware that its characteristic is that of the exceptional – a characteristic that is specific to it, as adventure – and it thus remains related to the return to the habitual into which it cannot be accommodated. Thus, adventure is something one passes through, as one passes a test or a trial, out of which one emerges enriched and more mature.”60 Likewise, Erlebnis is distinctive not only because it disrupts the continuity of the life flow, where nothing is truly experienced, but also because it leaves durable traces or residues in the life course it interrupts. By forcing a life course to accommodate something unexpectedly new or foreign to it, Erlebnis effectively impinges upon and restructures this life course. If the hero, say, of the 1866 short story “Ein Erlebnis in Texas” can claim to have undergone an experience, it is not only because the continuity of his horizon in Germany was perturbed by the unexpected harshness of a sojourn in Texas but also because upon resuming his life in Germany, he is prodded by this event into self-reflexively reworking this horizon in such a way that he “becomes a better citizen of everyday life.”61 In spite of its eventual appropriation by certain vitalist currents after Dilthey, Erlebnis, then, does not stray far from the conceptual and semantic history of experience. Erlebnis does not foster a mere opposition between distorting mediation and pristine unmediated reality, between the habitual and the unexpected; it instead reworks the discontinuity of 59 Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 5–6. 60 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 75. My emphasis. 61 In Westermanns Monatshefte (1866), 519–43, cited in Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 5–6.

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the unexpected, the new, or the extraordinary into the very continuity it interrupted – and this much in the manner of the Thompsonian notion of experience, which strives not after immediacy as a prediscursive entity but after that which, by violating expectations and by disrupting dominant mediated reality, unsettles prior dispositions in a lasting and consequential manner. The dialectic of continuity and discontinuity at hand in Thompsonian and subaltern notions of experience is not, then, some aberrant phenomenon confined to certain strains of theorizing; it instead refers to a problem explicitly thematized by both academic and para-academic uses of experience, whether in the recent Erfahrungshunger decades or in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By capitalizing on the incongruence that dialectical experience inserts between the given and the possible, between the routine and the unexpected, experienceoriented cultural, subaltern, and historiographical theories à la Thompson merely perpetuate an understanding of experience that has been around for quite some time.

beyond academic squabbling As can be gathered from its etymological sedimentations and conceptual history, as well as from the manner by which it informs certain strains of theoretical inquiry, experience is imbued with a dialectical structure suspiciously reminiscent of German idealism. With its dialectic of continuity and discontinuity following a confrontation with unexpectedness, the strange, or the new, with its apparent stress on both cancelling and preserving what is negated, while at the same time yielding a higher synthesis, experience seems to be but a variant of Hegelian Aufhebung, or a German idealist notion of Bildung, whereby an encounter with otherness leads to an unfolding and enriching process of selfobjectification and self-knowledge.62 This apparently Hegelian hue to 62 To this it ought to be added that if the dynamic of experience seems “Hegelian,” it no less appears to have an affinity with aspects, say, of the pragmatism of Peirce and Mead. In his earlier writings, before he turned to a more intersubjectively informed theory of the self, Mead indeed initially tried to account for self-consciousness through the pragmatic concept of “problematized interpretation-situations,” borrowed from Peirce, according to which an actor becomes conscious of his subjectivity through the disruptive violation of expectations and the problematization of habitualized performances. These “problematized expectations,” by making the familiar unfamiliar, engender a need for the re-evaluation and reconstruction of what seemed given and, in so doing, make the actor self-consciously aware of his expectations and horizon. See G. H. Mead, “The Definition of the Psychical.”

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experience becomes all the more flagrant when we recall that Hegel, who first systematically formulated the dialectical structure of experience, actually provides the backdrop against which Heidegger expounds the second general meaning of experience. Moreover, Hegel himself goes so far as to equate experience with the dialectic, telling us that “what one calls experience [Erfahrung]” is actually a “dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on itself, on its knowledge as well as on its object, insofar as the new true object springs before it.”63 With good reason Heidegger notes how “Hegel does not conceive experience dialectically; he thinks the dialectic on the basis of the essence of experience.”64 But to maintain that experience is a dialectical affair is not necessarily to subscribe to some general Hegelian project that would have experience assist in the self-objectification of Geist on its way to absolute selfknowledge; nor does it entail, as Jay puts it in reference to the generic poststructuralist objection to experience, a “reliance on a strong notion of subjectivity, a subject present to itself after a process of apparent alienation, and its pivotal role in mediating between consciousness and science.”65 One need but think of Luhmann’s systems theory, which is hardly Hegelian and where a “strong subject” is, if anything, quite absent.66 Better yet, one need but think of Gadamer, who – although very much under the sway of Hegel in several important respects that need not be addressed here and that as such ought not to be a sin67 – pro63 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 79. 64 Heidegger, Holzwege, 187. For more on this, see also Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, 10–13, and Hyppolite, Génèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, 15–30. 65 Jay, “The Limits of Limit Experience,” 170n10. 66 For a concise compte rendu of Luhmann’s position with regard to “the subject,” which he of course prefers to call a “psychic system,” see his “Individuality of the Individual: Historical Meanings and Contemporary Problems,” in Essays on Self-Reference, 107–22. 67 Or if it does constitute a sin, then the burden of proof rests on the shoulders of the accusers and not the accused. As Duncan Forbes caustically reminds us in reference to what is perhaps Hegel’s most unread, most misunderstood, yet most maligned work: “[the Philosophy of History] contains the notorious phrases about the state being the divine Idea on earth, reason ruling the world and so on, which have been made to mean precisely the opposite of what Hegel intended. Even those who have spent years of suffering as well as enjoyment on this mountain can slip badly at times, and this should be sufficient warning to those critics and quick-reading, quick-judging able men – from whom God defend the history of ideas – who, taking a quick look through the telescope, usually someone else’s, feel competent to lecture the crowd, always ready to enjoy the deflating of large balloons, on the iniquities of a system which they have not begun to understand properly. And there are the sly innuendoes of otherwise learned men, which are difficult to nail because the nature and depth of the ignorance involved cannot be properly established” (Forbes, introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World Spirit, vii-viii).

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poses experience as a dialectic that, contrary to the march of Geist in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, merely loosens the grip of prevailing horizons, a dialectic that “never ends in complete knowledge and perfect identity of consciousness and object, but continually opens unto ever new experiences through its unceasing questioning.”68 One need, in other words, no more subscribe to the Hegelian march of spirit when acknowledging the dialectical structure of experience than one needs to agree, say, with Hegel’s political philosophy when taking the masterslave dialectic as a basis for a theory of recognition, as the recent work of Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor eloquently shows.69 The dialectical aspect of experience in fact persists even in such selfconsciously anti-Hegelian thinkers as Foucault and Bataille.70 In spite of their attempts to stay clear of a dialectical notion of experience, which they equate respectively with phenomenology and Hegelianism, along with the evils of a repressive, centred subjectivity, Foucault and Bataille in fact end up reproducing the dialectic they sought to oppose. In the case of Foucault, experience ought not (as he puts it) “to reaffirm the fundamental character of the subject, of the self” but ought instead to adhere to the Nietzschean task of ‹tearing’ the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely ‘other’ than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.”71 But as we saw earlier, the very fact that, as Foucault himself put it, “an experience is something that you come out of changed”72 presupposes a reestablishing of the ruptured continuity and a reflexive Umkehrung: in sheer discontinuity, there would indeed no longer be a subject where change might be registered; there would be but disparate punctual shocks – in fact, it is only through a reflexive restructuring following a disruption that experience testifies to its own eventness, that is, to its having taken place in such a way that one emerges changed. After all, as Luhmann reminds us, “events are happenings that make a difference between a ‘before’ and a ‘thereafter.’ Events can be identified and observed, anticipated and remembered only as such a difference … Their presence is a copresence of the

68 Kisiel, “The Happening of Tradition,” 24–5. For a concise examination of Gadamer’s notion of experience (Erfarhung) as compared to both Hegel’s and Jauss’s, see Piché, “Expérience esthétique et herméneutique philosophique,” 179–91. 69 In this regard, see Honneth, “Pluralisierung und Anerkennung,” 624–9, as well as his Struggle for Recognition, and Taylor’s Multiculturalism. 70 See Jay, “The Limits of Limit-Experience,” 155–74. 71 Foucault, “How an Experience-Book is Born,” in Remarks on Marx, 31; cited in Jay, “The Limits of Limit-Experience,” 158. 72 Ibid., 27; cited in Jay, “The Limits of Limit-Experience,” 157.

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before and the hereafter.”73 This is why Foucault’s notion of experience involves not only a disruptive undermining of the continuity of the subject, which Jay calls the proactive moment of Foucault’s experience, but also a mise en rapport between the disruption and what was disrupted, between “a ‘before’ and a ‘thereafter› – a mise en rapport made possible by what Jay calls a reactive moment, a “post facto reconstruction,” a retrospective articulation of the disruption in terms of an autobiographical narrative, which is actually what allows for experience to be engendered in the first place. Experience is indeed not an entity that is first present and then narrated; it is instead in the narrative act prompted by disruption that experience actually comes about. Experience for Foucault, no less than experience in general, is both the occasion for and the result of reflexive restructuring, and not merely disruptiveness for its own sake. And at hand in Foucault’s notion of experience is a dialectic (as Jay puts it) of the “proactive and reactive,” of “self-expansion and selfannihilation, immediate, proactive spontaneity and fictional retrospection.”74 – or, in other words, of continuity and discontinuity. With good reason Jay reminds us that Foucault’s notion of experience ends up being no less dialectical than the very “dialectical account of phenomenological Bildung that Lyotard and other critics of Hegelian sublation find so troubling.”75 The problem of experience, however, ought not to be addressed as if it were merely the persistence of Hegelian-inspired terminology. True, it could be argued that although the etymological history of experience testifies to a dialectical element, it is nevertheless only with Hegel that such a dialectical structure is systematically formulated; and experience, the argument could continue, is thus a pernicious co-conspirator in the most resilient of ontotheological systems, Hegelianism – a system so resilient that even a Bataille and a Foucault remain malgré eux under its insidious sway. When considering the emergence of certain cultural paradigms or the inauguration of epistemological configurations, it is of course tempting to limit the sociohistorical forces at work in such formations to the speculations of a few key thinkers who act as catalytic 73 Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems,” in Essays on Self-Reference, 10–11. My emphasis. 74 Jay, “The Limits of Limit-Experience,” 159. 75 Ibid., 160. To this it ought to be added that with regard to postmodern thought in general, it is important not to dismiss, as Habermas notes, “the suspicion that postmodern thought merely claims a transcendent status, while it remains in fact dependent on presuppositions of the modern self-understanding that were first brought to light by Hegel” (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 4–5).

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agents within a histoire des mentalités. But if by the seventeenth century, subjectivity is increasingly considered centred or if by the nineteenth century the dialectical dynamic of everything from history to consciousness becomes an idée reçue, it is not because Descartes woke up one day and decided to oppose res extensa to res cogitans or because Hegel decided to air his views on the vagaries of some Geist. It is, indeed, important not to forget that “the temptation to give priority to the philosophical formulation comes from the fact that it is a formulation.”76And of this Heidegger and Gadamer remind us when they make it clear how Hegel’s concept of experience is but a particular formulation of how experience has generally been understood. It may well be that dialectical experience in fact ought not even to be addressed as if it were a strictly philosophical concept in need of either demystifying deconstruction or belated rehabilitation; it may well be that dialectical experience has instead as its referent something beyond a self-contained history of opinions exchanged amongst theorists. Not only does the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity at hand in the etymological and, more pronouncedly still, the post-Hegelian conceptual history of experience indeed inform various philosophical endeavours and academic debates to this day; it has also permeated para-academic identity politics since the 1970s, as well as the early-nineteenth-century German neologism Erlebnis – a term first consistently used in popular fiction and one that, unrelated before the late nineteenth century to philosophical or geisteswissenschafltich concerns, enjoyed considerable vogue precisely in those segments of the population unfamiliar with Hegel or Dilthey, let alone the implications of German idealism and hermeneutics. That academic and para-academic discourse should simultaneously thematize the dialectical aspect of experience suggests that at stake is more than a problem confined to the history of ideas. Questions about experience, then, should not exclusively concern themselves with, say, the extent to which Hegel enthralls us to this day and hoodwinks us into perpetuating our incorrigibly weak-kneed logophilia or whether or not certain thinkers may or may not have had the fortitude to become bona fide Nietzschean yea-sayers. Pointing as it does beyond the narrow parameters of academic squabbling, experience raises issues of a sociohistorical order. Why, indeed, is it only by the early nineteenth century that the dialectical aspect of experience receives its first systematic exposition and why does it manifest itself with such force in the neologism Erlebnis that within popular fiction “its 76 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 307.

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axiological character was so self-evident that many European languages adopted it without translating it”?77 The answer to such questions lies neither in Hegel’s concept of Erfahrung nor in Dilthey’s notion of Erlebnis, and still less does it lie in the various subsequent philosophical appropriations of either of these terms. Instead, it lies in the sociohistorical vectors that presided over the emergence, or at least over the increased prevalence, of a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that happens to be registered by both academic and para-academic uses of the term experience.78 Since it is at the end of the eighteenth century that experience first becomes insistent, it is to this period that we must first turn in order to consider what is at stake in the appeals to experience that were to follow some two centuries later. Only then can we consider whether the last three Erfahrungshunger decades are either a perpetuation or a mutation of that cluster of sociohistorical vectors that by the late eighteenth century initially allowed for experience to become a thematized problem. The capacity itself for experience, and not just the manner by which experiences are mediated or articulated, may after all be not some innate faculty but, on the contrary, a product of history. Potentially subject as it is to historical change, experience may turn out to be more encompassing a problem than can be rectified by conceptual rectitude alone or than can be set aright by admonishing poststructuralist or neo-Althusserian interventions. Before counterhegemonic strategies based on experience can be either devised or debunked, the historical status of experience must first be ascertained.

77 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 67. 78 This will be addressed in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the term “sociohistorical vector” is intended as a reminder that certain process are socio-historically contingent, and not transhistorically given or natural, processes such as temporality, experience, or subjectivity, which are implicated within signification, within the manner by which the complexity of one’s environment is reduced (to use Luhmann’s terminology), or within the manner by which one’s horizon of possible signification is constituted (to use phenomenological terminology).

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Experience and the Prospective Gaze to the Future Needless to say, the historical character of certain concepts is no guarantee whatsoever that the intellectual edifices which make use of them are historical. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation

the mo dern it y of ex perience As a popular term that gained currency in tandem with philosophical formulations of Erfahrung and as a term that points no less than does its philosophical counterpart to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, the neologism Erlebnis of course testifies to a certain convergence between both academic and para-academic dealings with experience. But what is striking here is not that the dialectical aspect of experience should receive its first systematic philosophical formulation through Hegel while almost simultaneously finding its way into popular fiction and biographical literature – after all, we have already seen how such a dialectic informs an etymological and semantic history that can be traced as far back as Aristotle. What is striking here is instead that only by the early nineteenth century, and not before, is such a dialectic foregrounded, explicitly thematized, and, more strikingly still, valued as constitutive for the developmental unfolding of consciousness and for the building or fortification of self-identity. What is indeed characteristic of uses of experience after the late eighteenth century – after the advent of modernity in other words1 – is not that they become imbued for the first time with a dialectical aspect but rather that they testify to a shift of emphasis onto the implications of such a dialectic: instead of being seen as 1 As mentioned earlier, in the introduction, the advent of modernity is understood here as coinciding with the emergence and consolidation of the temporality (such as the divergence of past and future noted by Koselleck), the structure of the self (such as Giddens’s “modern reflexive self-identity” or Taylor’s “modern expressive subject”), the dominant mode of social organization (such as Luhmann’s “functional differentiation of social

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an extraordinary event or painful ordeal to be endured, as an aberrant mishap to be contained, or as an inductive prelude to the universal, the dialectical aspect of experience by the late eighteenth century is increasingly seen as a phenomenon imbricated within everyday reality, as an open-ended process to be actively cultivated in the name of growth and self-expansion.2 A dialectical dimension permeates the conceptual history of experience well before the late eighteenth century. But because the emphasis was typically placed not on the process but on the product of experience, any such dialectical dimension tended to be obscured by more fundamental ontological priorities. If, for example, Aristotle resorts to metaphors comparing experience to the disruption of a prior stable state, he nevertheless finds experience of interest only insofar as it contributes to the formation of the concept. Even in those atypical premodern instances between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that seem to stress the disruptive aspect of experience – one need but think of Montaigne – the dialectical aspect of experience remains a peripheral matter. Montaigne indeed considers experience in terms of an opposition between the singular and the universal, between the concrete and the abstract, and as such his notion of experience is closer to the first group of meanings outlined by Heidegger, with its stress on first-hand verification through the direct intuition of concrete singularity, than it is to the notion of experience as a dialectical and transformative process one undergoes following encounters with unexpectedness. The dialectical aspect of experience could come to the fore as a disruptive and transforming process, rather than as something concrete at one’s disposal, only when the self itself could be envisioned as subject to possible transformation. This presupposes what some call the modern systems”), or concepts and “pratiques du savoir” (as Foucault would have it) under the sway of which we still find ourselves or which have contemporary significance for us to this day. It is to the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the above thinkers, who agree on little else, unanimously ascribe the advent of modernity – a rough chronological marker that will also serve us here. In spite of variations that oppose, say, the classical age to the middle ages, premodernity can, on the other hand, be understood, as Foucault puts it, as the prehistory of what is contemporary for us – and what is contemporary for us emerged for the most part by the late eighteenth century. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 315. Although it is formulated in terms of temporality, an excellent defense of the mid- to late eighteenth century as a rough marker for the advent of modernity can be found Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 154–69. 2 For an excellent study on how this late-eighteenth-century trend manifests itself in changed literary narrative techniques, see Moretti, The Way of the World, 40–7.

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subject, and others bourgeois subjectivity – a subject that, unlike its earlier counterparts, no longer designates the substratum behind the accidental characteristics and attributes of any being, whether sentient or inanimate,3 but that instead refers specifically to the human self or “I” as the bearer of psychological states and as the performer of actions.4 This also presupposes that the self, no longer a static entity preordained by fate or caste, becomes an open-ended project that incorporates rather than smothers the new and the unexpected. Such a self is unlikely to come about as long as the given is seen as immutable, as it indeed was in a medieval world “defined by the Church’s transcendence of time,” as Helmut Plessner puts it, as well as in the later era of “natural law … defined by the timeless validity of the principle of reason and the divinely ordained nature of the relations of social dependence.”5 Before the self could be seen as subject to change and before the unexpected could impinge upon, rather than submit to, the given, the order of things itself had to be seen as subject to temporal and historical perturbation. Only then could future experimentations, rather than past wisdom or a timeless cosmological order, become the guarantor of self-identity, if not of truth. The latter are no longer timelessly given but instead become, at worst, provisional and, at best, asymptotically projected onto an indeterminate future. Before such changes, experience was couched more in terms of the vertical relation of the manifold to the one than in terms of the horizontal 3 Before the late eighteenth century, substantia and subjectum were in fact essentially synonymous. Luhmann also reminds us that “until the late eighteenth century, human individuals were only a special kind of individual thing (res), characterized by their rational substance. And res meant simply a constraint on possible combinations of traits” (“The Individuality of the Individual,” 119n5). 4 This, of course, in turn presupposes that, following the Cartesian opposition of res extensa to res cogitans, the substantivisation of the I, from Berkeley to Locke, fosters what Giorgio Agamben describes as “the concept of a psychic consciousness replacing the soul of Christian psychology and the õï¯ò of Greek metaphysics” (Infancy and History, 23). The well-known story behind these developments is a long one that cannot detain us here. For a concise overview, see chapters 4–5 of Dupré, Passsage to Modernity. But what is of interest here is not the origin of such a modern notion of the subject but the fact of its historical emergence by the late eighteenth century. As Luhmann puts it, “One can find many forerunners – in the concept of the soul and its cognitive parts, in the form of thought as reflexivity (noesis noeseos), or in the Cartesian concept of the ‘I think,’ which designates a selfcertainty given independently of whether one is in error or not. But not until the end of the eighteenth century was man understood to be a subject in the strict sense, and thereby unlinked from nature” (Social Systems xxxviii–xxxix; my emphasis). 5 Plessner, “Zur Soziologie der modernen Forschung,” 122. Cited in Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 69.

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rapport of subject to object. Experience was indeed less an issue revolving around how a subject’s continuity can be disrupted by something unexpectedly foreign to it or how a given horizon can be reflexively reorganized so as to accommodate the new, than it was a problem of cognitio singularium – a problem limited to how the retention in memory of singular perceptions allows universal knowledge to proceed from the experience of the particular. Although Gadamer rightly points out that “the relation between experience, retention, and the unity of experience which proceeds from it remains remarkably unclear,”6 experience as cognitio singularium (knowledge of particulars) is nevertheless a recurrent theme that, beginning with Aristotle, spans the Middle Ages and persists well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where it can be seen no less insistently in Thomas Aquinas, for whom “experientia fit ex multis memoriis,” than in the work of Hobbes, which tells us that “memoria multarum rerum experientia dicitur.”7 And while it is true that there have been sixteenth-century thinkers for whom, as one historian puts it, “experience puts limits on Theory and Doctrine, not the other way about,”8 experience nevertheless remains a problem of the singular and the universal – even if only in a reversed mirror image. For Montaigne, who can stand here as representative of such a trend, experience does not actually impinge upon or transform the self – it instead cumulatively furnishes the concrete material that assists more effectively in self-knowledge than do abstract formulae. This is of course why Montaigne speaks of experience not in terms of how it has transformed him but in terms of what he has learned (“l’experience m’a encores appris cecy”).9 Before the end of the eighteenth century, the unexpectedness involved in experience was generally seen as an aberrant mishap to be managed, as a temporary obstruction on the way to higher universal knowledge, or, conversely, as a concrete singular standing in opposition to the universal. This of course does not imply that the unexpected had no place in premodern or traditional society. Ethnographic studies show how the oral recitation of hunting stories, instead of emphasizing the routine, 6 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 356. 7 See Kambartel, “Erfahrung,” 610–11. 8 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 130. 9 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 299. Cognitio singularum is indeed a central leitmotif in Montaigne’s work. For all his scepticism, he sees in experience a problem revolving around how similarities can be inferred, however tentatively, from a multiplicity of differences and minutiae: “toutes choses se tiennent par quelque similitude, tout exemple cloche, et la relation qui se tire de l’experience est tousjours defaillante et imparfaicte; on joinct toutesfois les comparaisons par quelque coin” (280).

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stress breaks from daily life by revolving around the unexpected mishaps that beset hunting expeditions.10 But rather than lead to a reflexive integration of the new within the old, so as to occasion a changed orientation, the unexpectedness of such mishaps is interpreted so as to accord with the given. Unexpectedness in premodernity, to borrow a Luhmanian term usually deployed in a different context, is “normalized,” that is, it is “dealt with by being so interpreted that it accords with already existing or accepted meaning. The unknown is assimilated to the known, the new to the old, the surprising to the familiar.”11 Even when change does actually follow from a disruptive suspension of the routine, such change in premodern society is seen as something exceptional, as the stuff of religious conversions or initiation rites, and hardly as the reflexive restructurating and formation of self-identity in the manner, as we have seen, of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity at work in experience.12 The notion of ordeal or trial – a notion narrowly imbricated in the etymological and conceptual history of experience – indeed has strikingly different implications in its premodern usage, where it is associated with initiation, as opposed to its modern usage, where it is linked to the idea of self-formation. Whereas the premodern notion of trial designates an external obstacle to be overcome so as to reestablish an interrupted continuity or an initiatory transmutation of social status during specific life stages, by the mid-eighteenth century it instead becomes linked to the incremental construction of the self and is seen, as one historian notes, as “an opportunity: not an obstacle to be overcome while remaining ‘intact,’ but something that must be incorporated, for only by stringing together ‘experiences’ does one build a personality.”13 Such changes in the status of the unexpected and of the ordeal are also registered in the conceptual history of experience. Just as the initiation rites of premodern society give way to the modern idea of self-formation

10 See Rosaldo, “Hunting as Story and Experience,” in The Anthropology of Experience, 97–138. 11 Luhmann, “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” 33. 12 As Giddens notes, “Transitions in individuals’ lives have always demanded psychic reorganisation, something which was often ritualised in traditional cultures in the shape of rites de passage. But in such cultures, where things stayed more or less the same from generation to generation on the level of the collectivity, the changed identity was clearly staked out – as when an individual moved from adolescence into adulthood” (Modernity and SelfIdentity, 32–3). 13 Moretti, The Way of the World, 48.

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or Bildung,14 likewise does experience leave the ether of the extraordinary in order to permeate instead the everyday formation of self-identity. No longer a prelude to the inductive formation of concepts, no longer an ordeal to be overcome or a privileged moment of initiatory transmutation or religious conversion, experience instead increasingly refers by the mid- to late-eighteenth century to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity where the everyday encounter with the ordinary, and not the extraordinary, where incremental growth, and not metamorphosis, are the order of the day. With the advent of modernity, experience becomes conflated with notions of growth and self-expansion, and the turbulent episodes besetting a life-course – as long as the individual manages to capitalize on them for the sake of a strengthened self-identity – are seen as the stuff of experience.15 The change wrought by experience on a life course, horizon of understanding, or biographical itinerary no longer annihilates earlier life stages – it instead leads to the reflexive restructurating and enrichment of the earlier orientations it disrupts, and it becomes a stimulus for rather than an ordeal of self-formation. It is no coincidence, then, that Erfahrung and Bildung should become so closely linked to one another in late-eighteenth-century Germany that, as one theorist puts it, “the most elevated concept created by German thought at the time to interpret this process [of Bildung] is experience.”16 It is indeed at this time that Bildung, earlier associated during the Aufklärung with goal-oriented Erziehung, where a final pedagogical product is to be had, and associated earlier still with the formation and

14 After the eighteenth century, the German Bildung can approximately be rendered in English by the term “self-cultivation” (as Walter Bruford suggests in his German Tradition of Self-Cultivation) or in French by éducation de soi-même (as Louis Dumont suggests in L’Idéologie allemande). As is the case with most fundamental concepts in history, culture, and philosophy, such as progress, the new, revolution, culture, and the individual, Bildung has a complex and convoluted conceptual history that cannot detain us here. Suffice it to say that it is by the late eighteenth century (which Koselleck has appropriately dubbed Sattelzeit) that Bildung, along with other central cultural and philosophical concepts, assumes the meanings attributed to it to this day. In this regard see Koselleck’s Futures Past and, more specifically, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 170–207. 15 As Moretti sums it up, experience by the late eighteenth century “implies growth, the expansion of self, and even a sort of ‘experiment’ performed with oneself. An experiment, and thus provisional: the episode becomes an experience if the individual manages to give it a meaning that expands or strengthens his personality” (The Way of the World, 46). 16 Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger, 74. Lyotard likewise notes that “the idea of an experience presupposes the idea of an I which forms itself (Bildung)”(Le Différend, 75).

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shaping of matter and soul through the imitation of exemplars,17 semantically shifts instead to the notion of an open-ended process of self- cultivation, growth and development (whether of individuals, a Volk or, later, a nation)18 – a development that, in spite of the varied uses to which it has been put, from Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe to Thomas Mann and Matthew Arnold, if not to the underlying pedagogical philosophy of the university to this day,19 – involves what has been called “the constitution of the self through the ordeal of the non-self,” or “the formation of the self through the trial of otherness.”20 This late-eighteenth-century association between experience and Bildung is to be found no less in Hegel’s philosophical formulation of Erfahrung and its relation to the unfolding of consciousness than in the early-nineteenth-century neologism Erlebnis and its relation to biographical literature. This link also persists in the Erfahrungshunger decades, as we have seen, where it is through the reflexive integration of the unexpected within the very horizons it disrupts that Thompson-inspired theory hopes to develop subaltern consciousness and consolidate counterhistories or that various theories of aesthetic experience hope to “expand the boundaries of the world and of the subject.”21 What is specific to the modern notion of experience, then, is not only that the dialectical aspect of experience lends itself for the first time to explicit thematisation but also that this aspect is actively sought and cultivated within the everyday encounter with reality as instrumental to the growth of self-identity and to the unfolding of consciousness. By the late eighteenth century, experience semantically shifts to problems revolving 17 For more on premodern notions of Bildung, see Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 509–12. See also Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 170–207. 18 For more on this, see Dumont, L’Idéologie allemande, 219, and Vierhaus, “Bildung,” 511–16. 19 Such has indeed been the guiding pedagogical philosophy of the university – and this not only in Germany but throughout the Western industrialized world – since Wilhelm Humboldt’s model for the University of Berlin prevailed (between 1809 and 1810) over Schleiermacher’s and Fichte’s. For a recent discussion of the continuing influence of the Arnoldian project (as outlined in his 1869 manifesto Culture and Anarchy), which is heavily indebted to Humboldt’s model of the university’s role in assuring judicious Bildung, see Ryle and Soper, To Relish the Sublime? Following the increased transnationalisation of capital since the 1970s, however, which has been eroding the nation state upon which such a model is predicated (as Bill Readings has shown), the pedagogical philosophy of the university is currently in limbo or, to use an overused expression, “in crisis.” For more on this issue, see Readings, The University in Ruins. 20 Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger, 68, 75. 21 Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” 53.

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around the interaction between the new or unexpected and the very structure of subjectivity, becoming for Hegel the very “dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself”22 as it confronts the unexpected, becoming in the neologism Erlebnis the disruptive stimulus to self-formation, and persisting throughout modernity and well into the last three decades decades as “the ritualising of the construction of one’s self,” as one anthropologist puts it, which continues the general modernist project “of self-possession, self-fashioning, self-expression.”23 Even when the term experience is not expressly used, the role of a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in self- formation and the unfolding of consciousness initially comes to the fore in a number of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenthcentury philosophical projects, beginning of course with Fichte’s attempt to ground the self-realization of the ego in the very disruptive resistance of the objects it itself “posits,” yet eventually overcomes. Such a dynamic can also increasingly be seen at work in various late-eighteenth-century literary genres, where it can be traced as far back as Rousseau’s Confessions but where it nevertheless first becomes a generalized phenomenon within the Bildungsroman24 – which was the first literary genre to have portrayed (as well as promoted) modern socialization and which has rightly been seen as the first genre to have formulated those presuppositions regarding temporality and self-formation that, for the next two centuries, would inform the popular narrative genres, if not the dynamics of identity-formation as such, of industrialized Western nations.25 22 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 79. 23 Abrahams, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience,” 46. Between the early popularisation of Erlebnis and the use of experience in the Erfahrungshunger decades there has been little change. Abrahams characterizes the situation for contemporary Americans in terms no different from those used by Sauerland in her discussion of the early use of Erlebnis: “Americans have placed ever greater importance on experience,” Abrahams notes, “relating it to our notions of the person in constant development, always heading towards some kind of self-realization. We have been searchers after experience, always preparing ourselves for significant actions that may enhance our lives if we remain open to the new” (50). 24 Rousseau’s Confessions indeed involves a series of collisions between the I and the external world, each of which, as Gunther Gebauer and Christoph Wulf note, “leads to an affirmation of the self, which, because of the intensity of the experience, becomes the equivalent of a formation of the I. The I, in the experience of the conflict, is created anew” (Mimesis, 210). 25 This position has indeed been commonly adopted by theorists of the novel. For more on this (which will be dealt with in the next chapter), see, for example, Moretti, The Way of the World, 10; and Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres, 10–59.

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But the shift of experience from the exceptional and the extraordinary to the everyday encounter between the self and the new, as Vierhaus reminds us in reference to Bildung, ought not to be entirely imputed to the eighteenth-century secularization of cultural and philosophical concepts.26 Such a semantic change instead stems from a new notion of the human subject – a subject that emerged some two centuries ago yet that has so persisted to this day that in hindsight the century of Goethe still seems contemporary to us, whereas in contrast the baroque era already appears as a bygone age that belongs to history. This tells us two things. First of all, we are reminded that late-eighteenthcentury semantic changes in various key concepts, of which experience is but one, have contemporary significance for us to this day27 and that such concepts, informing as they do our current self-understanding, are not unrelated to present concerns. If experience by the late eighteenth century becomes decisively linked to how the new and unexpected participate in and are integrated within economies of the self and of consciousness, such a link no less persists in much of recent cultural and subaltern theory. Second, it is in the problem of self-formation, which Vierhaus unfortunately mentions only in passing, that may lie the answer to why experience has been so insisted upon during the Erfahrungshunger decades. Indeed, if experience as a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity has aroused strident debates in academia and para-academia since the 1970s, it is because it has a very real referent – a referent that is betrayed by that towards which experience-oriented theories have been invariably drawn over the last two hundred years: the manner by which a sense of self is constituted through the new and the unexpected. Theories of the last three decades that reckon with the relation of experience to cultural and aesthetic mediation or to resistance and counterhegemony, whether in the name of neo-ethnic specificity, subaltern agency, aestheticized self-cultivation,28 or even antioedipal depersonalization, are 26 This change in the concept of experience is indeed paralleled by a similar semantic shift in the term Bildung itself. Rather than refer to the transformations initiated by divine intervention or other transcendental entities, Bildung increasingly refers by the late eighteenth century to the self-formation that results from the subject’s confrontation with the unexpected immanent to his everyday environment. For more on this, see Dumont, L’Idéologie allemande, 109–10 and 224–5. 27 Or, at least, they had significance until the last two decades, as we shall see in chapter 5. 28 Such aesthetic self-cultivation includes both the logophiliac concern for sociocultural integration and continuity, as well as the logophobic celebration of discontinuous and unfettered self-invention, or what Axel Honneth calls a “Nietzschean tinged concept of aesthetic freedom” (The Fragmented World of the Social, 221).

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indeed all informed by issues either of identity and self-constitution or, conversely, of depersonalization and self-disruption – by issues, in other words, that are linked, positively or by negation, centrally or peripherally, to the constitution of the self in the face of disruptive unexpectedness or, as current parlance puts it, of otherness and the incommensurable. Even in the case of aesthetic experience as proposed, say, by Jauss, at stake is not so much the disruptive fluidization of literary horizons as such as it is the manner by which the aesthetic contributes to and expands upon the subject’s horizon and self-understanding. Since it became an important category at first in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic and hermeneutic inquiry and, later, in cultural and historiographical inquiry since the 1970s, the various formulations of experience, as a concept, whether as retrospectively mediated or always already mediated, whether as punctual Erlebnis or as temporally extended Erfahrung, all have as a common denominator the manner by which experience as a process operates in the economy of self-formation, the unfolding of subjectivity, the formation of identity, or the constitution of both individual and intersubjective horizons. Dealings with such issues have of course varied considerably over the last two centuries. Whereas Hegel’s take on experience can be diagnostically seen as an attempt, as Louis Dupré rightly suggests, to “incorporate the modern experience of subjectivity within a classical style ontology,”29 the Frankfurt School, in contrast, explicitly thematizes a correlation between modes of experience and the historically changing structures of subjectivity by synthesizing Marx, Weber, and Freud – whether in terms of the Adornian focus on the regression of hearing or of the Benjaminian diagnosis of the loss of Aura, the growing incapacity for telling stories, and the changes wrought upon the human cognitive apparatus by urbanization. But although couched in varying philosophical terminologies, the association between experience and issues of selfformation is no less present in the German idealism and American pragmatism of yesteryear than in strands of cultural anthropology, feminism, and Anglo-American cultural studies of today. With good reason Geertz, Scott, and others tell us that experience is not to be readily dispatched – except that the resilience of experience stems not so much from its undeniable ubiquity within “everyday language,” as Scott has suggested, as from the central role it has played in self-formation or, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the constitution of a historically specific sense of self that, after its initial manifestation within the late-eighteenth-century 29 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 161.

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bourgeoisie, has become increasingly generalized over the last two centuries and has, until recently at least, informed our current selfunderstanding. Experience testifies to a historical problem that must be addressed before its demise can be pronounced or its resurgence proclaimed. If, with regard to experience, theorists from otherwise incompatible schools of thought appear to be but so many footnotes to Hegel, this is not because Hegel “invented” dialectical experience and somehow exercises, outre-tombe, a nefarious influence on us all to this day; it is instead because Hegel merely gave a philosophical formulation to the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity already embedded in the conceptual history of experience, yet one that only a convergence of late-eighteenthcentury sociohistorical vectors could bring to the foreground. And if Erlebnis in the early nineteenth century becomes an ubiquitous term in popular fiction, in biographical literature, and, shortly thereafter, in aesthetics beyond Germany, it is not because German literature, by some underhanded tour de passe-passe, somehow came to dominate the literary scene; it is instead because the term Erlebnis, by responding to a cluster of problems increasingly felt by the late eighteenth century, struck a sensitive chord that reverberates to this day. Experience is of course not itself a specifically modern phenomenon; yet it is only with the advent of modernity that experience becomes an explicitly thematized problem – particularly when issues of self-formation are at stake. It is only with the differentiation of the private from the public sphere, as well as the intra-differentiation of an Intimsphäre from the private sphere itself, it is only when a sense of subjective interiority (or, as Foucault would put it, the opposition as such between depth and surface) emerges historically,30 it is only when the once seamlessly conjoined past and future, to put it in Koselleckian terms, begin to pronouncedly diverge – in short (and if only to put an end to this Ciceronian periodic sentence), it is only by the mid- to late eighteenth century that self-identity, no longer an attribute externally conferred by caste affiliation or kinship ties, becomes sufficiently negotiable an affair and sufficiently open-ended a project to allow for experience to play a central role in its constitution. Just as modes of self-formation are not shielded from the vicissitudes of historical change, likewise is the role of experience in self-formation – let alone in the attendant issues, say, of counterhegemonic cultural specificity or even aesthetic self-cultivation – a matter that cannot be 30 Regarding the emergence of the modern opposition between interior and exterior, or depth and surface, see chapter 7, sections 3 and 5, of Les Mots et les choses.

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peremptorily presupposed. Before we can diagnose the current status of experience, we must first consider the sociohistorical vectors that helped experience become linked, in the first place, with issues of selfformation. Only by then ascertaining the continuing presence or, conversely, the gradual waning of such vectors over the last three decades can we turn to the current status of experience, let alone diagnose the subaltern insistence on this experience. Only then will it be possible to ascertain, or at least to speculate on, the extent to which experience may or may not be or, rather, may have been but may no longer be a constitutive element of self-formation or a viable category for aesthetic, historiographical, and cultural theory.

t h e te m p o r a l i t y o f e x p e r i e n c e The relation between concepts and their sociohistorical context raises thorny epistemological issues that go beyond the scope of this study. The aim here is not to adjudicate causal relations or to ferret out homologous structures – such operations raise more problems than they solve, replete as they are with presumptions about the relation of thought to being. But suffice it to say that nebulous Goldmanian homologous structures or determinist Althusserian last instances are not a prerequisite for acknowledging a connection between conceptual history and sociohistorical developments. Concepts, philosophical or otherwise, do not arise ex nihilo or gain currency in isolation from other historical considerations – they no less abhor a vacuum than does nature and, on the contrary, testify, however residually, to the larger sociohistorical developments within which they are embedded yet which they also help shape. What must be kept in mind is that conceptual history, to use Vattimo’s formulation in reference to the history of metaphysics, “is not only, nor even primarily, a history of certain ideas of philosophers, or of the constitution of a certain common state of mind”; instead, it is a testimony to “an evolution of the human manner of being in the world.”31 What is proposed here is that the association between experience and issues of self-formation be neither confined to some self-enclosed histoire des mentalités nor, conversely, limited to some epiphenomenal manifestation or refraction of some deeper or parallel domain. Instead, this association will simply be addressed in the form of a question: what are some of the historical developments without which such an association could not have come about? As Foucault reminds us in his genealogical 31 Vattimo, Introduzione a Heidegger, 101–2.

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investigations, “in the historicity of knowledge,” that is, the historically contingent modes of legitimizing what constitutes knowledge, “what is of import are not the opinions nor the resemblances that throughout the ages can be established between them”; of import instead are the conditions of possibility of epistemological shifts.32 In order to better understand how, and why, experience came to be thematized at the turn of the eighteenth century in a manner persisting to this day, the historicity of the association between experience and issues of self-formation will likewise be addressed in terms of its sociohistorical conditions of possibility. Of these conditions of possibility, the one that shall detain us is temporality, that is, the historically contingent manner by which past, present, and future are related and coordinated. Temporality is of course only a necessary, and not a sufficient, condition of possibility for an explicitly thematized relation between experience and self-formation. Sauerland has shown, for example (and there many more such examples), how Erlebnis could become a popular concept only with the late-eighteenth-century division between the “inner” and the “outer,”33 which Foucault calls the modern opposition of depth to surface or which Charles Taylor calls the opposition between the perceived interiority of the modern subject and the external means of its expressive objectification.34 And a developed sense of interiority in turn presupposes historical developments ranging widely from the gradual internalization of restraint (or what could be called the historical emergence of a strong superego), in the manner addressed by Norbert Elias, to the consolidation of functional differentiation as the dominant mode of social organization, as addressed by Luhmann. But Pandora’s box need not be opened here. Indeed, if temporality has been singled out here at the expense of other sociohistorical vectors, it is first of all because temporality is at the core of the most common of academic and para-academic appeals to experience of the last 32 Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 287–8. 33 Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff, 11. 34 Taylor, of course, does not claim that the subject or self is structured as an interiority opposed to the external world – what he is referring to is the sense, and not the fact, of interiority in the modern subject. He underlines how our various “languages of self-understanding” are historical products, and with regard to the sense of inwardness, at hand is not a universal quality but rather “a function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modern West and which may indeed spread thence to other parts of the globe, but which had a beginning in time and space and which may have an end” (Sources of the Self, 111).

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three decades. The salient issue in subaltern historiography and cultural theory à la Thompson is indeed a temporal one. After all, the whole point of appealing to immediate experience is to reverse the dissipation of subaltern specificity by consolidating subaltern counterhistories – counterhistories that reconnect the subaltern group’s past with its present so as to enable future-oriented action, while at the same time mediating the specificity of the subaltern’s experience. It is through the “irreducibility of experience,” as John Toews puts it while justifying his Thompsonian methodology, that the historian can fulfill “the task of connecting memory and hope” and thus thwart the dominant historiographical trend that, so he tells us, robs the subaltern of “any stand point from which a relationship between past, present and future can be objectively reconstructed.”35 Such temporal implications, moreover, are not confined to those currents in theory that appeal to immediate experience as a rampart against everything from dominant ideology to reason itself; they no less permeate the work of those who on the contrary frequently conjure experience as a foil to premature immediacy – from idealists and phenomenologists to critical theorists and pragmatists. True, an accentuated association between experience and problems of self-formation after the late eighteenth century cannot be attributed exclusively to temporal issues; yet temporality remains that without which this late-eighteenth-century association cannot be fully accounted for. We have indeed already seen that however contradictory the motivations and however divergent the theoretical stances, various appeals to experience are subtended by a common denominator, namely, the changed horizons and orientations occasioned by unexpectedness. This is where the temporal aspect of experience comes to the fore. In order for the new and the unexpected to so much as cross the threshold of a given horizon, let alone perturb it, in order for the unexpected to assume, in other words, such importance as to warrant its transformative integration into the past and present as opposed to its outright dismissal, a certain temporality must be presupposed – a temporality that stresses the indeterminacy of the future, the provisionality of the present, and the revisability of the past. Only when future possibilities are no longer shackled by the past or seamlessly integrated in the present can unexpectedness impinge upon a given horizon or set of practices. And only when 35 Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” 902, 907. Such a program is of course not limited to Anglo-Saxon cultural theory – it is no less present, say, in Germany, where “the main issue of cultural studies in the past twenty years,” Michael Geyer notes in his diagnosis of the rise of German cultural theory, “is temporality rather than positionality” (“Why Cultural History?” 112).

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the present distances itself from the past and opens itself to the future can the unexpected graduate from mere bavures to be dismissed or from isolated miracles to be ascribed to divine whim, to become instead a disruptive intrusion to be heeded as the very stuff out of which one’s orientation is forged and one’s sense of self negotiated. The new and the unexpected, without which experience as a transformative process cannot be undergone, are in other words predicated on a temporality that can be characterized as open-ended and future-oriented. But temporality is not ahistorically given – it is the stuff of historical change. Before the late eighteenth century, the future and the unexpected it harbours were either held in check by the sheer weight of the past or suspended in timelessness by eschatological expectations; modernity, in contrast, “expresses the conviction that the future has already begun,” as Habermas phrases it, for “it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.”36 A decidedly futureoriented temporality where the unexpected and the new become salient features is indeed predicated upon what Luhmann, Giddens, Taylor, and others have diagnosed as a temporality specific to modernity,37 a temporality that by the mid- to late eighteenth century was (and at least until recently has still been)38 characterized by a growing rift or disjunction between past and future, between memory and hope, or, to use Koselleckian terminology, between space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont)39 – a disjunction, in short, between the accumulated past experiences of tradition and the oncoming future from which emerges the “New.” No longer a perpetuation of the past or a consecration of the given, the future by the late eighteenth century is 36 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 5. 37 See, for example, Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in Futures Past; Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin” and “World Time and System Theory,” in The Differentiation of Society. 38 Paul Ricoeur, for example, doubts whether such a disjunction is still predominant today. See Temps et récit III: Le temps raconté, 300–13. 39 Erfahrungsraum (the persistence of the past in the present) and Erwartungshorizont (the future made present, oriented to the not-yet) are two categories that Koselleck deploys not as actual concepts that might lend themselves to a Begriffsgeschichte but as formal categories that refer, on an anthropological basis, to two “dissimilar modes of existence from whose tension something like historical time can be inferred” (‹Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past, 274). Although these two “modes of existence” are themselves anthropologically given and thus metahistorical, their assymetrical interrelation nevertheless historically varies: whereas in premodernity they were in relative continuity with one another, by the late eighteenth century they pronouncedly diverged. For a critical discussion of theses two categories, see Ricoeur, Temps et récit III, 300–12.

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envisaged as open and indeterminate, and a breach is opened through which unexpectedness can impinge upon and disrupt a past now seen as supersedable and a present as provisional. If such a temporal divergence was minimal before the late eighteenth century, it was because the past held such sway over the present that the future was always already articulated in advance and, as a result, past, present, and future roughly coincided, or, as Koselleck puts it, “temporal difference was not more or less arbitrarily eliminated; it was not, as such, at all apparent.”40 There was little room for the unexpected within such a temporality, as can be seen, for example, in the persistence well into the late eighteenth century of one of the most tenacious of premodern topoi, Historia Magistra Vitae.41 For this topos, history was a pedagogical reservoir of past exempla from which lessons for the future could be derived and in which thus predominated a continuity connecting the past to the future – a seamless continuity that did not exactly foster an incongruence between the given and expectation. Because such a temporality, as Jauss notes in his variation on a Koselleckian theme, “could insulate everyday apprehension of the world from new experience by linking everything related to the future to the truth revealed by the past,”42 the unexpected was indeed hardly in a position to seriously disturb a given horizon – it tended instead to remain within the confines of previous interpretative schemes. The past and the given so circumscribed the premodern horizon of expectations that change remained imperceptible and only a minimal role could be imputed to unexpectedness, and thus to experience, in the engendering of reorientations.

40 Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures Past, 4. 41 Although Historia Magistra Vitae is a premodern topos that has undergone variations over the two millenia during which it held sway, its temporal dynamic has remained essentially unchanged. For more on this matter, see Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” 21–38. 42 Jauss, “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” 202. It is no surprise that the most common premodern theory of time has been what Peter McInerney calls the “present representation theory,” of which St Augustine was the first important advocate. Its central tenet is that a present perception can come into contact only with presently existing entities. As a result, present representation theories consider the present to be the primary (if not the only) realm of possible existence. See McInerney, Time and Experience, 19, 25–7. The specifics need not detain us here – of interest are instead the consequences and underlying presuppositions of such a stance towards time. This present representation theory indeed sheds light on just how marginal the future remained in premodernity: if in such a theory only present conscious awareness counts and “only present phases of perceptual acts can contribute to that of which we are aware,” then it goes without saying that “future entities do not participate in the generation of representations; representations of future entities are generally thought to be derived from complex projections into the future of patterns discerned in the past” (27).

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The future is of course not the exclusive property of modernity, and the capacity for distinguishing between past, present, and future of course antedates the late eighteenth century. But premodern temporality has envisioned the future less at the expense of the past than in terms of the past (as in Historia Magistra Vitae), if not in terms of an atemporal present (as in eschatology). In the case of eschatology, for all its apparent emphasis on other-worldly future redemption, at hand is not the future-orientedness characteristic of modernity, whereby the unexpected can impinge upon and change the present; at hand in eschatology is instead an immobile temporality that “always sees the segment of a future separating the present from the end as lacking in value; this separating segment of time loses its significance and interest, it is merely an unnecessary continuation of an indefinitely prolonged present.”43 As an indefinitely prolonged present, eschatological temporality is not fertile ground for the changing of orientations following encounters with unexpectedness. Much as the anagogic mode of interpretation in medieval hermeneutics, when confronted with what cannot be accounted for by a prior interpretative framework or horizon, defuses the situation by seeing such strange textual passages as but so many cryptic omens signalling the impending Second Arrival of Christ,44 likewise does eschatological temporality contain the 43 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 148. 44 The dynamic of eschatological temporality is indeed echoed in pre-Renaissance exegesis. Foucault notes in his archeology of epistemic shifts that until the Renaissance, premodern allegorical interpretative practices essentially involve the begetting of commentary upon commentary – commentaries that are not required to remain faithful to the text they gloss but that are instead expected to “make everything speak, that is, to beget beyond the marks of discourse the second discourse of the commentary” (Les Mots et les choses, 55). Such exegetical practices were deemed plausible because language at the time operated as something that is “never enclosed within a definitive parole, it will enunciate its truth only in a future discourse, entirely devoted to saying what it will have said” (55–6). In the manner of eschatology, the temporality of such exegetical practices is that of the future anterior (“entirely devoted to saying what it will have said”), and not the future tout court. In such a temporality, the future cannot impinge upon the present because it is endlessly deferred – or, to phrase it differently, because the future is endlessly deferred, it becomes timeless. As Erich Auerbach explains, “In this way the individual earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, nor as a link in a chain of development in which single events … perpetually give rise to new events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order which encompasses it, which on some future day will itself be concrete reality; so that the earthly event is a prophecy or figura of a part of a wholly divine reality that will be enacted in the future. But this reality is not only future; it is always present in the eye of God and in the other world, which is to say that in transcendence the revealed and true reality is present at all times, or timelessly” (Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 77). For more on pre-Renaissance hermeneutics, see Henri de Lubac’s classic study, Exégèse médievale, and part 1, chap. 3 of Gusdorf, Les Origines de L’herméneutique.

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new by either seeing it as a confirmation of things foretold in the past or by confining it to the ethereal realm of the supernatural.45 Such maneuvering fobs off the new as an enigmatic miracle unrelated to everyday reality, thus preventing the unexpected from directly impinging upon the present. If in Historia Magistra Vitae the future and the unexpected perpetuate rather than perturb the past, in eschatological temporality time becomes a transcendental extension of a timeless present in which, as Bakhtin phrases it, “there is a greater readiness to build a superstructure for reality (the present) along a vertical axis of upper and lower than to move forward along a horizontal axis of time.”46 In either scenario, the future is in no position to seriously disturb the present or the past, and the unexpected is held at bay within an essentially static temporality.47 With the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, where the principle of Cuius regio eius religio replaced the grander universal claims of religion and after which temporal concerns began to supplant eternal ones, eschatological temporality of course no longer fared so well. It was for the most part marginalized by the end of the Thirty Years War, which failed, against all expectations, to herald the Final Judgment and which instead helped the principle of religious indifference to increasingly become the basis for domestic peace.48 But for all the secularization of temporality that 45 Habermas has an interesting take on this: “The traditional form of authority included as one of its elements the right to represent whatever was held to be ‘the ancient truth.’ Communications concerning actual events remained anchored in this knowledge of the tradition. Any thing novel appeared under the aspect of a more or less marvellous event. ‘New facts,’ if only they were sufficiently unusual, were transformed in the court of the ‘ancient truth’ into something ‘extraordinary’ – into signs and miracles. Facts were transfigured into ciphers. Since they could only be representations of knowledge vouched for by tradition, the novel and the surprising assumed an enigmatic structure” (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 254n35). 46 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” 148. 47 It ought to be added here, however, that premodernity did not of course entirely exclude the possibility of innovation. As Luhmann puts it in his discussion of premodern experience, “the customary characterization of archaic experience in terms of its being bound to tradition seems to me to miss the point or merely to grasp a secondary characteristic. More important is the overwhelming pre-eminence accorded the present in which life must take place and whose existence (that is rich in risks but poor in possibilities) provides the occasion to look for security in the repetition of the past. Innovation is by no means excluded. But it is admitted only if it can be stabilized quickly and successfully in the present” (“Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” 74n36; my emphasis). 48 For more on the temporal implications and eventual demise of eschatology, see Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” 3–20. But it would not be entirely correct to maintain, as does Karl Löwith, that modern future-orientedness is but a secularized eschatology. Hans Blumenberg has indeed convincingly shown how eschatological temporality is hardly homologous with modern temporality. For more on Löwith’s position, see his Meaning in History and Bultmann, History and Eschatology. Blumenberg’s counterargument is outlined in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

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was to follow – a secularization that had in fact already begun with early Renaissance mercantilism49 – a decidedly future-oriented temporality had yet to surface. True, the gradual shift to profane history under the aegis of mercantilism might seem to testify to a decidedly futureoriented temporality, and with good reason historians and theorists from E.P. Thompson and Fernand Braudel to H.-W. Hohn and Barbara Adam underline the correlation between emergent mercantilism and techniques of future-oriented risk management.50 Nevertheless, there is a difference between, on the one hand, mercantilist goal-orientedness, with its quantitative calculation of probability (let alone its obsession with the quantitative accumulation of bullion), and, on the other hand, the actual future-orientedness of modernity, with its stress not only on quantitative but also on qualitative change. What is specific to the open futurity of modernity is indeed that the future will qualitatively differ from, impinge upon and restructure the past and present, and not that the given order of things merely lend itself to quantitative extension. This can be seen in one particular case of modern future-orientedness – that of the planned obsolescence of ships: when de Tocqueville asks an American sailor why his country builds ships to last only a short time, the sailor unhesitatingly responds that “the art of navigation is everyday making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would almost become useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years.”51 This starkly contrasts with Colbert’s take on the future, let alone the future of shipbuilding, which wagers on the mere quantitative intensification of the given: hoping to anticipate the future need for solid masts by the French fleet from the nineteenth century on, Colbert had hundreds of oak trees planted in 1670, which stand to this day unused.52 49 The role of secularization in the transition to modernity should not be overestimated, however. The mode of cultural reproduction of stratified societies, Jochen SchulteSasse notes, “depends on the existence of a global and universal transcendent anchor; their hierarchical structure is mirrored in a legitimizing discourse that anchors the existing hierarchy within a universal entity. Structurally, the displacement of such an anchor from ‘God’ to an absolute ruler, to nature, and so on, does not change anything. Structurally, ‘Nature’ or ‘Reason’ still serves as a metaphysical entity that legitimizes societies and their discursive practices” (afterword to Control of the Imaginary, 214). Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age has of course made it clear just how useless the notion of secularization turns out to be when used as an explanatory scheme for the advent of modernity. At best, secularization is useful for descriptive ends. 50 See, for example the first two chapters of Braudel, Les Jeux de l’échange; Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”; Adam, Time and Social Theory, 138–40; and Hohn, Die Zerstörung der Zeit, 49–104. 51 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 35. 52 Colbert’s 330-year-old oak trees can be found in the forest of Tronçais, in the department of the Allier in France.

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For all the “discoveries of new worlds,” as one historian notes, the sixteenth century remained “an age which was inclined to prefer the classification of old facts to the discovery of the new,”53 and quantitative extension, not qualitative innovation, remained the order of the day. And this was no less the case for the seventeenth as it was for the better part of the eighteenth century. Before the late eighteenth century, the opening of the future in nascent capitalism, for all its emphasis on change, turned out in fact to be but what Foucault calls a “modification of a spatial type: the tableau, which wealth was supposed to form by deploying itself, by exchanging itself and by ordering itself, could very well increase; it remained the same tableau.”54 Spanning the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, including and encompassing the Aufklärung, the épistémè of the classical age55 can indeed be visualized as a unified, atemporal, and immutable tableau, or as a static taxonomic order, where identities and differences are synchronically or spatially distributed according to immutable universal laws – an order of things, in other words, beyond the meddlesome ways of historical change and in which even “the succession of chronologies could but run through the prior and more fundamental space of a tableau which offered all possibilities in advance.”56 Little wonder, then, that a Leibnitz could confidently assure us that “the whole of the coming world is present and prefigured in that of the present.”57 If change was possible in the classical épistémè, it was only as a quantitative intensification, and not as a qualitative transformation, of a given and transcendentally anchored order of things. Nor was even the Aufklärung notion of progress immune to such an order: here, the past was not reorganized in light of the new but was instead altogether jettisoned as but an obstruction to the universal reign of Reason. The Aufklärung notion of progress pointed not to the differentness of the 53 Eliott, Europe Divided, 391. 54 Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 271. 55 By épistémè or “champ épistémologique,” Foucault refers to the cluster of presuppositions governing the prevalent discourse of a given historical period. As he himself puts it, épistémè refers to the “fundamental codes of a culture – those which govern its language, its perceptual schemas, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – [which] in advance determine for each man the empirical orders with which he will reckon and within which he will find himself” (ibid., 11). 56 Ibid., 230. In this sense, the classical épistémè differs little from that of premodernity as a whole, in which “every unexpected event,” as Marc Augé puts it, “demands to be interpreted not, really, in order to be known, but in order to be recognized: to be made accessible to a discourse, a diagnosis, in terms that are already established” (Non-Places, 44). 57 Cited in Koselleck, Futures Past, 15.

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future and still less to the advent of the truly new or unexpected; it referred merely to the unshackling of Reason from the trappings of obscurantist superstition, from dubiously founded tradition and other variants of the infâme that Voltaire exhorts us to crush. In such a context, the new was not truly new in the sense that it might entail a reorientation of the present or a re-writing of the past – indeed, the present already contained in advance the repertoire of all possible future permutations, permutations that the future could better bring to light but that the future could not radically alter. While change was not altogether excluded from the premodern horizon, such change remained, well into the eighteenth century, within what could be summed up as a “closed prior table of possible variations.”58 Temporality, then, is characterized well into the late eighteenth century by an apparently seamless continuity between past, present, and future, between past experience and future expectation – a continuity that precludes the possibility of any serious breach within an essentially static horizon.59 Without a noticeable discrepancy between the past and the future, premodern temporality did not readily accommodate the discontinuity that might have arisen from a confrontation with unexpectedness. Only negligible weight could be accorded to unexpectedness and the new, let alone to experience as a dialectic of disruptive unexpectedness and reflexive reintegration. In spite of intervening historical change, the early- to late-eighteenth-century state of temporality differed little from Aristotle’s characterization of his time as one in which “nearly everything has been discovered.”60 But if the notion of horizon in premodernity conjured images of a fixed and permanently closed frontier between the sensible and the intelligible, thus shielding the given from the contingencies of an open 58 Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 288. 59 Arthur Lovejoy was the first historian of ideas to have systematically shown the extent to which continuity and plenitude were the order of the day well into the eighteenth century. In what he calls the Great Chain of Being, “There not only is not, but there will never be, anything new under the sun. The process of time brings no enrichment to the world’s diversity; in a world which is the manifestation of eternal rationality, it could not conceivably do so … To many eighteenth-century minds, this conception of a world in which, from the beginning, no emergence of novelty had been or would hereafter be possible seems to have been wholly satisfying (The Great Chain of Being, 243–4). To this it ought to be added, however, that the secularizing displacement of divinity by reason and rationality is not of itself a sufficient condition for a valorization of the new. For all the advances of reason during the Enlightenment, the chain of being indeed remained “a perfect example of an absolutely rigid and static scheme of things. Rationality has nothing to do with dates” (242). 60 Aristotle, The Politics, bk. 2, ch. 5, 1264.

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future, by the late eighteenth century the term horizon in contrast refers to a “momentary field of vision that, as experience moves on, opens unto an endless succession of new horizons.”61 It is at this historical juncture, when past, present, and future begin to pronouncedly diverge, that the disruptiveness of the unexpected becomes a thematized problem and that experience gains currency less as product at one’s disposal than as a disruptive process one undergoes. Predicated as it is on a historically contingent future-oriented temporality, dialectical experience is not a transhistorically given anthropological constant but is instead subject to the vagaries of historical change.62

th e h i s to r i c i t y o f e x p e r i e n c e To stress the historical contingency of the relation between experience and self-formation admittedly requires some further justification. After all, one of the most common theories of dialectical experience has been the narrativist one, which maintains that throughout and in spite of (rather that as a result of) historical change, narratives have always already been at work in configuring the unintelligibly disparate into biographically meaningful experiences. If it is indeed the case that narratives and experience are an anthropological constant in self-formation, to what extent can future-oriented temporality actually be considered a historical condition of the possibility of dialectical experience? Is it not possible that a close association between experience and issues of selfformation is actually immune to historical change? The narrativist approach to experience essentially tells us that “narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves,” and that the “storied nature of our experience is … what holds the past (memory) and future (anticipation) together in the present, creating the more or less unifying sense we have of our ongoing lives, a sense upon which our personal identity so thoroughly depends.”63 Stephen Crites even goes so far as to equate experience with narrative, claiming that “in principle, we can distinguish between the inner drama of experience and the stories through which it achieves coherence. But in any actual case the two so interpene61 Jauss, “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” 200. 62 This is not to imply that experience was nonexistent in premodernity – what historically varies is not experience as such but rather the importance accorded to experience in issues of self-identity or self-formation. 63 Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 3, 8.

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trate that they form a virtual identity.”64 As a description of what is necessary for the meaningful organization of experience in modern selfformation, this thesis seems plausible enough, and even if, as some narrativist theorists maintain (as does Louis Mink contra Alasdair MacIntyre, for example), there is room for non- or prenarrative experiences, Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume study of narrative and time convincingly shows that even such an unorganized prenarrative experience “constitutes a demand for narrative,” for “the plots that we invent help us to shape our confused, formless and in the last resort mute temporal experience.”65 The problem with such a theoretical stance, however, lies in the assumption that experience and a sense of self have always been and always will be sustained by narrative structures and that throughout history narratives have organized the experiences of the self into linear continuity. Research on oral cultures, especially after the work of Milman Parry and, later, of Albert Lord and Erich Havelock,66 has shown that such is not the case. In such pre-chirographic cultures, it is the repeated performance of oral recitations, and not the narrative sequencing of events, that primarily socializes and forms the self. While narratives of course played a significant role in pre-chirographic and pre-typographic cultures, such narratives, whether as epics, ballads, or even early novels, did not involve the emplotment or mise en intrigue (as Ricoeur puts it) of events and experiences into temporal coherence; they were instead paratactic aggregates of disparate episodes, the temporal sequentiality of which was not even an issue within a cosmological order itself regarded as unchanging.67 Finally, the very thesis that tells us that narratives are needed for coordinating the past, present, and future presupposes a pronounced divergence between these temporal components – yet such a temporal divergence, as we have seen, is not transhistorically given but, on the contrary, a historical product of the late eighteenth century. The very need for narratively organized sequentiality is itself a historical phenomenon, and not an anthropological constant. If narratives are a temporal affair, as Ricoeur’s study on this matter rightly suggests, and if temporality itself historically varies, and we have

64 Crites,“The Narrative Quality of Experience,” 291–305, cited in Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 8. 65 Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 42. 66 See Milman Parry’s groundbreaking L’Epithète traditionnelle dans Homère; Lord, The Singer of Tales; Havelock, Preface to Plato. 67 For more on this, see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 140–51. For a panoramic survey of these issues, see Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale.

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just seen that it does, then it follows that the extent to which narratives, let alone the narrativisation of experience, play a role in the economy of a sense of self is also historical. The sequentializing operations of narratives or metanarratives, then, were not an issue in a premodern temporal context, where the exemplary force of the past and the timelessness of a transcendentally anchored order held the future in check and where limits were thus placed on the range of possible reevaluations of the given following the irruption of the unforeseen. But as past, present, and future increasingly diverged by the late-eighteenth-century, such narratives were not only possible but also required. The decreasing relevance of timeless external referents to lineage, as well as the erosion of a timeless exemplary history that might have provided a buffer against the onslaughts of the unexpected unleashed by a henceforth open future, all conspired to make narratives necessary for palliating temporal divergence and for managing and reducing increased environmental complexity.68 The recourse to such metanarratives as national history and progress, in short, was required in order, as Habermas put it, to “close off the future as a source of disruption with the aid of teleological constructions of history.”69 Such coordinating narratives, however, have operated not only on a larger social scale through what has rightly been diagnosed as the mediating narrative operations of modern historiography (as opposed to the premodern chronicling of the disparate into paratactic aggregates);70 they have also operated on the smaller scale of the individually forged sense of self. Increasingly disembedded from what were once determining external circumstances and thus no longer a preordained entity within a static cosmic order, self-identity by the late eighteenth century increasingly becomes a reflexive project articulated in terms of individually forged biographical narratives – narratives by means of which the individual, as Giddens phrases it, can “integrate information deriving from a diversity of mediated experiences with local involvements in such a way as to connect future projects with past experiences in a

68 The next chapter will more fully address the notion of complexity management. Suffice it to say here that this notion refers to the containment of the contingent and unexpected – the management, in other words, of that which is not always already circumscribed in advance. 69 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 12. My emphasis. 70 For a comprehensive account of the narrative structure of modern historiography, see White, Metahistory.

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reasonably coherent fashion.”71 If in premodern society the past served as a selecting mechanism that circumscribed the limits of the possible, in modernity, however, the future now plays this role, and the modern reflexive self henceforth “appropriates his past by sifting through it in the light of what is anticipated for an (organised) future.”72 The late eighteenth century witnesses, in other words, the gradual emergence and consolidation of a modern self henceforth organized as a narratively constructed and future-oriented project – a project to be undertaken individually and without the buttressing formerly provided by a transcendentally anchored order of things. And the narratives at work in such a modern sense of self are reflexively constituted in light of new developments rather than timelessly proclaimed in terms of past genealogies. But what is specific to modernity is not the fact itself of narratives but instead the centrality of future-oriented narratives in the forging of a sense of self. What Ricoeur calls narrativité is indeed not an exclusively modern phenomenon – in fact, it could be argued, say, along Husserlian lines, that narrative operations are always already at work even in the most minimal of conscious acts, as can be seen in the retentional and protentional aspects of temporality that are the condition of the possibility of, and not a mere an appendage to, present acts of perception and cognition. The “always already” temporal and ek-static extension of Heidegger’s Dasein could likewise be considered a narrative operation, as could also Gadamer’s notion of the anticipatory nature of understanding which within a Tradition is always already ahead of itself in terms of the prejudices without which it could not come about. Anthony Kerby, who adopts an essentially refurbished Husserlian stance on this matter, rightly reminds us that “narration should not be seen as creating order where there was once pure chaos or dissonance”73 – narrative operations are to an extent involved in any act of consciousness. It is quite possible, then, that attempts to historicize the narrative operations in cognition are as senseless as would be attempts to historicize breathing in mammals. 71 Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity, 215. It should be added here that Giddens’s notion of disembedding mechanisms only seems to connote a Tönniesian GemeinschaftGesellschaft dichotomy. Such mechanisms, Giddens explains, “do not empty out the self any more than they simply remove prior supports on which self-identity was based. Rather, they allow the self (in principle) to achieve much greater mastery over the social relations and social context reflexively incorporated into the forging of self-identity than was previously possible” (149). 72 Ibid., 75. My emphasis. 73 Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 44.

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Nevertheless, the issue at hand here is not the anthropological status of cognition – the issue is instead the extent to which the divergence between past, present, and future becomes so exacerbated by the late eighteenth century that future-oriented narratives become conflated with a modern sense of self. Informing as it does not only collective social narratives but also individual biographies, the future-oriented temporality of modernity indeed had consequences that, to use Foucault’s formulation, led to a “fundamental new mode of being.” The claim regarding the narrative structure of the self and its experiences does have some validity, but only insofar as it limits itself historically to the modern sense of self. Since the narrativist theory of experience is predicated upon the historical emergence of futureorientedness, it cannot retrospectively foist its findings upon premodernity, nor can it legitimately extrapolate them to the future – in fact, it cannot even apply them to the present, which, if anything, is the site of a dispute as to whether it perpetuates or breaks from modernity. While various narrativist theories of experience may have provided important insights into the temporal structure of modern self-identity, a sociohistorical analysis concerned with the status, today, of this modern self must consider just how operative is the future-oriented temporality upon which it is predicated. This in turn requires a minimal understanding of certain historical processes – however unfashionable this may have become in certain quarters.

a socio-historical synopsis Koselleck’s work may have convincingly historicized the opening of the future by tracing its emergence to the late eighteenth century, and it may thus well substantiate our thesis regarding the historicity of an accentuated role of experience in self-formation; it nevertheless remains that such work has failed to address the historical preconditions for such a historical shift in temporality.74 True, such preconditions could be traced with equal plausibility, say, to the instrumentalisation of reason, to the rise of the protestant ethic, to the shift from oral to chirographic and then to typographic culture, or to the transition from stratified to functional social differentiation. But while the causes behind the transition to modern future-oriented temporality continue to arouse debates that cannot be settled here, it is nevertheless safe to say that there is a correlation, and not 74 Such a critique of Koselleck has best been expressed by Luhmann. See his Love as Passion, 2–5.

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necessarily a causal relation, between the rise of modern temporality, on the one hand, and the consolidation, on the other, of networks of horizontal dependencies (i.e., the intensified circulation of exchangeable commodities), dependencies that could no longer be accommodated by the vertical relations of dependence characteristic of feudally regionalized self-sufficient economic units.75 With the consolidation, in other words, of capitalism as the dominant (as opposed to a peripheral) mode of production76 (at which point lateral functional differentiation eventually supplanted hierarchically stratified differentiation by the late eighteenth century as the dominant mode of social organization and at which point upward social mobility became conceivable at the expense of the formerly nonporous castes into which stratified society had been rigidly segregated),77 the past and tradition could indeed but see eroded their former capacity for self-legitimation. No longer reined in by a hallowed past and no longer hemmed in by a timeless order of things, the present had to henceforth reckon with the contingencies of an open future. As a result, the unexpected could but 75 See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 14–26. It is true that such developments can already be seen at work within the budding towns of eleventh- and twelfth-century Western Europe. But the thesis that such early developments represented microcosms of capitalism ought to be taken grano salis: as Maurice Dobb early pointed out, “while these urban communities, to the extent that they were independent centres of trade and of contractual dealings, were in a sense alien bodies whose growth aided in the disintegration of the feudal order, it would be wrong to regard them as being, at this stage, microcosms of Capitalism … Nor can one regard their existence as necessarily solvent of feudal relations. True, the trading element that these communities nourished were gathering between their hands the first germs of merchant and money-lending capital that was later to be employed on a larger scale. But other instruments of accumulation than the mere snowball-tendency had to intervene before this capital became as dominant and ubiquitous as it was to be in later centuries. In their early stage many, if not most, towns were themselves subordinated to feudal authority” (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 71). 76 There are of course various definitions of capitalism. Although this is not the place to wrangle over definitions, suffice it to say that because it has been adopted by most historians, regardless of their ideological stance, from the 1940s to this day, the Marxian definition of capitalism shall prevail here. Rather than speak of the “spirit”of capitalism in the manner of Werner Sombart and Max Weber and rather than consider capitalism in terms of an opposition between “market economy” and “natural economy” in the manner of the German Historical School, the Marxian definition instead traces the specificity of capitalism to its mode of production, that is (as Dobb phrases it), to “the ways in which the means of production were owned and to the social relations between men which resulted from their connections with the process of production.” Ibid., 4–11. 77 It should be kept in mind that this Luhmanian terminology refers to the varying degrees to which different modes of social differentiation have co-existed throughout history. Luhmann indeed defines modernity as the predominance, and not as the ubiquity, of functional differentiation at the expense of stratification.

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penetrate the formerly self-contained and hermetically sealed horizon of premodernity. Once the future could no longer be entirely derived from prior history, the unexpected and the new began to assume a life of their own, and the future became open-ended. But before the consolidation of capitalism can be correlated with the late-eighteenth-century rise of a future-oriented temporality, a distinction must be made between the capitalism of the late eighteenth to midnineteenth century and that of its earlier homologues. Both modern and premodern forms of capitalism, indeed, seem on the face of it to a certain extent predicated on an orientation to the future. After all, if we understand physical capital to consist of the produced goods that remain unconsumed – either because they are fixed capital (that is, tools and implements such as machines, tools, bridges, and factories, which are repeatedly used in cycles of production) or because they are working capital (that is, goods reserved for future consumption) – then it is true that all forms of physical capital can arguably be considered “futureoriented.” A degree of future-orientedness is at work in both fixed and working capital, whether this be as stored grain for the next sowing season, hoarded goods in uncertain times, or substantial expenditures on machinery wagered on future returns.78 A certain orientation to the future is also to be found in merchant capital, which wagers, among other things, on the quantitative accumulation of bullion and on seasonal variations in the availability of raw goods. Yet there is a crucial difference between 1 the essentially spatial organization of merchant capital, 2 the short-term future of working capital, and 3 the decidedly long-term future-orientedness of fixed capital. In the case of merchant capital, the temporality at hand is not so much an extension into the future as it is a spatial organization of the present. Merchant capital indeed capitalizes on the short-term profits to be reaped from price disparities among geographically divergent regions and, as befits the épistémè of the classical age, such capital wagers on the mere spatial and quantitative intensification of the given. Similarly, the temporality of working capital (such as stored goods and inventories) is not that of modern long-term projection but instead that of short-term prognosis: it remains tethered to an essentially cyclical temporality and represents a form of delayed consumption, often operating as a function of inelastic demand in the face both of precarious distribution networks stemming from unreliable transportation and of uncertain supply due to 78 Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, 108.

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unpredictable harvests. Fixed capital, however, represents a long-term investment linearly projected into the more distant future: such capital is indeed imprisoned by a physically embodied form, such as machinery and factories, from which future returns are only gradually – albeit relatively predictably – extracted over time.79 What is characteristic of the consolidation of capitalism as the dominant (as opposed to a peripheral) mode of production and what is thus characteristic of the rise of the bourgeoisie to political and economic prominence between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century is the increased recourse to future-oriented fixed capital as opposed to the short-term prognosis of working capital or the spatial structure of merchant capital. And as the recourse to fixed capital becomes systematic, as opposed to sporadic, a change in temporal priorities takes place: the future becomes for the bourgeoisie what the past had been for the nobility – a buffer shielding a present horizon from unpredictability. With the deferred gratification presupposed by fixed capital, future returns shield the present from the contingencies of an open future by economically colonialising it. That a future-oriented temporality should arise in tandem with capitalism ought not, then, to be seen as a surprising turn of events. Futureorientedness was indeed in the economic interest of the emerging capitalist class or bourgeoisie. The accumulation of capital by the mideigtheenth century is after all increasingly predicated on long-term deferred gratification – a form of future-orientedness that tradition and the past could but obstruct. Max Weber early noted that in spite of the raising of piece rates by budding entrepreneurs in an effort to goad the premodern rural worker’s output with the carrot of higher income, the resiliency of the precapitalist attitude towards labour proved stronger: because the short-term gratification of needs as defined by tradition prevailed at the expense of the future-oriented possibilities enabled by increased monetary returns, for the precapitalist labourer “the opportunity of earning 79 When differentiating between working and fixed capital, it is important keep in mind that simple tools (from the peasant’s hoe to the weaver’s loom) represent a very limited form of fixed capital: the rapid turnover of such vulnerable tools and the limited investment they required differentiate them from the more massive investment in (and durability of) such fixed capital as factories. Even in the case of ships, which were vital for merchant capital and the construction of which was no doubt at the origin of shared risk via distributed ownership in the form of stocks, what is at hand is a tool used merely for distribution, and not production. It is such nuances that, among other things, differentiate industrial from preindustrial capitalism.

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more was less attractive than that of working less. He did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I work as much as possible? But: How much must I work in order to earn the wage, 2½ marks, which I earned before and which takes care of my traditional needs?”80 Such “traditionalism,” as Weber calls it, had to yield to the economic exigencies of the emergent bourgeoisie, with its focus on deferred gratification, before the future could attain temporal predominance. Unlike the courtly classes, which legitimized the present by appealing to the past, and unlike the merchant class, which would mimic the nobility once material security had been assured, the bourgeoisie of industrial capitalism wagers on the future to a much greater extent, and no longer as a temporary means to an end. It is no coincidence that it is at this sociohistorical juncture, at which point economic and political policies hinged increasingly on the emergent industrial bourgeoisie, that the very term “bourgeoisie” gained widespread currency in everyday discourse.81 And over the following two centuries, well into the 1970s, the productivity of fixed capital would outpace the vagaries of finance, trade, and currency speculation typical of the earlier merchant class, which tended to wager on short-term returns and which, as such, hardly partook of modern future-orientedness. The consolidation of the bourgeoisie as a powerful socioeconomic class between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century may well coincide with a shift in temporal priorities;82 yet such a shift in temporal horizons had effects beyond the strictly economic considerations of class interests. In economic calculation no less than in political considerations, what Luhmann calls the late-eighteenth-century “transition to bourgeois society” gradually transferred the decision-making process from memory to prognosis, and the future rather than the past increas-

80 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 58–60. 81 See, for example, the last chapter of Braudel, Les Jeux de l’échange. 82 Feudal modes of production began of course to erode under the rising importance of towns in the fourteenth century and were dealt serious blows by various religious and political developments throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in spite of the clearly decisive political transformations of, say, seventeenth-century England, which were to culminate in the Cromwellian revolution, it was not until the closing years of the Tudor era in the early eighteenth century that a capitalist mode of development, along with a specifically capitalist or bourgeois class, began to have a significant influence on socioeconomic, and not merely political, developments. It is of course with the late-eighteenth-century industrial revolution that such influences were felt on a large scale by a significant proportion of the general population.

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ingly served as the dominant referential horizon.83 Such a temporal shift is of course at its most manifest in the French Revolution, which “made it impossible for anyone to claim that revolution could be the restoration of anything time honored” as Lowe notes, for “the present had become so different from the past that it could no longer be bound by the past.”84 After all, the French Revolution, in spite of certain initially social democratic and protosocialist elements (from the Enragés, Hébertistes and Sans Culottes to the tamer Jacobins), was, if anything, a thoroughly bourgeois affair in both its long-term national and its long-term international ramifications, as was to be made clear by the course of events following the fall of Robespierre, from the instauration of the Convention Thermidorienne and of the Directoire to the eventual “restoration” of monarchy (to say nothing of subsequent Empires and Republics) under bourgeois tutelage. Such a correlation between the rise of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of future-oriented temporality also coincides with a series of semantic shifts in such concepts as revolution, development, and, as we saw earlier, experience, the results of which persist to this day, as the work of Raymond Williams, Lowe, and of course Koselleck has shown – shifts that register late-eighteenth-century socioeconomic changes, in which can be traced presuppositions regarding the structure of temporality and which unambiguously testify to a decided shift from the past to the future.85 It is indeed at this sociohistorical juncture, at which point the bourgeoisie began to develop an awareness of itself as a specific class 83 Luhmann, “The Self-Thematization of Society: A Sociological Perspective on the Concept of Reflection,” in The Differentiation of Society, 349. As a possible explanation for the temporal changes that followed the late-eighteenth-century rise of the bourgeoisie to political and economic dominance, Luhmann adds: “This inversion or rearrangement may have had something to do with the transfer of functional primacy from politics to the economy, for politics (owing to its need for legitimation and consensus) tends to depend for orientation on articulated history, while the economy (owing to its need for calculation) tends to depend on an articulable future” (350). For a different and more recent take on the implications that such a shift in temporality had on political thought, see David Carvounas’s excellent study, Diverging Time. 84 Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 39. My emphasis. 85 See, for example, Williams, Keywords. See also Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 21, for more on the specific case of the concept of development (the semantic history of which parallels that of Bildung), which by the mid- to late eighteenth century underwent a decided shift from a concept informed by cyclical time to one informed by a future-oriented temporality, or (as Lowe phrases it) time “as cumulative change, leading to the unexpected, the new.”

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with identifiable interests,86 that future-oriented narratives became generalized, narratives such as those of the unfolding of the nation state at the expense of the perpetuation of static estates, of modern futureoriented notions of utopia (inaugurated in 1771 by Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2440)87 as opposed to the premodern relegation of utopia either to some past Golden Age, to some timeless haven or to some spatially parallel locus (as with More’s Utopia), and, finally, of the primacy of individual personal development, or Bildung, at the expense of rigidly preordained caste. Even the notion of theoretical curiosity at this time shifts its focus from transgressing spatial limits (as in Bacon’s curiositas) to transgressing temporal limits in order to “anticipate what is possible for man, which is the future.”88 It is important at this point to stress, however, that the apparent correlation between a consolidated industrial bourgeoisie, an increased recourse to fixed capital, and the increased prevalence of a modern future-oriented temporality is just that – a correlation. The conundrum 86 The rise of bourgeois self-awareness should not be hastily correlated with the sixteenth-century diffusion of Reformation tenets: “In sober truth,” G.R. Elton notes, “any description of the sixteenth century, or the Reformation, which lays stress on the ‘rise’ of the bourgeois or middle-class is quite simply wrong. Sixteenth century society was hierarchic, believing in ordered ranks from kings downwards” (Reformation Europe, 306). Nor should the self-understanding of the late-eighteenth-century bourgeoisie be conflated with that of its earlier homologue, the economically powerful merchant class. Indeed, the merchant class, or négociants, of the late middle ages to the early eighteenth century, which relied on working capital and trade, envisaged only a short-term future that did not essentially impinge upon or change the present. Once it had amassed sufficient wealth, the merchant bourgeoisie merely mimicked the ways of the established older nobility, buying or intermarrying its way into aristocratic titles and privileges and currying the political favour of the ruling elite instead of demarcating itself as a specific class with its own political goals and economic interests – let alone with its own temporality. Before the industrial revolution, the merchant bourgeoisie was parasitic on, not sharply differentiated from, the nobility (for more on this, see the last two chapters of Braudel, Les Jeux de l’échange). But if the premodern social hierarchy could accommodate and contain the early merchant class, it could no longer do so for the mid- to late-eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, which rose to economic and political predominance as it began to consolidate itself as a separate class with its own Weltanshauung and temporality. And what was specific to the temporality initially propelled by the bourgeoisie was that the future would differ qualitatively from, impinge upon, and restructure the past and present, and not that the given order of things merely lent itself to quantitative extension or intensification, as was the case with merchant capital. 87 For more on how Mercier was the first to give expression, as Krishan Kumar puts it, to the “new zest for the future which in the second half of the eighteenth century was transforming both the form and the substance of utopia,” see Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, 38; Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 458–60; and Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Utopia,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 84–99. 88 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 442.

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over which phenomenon preceded the other will not be addressed here – these phenomena are instead to be seen as concomitant and mutually reinforcing. Indeed, the long-term deferred gratification presupposed by fixed capital in turn presupposes “a certain trust, knowledge and expectancy of the future; in other words, the future has first to attain reality status.”89 But it is no less true, on the other hand, that it is by means of the long-term security provided by fixed capital that trust in the future can be mustered to begin with. Of concern here, then, is not the causal relation between correlative developments; of concern here is instead the extent to which a confluence of sociohistorical developments contributed to the shift from a reliance on the past and on the short-term projections of prognosis to a modern future-orientedness – a modern future-orientedness without which experience could not play a pronounced role in issues of selfformation. As we shall see more clearly in later chapters, it is in tandem with the late-eighteenth-century rise of the bourgeoisie to politicoeconomic predominance that a future-oriented temporality so asserted itself that not only did it permeate metanarratives of progress, whether as reason, as the unfolding of the nation’s Geist, or as a future-directed utopian gaze and not only did it impose itself on various fundamental cultural and philosophical concepts, but it also informed the very manner by which is to be a sense of self negotiated. No longer always already circumscribed by the weight of past tradition or by the sanctification of the given, modern self-identity instead became a negotiable affair and a future-oriented project, an open process of Bildung that, in the manner of modern temporality described by Lowe, capitalizes on “cumulative change, leading to the unexpected, the new.”90 And it is precisely in such a sociohistorical context, and not before, that experience as a process that engenders a revision of the past and present in the name of a henceforth open future could come to the fore as an instrumental aspect of modern self-formation.

th e c o n s e q u e n c e s o f a n o p e n f u t u r e Experience may well presuppose a pronounced future-oriented temporality that valorizes the unexpected instead of seeking to contain it, and such a temporality in turn may well be predicated upon a confluence of sociohistorical developments; yet such claims explain only how experience 89 Adam, Time and Social Theory, 124. 90 Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 21. My emphasis.

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became possible for, and not why experience became perceived as central to, the economy of the modern sense of self. Just how did a future-oriented temporality affect the sense of self, and how did it somehow result in a perceived need for experiences, let alone in the hunger for experience that was to follow some two centuries later? While the advent of a modern future-oriented temporality is not to be underestimated, it cannot, of itself, adequately account for the transition from premodern to modern modes of self-formation. Likewise, the increased importance of experience in issues of self-formation cannot be explained by simply retracing some epochal shift from the past to the future or by acknowledging the historicity of temporality and the manner by which it informs experience. However entwined experience may be with the late-eighteenth-century opening of the future, what must also be addressed is not only the fact, but also the consequences, of such a temporality. One such consequence was a reflexive reassessing of the past, as opposed to its outright dismissal. It is true that the Enlightenment, to which most of the initial French revolutionary ideals were indebted, can be characterized by the zeal with which it waged a war against the sway of the past over the present – from customs and institutions to methodology and epistemology – that eventually culminated in the proclamation in September of 1792 of a new Revolutionary Calendar inaugurating year I. It is also true that at this time utopian aspirations turned away from both a past Golden Age or some timeless paradise (in order to gravitate instead towards the shimmering gleam of future promises) and that the ideal of timeless perfectio yielded to Rousseau’s idea of future perfectibility.91 It is no less true, however, that it is also around this time that the museum initially assumed its modern guise, dispensing lessons on the unfolding of national grandeur by providing glimpses of its past manifestations – a move soon to be duplicated in literary historiography, the complicity of which in nation building is no mystery.92 It is also at the turn of the eighteenth century that antiquarian societies proliferated, that legends and

91 For more on the mid- to late-eighteenth-century semantic changes in the concept of perfectio, see Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Utopia,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 89–90. 92 Works dealing with the role played by literary history in the forging of national narratives throughout the nineteenth century have proliferated over the last two decades. For some representative samples of this trend, see Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture and The Necessary Nation, as well as Hohendahl, Building a National Literature.

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folk tales were meticulously collected, studied, and published, that archeology became an actual discipline as opposed to a hobby, and that the very term nostalgia shifted from a spatial yearning for familiar surroundings to a temporal yearning for a familiar but lost past.93 Modernity could in fact be characterized, to use Huyssen’s phrase, as “a dialectic of innovative drive and museal desire.”94 The divergence of the present from the future had as its consequence a divergence of the present from the past, and the result was that the prospective gaze to the future had as its corollary a retrospective glance to the past. If utopia was temporalized by the late eighteenth century, this was no less the case for nostalgia. Yet this retrospective glance to the past should not be fobbed off as some escapist consolation in the face of a structurally transformed society. Burke’s premonitory reservations about the Jacobin attempt to altogether dispense with the past did not stem merely from a conservative stance towards changes in the social order – after all, he hardly viewed the earlier American Revolution with a jaundiced eye. Burke was instead concerned, among other things, with what he perceived to be the destruction of the social fabric that might follow attempts to arbitrarily suspend temporal continuity and to abstractly atomize the population into individuals without a common collective history, and, as such, he was more a critic of the effects of economic liberalism than he was a defender of l’Ancien Régime. Individual and collective modes of self-formation cannot simply rush headlong into the future by abolishing the past by decree, in the manner of Jacobin France. In other words, there are consequences of a modern opening of the future that are not to be underestimated. And among these is a need for maintaining a rapport, however tenuous, with the past – even if only as a farce, as Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte would put it. The modern retrospective glance to the past, however, has little to do with the past of Historia Magistra Vitae – we have already seen how the latter, by dominating the present, essentially forecloses the future. The

93 Initially coined in the second half of the seventeenth century as a term to denote homesickness, or Heimweh, nostalgia did not yet refer to the longing for a lost past– after all, Lowe observes, “the continuity from the past into the present was still a seamless web.” For more on how, “in bourgeois society, with the break between past and present, nostalgia was temporalized to be the longing for a former, more familiar time,” see Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 40. 94 Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia,” 19.

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advent of the modern retrospective glance involved a reflexive, and not a submissive, return to the past: if the Middle Ages were rehabilitated after years of contemptuous neglect and if hermeneutics and philology developed a more sophisticated understanding of the historicity of cultural horizons and textual production,95 and if the past became an obsession for emerging nation states that persists to this day, this was not in order to perpetuate exemplary history by merely reshuffling a few variables while leaving intact the temporal paradigm of Historia Magistra Vitae itself. On the contrary, the late-eighteenth-century intelligentsia of Western Europe was all too aware that “the selectively organized past,” as Huyssen has rightly summed it up, was “indispensable for the construction of the future.”96 The future cannot simply be created ex nihilo in the manner proposed, say, by utopian socialists from Saint-Simon and Fourier to Owen, whom Marx was of course to duly castigate for their attempts to leap altogether out of time in the name of a future unconnected with its preconditions in the past and present.97 This is the subject of the next chapter. But suffice it to add here that with the mid- to late-eighteenth-century opening of the future, an exemplary past was no longer in a position to shield the present from a proliferation of possibilities, and the need for a principle of selectivity was thus acutely felt. With good reason theorists of modernity from Simmel, Benjamin, and Freud to Giddens, Huyssen, and Luhmann have shown that more instrumental in the forging of modern self-identity than brute temporality have been the consequences of modern temporality, namely, an increase in complexity and unexpectedness, or what Giddens calls 95 Although such developments are usually attributed to Herder and the Schlegel brothers, they were first fully addressed by Johann Semler (1725–91). This will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. 96 Huyssen,“Escape from Amnesia,” 19. This was of course to remain a persistent leitmotif to this day – and this in spite of the castigations against certain abuses of history, from Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässige invectives to certain poststructuralist polemics. Even in the apparent ahistoricism of Russian formalism or in the future-oriented gaze of the avant-garde, a rapport with the past is maintained – even if only to break with it in order to impinge upon past conventions and defamiliarized present horizons through new modes of perception. 97 For a recent take on the specifically temporal issues in Marx’s critique of utopian socialism, see Carvounas, Diverging Time, 69–77. Marx’s essential point, of course, is that the various utopian blueprints proposed by Fourier and others, for all their philanthropist dimensions, are at best wishful fantasies unconnected to the emancipatory potential of the present. As Carvounas sums it up, “Their prescriptions will not bring an end to class conflict; on the contrary, their prescriptions presuppose the end of class conflict” (74).

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“counterfactuals.”98 And it is in order to manage such increased complexity that the late-eighteenth-century rapport of the present with the past shifts from a submissive to a reflexive operation: rather than foreclose the future in deference to an exemplary past, the present instead rewrites the past so as to accommodate future developments. The reflexive operations of the present upon the past in the face of the open future keep complexity in check precisely because, as Luhmann phrases it, “the present, in this situation, assumes the specific function of mediating between very dissimilar past and future states.”99 The reflexive return (as opposed to the submission) to the past indeed begins to assume a pivotal role in the devising of narrative operations: it provides the temporal extension and linearity without which narrative operations would not be possible – from individual biographical itineraries to the more encompassing méta-récits of the nation state, of progress, and of futureoriented utopias. Hence the proliferation of archeological and historiographical attempts to retrospectively reconstruct what has been (and still is) perceived as the linear unfolding of the past to the present – whether this be in terms of nation development, of a regional community or, more recently (as we shall see), of a specific subaltern culture. If anything, as we shall see in the following chapters, one consequence of an open future has been the return to the past not in order to escape, but on the contrary to enable, the future. It is such a dialectic between past and future, between continuity and discontinuity, that must now be addressed, for it just such a dialectic that informs the experiential process itself. While future-orientedness may well be a temporal precondition for an accentuated role of experience in self-formation, we have also seen in the second chapter that experience involves a receptiveness not only to the discontinuity of future unexpectedness but also to the continuity of a reconnected past and present. Experience does not pit the past against the future or discontinuity against continuity – it is on the contrary a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. It is by turning not only to the future-orientedness of modern temporality but also to its consequence, a reflexive return to the past, that can best addressed why experience, after the late 98 As Giddens explains, “Living in circumstances of modernity is best understood as a matter of the routine contemplation of counterfactuals, rather than simply implying a switch from an ‘orientation to the past’ characteristic of traditional cultures, towards an ‘orientation to the future› (Modernity and Self -Identity, 29). 99 Luhmann, “The Differentiation of Society,” in The Differentiation of Society, 239.

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eighteenth century, came to be so entwined in issues of modern selfformation that it became not only a thematized problem but also a crucial leitmotif – so much so that, to this day, what is considered characteristic of modernity, as Daniel Bell once phrased it, is that “for us, experience, rather than tradition, authority, revealed utterance, or even reason, has become the source of understanding and identity.”100

100 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 89.

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Experience and the Retrospective Glance to the Past Plato, Euthydemus

th e c o m p l e x i t y a n d r e f l e x i v i t y o f m o d e r n i t y The experiential process may well appear future-oriented insofar as it remains recalcitrant to seamless integration within prior expectations and insofar as it perturbs routinized perceptions, actions, and attitudes. Yet it also involves the retrospective revision, and not the outright dismissal, of the earlier orientations it disrupts. Experience harbours two temporal maneuvers: an initial disruption of the given is followed by a retrospective revision of the past so as to accommodate the new and reestablish continuity. At hand in dialectical experience is what can be called – what has in fact already been called by Kristeva, Heidegger, Luhmann, and others – a reflexive dynamic, which can best be described as the process whereby a confrontation with unexpectedness restructures earlier perceptual schemas. It is just such a reflexive dynamic that informs Thompsonian historiography and cultural theory – these after all appeal to experience not in order to sanctify the future at the expense of the past but in order to reflexively return to the past in the light of the future. It is also just such a reflexive maneuver that informs the etymological and conceptual history of experience. It is this reflexive aspect of experience that must now be addressed. If the open future of modernity made an accentuated role of experience in issues of self-formation possible, it is the need for reflexively coordinating an increasingly divergent temporality that made such a role necessary. In the midst of a future-oriented temporality replete with unexpectedness, a strategy was needed for countering and containing an increase in temporal complexity – and this is where the reflexive aspect of experience

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historically comes into play. We must therefore take leave of the specific issue of experience and take a detour through the more general problem of reflexivity. This latter problem not only brings to the fore the temporal implications of experience but also lays the groundwork for diagnosing why experience came to play a central role in modern self-formation to begin with. But what exactly is reflexivity, and what does it entail? Is it to be seen, as it has tended to be particularly since the mid-eighteenth century, as an epistemological relation of subject to object? Is it an anthropologically innate faculty involved in the self’s temporal and intersubjective constitution, as G.H. Mead claims?1 Or is it on the contrary, as Luhmann, Giddens, and others contend, historically descriptive of a specifically modern sense of self? Is reflexivity an epistemological issue, an anthropological category, or a historical product of modernity? The best way to approach such questions is not to turn to the history of ideas but to address instead that of which these ideas may themselves be a symptom. This requires that we consider not only the temporality of modernity but also the consequences of modern temporality. Among the more prominent of these consequences was a growing sense of the provisional nature and historical relativity, or historicity, of everything from history to knowledge. If in premodernity the order of the day was the quantitative extension of a divinely revealed universitas rerum or a transcendentally anchored aggregatio corporum and if various pratiques du savoir were legitimized by an exemplary past or the timelessly given and were thus shielded from unexpectedness and change, in modernity, on the other hand, the world is meaningful only as an indeterminate horizon for further exploration. Such an indeterminate future-oriented horizon could but foster the retrospective revision of the past and the present in the light of new and unexpected developments. This is particularly evident in changes in historiographical practices. As future-orientedness dominated temporality by the turn of the eighteenth century, “the relativity of historical judgment was no longer treated as an epistemological defect,” Koselleck notes, “but rather as a testimony to a superior truth itself determined by the passing course of history … History was temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered according to the given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered … . It became regarded as self-evident that history 1 See, for example, Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, and “The Definition of the Psychical.” For an outstanding overview of Mead’s notion of reflection, see Joas, G.H. Mead, chap. 8.

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as world history had to be continually rewritten.”2 Premodern historiography could with good conscience confine itself to chronicling disparate past res gestae or to recounting timelessly exemplary genealogies – such historiography after all presupposed so seamless a continuum between past, present, and future that the unexpected posed few problems. But with the increased predominance of future-orientedness in the late eighteenth century, the past and present became so tenuously linked to one another that the new and unexpected in turn became prevalent rather than aberrant and disrupted rather than submitted to a given horizon. Bereft of an exemplary past or of timeless eschatological expectations, any presumed act of knowing – historiographical, philological, or otherwise3 – had to turn back and revise its own premises, rather than appeal to timeless essences, as it confronted the unexpected. It was from within themselves and their own revisable history, then, that various pratiques du savoir had to henceforth fathom the grounds for their own legitimation.4 So prevalent had reflexivity become by the late eighteenth century that many have identified it with the very dynamic of modernity. For Luhmann, it is the predominance of what he prefers to call self-referentiality or selfthematization that demarcates modernity from premodernity,5 and for Habermas reflexivity is a quintessentially modern phenomenon because modernity, unable and unwilling as it is to borrow from models of a past epoch in order to normatively orient itself, inevitably ends up reflexively 2 Koselleck, “Neuzeit,” in Futures Past, 250. My emphasis. 3 Such a reflexive turning back upon the very operations of a particular practice is of course flagrant in modern historiography, which began to systematically historicize its methodology by the early nineteenth century. Yet this reflexivity no less surfaces in other late-eighteenth-century epistemological enterprises, as can be seen for example in philology and hermeneutics. Unlike their premodern homologues, which were not pestered by a pronounced divergence between past, present and future, and for which understanding thus involved what Jauss calls an unproblematic or naive “conflation of the text’s and the interpreter’s horizon,” modern exegetical practices in contrast acknowledge that “the recognition of something that has been previously understood can no longer guarantee correct understanding. As soon as historical consciousness begins to uncover the qualitative difference that exists in the temporal distance between past and present life, the mediation between the text’s horizon and that of the interpreter must transpire reflectively” (“Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” in Question and Answer, 201). 4 This development can be seen in the general epistemological configuration at the time – so much so that after the late eighteenth century, for modern thought itself “the essential is that thought be for itself and within the density of its work at the same time knowledge and modification of what it knows, reflection and the transformation of the mode of being of that upon which it reflects” (Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 338). 5 See Luhmann,“The Self-Thematization of Society,” 324–61.

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“cast back on itself.”6 This reflexivity is of course alive and well today: it can be seen at work in various current theoretical ventures such as textualist literary criticism (which owes much to the Russian formalist aesthetic criterion of the reflexive “perception of perception” sparked by defamiliarizing literary devices), the reflexive “experience of experience” proposed by Seel and others as a new aesthetic category,7 recent neo-Arnoldian projects of cultural self-realization through the self-reflection fostered by certain texts,8 or the strategic essentialism à la Spivak, which tells us that a reflexive vigilant self-awareness of one’s maneuvering is a sufficient immunization against the more abusive of logophiliac excesses. Philosophical discourse has of course most explicitly thematized the notion of reflection – a notion that can be minimally defined, in spite of its numerous different philosophical uses, as “the structure and the process of an operation that, in addition to designating the action of a mirror reproducing an object, implies that mirror’s mirroring itself, by which process the mirror is made to see itself.”9 This optic metaphor can be found at work in the concept of reflection from ancient Greek philosophy to this day. Yet only with Descartes’ prima philosophia does reflection shift from a mere medium for metaphysics to the very foundation of metaphysics, at which point the essence of human being is seen as resting no longer on grounds purely external to itself but instead on the cogito me cogitare (where the thinking subject, the cogitans, appears to itself as a me cogitare). It is particularly in modern philosophy that the problem of reflection comes to the fore, receiving its first systematic exposition as early as Descartes’ prima philosophia but becoming an explicitly thematized problem only with Fichte and eventually culminating in Hegel’s attempt to transcend both the subjective and objective versions of self-consciousness and self-reflection (as incarnated by the radicalization of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception into a subjective idealism by Fichte and into an objective idealism by Schelling). But if from Descartes to Kant the grounding of possible knowledge in self-consciousness remains an unanalyzed presupposition, it is only after Fichte that this presupposition lends itself to scrutiny and that the philosophy of reflection itself begins to self-reflexively turn upon its own mode of operation. If Locke’s empirical re6 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 7. 7 As Seel puts it, “to have an aesthetic experience is to have an experience with experiences,” and aesthetic interest “seeks and creates objects through which can be satisfied our desire to experience our own experience”(Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 170–3). 8 See, for example, Ryle and Soper, To Relish the Sublime? 9 Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, 16–17.

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flection preoccupied itself with psychological knowledge by bending back on what takes place within us, if Leibnitz’s logical reflection involved the turning backward of thought away from its relations to objects, and, finally, if Kant’s transcendental reflection inquired into the a priori principles of cognition in general, it is only with Hegel’s absolute or speculative reflection that a surenchère occurs. Indeed, rather than perpetuate a paradigm of reflection beset by the two irreconcilable movements of thinking being and the being of what is thought10 – a paradigm that raises the thorny issue of how to connect the reflection of objects to the self-reflection of the subject11 – Hegel’s absolute reflection, intended as a critique of such a paradigm of reflection, instead turns reflection upon itself so as to encompass both moments within a “metatheory” of reflection. Hegel of course achieves this by considering thinking and being not as irreconcilable opposites but instead as transitional moments in the objective unfolding of self-developing thought.12 But the specifics of Hegel’s surenchère need not concern us here. What is noteworthy here is that by the early nineteenth century the problem of reflexivity reaches such a climax in philosophical discourse that it reflexively subjects itself to its own operations, and this in a manner paralleling the self-reflexive tendencies of other institutionalized pratiques du savoir, if not of the very dynamic of modernity. 10 Or, to use the optic metaphor of reflection, the mirroring of an object and, at the same time, the mirroring of the mirror itself. 11 Reflection, as a philosophical concept up to and including Kant, involves the mirroring of an object as well as the mirroring of the mirror itself. Reflection thus involves two distinct moments. But as Gasché and, before him, Heidegger, have pointed out, “it is far from clear how these two moments relate, how reflection as a unitary phenomenon can at once be reflection of Other and reflection of the mirroring subject” (Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, 20). 12 Kant well recognized, as Hegel was later to do, that operations of separation and dissolution are meaningful only in terms of a totality and that the metaphysics of reflection presupposes (often à son insu) an original unity within which the fragmenting and analytical ways of Verstand can take place. But because Kant considered this need for totality as only a hypothetical necessity or as a mere object of human yearning (the ideas of Vernunft beyond the legitimate realm of Verstand), he essentially removes original unity from the realm of the knowable and he thus remains trapped, ironically enough, within the very philosophy of reflection the conditions of possibility of which he had hoped to establish. We should be fair to Kant, however, by keeping in mind that the decisive turn in post-Kantian philosophy of reflection owes much to Kant himself. As Gasché rightly notes, “With the pure synthetic unity of the I think that must at least virtually accompany all of the experiencing subject’s representations, and which Kant was led to assume as a result of his transcendental deduction of the categories, he achieved a first, however hypothetical, unification of the different moments that constitute the minimal definition of reflection as self-reflection” (The Tain of the Mirror, 18–19).

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But the question of reflexivity need not be restricted to epistemological considerations, and still less need it be equated, in an association that entrenched itself in philosophical discourse particularly by the late eighteenth century, with the intentional movement of thinking or, as Luhmann phrases it, “with the idea of an underlying subject that unfolds itself and asserts itself in the ‘thinking of thinking.›13 True, the link between reflection and the cognitive antics of the thinking subject towards objects, if not upon itself, has been a resilient epistemological issue that, in spite of repeated critiques from various quarters, can still be found in what Habermas derisively but rightly calls philosophies of the subject; nevertheless, reflexivity is first of all a retrospective movement, an Umkehrung in the sense discussed earlier – only later would it refer in specialized philosophical discourse to the specular unfolding of selfconsciousness. By historicizing the role of reflection in what he calls social and psychic systems, that is, in systems where meaning plays a predominant role,14 Luhmann has convincingly shown that the philosophy of reflection, as epitomized by (though not limited to) German idealism, is in fact but a culturally and historically specific formulation of a more fundamental dynamic – a dynamic that refers less to specular self-knowledge than to a self-reflective (or “self-thematizing,” as he prefers to put it) “process through which a system establishes a relationship with itself.”15 This reflective process need not be conflated with a self-hypostatized self under the aegis of absolute or self-conscious knowledge;16 it can be – in 13 Luhmann,“The Self-Thematization of Society,” in The Differentiation of Society, 324. 14 The complexity of Luhmann’s notion of system need not detain here. Suffice it to say that unlike those who see a system either in terms of the strictly internal order of constitutive elements or, conversely, in terms of a system’s external demarcation from an environment, Luhmann focuses on the interdependence of system and environment. “In this view,” Peter Beyer explains, “a system’s selectivity processes input from the environment and responds by changing its state or attempting to influence the environment with selective outputs. The system then is a combination of processes that maintains itself by maintaining a boundary between itself and its environment” (Introduction to Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies, xiv). But what is specific to social and psychic systems is that these process complexity in the form of meaning, where meaning is understood, as it is by Luhmann (who combines functional analysis with Husserlian phenomenology), not as a content of consciousness but instead as the continuous processing of the difference between actuality and possibility. 15 Luhmann, “The Self-Thematization of Society,” 327. 16 Luhmann goes so far as to suggest that the traditional concept of the subject be seen “as a sort of cultural ‘prescription’ for individual self-thematization” that stems from an increase in complexity following the shift from stratified to functional differentiation. It is after all in early modern philosophy that “the psychological reflexivity of thinking, willing and feeling, for example, was hypostasized as ‘the subject’ unable to negate itself. Similarly, it became a last ditch source of certainty in an unstable world” (Ibid., 330).

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fact it ought to be – seen instead in terms of how a system cultivates its own sense of continuity across time so as to sustain itself in the face of increased temporal complexity.17 If we are to address some of the historical developments that to this day govern our self-understanding, we ought to see reflection less as a timeless epistemological conundrum than as a historical issue – an issue revolving around the historical manner by which increased temporal complexity has been managed and reduced following the late-eighteenth-century opening of the future. But to what extent can reflexivity be considered a strictly historical issue? After all, it could be and already has been argued, say, along American pragmatist lines, that reflexivity is an anthropological constant always already present not only in the intersubjective forging of selfhood but also in the most elementary acts of sense perception. Mead, for example, maintains that a discrepancy between anticipatory future-oriented perception, or what he calls “distance perception,” (such as seeing a tree reflected in a pool of water) and actual immediate contact perception (such as touching water instead of the reflected image of a tree) helps foster a reflexive tendency to reevaluation that in turn is the condition of possibility of any eventual intersubjective forging of the self.18 Mead would agree with Luhmann and Giddens that reflexivity involves a 17 Complexity can be defined in Luhmanian terms as that which forces social or psychic systems, for the sake of their survival, to select from a surplus of environmental possibilities that would otherwise prove overwhelming. To survive, that is, to maintain a difference between themselves and their environment, social and psychic systems must indeed keep complexity within manageable proportions – they must in other words select which aspects of the environment are relevant (or not) for their own operations. Such a process of complexity reduction essentially involves the negation of certain possibilities and the actualization of others – a process that begets what Luhmann calls “meaning.” He explains this process as follows: “for each system the environment is more complex than the system itself. Systems lack the requisite ‘variety’ … that would enable them to react to every state of the environment … There is, in other words, no point-for-point correspondence between system and environment (such a condition would abolish the difference between system and environment). This is why establishing and maintaining this difference despite a relative difference in degree of their relative complexities becomes the problem. The system’s inferiority in complexity must be counterbalanced by strategies of selection”(Social Systems, 25). To this he adds: “Complexity is meant to indicate that there are always more possibilities than can be actualized,” and “in practice, then, complexity means the necessity of choosing” (“Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept,” in Essays on Self-Reference, 26). Of course, such a definition of complexity need not be strictly Luhmanian. Giddens, for instance, comes to essentially the same conclusions while couching his analysis in the phenomenological terminology of Alfred Schultz and Thomas Luckmann. For Giddens, the maintenance of a sense of self presupposes the reduction of complexity through trust and the sustaining of a viable Umwelt (see Modernity and Self-Identity, 127–9). 18 For more on Mead’s take on reflection, see his “Definition of the Psychical,” 77ff., and his Philosophy of the Present, 75–90.

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future-oriented temporal dimension, and not some timeless epistemological link between subject and object; but while he concedes that reflexive activity is galvanized by unexpected obstacles to anticipatory or future-oriented behaviour, he nevertheless dehistoricizes expectational and reflexive behaviour by proposing these as anthropological, if not as biological, constants to be traced to sense perception. Mead’s argument is not without merit. As we saw earlier with the problem of narrativity (with which reflexivity is actually closely entwined), reflexivity may well be involved in the most fundamental acts of sense perception. But this need not concern us here, for what is in need of historicisation is not reflexivity as such, but instead the accentuated role that reflexivity, like narrativity, comes to play in strategies of self-formation in the face of late-eighteenth-century temporal divergence and increased complexity. Reflexivity – as Mead himself would concede – stems from future-oriented behaviour; yet because an increased predominance of future-orientedness is itself a historical development, then likewise historical is the increased late-eighteenth-century reliance on reflexivity – and not necessarily reflexivity as such – in preserving self-identity from a paralyzing proliferation of “counterfactuals” (to use phenomenological terminology) or in maintaining a psychic or social system’s sense of difference between itself and its increasingly complex environment (to use systems theory terminology). An anthropological theory of reflexivity is not necessarily unviable; yet such a theory fails to address why reflexivity has historically become so salient an issue over the last two centuries that it has often been equated with the very dynamic of modernity, and it fails to consider whether the late-eighteenth-century epistemological obsession with reflexivity symptomatically points to historical issues that are more than strictly epistemological. There are good reasons for considering reflexivity from a historical perspective. In the face of the perpetually renewed advent of the new, which a timeless past or an immutable order of things was no longer in a position to absorb or contain, and as appeals to timeless essences lost their appeal,19 besieged as they were by a growing sense of historical relativity, institutionalized disciplines from history to philology, no less than society as a whole (if not an individual’s very sense of self), increasingly depended for their self-maintenance on a diachronically extended 19 Such a premodern “immutable order of things” can, of course, assume various names depending on one’s theoretical predilections. For Luhmann, such an order is embodied by the stratified vertical differentiation of premodern society into rigidly hierarchical and nonporous social castes. For Giddens, who uses more conventional sociological terminology, it is “traditional society.”

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sense of identity and continuity – a sense of continuity to be reflexively cultivated and without which complexity would prove overwhelming. Indeed, when the past so distances itself from the present that the present in turn becomes susceptible to revision in the light of future unexpectedness, a reflexive turning back upon one’s modes of operation becomes not only a possible but also an essential moment in the sustaining of a sense of identity across the temporal manifold. “A self-reflective orientation becomes unavoidable if problems of continuity or discontinuity spring up and have to be solved by going back to a system’s conception of its own identity,” Luhmann explains, and it is precisely because “self-reflection … looks backward” that it “reinforces the identity of the system so that it can survive novel choices and innovations by reconstructing its past history as a consistent series of intentions and actions.”20 It is because of a system’s sense of its past history of choices or selections – a history that is reflexively maintained or, to phrase it differently, perpetually revised so as to accommodate new and unexpected developments – that a given modern system, social or psychic, can cultivate its sense of continuity and, in so doing, make meaningful choices among what would otherwise be an overwhelming surplus of possibilities.21 But the problem of complexity and the need to contain it, reflexively or otherwise, are not issues specific to systems theory. Luhmann, always 20 Luhmann, “The Differentiation of Society,” in The Differentiation of Society, 238–9. By “choices,” Luhmann refers to the selectivity to which a system must resort in order to maintain the difference between itself and its environment. Because there are always more possibilities in a system’s environment than in the system itself, the system must use relatively few responses to compensate for many environmental inputs. Such strategies for reducing complexity constitute the system’s selectivity. It should also be added here that a system’s history is not an aggregate of empirical facts that may or may not have taken place and that can be inductively recontextualised. In a system’s sense of its past history, which is reconstructed in the face of unexpectedness, “historical events … are viewed as ‘relevant’ or meaningful not because they are purely factual and not merely because of the sequence in which they happen to occur, but rather because they can be understood as having been selected from an array of possibilities” (“World Time and System History,” in The Differentiation of Society, 293). The Luhmanian notion of a “system’s history” has of course assumed other names – Taylor, Giddens, Kerby, and others, for example, speak of “biographical narratives of self-identity.” 21 The need for such a sense of identity across time is not to be underestimated: it is just such a diachronically extended sense of identity that in the context of modernity “serves as the basic reference point for a selective reduction and mastery of environmental complexity. To the extent that the unity of a system is made an explicit topic in reflection, the system itself becomes capable of making meaningful choices even in what is for it an indeterminate and unexplored environment” ( Luhmann, “The Self-Thematization of Society,” 328).

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eager (as is Habermas) to engage in dialogue with schools of thought other than his own, in fact defines complexity in terms of elements and relations precisely because such a definition it is not restricted to systems theory.22 Besides, Luhmanian credentials are hardly required in order to stress the link between, on the one hand, the survival of a social or psychic system (or, to use more traditional terminology, a sense of selfidentity) and, on the other hand, a capacity for reducing the complexity that can but follow from an onslaught of the unexpected. Similar conclusions have of course been reached by other theoreticians and historians of modernity who, in their sociohistorical studies of the modern sense of self, argue that it is only through self-reflexively forged biographical narratives that can be mustered the trust 23 needed for bracketing the overwhelming “counterfactual possibilities” of an open future that would otherwise undermine a temporally extended sense of self.24 In a similar vein, but from an entirely different philosophical tradition (one that is closer to Freud than to Marx), Walter Benjamin’s theory of the twentieth century impoverishment of experience contends that in order to palliate the proliferation of urban audiovisual and cognitive stimuli that threaten his psychic economy with overload, modern urban 22 As Luhmann puts it, complexity so defined indeed “enjoys the advantages of making the concept applicable to what is not a system … and, because the term is defined without using the concept of system, of enriching systems-theoretical analyses with additional perspectives” (Social Systems, 24). 23 By “trust,” which cultivates the sense of “ontological security” (to use Giddens’s term) without which complexity would overwhelm daily existence, Giddens and others essentially refer to the filtering mechanism whereby certain possibilities are discounted and complexity reduced. It is because we generally discount, say, the possibility that the sun will fail to rise or that the laws of gravity will be arbitrarily suspended that a considerable number of problems no longer demand our attention and that our focus can tend to other matters. As Giddens puts it, trust ‹brackets out’ potential occurrences which, if the individual were seriously to contemplate them, would produce a paralysis of the will, or feelings of engulfment” (Modernity and Self-Identity, 3). 24 Such a correlation between the reflexivity both of modernity and of the modern self in the face of growing complexity was noted before Giddens work – although Giddens himself has not acknowledged this. Some twenty years earlier, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, and others had indeed come to similar conclusions. See Berger et al., The Homeless Mind, and Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. It should also be added here that Giddens’s notion of “self-identity” is not some static or self-sufficient entity in the manner, say, of that most popular of postmodernist straw men, the “Cartesian subject”; it is instead a reflexively sustained sense of difference between one’s self and one’s environment. If identity “presumes continuity across time and space,” self-identity itself is “such continuity as interpreted reflexively by the agent,” for “self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her of his biography” (Modernity and Self-Identity, 53).

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man developed a self-protective psychic barrier that filtered such stimuli yet that, in so doing, reduced experience from the temporal extension of potential meaning to the spatial punctuality of disparate brute shocks. The problem of complexity is coterminous not with systems theory but with problems of modernity. The complexity of modernity, or what some prefer to call the restless dynamism of modernity, is such that it has to be curbed, and it ought not to come as a surprise, as Moretti suggests, that the ‹excess of stimuli’ … from Simmel to Freud to Benjamin – has always been seen as modernity’s most typical threat.”25 Such a threat had become very real by the late eighteenth century. Two prominent consequences of the modern temporal divergence between past, present, and future were indeed, as Koselleck phrases it, “the expected otherness of the future” and, with it, the “acceleration by means of which one’s own time is distinguished from what went before.”26 By generating ever-shorter intervals of time, such developments fostered such an acceleration of historical events, as Wilhelm von Humboldt noted at the time, that “whoever compares even superficially the present state of affairs with those of fifteen or twenty years ago will not deny that there prevails within this period greater dissimilarity than that which ruled within a period twice as long at the beginning of this century.”27 And once tradition and the given lost their capacity for selflegitimation, the present was severed from the past and “lived time was experienced as a rupture, as a period of transition, in which the new and the unexpected continually happened.”28 As time becomes a scarce resource for mastering problems, complexity becomes a pressing issue, and specific to modern complexity is the manner by which it became temporalized.29 Conversely, such complexity is increasingly held in check after the turn of the eighteenth century by a recourse to reflexivity that, by allowing for a system to turn back on its sense of its own history (or, as 25 Moretti, The Way of the World, 6. 26 Koselleck, “Neuzeit,” 252, 257. 27 Von Humboldt, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I: 401, cited in Koselleck, “Neuzeit,” 252. 28 Koselleck, “Neuzeit,” 257. My emphasis. 29 Specific to modernity as a social system is the predominance of functional differentiation – a form of differentiation accompanied by a growing rift between the past, present, and future. This modern temporality in turn leads to what Luhmann calls “complexity in time” or “temporalized complexity” (“The Future Cannot Begin,” in The Differentiation of Society, 275). See Luhmann, “The Differentiation of Society,” 238–40, for more on the idea that it is as a result of a divergent modern temporality that the need for reflexive selfconstitution emerges – the need, in other words, for constructing a history of one’s itinerary so as to manage temporal complexity.

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Luhmann would put it, a history of one’s past selections and choices), induces a sense of continuity that helps bridge temporal divergence and, in so doing, helps maintain a sense of identity through time. However at odds their theoretical stance on other matters and however irreconcilable their schools of thought, thinkers from Habermas and Luhmann to Giddens and Taylor all point to a correlation between reflexivity and the late-eighteenth-century consolidation of a futureoriented temporality, and they would all agree with the idea that “modernity’s self reflexivity refers to the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge.”30 With good reason they likewise all see reflection less in terms of speculative idealism than as a historical response to a modern problem – the problem, namely, of how the new released by an indeterminate future impinges upon the given and, more important still, of how the resulting increase in complexity is to be reckoned with. It is shortsighted to peremptorily dismiss reflection as but the perpetuation of debunked “philosophies of the subject” or other insidious ontotheological schemes. Reflection or self-referentiality, Luhmann reminds us, is “in itself nothing bad, forbidden, or to be avoided (or, more precisely, something that is permissible only in a subject and that must remain locked up inside it).”31 Reflection refers less to selfknowledge than it does to self-maintenance in the face of increased temporal complexity. As a sociohistorical problem rather than as a timeless philosophical concept, experience as a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, no less than reflexivity, also stems in large part from the late-eighteenthcentury opening of the future – it is after all upon a future-oriented temporality that is predicated the element of surprise or unexpectedness without which experience cannot take place. But for all their indebtedness to future-orientedness, both reflexivity, which involves a return to and revision of the past in the name of complexity reduction, and experience, which can be said to have taken place only if it leads to a restructuring of earlier horizons, do not so much reject the past as they revise it so as to accommodate the unexpectedness of an open future. But the point of this detour through reflexivity is not to sketch some late-eighteenth-century histoire des mentalités behind the rise of experience as a thematized problem. Reflexivity and dialectical experience are not unrelated – in fact, the temporal dynamic of reflexivity, as we shall 30 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 20. My emphasis. 31 Luhmann, Social Systems, 33.

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see, best sheds light on the interrelation of past, present, and future at work in experience itself. It is this temporality, which no less permeates modernity as a whole than it informs the very structure of the modern self, that we must further clarify in order to uncover just how, and why, experience came to be perceived as crucial for modern self-formation.

t h e r e f l e x i v e i n v e n t i o n o f tr a d i t i o n For all the future-orientedness at hand in modern temporality, the past was seen not as obsolete but instead as in need of revival and reassessment. This was an inevitable consequence of modern temporality: on the one hand, once the new becomes valorized at the expense of the old, the past recedes into decreasing contemporary relevance and, as such, can but appear as “other” and distant vis-à-vis the present; but on the other hand, the disjunctive temporality of modernity so exposes the present to the onslaught of the new that a buffer is required – the buffer of a temporal continuum that only a reflexive reassessment, and not the outright rejection, of the past can provide. The future-oriented gaze of modernity has in other words as its counterpart a retrospective glance to the past. It is no coincidence, then, that it is at this historical juncture that tradition should have been “invented” – to use Eric Hobsbawm’s popularized expression.32 As the past distanced itself from the present by the mid- to late eighteenth century, tradition had to be conjured in order to assure the temporal continuity required for the metanarratives of emerging nation states, while at the same time providing a rampart against the overwhelming complexity of an open future. The modern “invention” of tradition, however, refers not to the fact of tradition but rather to the late-eighteenth-century awareness both of the precarious link between past and present and of the need for a reflexive return to and cultivation of this past lest temporal continuity, let alone a sense of individual and collective identity, be torn asunder and dissipated into an aggregate of disparate and unconnected presents – a risk that Edmund Burke had in mind as he aired his reservations in his Reflections on the Revolution in France about the excessive zeal with which the French revolution precipitously attempted to altogether dispense with the past. 32 See, for example, Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, which shows how many of the traditions regarded today as hailing from the distant past turn out to be but recent codifications and inventions often dating no earlier than the late eighteenth century.

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On the other hand, the role of tradition in premodernity is not belittled by the fact of its late-eighteenth-century “invention.” So predominant was in fact the role of the past and tradition in premodern temporality that for all practical purposes the future was foreclosed and the new held in check. If continuity and tradition were not issues before modernity, it is not because they were inoperative but rather because they were all too operative. Because they were not a problem, they failed to so much as cross the threshold of premodern consciousness. Before it succumbed to temporalization, what Lovejoy calls the Great Chain of Being indeed kept ontological, let alone temporal, discontinuity at bay: the entities constituting the series rerum, however variegated, were conceived as contiguously linked to one another in an uninterrupted and gradually ascending chain, as “an absolutely smooth sequence, in which no break appears.”33 With such a diagram of the universe at one’s disposal, one could know in advance what to expect, discontinuity was always already glossed over, the past was perceived as unproblematically accessible, and tradition was so tightly integrated into daily praxis that it posed few problems aside from the usual intergenerational squabbling. In such a context, the new and the unexpected were hardly in a position to perturb the given, and complexity could thus be kept within manageable proportions without having to self-consciously appeal to and retrospectively reconstruct tradition and without having to resort to a reflexively constructed sense of one’s past history. Even when the premodern coordination of past, present, and future did present problems, (which it certainly did on occasion, albeit so imperceptibly as to pass unnoticed), these problems could be altogether circumvented insofar as the existence of a timeless preestablished order of things could be safely presupposed – something not exactly difficult to achieve in a cosmos regarded as divinely preordained and thus unlikely to arouse any epistemological gnashing of teeth or ontological wringing of hands. Premodern hermeneutics could for example bypass thorny epistemological issues (such as how to understand an ancient text that has become strange due to its historical and cultural remoteness) precisely because it presupposed the atemporal presence of a transcendent referent, whether as res extensa or res gestae, to which both author and interpreter could appeal.34 When confronted by the inevitable strangeness of ancient textual passages replete with archaisms or 33 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 327. 34 See, for example, Szondi’s reading of Chladenius in Einführung in die literarische Hermeneutik, chapter 9.

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with the portrayal of outdated mores, premodern exegetical practices and hermeneutic inquiry did not undermine the interpreter’s horizon, and still less did they arouse any sense of historical relativity or historicity; such inquiry instead confined itself to reviving the eternal truth of canonical texts by eradicating the alterity of that which had become strange due to historical distance35 – a manoeuver that, if anything, effectively defused any thematisation of a possible historical distance between past and present. With such a perceived contemporaneity of past distant events in spite of intervening historical change, it is not surprising that medieval portrayals of Virgil and other ancients should have them attired not in togas but in contemporary garb or that Alexander’s victory over Darius at the Battle of Issus in 333 bc should be depicted in Albrecht Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht (1529) as if it had taken place the week before.36 Anchored as they were in an immutable order beyond the intemperate ways of historical change and delimiting as they did the realm of the possible, tradition and the past indeed precluded the possibility of a vantage point external to themselves from which they themselves might be surveyed. As such, they could not lend themselves to the explicit thematisation they would later receive in modernity. The awareness of the past as alien or at least as precariously related to the present is a modern phenomenon that can be traced to the mid- to late eighteenth century. It is only when the past appears distant from rather than seamlessly continuous with the present and it is only when the future becomes unexpected rather than foreclosed that tradition, if not the problem of conservatio itself,37 can become an object of concern and that the need for temporal continuity can be felt – hence the emergence 35 For more on this, see Jauss, “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” 201. It should be added here that if in premodernity tradition was perceived as self-evident as the daily rising of the sun and if the past was perceived as unproblematically accessible, the force of such convictions stemmed not from any actual, but rather from a perceived, exemption from historical change. 36 For all the meticulous attention to historical accuracy (e.g., the exact number of soldiers fighting, killed, or taken prisoner – Altdorfer had in fact sought advice from the court historiographer Curtius Rufus), it nevertheless remains that everything depicted in Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht, from the soldiers’ armor and the Persians’ garb to the fortified town in the distance, is unmistakably of the sixteenth century. For more on the temporal implications of Altdorfer’s painting, see Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Future’s Past, 3–20. 37 As Luhmann observes, it is only by the late eighteenth century that the problem of conservatio comes to the fore: “older societies which thought of themselves as living in an enduring (or even eternal) present did not experience our problem. Only in modern times, and only after a shortening of the time span of the present, does the problem of perseverence or conservatio become of current interest” ( “The Future Cannot Begin,” 282–3).

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of such modern institutions as archeology and the museum. Unlike premodern unexpectedness, which was dismissed outright or fobbed off as a miracle unrelated to earthly goings-on, modern unexpectedness, or, as Helga Nowotny prefers to call it, “surprise,” “indicates that the time-curve of history cannot simply be extrapolated from the past, that there can be discontinuities and breaks.”38 By the late eighteenth century, the past had become so flagrantly estranged from the present, and the future had begun to harbour such a surplus of possibilities that they warranted efforts at reconnecting the past, present, and future by means of temporally extended and coordinating narratives – that they warranted, in other words, a reflexive return to the past that might accommodate the new. And the “invention” of tradition was but one of these efforts at reflexively reworking the past in the light of the new so as to link it in a linear sequence leading to the present.39 Other efforts at countering the threat of discontinuity can be seen no less at work in the frequent recourse by emerging nation-states to national literary historiography as evidence of an unfolding national Geist (say, à la Gervinus) or in the rise of biographical and autobiographical literature that stages the self as a sequentially narrativised and temporally linear trajectory. Attempts at reckoning with growing temporal discontinuity and complexity are yet more tellingly revealed by the late-eighteenth-century emergence of the very notion of time as a linear sequentiality of temporal points.40 Even in the economy of the human sense of self does temporal continuity become a salient issue. In the face of a discrepant temporality, it is to memory that is increasingly entrusted the sustainment of a sense of self-identity across the temporal manifold – with Hume, it becomes the very condition of possibility of a sense of identity: “Had we no memory, 38 Nowotny, Time, 44. 39 For more on how “transformations in spatial and temporal practices implied a loss of identity with place and repeated radical breaks with any sense of historical continuity,” and how this underlies “the ideological labour of inventing tradition,” see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 272. 40 For more on the late-eighteenth-century emergence of such a notion of time, see Luhmann, “World Time and System History.” Such a notion forcefully imposed itself precisely because of the strongly felt need, with the advent of modernity, for “the reconstruction of past history in terms of a linear sequence of actions, events, or stages” and thus for a form of linear temporal continuity that “reinforces the identity of a changing system – in our case, the identity of bourgeois society in its transition from stratification to functional differentiation” (Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, 392–3n17). As we saw in the third chapter, it is of course precisely the historicity of linearity that various narrativist theories of experience fail to address in their attempts to ahistorically conflate narrative structures with the constitution of the self.

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we never should have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.”41 It is likewise to the modern disjunction between past, present, and future that can conceivably be traced the increasingly pronounced interest of eighteenth-century philosophical discourse in reflexivity as a problem of self-consciousness and of the subject: if with the rise of a sense of historicity, the past could appear as but tenuously connected to the present, then not only the relation of subject to object but also the relation of the subject to itself as it alters along a diachronic axis could likewise become serious problems. The otherness of past sociohistorical cultural horizons vis-à-vis a present horizon, which began to preoccupy both biblical and secular hermeneutics at the turn of the eighteenth century,42 is indeed echoed in philosophy’s concern for the otherness or alienation (Entfremdung) that a temporally extended and changing subject can but experience towards its earlier states – a problem that threatens the possibility of self-identity across time. Already in Leibnitz’s Monadology (1714) we can see how the principium individuationis begins to shift from a fixed status within the chain of being to the matter of temporal coordination: “a being which recalls its past experiences as its own experience has a continuing sense of personal identity which may persist through out any number of changes of any degree.”43 And such a problem informs to a certain extent Kant’s recourse to transcendental apperception as a means of connecting the otherwise disparate empirical “I’s” scattered across the temporal manifold.

41 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 262–3. 42 Except for the odd case of Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725), which early addressed issues of historicity, it is only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century that issues of historicity, at first hermeneutic and aesthetic and, later, in general, gain currency in historiographical inquiry. Such developments are of course usually attributed to Herder and the Schlegel brothers, but as mentioned earlier, such developments were first fully addressed by Johann Semler (1725–91), whose work on biblical hermeneutics shows how the Bible, far from being a homogeneous whole of which each part had equal contemporary validity, was on the contrary a collection of disparate texts circumstantially written for specific historical communities. True, Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus was perhaps the first work to see biblical texts more as natura naturata than as natura naturans, and thus as potentially subject to historical and cultural contingency. Yet, only after the pantheism controversy sparked by Jacobi’s Briefe über die Lehre von Spinoza (1785) do Spinoza’s ideas gain currency beyond a small coterie (in this regard, see chapter 2 of Beiser, The Fate of Reason). Furthermore, only with Semler were the full implications of the historical distance between the past and present fully worked out. For a concise overview of this issue, see Gusdorf, Les origines de l’herméneutique, 134–6. 43 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 260.

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Permeating as it did not only methodological questions of historiography, philology, and philosophy but also the very structure of self-constitution, reflexivity had become so ubiquitous by the late eighteenth century that it has often been equated with the very dynamic of modernity itself. It is hardly surprising that shortly thereafter experience should come to the fore and receive explicit thematisation as a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, that is, as an essentially reflexive process that reintegrates the unexpected within the very orientations or horizons it disrupts. Experience depends, as does reflexivity, not only on a future-oriented receptiveness to the new but also on a reassessing glance to the past – the unexpected is valorized only insofar as it does not leave one unchanged, that is, only insofar as it entails a return to and a restructuring of both the given and the past so as to accommodate the new. The dialectic of continuity and discontinuity at hand in experience is an essentially reflexive process, and with good reason Heidegger, Kristeva, Turner, and others remind us that experience stems not only from the disruptiveness of the unexpected but also from a retrospective Umkehrung or retournement upon past practices or presuppositions. Far from being a reckless rush to the new, experience is on the contrary “constantly arrested by reflexivity.”44 As a consequence of modern temporality and as a response to increased complexity and temporal discontinuity, reflexivity sheds light on the dynamic at hand in experience itself. Experience refers, as does reflexivity, to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, or, to rephrase, the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of experience is essentially a reflexive process. But what is the actual relation of reflexivity to dialectical experience? Increasingly problematized and thematized as they both were following the advent of a modern temporality, and exhibiting as they do a similar temporal dynamic, reflexivity and experience raise questions about the actual nature of their apparent affinity. Is experience a particular incarnation of the reflexivity of modernity, or is it a parallel but unrelated phenomenon? Are reflexivity and experience reflections of some “Spirit of the Age,” or is one the subset of the other? While both experience and reflexivity owe their explicit thematisation to the opening of the future, their affinity does not merely testify to some late-eighteenth-century Zeitgeist. Dialectical experience is indeed not so much a phenomenon parallel to as it is instead a particular instance of reflexivity. True, it would seem that the dynamic of experience 44 Victor Turner, cited in Bruner, “Experience and its Expressions,” 13.

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is essentially described by the reflexivity at hand, say, in Russian formalism – a reflexivity whereby “defamiliarizing literary devices,” by disappointing perceptual expectations, so disrupt the continuity of one’s cultural and perceptual horizon that one is prompted into reflexively turning back upon and revising former presuppositions,45 and this, in turn, so as to augment one’s self-understanding and repertoire of responses, much in manner of Bildung as an accumulative and transformative process. But what demarcates the reflexivity of experience from the reflexivity of Russian formalism, if not from reflexivity in general, is its specific association with problems of modern self-formation. Whereas reflexivity can as readily refer to historiographical or hermeneutic methodology, to the unfolding of some national Geist, to the tenets of Russian formalism and early Rezeptionsästhetik, as it can to the dynamic of modernity itself, the reflexive dynamic of experience itself, however, typically revolves around issues of identity formation in the face of a future-oriented temporality replete with increased complexity. As we shall see, experience is no less imbricated than is reflexivity in the reduction of complexity: both reckon with one of the most insistent problems of modernity – the problem of how a system is to avoid its own dissolution by sustaining a sense of difference between itself and its environment, of how a system is to reduce the complexity of an environment that threatens to overwhelm it. But what is specific to the reflexivity of experience as opposed to reflexivity in general is that the system at stake is the modern sense of self. Such an accentuated role for experience in issues of self-formation could come to the fore only when the self itself became reflexively structured. Only when so structured can the self allow the unexpected to goad it into the reflexive self-revision characteristic of the experiential process. Unlike its premodern homologue, which remained shielded from the complexity of an unbridled future, the modern self, in contrast, becomes an open process of self-revision in the face of unexpectedness, an individually forged future-oriented project, as well as a reflexively narrativized biographical trajectory. Once permeated by such reflexivity, the self not only allows for but also depends upon experiences, for these not only help coordinate a discrepant temporality and reduce complexity, as we shall see, but they also become the fodder, so to speak, out of which the modern sense of self constructs and sustains itself. The 45 Or, in the case of Jauss’early Rezeptionsästhetik, one’s former literary horizon. See his “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity” for his own mea culpa, in which he acknowledges and repents for the Russian Formalist presuppositions at work in his earlier texts.

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key to the insistence – subaltern or otherwise – on experience lies in the manner by which the self itself became increasingly reflexive after the late eighteenth century. It is to this historical problem, then, that we must now turn.

th e r e f l e x i v i t y o f m o d e r n s e l f - f o r m at i o n If such a reflexive structuring of the self surfaces with insistence only by the mid- to late eighteenth century, it is because before the emergence and consolidation of modern temporality, the self was an essentially static entity from which change and the new were for the most part excluded. Even when change or the new were the order of the day, we have seen how these were either confined to initiatory rites of passage institutionalized by an immutable tradition or fobbed off as ethereal miracles unrelated to daily existence. In either case, the unexpected was either contained or dismissed and was thus hardly in a position to perturb a given horizon, let alone impinge upon one’s sense of self. “The changes that take place in temporal orientation,” however, “appear nowhere more profoundly and inevitably than in the process of restructuring the image of the individual in literature.”46And the temporal organization of the self before the late eigtheenth century can better be brought to light by considering the spatio-temporal, or chronotopal, structure of premodern literary genres.47 The work of Bakhtin, Auerbach, and others shows how a common thread running through various literary genres before the late eighteenth century is the imperviousness of portrayed characters to the incremental change characteristic of the experiential process. The epic, from the Iliad to the Nibelungenlied (the essential chronotope of which was to persist, although residually, well into the early sixteenth century, as can be seen with the influential Amadis de Gaula of 1508) presents us with a closed temporal horizon from which has been excluded any open-endedness, indecision, or indeterminacy. In such a temporality, what Bakhtin calls the “image of the individual” is construed as a fully finished and completed being in which “there is not the slightest gap between his authentic essence and its ex46 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 33. 47 For Bakhtin, chronotopes constitute the “organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel” and thus provide “the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events” – including the representation of the self (“Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” 250). A similar mode of analysis (although unburdened by any specific terminology) can of course also be found in Auerbach, Mimesis.

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ternal manifestation,” for such an individual “has already become everything that he could become, and he could become only that which he has already become.”48 In other predominantly premodern chronotopes, such as “adventure time,”49 which can be traced back to Petronius’s work but which first manifested itself with force in picaresque novels (Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas) and which persisted in works as late as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, portrayed characters begin to enjoy an increased differentiation between their “essence” and the latter’s “external manifestation.” But for all the conflicts such a growing dichotomy arouses, and although a hero’s social status may change after a series of misadventures, the hero himself remains unchanged: conflicts and obstacles merely serve to test the durability of an already finished product, and the nature of the product is confirmed, not transformed. This holds true even for those premodern literary genres where a changed protagonist is expected, as in the novel of ordeal (Prüfungsroman), early Christian crisis hagiographies, and, later, the baroque novels of D’Urfé, Scudéry, and others. For all the unexpected adversity faced by characters and for all the play of masks and alternations between delusion and reality, characters themselves fail to undergo any intrinsic transformation and, as Bakthin sums it up, “nothing they see or undergo can be utilized as a life experience that alters and shapes them.”50 Even the work of Corneille, with its stress on psychological complexity and character fluidity, ends up depicting conflicts that are resolved within the prescribed twenty-four hours, during which time there is much struggle but little inner-growth,51 and as a result of which the character’s essence is confirmed rather than questioned. In spite of various genres and numerous subcategories, premodern literary discourse and the chronotopes subtending them have in common their lack of a sense of historicity and contingency, and it is beyond their ken 48 Bakhtin,“Epic and Novel,” 16, 34. 49 Bakhtin’s classification of literary genres according to their chronotopes ought not to be seen as a rigid categorizing scheme. Far from being mutually exclusive, various chronotopes tend, on the contrary, to coexist in varying ratios, depending on the historical period. What demarcates one genre from another is the predominance, and the not the exclusive domination, of one particular chronotope over others. The chronotope of the Künstlerroman, for example, which is closer to that of the Bildungsroman, nevertheless harbours vestigial chronotopal elements of the novel of ordeal. See his “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical topology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres, 16. For a different take on the historical implications of “adventure time,” see Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure. 50 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman,” 12. 51 See Dupré, Passages to Modernity, 242.

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to envision how unexpectedness might spur to the reflexive revision of horizons. When deviations from the norm do occur, these are either mishaps or exceptional events that merely serve to delay or complicate the normal course of things and that, in so doing, confirm and reinforce rather than reflexively change the self. Such a state of affairs is of course to be expected if we pause to consider the status of the individual within the dominant structure of premodern society. This overarching structure can be characterized as a rigid vertical hierarchy of nonporous social strata that entirely and unambiguously encompassed the individual, from vestmental codes and demeanour to spoken dialect and accent. Always already predetermined as he was by the external determinants of lineage and caste, which themselves were embodiments of an immutable cosmos, the premodern individual was not exactly subjected to reflexive revision in the face of unexpectedness. In stratified societies, the individual was placed in only one subsystem and, as a result, social status (condition, qualité, état) was actually the most stable characteristic of an individual’s personality, and the premodern individual’s sense of self posed few problems – premodern society was after all so stratified as to limit the possible combination of varied functional roles. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the individual as a thematized category, let alone as a problematic issue, did not even emerge until the late eighteenth century.52 It is only at this time that a divergent temporality could cause considerable remue ménage in the premodern order of things, sabotaging as it did the legitimacy of the past and other transtemporal courts of appeal. To complicate things further, the predominance of functional differentiation at the expense of stratification by the late eighteenth century prevented any single subsystem, let alone a caste, from delimiting an individual’s entire identity. Rather than remain confined to any single overarching subsystem, the modern sense of self consists of a plurality of intersecting and often conflicting functionally differentiated subsystems and social roles. Such developments raise two closely related problems. The first problem involves the unification and reconciliation of the disparate aspects of an individual’s life, such as those of family ties, social function, legal status, and a sense of past history and future expectation, into a coher-

52 For more on the late-eighteenth-century emergence of the individual as a thematized problem, see Luhmann, “The Individuality of the Individual.”

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ent and intelligible whole. This problem then begets a second one: how can the individual himself, as a whole, viably lend himself to integration within the some larger social whole? Since individuals in a functionally differentiated society are not confined to any single subsystem, the synthesis of a plurality of roles into coherent self-narratives becomes problematic – so problematic, in fact, that Moretti rightly suggests that this is what subtends the obsession with which, as if to compensate for the perceived threat of imminent self-dissolution, the earliest specifically modern literary genre – the Bildungsroman, to be discussed shortly – “attempts to build the ego, and make it the indisputable center of its own structure.”53 A centred subject, so reviled today as some insidious Cartesian, metaphysical, phallocratic, or bourgeois scheme, ought to be seen more as a symptom of functional differentiation, temporal divergence, and other late-eighteenth-century developments (not least of which would be the consolidation of capitalism), than as the unavowed desideratum of incorrigible logophiliacs or as descriptive of any actual or past state of affairs.54 But if the category of the individual becomes a thematized problem only by the late eighteenth century, this is not so much because of “increased individuality” as it is because of the increased difficulty of integrating the individual within larger social structures – something to be expected in a functionally differentiated society that, after all, offers no single overarching subsystem that might unproblematically encompass the individual. Such a problem increasingly informs not only the chronotopal structure of late-eighteenth-century literary genres but also mid- to lateeighteenth-century epistemological, pedagogical, and aesthetic concerns, where the initial successes of the Enlightenment’s encyclopedic ambitions were soon to give way, as early as Diderot’s 1755 “Encyclopédie” article, to growing reservations about the discrepancy between what can be achieved through theoretical insight into reality and what can be transmitted to the individual for orienting himself or herself in

53 Moretti, The Way of the World, 45. 54 In reference to his historical diagnosis of the late-eighteenth-century sense of self, which he describes as self-referential rather than as “centred,” and in his analysis of the various concepts that he calls a “stopgap measure” to palliate increased complexity, Luhmann notes that “it is no accident that the modern concept of the subject began its career at the historical moment when modern European society discovered that it could no longer describe itself in the old categories of a stratified society, its essential forms and essential hierarchy, but could not yet say what was the case instead” (Social Systems, xi).

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the world,55 and where the late-eighteenth-century concern with the antimony of taste and the communicability of aesthetic judgement can be seen as an attempt to integrate the particular within the universal (and in so doing, counter the solipsism of empiricism) by appealing not to some transcendental preestablished harmony but instead to the immanence of sensus communis.56 Another problem closely associated with this need for unification and integration is the need for complexity reduction. It is indeed upon an individual’s sense of self-unification in terms of a coherent life story that the capacity for managing an overabundance of possibilities hailing from an open future depends – except that such a unification refers to the reflexive sustaining of narrative sequentiality, and not to what some have dismissed as the arbitrary positing of some logophiliac, phallocentric, or albinocratic “centred subject” intent on manhandling hapless differences.57 This need for protecting and reconstructing narratives of self-identity by the late eighteenth century is not to be underestimated. No longer buffered by an exemplary past or contained by a timeless cosmos, the complexity unleashed by an open future does not augur well for a diachronically extended sense of self – it is indeed unlikely that a psychic system (as Luhmann would put it) or viable economies of selfidentity (to use Giddens’s term) would withstand a perpetually renewed overhauling of their entire constitution following each contingent encounter with unexpectedness. If, in contrast to the modern self, the premodern self could afford to remain static, it is because the reflexive narration of the self was not only an unlikely but also an unnecessary scenario: in a temporality where past present and future fail to pronouncedly diverge, there is little room for the unexpected and the new, the management of which, as we have seen, accounts for the need for reflexive self-narration to begin with. This is why the threat of self-dissolution in the face of increased tempo55 For more on how during the Enlightenment “the expansion of the horizon of known and understood reality could not be coordinated with the presence of what was already accessible within this horizon” and how this in turn created problems for individual social integration, see Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 236–40. 56 For more on this, see Ferry, Homo aestheticus, 40–7, 71–8. 57 “The problem of unification,” Giddens reminds us in his historical account of modern self-identity, “concerns protecting and reconstructing the narrative of self-identity in the face of massive intensional and extensional changes which modernity sets into being” (Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 189). Narrativist theories of the self, as advanced (for example) by Ricoeur and Kerby, are conceptually close to the work of Giddens and Taylor, but with this crucial difference: they do not historicize the narrative structure of self-identity.

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ral complexity was never really a problem before the late eighteenth century, as can be seen even in the worst case scenario, say, of the Pyrrhonian skepticism of the turbulent Hellenistic era: for all its attempts to reduce the subject to its disparate transient states by advocating restraint from assertoric judgment and self-abandonment to the immediacy of the given – a situation in which it seemed inevitable that selfidentity, as Blumenberg phrases it, should “threaten to dissolve into an atomism of moments, from which neither confirmation nor disappointment of the faith in the cosmos that no longer ventures to make itself explicit may be expected” – it turns out that Pyrrhonian skepticism could make such a situation theoretically viable, let alone practically livable, precisely because of its trust, however residual, in the temporal continuity of a timeless cosmos.58 Some two millennia later, Leibnitz could, in a similar vein, safely presuppose the connectedness of otherwise isolated monads by trustingly appealing to a timelessly harmonious order.59 But once the trust needed for reducing complexity can no longer be presupposed by such appeals and once the predictability of a closed future and a timeless order yields to unexpectedness and increased complexity, as was increasingly the case by the mid- to late eighteenth century, the prospects for maintaining a sense of self came under serious threat. Indeed, no system or economy of self-identity can maintain a difference between itself and its environment if it relates equally to all fluctuations and changes in its environment – such a situation would prove overwhelming and in fact would be symptomatic of depersonalization. Serious threats to psychic, let alone physical, survival can but arise if, say, when crossing a busy street, one were to expend as much thought on circulating traffic as on the possibility that the sun will not rise tomorrow, on the implications of a cigarette butt lying discarded on the pavement, or on the chirping of a bird in a distant tree. A sense of self can sustain itself only through a principle of selectivity, or filter, which differentiates in given situations what is relevant from what is not. And after the late eighteenth century, such a principle of selectivity, no longer buttressed by an exemplary past, has had to rely on new temporal priorities: instead of relying on the buffer of an exemplary past, it has been in terms of the filtering mechanism enabled by future-oriented narratives or projects that the

58 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 275. See also part 3, chapter 3, in toto. 59 For more on this latter issue, see Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 157–8.

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relevant has been delimited from the irrelevant.60 Whether for modernity as a whole, for individual institutions from hermeneutics to historiography, or for the individual sense of self, reflexively sustained narratives, that is, narratives that revise the past and present in light of future developments, have provided the future-oriented project in terms of which selections can be made from an overwhelming surplus of possibilities. With regard to the more specific issue of self-formation, such a shift in temporal priorities is registered in a series of historical changes noted by John B. Thompson, who, echoing the position of Giddens, shows how the self after the late eighteenth century increasingly becomes a project involving “a continuously modifiable set of priorities that determine the relevance, or otherwise, of experiences or potential experiences … We do not relate to all experiences or potential experiences equally, but rather orient ourselves towards these experiences in terms of the priorities that are part of the project of the self.”61 Such projects of the self delimit and filter future possibilities without altogether foreclosing them, and this precisely because, as a “modifiable set of priorities,” they can accommodate unexpectedness by reflexively submitting themselves to revision. In such a context, the unexpected is delimited by the individual’s biographical

60 Because it is a condition of possibility of dialectical experience and, more important, because it informs the Thompsonian insistence on experience that prompted this investigation to begin with, temporality has been at the centre of this study. But this does not imply that the modern increase in complexity and its corollary, the increasingly reflexive structure of modern self-identity, stem exclusively from the late-eighteenth-century advent of a divergent temporality. There are of course numerous other no less important variables involved in complexity reduction and self-formation that cannot be addressed here, such as the historical changes at work in the intersubjective relations of recognition (as addressed by Taylor and Honneth), as well as historical transformations in the production and dissemination of media products (as Elizabeth Eisenstein, Walter Ong, and others have suggested). With regard to the rise of the press, John B. Thompson has recently shown the extent to which the proliferation of media products at the turn of the eighteenth century played a large role in accentuating the reflexivity of the modern self: with the increased circulation of publications, “increasingly the self becomes organised as a reflexive project through which the individual incorporates mediated materials (among other things) into a coherent and continuously revised biographical narrative … The reflexive organisation of the self becomes increasingly important as a feature of social life – not because it did not exist previously (no doubt it did in some way and to some extent), but because the tremendous expansion of symbolic materials has opened up new possibilities for self-formation and placed new demands on the self in a way and on a scale that did not exist before” (The Media and Modernity, 211–12). 61 Thompson, The Media and Modernity, 229.

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narrative – the unexpected can indeed prove disappointing only in terms of what one has come to expect – yet at the same time the unexpected can so disrupt a horizon that it fosters the reflexive revision of prior orientations, practices, or assumptions. It is because of such late-eighteenthcentury developments that Giddens and others rightly remind us that “self-identity today is a reflexive achievement.”62 At stake in the narrative structure of the modern self, then, is not only the sequential emplotment of the disparate into narrative continuity or the mere coordination of a divergent temporality; at stake also is the reflexive turning back of this self upon itself so as to accommodate the unexpected within its economy. With the past and the given subject to revision, it is in terms of a reflexively revisable history of past operations, as well as in terms of prospective choices and future unexpectedness, that the relevance of events is delimited, a horizon circumscribed, complexity thus contained, and a sense of self maintained.63 But while the reflexivity of the modern self, like reflexivity in general, entails a return to the past, such an operation has little in common with Historia Magistra Vitae: rather than interpret the future in terms of the past, the modern self reinterprets the past in terms of the future. What is indeed “new about modern society,” Luhmann notes, is that “there has been a change in the temporal horizon that primarily controls present selections. Present selections are chiefly made with an eye no longer to the past but to future selections.”64 This increasingly reflexive structure of the self can be seen no more clearly than in that late-eighteenth-century literary chronotope that was the first to “introduce time into man,” to use Bakhtin’s expression, yet that has persisted to this day under various guises: the chronotope of 62 Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, 215. 63 For more on how “the reflexive construction of self-identity depends as much on preparing for the future as on interpreting the past,” see ibid., 84–6. 64 Luhmann, “World Time and System History,” 321–2. To this Luhmann adds: “The present is understood as the past of future, contingent presents; its choices are seen as preliminary choices in an area of future contingency, which strengthens chains of selections, brings the present together, no longer with the past, but with the future. That is why the future becomes explicit as the horizon for making selections” (ibid., 322). This historical development has not gone unnoticed by other theorists of modernity. But unlike Schütz and Lucke and, later, Giddens, Luhmann does not transpose Husserlian philosophy into sociological concerns through such categories as lifeworld or Lebenswelt, and he thus avoids the temptation, as Gumbrecht puts it, of “offering a metahistorical basis for the reconstruction of historically specific cases of sense constitution” (Making Sense of Life and Literature, 7).

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the late-eighteenth-century Bildungsroman.65 For the first time in literary discourse, the Bildungsroman registers the general modern dialectic of “identity and change, security and metamorphoses”66 – of continuity and discontinuity, in other words – that is at work in the conceptual history of experience particularly after the late eighteenth century. In fact, so radically inaugural of modern narrative modes was the Bildungsroman that it has occupied a privileged place in major philosophical and historical studies of the link between aesthetics, the novel, and modern forms of self-formation, from Hegelian aesthetics to Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and the work of Bakhtin, Auerbach, Goldman, Ian Watt, and Charles Taylor. But what is it exactly that distinguishes the Bildungsroman from earlier literary genres when it comes to registering or testifying to modern modes of self-formation? After all, the early- to mid-eighteenth-century biographical novel, along with other Bildungsroman “precursors” such as the novel of ordeal, undeniably construct central characters as a narrative sequence of events, if not as concrete individuals beset by an in-

65 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman,” 21. Referring to the modern narrative structure not only of literary genres but also of a sense of self, Taylor tells us that “typical forms of narrrativity include stories of linear development, progress stories in history, or stories of continuous gain through individual lives and across generations … Rather than see life in terms of predefined phases, making a whole whose shape is understood by unchanging tradition, we tell a story of growth towards often unprecedented ends” (Sources of the Self, 105– 6). “This mode of self-narration,” Taylor further notes, “where the story is drawn from the events in this double sense, as against traditional models, archetypes or prefigurations, is the quintessentially modern one, that fits the experience of the disengaged, particular self … This mode has been co-substantial with the modern novel from its beginnings in the eighteenth century until very recently. And it reaches one of its characteristic expressions in the Bildungsroman” (ibid., 289; my emphasis). It is hardly surprising, as Moretti has rightly pointed out, that the Bildungsroman should have been “the symbolic form that more than any other has portrayed and promoted modern socialization” (The Way of the World, 10) and that its chronotope should persist, however residually, to this day in most popular cultural forms, from Harlequin romances to Hollywood. 66 Moretti, The Way of the World, 9. It is important to add here that such a future-oriented temporality, which has as one of its consequences the fostering of a reflexively constructed sense of self, is not necessarily thematized in the Bildungsroman. As is the case with chronotopes in general, such a temporality informs the construction of the plot rather than lending itself to some direct portrayal. As Bakhtin cautiously adds, aware as he is of the dangers besetting “reflection theories” of literature, temporality in literary discourse is not so much something that is explicitly thematized as it is something that acquires “an essentially compositional and organizational significance” (“The Bildungsroman,” 26).

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creased differentiation between their interior essence and an external world that recalcitrantly foils their plans or itineraries – Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded of 1740 readily comes to mind here, as does also the more general epistemic shift of the mid-eighteenth century noted by Foucault in which the taxonomic ways of an immutable cosmic tableau yield to an increased dichotomy opposing reified surface to unfathomable depth. But regardless of the sense of interiority at work in the biographical novel’s protagonist, this literary genre portrays characters as an aggregate of fixed and ready-made features that are given from the very beginning and that remain nonnegotiable to the very end, however unexpected or adverse later events turn out to be. In the paradigmatic case of Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded – on the vanguard of the literary scene at the time – at hand is a heroine who is not so much changed as a result of as she is confirmed in spite of the external world obstacles against which her interior essence stumbles. Indeed, the subtitle to Richardson’s novel is, appropriately enough, Virtue Rewarded, and not Virtue Awarded – after all, Pamela’s nature or essence is steadfastly reaffirmed in spite of, and not developed as a result of, her various tribulations, and her virtue could thus not be awarded as a newly created variable but only rewarded in recognition of something that was always already within her to begin with. Unexpected events shape not the protagonist’s nature – they impinge only on the protagonist’s worldly destiny; at best, they bring to light the protagonist’s hidden but immutable essence. As a result, the protagonist is presented as a mere constant around which are clustered the peripheral and fickle variables of an external world, instead of being portrayed as a work in progress that might itself be subject to reflexive change in the face of future unexpectedness.67 All of this stands in stark contrast with the late-eighteenth-century novel, the Bildungsroman in particular, that was to follow a mere half century later and that began to present protagonists as developed or gebildet by virtue of, and not as confirmed in spite of, the obstacles crossing their paths. It is also at this point that a modern future-oriented temporality begins to manifest itself with force for the first time in literary

67 Bakhtin in fact goes so far as to state that for literary discourse before the lateeighteenth-century Bildungsroman, “the permanence and immobility of the hero are the prerequisite to novelistic movement.” See ibid., 19.

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discourse68 and that unexpectedness and the new begin to assume such importance as to impinge upon and reflexively change the constitution of characters. Such new developments are of course obvious, say, in the itineraries of such protagonists as Goethe’s Werther or Wilhelm Meister, which consist of peripatetic meanderings and unexpected bifurcations that impel the protagonists towards reflexive transformation. But Goethe’s work is not some isolated case that merely inaugurated a handful of new literary techniques – it is instead one of the earliest and more influential formulations of some of the general changes taking place in the temporal dynamics of self-formation. As the organization of society shifts by the late eighteenth century from premodern stratification to modern functional differentiation, premodern literary chronotopes yield to a specifically modern chronotope that presents the self as a work in progress to be reflexively reconstructed in the face of the new and where “changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance, and thus the entire plot of the novel is reinterpreted and reconstructed.”69 Even in the case of novels written specifically as a riposte to Goethe’s Bildungsroman, such as Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which is only peripherally linked to the Bildungsroman (it essentially tries to synthesize the Märchen with lyric poetry and the novel), the dynamic of self-formation remains the same: the protagonist’s symbolic voyage towards selfknowledge is a transition from a spontaneous but unconscious and thus limited harmony to a more complete self-conscious harmony through discord and trials; yet unlike the premodern Prüfungsroman or the early eighteenth-century biographical novel, trials reflexively transfigure the hero instead of merely bringing to light some inner hidden core – obstacles do not merely test the given, but on the contrary incite to selfrevision. Moreover, when Novalis tells us through Ofterdingen in the second chapter that the science of human history (Wissenschaft der menschlichen Geschichte) can be reached by two different paths – the first one being the path of experience (der Weg der Erfahrung), which is “painful 68 As Bakhtin puts it, because the hero in the Bildungsroman is “forced to become New” in the face of unexpected turns of events, “the organizing force field held by the future is therefore extremely great here” (ibid., 23). While it is true that Bakhtin suggests that the decidedly future-oriented temporality of novelistic discourse has sporadically surfaced throughout history – as he puts it,“the novel, from the very beginning, developed as a genre that has as its core a new way of conceptualizing time” (“Epic and Novel,” 38) – he also acknowledges that the consolidation of a future-oriented temporality takes place “with special force and clarity beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century” (ibid., 5). 69 Ibid., 21. My emphasis.

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and interminable, with countless detours,” and the second being the more immediate path of “inner contemplation (innern Betrachtung)”70 – by the end of the novel it becomes clear that the former is the precondition for, and not an alternative to, the latter: for all Novalis’s talk about unmediated intuition or inner contemplation, the very narrative structure of the novel actually mimics the unfolding of a Bildungsroman protagonist, perpetually revising itself and reflexively transforming itself in the face unexpected obstacles. It is encounters with the unexpected that enable reflexive revisions of earlier horizons and modes of perception, and these revisions in turn help hasten the advent of what Novalis considers to be higher modes of being – modes of being that will themselves likewise be eventually aufgehoben, although not in the Hegelian sense but rather in the manner of asymptotic (and thus endless) selfsurpassing, which Hegel was of course to later deride as “bad infinity.” The Bildungsroman may well be the first specifically literary genre to stage the modern self as both a future-oriented project and a retrospectively revisable narrative – a self, in other, words permeated by reflexivity and prone to undergoing experiences. Yet the Bildungsroman is merely one particular mise-en-scène of the late-eighteenth-century sundering of thought from being71 and of the temporalization of complexity that, among other things, led philosophical inquiry away from its focus on the rapport of the individual and the manifold to the universal and the One in favour of dealings with a reflexively forged subject. This we have seen earlier in the increased concern with reflexivity that was to culminate in such self-positing entities as Fichte’s “practically executed (vollzogen) and at the same time reflexively recapitulable (nachvollziehbar)” ego.72 The reflexive self staged by the Bildungsroman also remains but a particular instance of a more general shifting away from the classicist conflation of aesthetics, truth, and epistemology in favour of an autonomous aesthetic realm that, no longer ancillary to epistemological, cosmological, or ontological concerns, increasingly stresses, among other things, the link between the 70 Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 98. 71 While it is true that the seamless chain of being noted by Lovejoy seems at one point to have been eroded, say, by the late-medieval weakening of what Dupré calls the “link between the Creator and a predictable world order” (Passages to Modernity, 57), it is nevertheless only by the late eighteenth century, as Beiser has shown, that the “grand postulate of the correspondence between thought and being, which was as important for the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century as it was for metaphysical rationalism in the seventeenth century, was shattered” ( The Fate of Reason, 325). 72 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 159. Original emphasis.

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aesthetic and the subjective “quality of the experience evoked,” as Taylor puts it, and “the effect of the phenomena on us, in the reactions they awaken.”73 A common thread running through otherwise incompatible aesthetic theories in the eighteenth century is indeed the stress placed on the reflexive revision of the subject following aesthetic encounters or resulting from aesthetic activity – whether this be Du Bos’s conflation of aesthetic value with the intensity of the effects that a work of art produces in its contemplators, the reflexivity of Kantian judgments of taste occasioned by a subject’s incapacity to justify conceptually that which nevertheless has a claim to universality, or, more tellingly still, the subjective changes occasioned by disruptive confrontations with unexpected cognitive limitations in the face of the sublime.74 No longer a passive entity to be prodere after being delectare, or to to be goaded into contemplative repose before (or, conversely, to be ridden of terrestrial fetters in ecstatic union with) the One, the subject of aesthetic reception and production instead increasingly becomes identified with prospects for growth in selfunderstanding and self-determination as it encounters disruptive unexpectedness and the unforeseen. In mid- to late-eighteenth-century aesthetics in general no less than in the Bildungsroman in particular, the stress is placed on the manner by which the self is to reflexively submit to change as it undergoes experiences. As a retrospective reassessment of the past that accommodates the new while at the same time bridging an otherwise disjunctive temporality, reflexivity has not confined itself to the methodological issues of historiography or textual exegesis, to the self-legitimizing maneuvers of 73 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 299, 373 (my emphasis). So central does the role of an open-ended self become in aesthetics at this time that, as John Zammito observes, “not merely the object but even the representation of the object shifts far into the background,” and the object’s “form serves as the occasion, becomes at most a catalyst, for a complex subjective response” (The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 113). For more on the potential consequences of the late-eighteenth-century divorce between aesthetic experience and the aesthetic object, see Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters,” 63–85. 74 The category of the sublime has of course a long history predating the mid- to late eighteenth century, and it is Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus, and not Burke’s Enquiry or Kant’s third Critique, that was instrumental in propagating this term. Yet the sublime of classical aesthetics represented the extension of, and not a rupture with, the beauty of perfected nature or Being (as the foundation and origin of truth), and the sublime here refers to the harmony and form that ultimately triumph over initial discord. Only with Burke’s 1757 Enquiry does the sublime assume its modern meaning and dissociate itself from beauty in order to refer to that which confronts the subject with its own cognitive limitations and which, in so doing, does not leave the subject unchanged.

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emergent nation states, or to the epistemological hair-splitting of the philosophy of reflection; reflexivity no less permeates the very manner by which a modern sense of self is to be negotiated in the midst of a modern temporality, and it is in aesthetics and literary discourse that this is most clearly registered.75 Just as modernity as a whole can no longer borrow from models of a past epoch in order to orient itself but is instead reflexively cast back on itself, likewise the modern individual is no longer defined by extrinsic moral precepts but instead by means of the reflexive organization of the self. By the late eighteenth century, “the reflexivity of modernity,” as Giddens puts it, “extends into the core of the self.”76 Once the open future made the self rely more on how it confronts the unexpected than on how it turns to an essence, it is through reflexively maintained biographical narratives that the modern self musters a sense of unification. The reflexivity of the modern sense of self refers not to the epistemological antics of some self-positing 75 As theorists from Lukács, Bakhtin, Auerbach, and Goldman to Charles Taylor and Luc Ferry have shown, it is from aesthetic discourse that historical insights into the spatiotemporal structure of modern self-formation can best be gleaned. Less clear, however, are the reasons behind the usefulness of aesthetic discourse for such insights. One of the most common and persistent theses in this regard over the last seventy-five years has been the “subjectivation” thesis, which contends that aesthetics (as Ferry–who defends this thesis– puts it) is “the field, par excellence, in which can be observed, in their chemically pure state, the problems raised by the subjectivation of the world characteristic of modern times” (Homo aestheticus, 14). For those concerned with modernity and modern modes of selfformation, this “subjectivation” thesis has been particularly influential, not unlike the equally influential secularization thesis of modernity. Still, it may be that an increased focus on reflexivity in aesthetics can no more be attributed to what theorists from Cassirer to Gadamer have called the subjectivation of aesthetics than modern future-oriented temporality (as Blumenberg has shown) can be attributed to some secularization of eschatology. Although this issue cannot be settled here, suffice it to say that with the mid- to lateeighteenth-century unshackling of aesthetic concerns from their formerly ancillary status in philosophical inquiry, it is fitting that the novelty of a recently autonomized aesthetic terminology should prove more receptive to and better poised for articulating various novel modern phenomena (such as changed modes of self-formation) than could the more established and rigid terminology of other philosophical discourses. 76 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 32. Thompson likewise adds that “with the development of modern societies, the process of self-development becomes more reflexive and open-ended in the sense that individuals fall back increasingly on their own resources to construct a coherent identity for themselves.” Thompson warns us, however, against interpreting such developments as signs of an emergent “autonomous subject”: on the contrary, modern individuals came increasingly to depend “on a range of social institutions and systems which provide them with the means – both material and symbolic – for the construction of their life-projects” (The Media and Modernity, 206, 215).

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entity bent on self-knowledge77 – it instead refers to the manner by which a diachronically extended sense of self sustains itself in spite of environing temporal discontinuity. It refers, in short, to how the modern self negotiates its sense of identity across time.

experience and the nachträglichkeit o f tr a u m a A consequence of modern temporality for strategies of self-formation, then, has been the migration of a sense of self from a set of given attributes to a reflexively sustained project. And since the advent of modernity, one of the names given to this reflexive aspect of the self has been experience. It is indeed just this sort of reflexive maneuvering that informs the etymological and post-Hegelian conceptual history of experience, as well as the early-nineteenth-century literary use of Erlebnis before its eventual (mis)appropriation by Lebensphilosophie and other vitalist trends. In the case of the former, we have seen how it is in conjunction with the increasingly reflexive structure of the modern sense of self that the conceptual history of experience and Erfarhung registers a series of semantic shifts, migrating as it does from a concern with the relation between particular accident and universal instance to the problem of the self’s confrontation with the new, the unexpected, the incommensurable – the modern self’s confrontation, in other words, with what it can neither readily assimilate to nor peremptorily dismiss from its horizon. Likewise, in the case Erlebnis we have seen how the distinctiveness of this term stems not only from a rupturing of the continuity of the life flow, where nothing is truly experienced, but also from the durable traces or residues that such a rupture leaves behind as a result 77 Reflection cannot be related to the subject’s self-knowledge; it can at best be related to a sense of self. Although his argument need not be rehearsed here, Dieter Henrich has indeed shown that reflection presupposes the self-consciousness it seeks to explain and, as such, it can hardly serve as a viable account of self-consciousness. At best, reflection can “account for an explicit self-experience of the self, but it is unable to explain the self-knowledge of a knowing subjectivity” (“Fichte’s Original Insight,” 15–53). Critiques of reflection have of course come from many quarters, beginning with Fichte’s awareness of the inadequacy of self-reflection as an explanation for self-consciousness and continuing in the work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and others. Also to be heeded in this context is Osborne’s reading of Gadamer, which tells us that reflection ought to be seen not as an attribute of the subject but rather as one of its conditions of possibility: reflexivity is but the “structure of the relation into which the present must enter with the past in order for memory to be possible – an external condition of subjectivity, rather than its self-positing ground” (Osborne, The Politics of Time, 129).

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of not lending itself to seamless integration. By forcing an individual’s life course to accommodate something unexpectedly new, Erlebnis indeed effectively impinges upon and reflexively restructures this life course and, in the manner of Dilthey’s influential formulation of Erlebnis, “new experiences revise the way in which the past is understood and the future anticipated.”78 Insofar as issues other than those of empiricist methodology are concerned, a common denominator at hand in the conceptual history of experience, Erfahrung, and Erlebnis after the late eighteenth century has been the manner by which the unexpected and the new are to be reflexively integrated and thus managed within economies of self-formation. This development in the conceptual history of experience has persisted to this day, as can be seen in the subaltern appeal to experience since the 1970s, which, for all its apparent stress on material immediacy, in fact ends up wagering – as we have seen in the first two chapters – on experience as a dialectic of violated expectation and retrospective assimilation within reflexively forged subaltern counterhistories. Rather than suffer outright dismissal (as in premodernity) or, conversely, rather than overwhelm and undermine a diachronically extended sense of self (as in late modernity or postmodernity),79 the new and the unexpected lend themselves in modernity to reflexive integration within a self-narrative that submits to possible change while at the same time fostering a diachronically extended sense of identity. It is through such coordinating operations that the experiential process, like reflexivity, participates in the reduction of complexity. The unexpectedness of an open future indeed leads to experience only insofar as it elicits a second manoeuver that, by reflexively reconfiguring the past and the present, accommodates and thus contains the very future-oriented unexpectedness from which it springs. Experience fosters change through unexpectedness, while at the same time reducing such potential complexity through the reintegration of the unexpected within renewed but modified narratives of the self. Experience, then, is not simply a response to temporal discontinuity; it is also narrowly imbricated in problems of complexity reduction. This latter problem repeatedly surfaces in reflections on experience, however varied their terminology or philosophical affiliations. Hegel of course speaks of experience as a process through which Geist becomes 78 Warnke, Gadamer, 29. 79 If, that is, theorists from Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to Baudrillard are to be believed. This issue will be considered in the next chapter.

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other to itself, only in the end to suspend this otherness.80 From the standpoint of post-Gadamerian hermeneutics, we are told that “for the process of experience … the unsettling of the established attitude is endured in the course of a process aiming at reducing the strangeness of the new that arises.”81 In his variation on a Benjaminian theme, Agamben likewise notes that “experience … best affords us protection from surprises,” for “to experience something means divesting it of novelty, neutralizing its shock potential.”82 Similar conclusions have been drawn even from completely different philosophical repertoires: Oakeshott, who discusses experience in terms of coherence and unity rather than in terms of unexpectedness, surprise, or complexity reduction, for example tells us that “in experience we begin … with the negation of the presented unity wherever that is seen to be false or inadequate. The first step in experience is a denial of the confusion and lack of unity which it finds in its given world.”83 Such a link between experience and complexity reduction has also been addressed by the “stimulus barrier” theory of psychoanalysis, initially outlined in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle but which also informs Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, while also eliciting the interest of recent preoccupations with posttraumatic stress disorder.84 True, complexity reduction is not specific to post-eighteenth-century notions of experience. Well before the association of experience with problems of self-formation, the conceptual history of experience testifies in one way or another to issues of complexity reduction – generally as a step leading from the manifold to unity, from the particular to the universal, as a step, in other words, allowing for the contingency of the empirical to eventually exhibit the regularity of the universal or for the disparity of the singular to coalesce into the intelligibility of the concept. If the function of experience in modernity can be summarized, as it has been for example by James Miller, as a way of wresting coherence from chaos,85 no less can be said of experience in premodernity, where Albertus Magnus defines it as “acceptio universalis in singularibus con80 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 38–9. 81 Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung, 82. My emphasis. 82 Agamben, Infancy and History, 41. 83 Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, 30. 84 For a brief overview of this latter issue, see Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Benjamin’s historical take on this Freudian issue is of course to be found in his various writings on Baudelaire. For more on the recent preoccupation with experience, trauma, and temporality, see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. The problem of trauma and its relation to experience will be dealt with shortly. 85 See Jay’s analysis of Miller’s The Passion of Foucault, in “The Limits of LimitExperience,” 58–160.

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fusi et permixti.”86 We have also seen that the meaning of experience as used to this day was not inaugurated with the advent of modernity: for Aristotle and Bacon no less than for Hegel and Gadamer, experience is associated with the idea of unexpectedness and with that which, whether it potentially leads to the concept (so Aristotle tells us) or contributes to the unfolding of consciousness (as Hegel would have it) or to self-formation (à la E.P. Thompson), nevertheless remains initially disturbing because it has not yet been, or proves recalcitrant to being, subsumed within a given horizon or current modes of mediation. Yet it is only in modernity that reflexivity so permeates the structure of the self that the dialectical aspect of experience becomes a central problem for and aspect of self-formation rather than a stage to be endured on the way to some higher end or universal truth. Likewise, what is specific to the complexity reduction at work in experience by the late eighteenth century is less its role in uncovering timeless truths than it is its imbrication in issues of diachronic self-formation, in the operations of consciousness in relation to its changing environment, in the constitution of horizons of understanding in the face of new developments. It is in such a stress on the future, as well as its corollary, a reflexively revisable past, that the specificity of the modern experiential process lies. Perhaps the best way to consider in more detail the link between experience and complexity reduction is to turn to the Freudian “stimulus barrier” theory mentioned earlier. This theory sheds new light on this issue precisely because it reckons more with the failure than with the fulfilment of the experiential process – in fact, with its stress on Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, this theory would seem to belie the future-oriented temporality and reflexive dynamic of the experiential process. Freud formulates this problem less in terms of the reflexivity occasioned by a futureoriented temporality than in terms of the Reizschutz, or “protection against stimuli,” needed for preserving the self from the sensory and cognitive overload stemming from a threatening environment. His Beyond the Pleasure Principle goes so far as to claim that consciousness itself developed in order to preserve the “little fragment of living substance … suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies” that “would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli.”87 If for Freud trauma stems from a particularly intense unexpected event, such as accidents, and if for Benjamin, who combines 86 The receiving of the universal within confused and mixed particulars (my translation). Cited in Kambartel, “Erfahrung,” 610. 87 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 27.

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Freud with Simmel’s analysis of modernity, traumas or “shocks” are instead produced by the excessive stimulation of modern urban life, they both nevertheless consider trauma to be a failure to integrate and work through the unexpected. Trauma is blocked, so to speak, before it has the chance to integrate itself within and potentially wreak havoc on the horizon it assails. Such a blocking out of shocks by a protective psychic barrier may well help forestall potential overstimulation, and it may thus seem on the face of it to parallel the affinity between experience and complexity reduction; nonetheless, the experience of trauma ought not to be conflated with experience as such. Unlike the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of experience, which reflexively reworks a given horizon so as to accommodate disruptive unexpectedness, trauma remains stalled at the stage of unexpectedness – it cannot go beyond what can be called “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.”88 Because in trauma this breach is never bridged within a revised horizon and reestablished continuity and because in trauma, as Cathy Caruth phrases it in her recent work on the issue, “the outside has gone inside without any mediation,”89 trauma remains a foreign body within a psychic economy that can neither accommodate nor dismiss it – hence the obsessiveness with which trauma sporadically but insistently revisits, nachträglich, its victim. What is nachträglich about trauma is not that it has been experienced, but that it has failed to be experienced.90 88 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 89 Ibid., 59. 90 Benjamin’s position on this matter, however influential it has been in the humanities – particularly in literary criticism – will no longer detain us here, for it is beset by just those problems of historicity that this study hopes to counter. Indeed, for all his attempts to historicize the capacity for experience in modernity by combining Freud with Simmel, Benjamin nevertheless fails to historicize the psychic structure of the very self upon which is predicated his theory of experience. Andreas Huyssen has well summarized this problem: “In relying on the strength of consciousness to provide Reizschutz against a traumatic breakdown, protection against the stimuli, shocks, and accidents of street life in the city, Benjamin and Simmel implicitly assume a psychic instance in control, the conscious ego. What else is this consciousness but part of the armor of the fortified ego … which proves itself in fending off the shocks and assaults of city life on human perception” (Twilight Memories, 123). But as Huyssen reminds us, this Freudian id/ego/superego triadic structure of the self “is not given but contingent on historical change” (108–9) – the Freudian structure of the self is indeed no less exempt from historical change than is temporality or strategies of complexity reduction. This issue will be dealt with shortly. Suffice it to add here that Benjamin is of course not alone in failing to heed the historicity of Freud’s theories – such a tendency is quite common and persists to this day. For an early critique of this tendency, see Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 34–7, and of course the work of Norbert Elias from the late 1930s, such as The Civilizing Process.

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Unlike trauma, which is blocked before being worked through, or durchgearbeitet, as Freud would say, and which thus repeatedly returns to haunt its victim as an unresolved obsession, experience reduces complexity by reflexively integrating the unexpected into the very horizon it disrupts. This it achieves not by passively submitting to the external exigencies of ready-made biographical narratives but by reworking the unexpected within actively renewed or “rewritten” narratives. Because such renewed narratives are reflexively modified so as to accommodate the unexpected, while at the same time delimiting the horizon that can be unexpectedly ruptured to begin with, experience helps preserve the self from cognitive and sensory overload, while at the same time sustaining the self’s sense of diachronic continuity. It is in this sense that experience participates in the reduction of complexity. But the relation between experience, reflexively sustained narratives, and complexity reduction is not simply a matter of coordinating disparate brute sense data or punctual units, of meaning into the intelligibility of temporally extended narratives. It is often mistakenly assumed that experience comes in discrete units and that the task of philosophy is to explain how these units become linked into a unified chain. Yet to claim that “experience naturally goes over into narration,” Kerby rightly reminds us, “is very different than saying that narrative structures are imposed on experience.”91 Experience is not some prediscursive unit that need but be duly inserted within a narrative in order for things to be set aright, for the unexpected to be defused, for complexity to be contained, and (with diligence and a little luck) for some reality to be unveiled. After all, narrativity is not a vehicle for transmitting some pregiven reality; it is instead a principle of intelligibility, or what could be called a “constitutive and synthetic activity.”92 And in the case of the experiential process, this synthetic activity relates past, present, and future, not in order to recapture an actual or past state of affairs93 and still less in order to sequentialize empirical brute sense data into the conceptually intelligible, 91 Kerby, Narrative and the Self, 43. 92 Ibid., 92. 93 This holds for the narrative operations not only of the modern self but also of the various disciplines purporting to buttress a sense of both individual and collective selfidentity, as can be seen, for example, in forms of psychotherapy and historiography. With regard to psychoanalysis, Kerby tells us that “a narrative is aimed not at achieving a mirror image of one’s history, but at generating a plausible account of the details of that history and allowing one to have an understanding of oneself that facilitates the overcoming of psychic blockages and allows one to function satisfactorily in the present.” After all, “narrative truth is thus more a matter of facilitating understanding and integration than of generating strict historical verisimilitude” (Narrative and the Self, 89–92).

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but instead in order to delimit the horizon from which selections will be made and complexity reduced, as well as to establish the threshold where expectations can be violated or disappointed. The role of experience in narrative operations of complexity reduction, then, stems not from its passive submission to given narratives, but rather from its galvanizing into further narrative activity. If experience disrupts prior meaning, this negativity also harbours what Gadamer calls a “particularly productive meaning”:94 the negation of the given is not just left at that – it on the contrary incites to the active production of new meaning, to changed orientations and to reflexively revised narratives that take the unexpected into account. In this sense, experience can be said to be both the occasion for and the result of narrative emplotment. Indeed, because it is within the parameters of a future-oriented project or narrative that expectations are formulated and thus subject to eventual disappointment, experience itself is delimited by the very narratives it disrupts; at the same time, it is precisely as a result of disruption that narratives are formulated and reformulated to begin with. As one cultural anthropologist puts it, the relation of experience to its narration is a dialectical or dialogical one, for the performance of cultural expression “does not release a pre-existing meaning [of experience] that lies dormant in the text … Rather, the performance itself is constitutive.”95 Experience is not a prenarrated or prediscursive entity lying in wait for its judicious articulation; it is instead a fissure within given modes of mediation or narration that prods or goads towards renewed narration – it as much constitutes as it is constituted by narratives. Experience, then, prompts not to the narration of the new but to renewed narration, and it is coterminous with, not subsequent or prior to, its narrativisation. As such, it ought not to surprise that over the last three decades it is to experience that those strands of cultural and subaltern theory concerned with agency have consistently and persistently appealed. Indeed, we have seen in an earlier chapter that for all their overt claims about seeking an immediacy impervious to the hegemonic ways of dominant ideology, it is in fact on the disruptive aspect of experience, as well as on its potential for galvanizing the subaltern into devising counterhegemonic histories and narratives, that subaltern theorizing has actually wagered, even if à son insu.

94 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 359. 95 Bruner, “Experience and its Expressions,” 11.

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experience and the future-oriented reflexivity of bildung By encouraging the self to rely more on how it confronts the unexpected than on how it appeals to a timeless essence, the mid- to lateeighteenth-century opening of the future not only invited, but eventually required, a more pronounced role for experience in self-formation. It is indeed less through eschatological timelessness, an exemplary past, or the paratactic performances of oral culture than it is through experience, that is, through the incorporation of unexpectedness within a reflexively revisable narrative, that the modern sense of self reckons with complexity while at the same time maintaining a diachronically extended sense of its identity across the temporal manifold.96 Within the future-oriented temporality of modernity, narratives of the self are not told once and for all; they must, on the contrary, lend themselves to perpetual modification so as to accommodate new developments.97 If experience, then, is to be seen as the “fodder” or material out of which the modern self constructs its narratives, this must be understood not in the sense that experience provides the discrete units or building blocks out of which plots are constructed or, conversely, upon which plots are externally superimposed; this ought instead to be understood in the sense that experience furthers the synthetic activity of open-ended and reflexively revisable narratives. For all its reflexive maneuvering, experience is imbued with a dynamic more akin to the future-orientedness of Bildung than to the Nachträglichkeit of trauma. Experience increasingly refers after the late eighteenth century to a cumulative process of renewed self-narration in the face of the new and to the fodder out of which the modern self constructs itself as a future-oriented narrative. Indeed, we have already seen 96 It should be noted here that just as experience, as we saw in the second chapter, need not entail cataclysmic mutations but can instead refer to mere changed nuances in orientation, likewise do narratives not necessarily involve one’s entire life itinerary – they can instead merely refer to one’s usual way of dealing with particular situations. Such narratives need not (and indeed tend not) to be consciously told – they are instead implicitly present so as to assure “self-identity in difference,” as Kerby puts it, by “framing the flux of particular experiences by a broader story.” As Kerby further adds, “we often undergo experiences in narrative sequences quite automatically, without choice. These may not be the full-blown narratives of autobiography or stories, but they serve in the same way to generate an understanding, direction, and unity in our lives” (Narrative and the Self, 46–7). 97 For more on how biographical narratives of modern self-identity, as Giddens puts it, “must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self,” see Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 54.

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how the etymological and post-Hegelian conceptual history of experience evinces an affinity with notions of self-formation, of incremental growth, and of comparative enrichment, all of which tally with those other late-eighteenth-century semantic shifts that we earlier saw at work in such concepts as Bildung and ordeal. As the self shifts from a foreclosed static entity or from a teleologically ordained itinerary to an open-ended and future-oriented project, experience comes into play as a mechanism for reducing complexity while at the same time promoting a sense of future-oriented growth. Growth was of course not unknown in premodernity. But only in modernity does growth designate a truly future-oriented and transformative process, as opposed to, say, an Aristotlean notion of growth as the teleologically ordained actualization of the Form lying in germ in natural entities. When transposed into the dynamics of self-formation, such a premodern model of growth actually represents what Bakhtin suggestively calls an “inversion in a character’s development” in which youth is treated as a mere preliminary to maturity. In such an Aristotlean notion of growth, struggles, trials and disappointed expectations, rather than entail a revision of earlier horizons and lead to experience, instead merely serve to reinforce a character’s given qualities without allowing for the creation of something new.98 This, of course, starkly contrasts with the late eighteenth century, at which point the enlargement of the self, as opposed to self-confirmation, becomes the order of the day, and at which point, as Lowe observes, “contemporaries experienced life as a developmental escalator.”99 But if “enlargement,” or Erweiterung – another term often used at the time of Herder in conjunction with Bildung and Erfarhung100 – can be considered the single most appropriate term for designating how the modern self reflexively constructs and sustains itself in the face of an open future, the same can be said of modernity as a whole, where Erweiterung, along with Bildung, no less informs the history of ideas, from national literary historiography to literary discourse and aesthetics. In the aesthetic considerations of Schiller’s Stofftrieb can, for example, be seen what Lovejoy has best described as a “perpetual impulsion towards change, towards the enrichment of experience through innovation.”101 This was of course to reach paroxysmal proportions within certain cur98 99 100 101

See Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” 139–40. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 52. See Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger, 61. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 302, 306.

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rents of German Romanticism, where exhortations to the perpetual transcendence of the given and to endless expansion – to what Hegel derisively refers to as “bad infinity” – became commonplace no less in daily than in aesthetic and philosophical discourse. It also informs the narratives of nation formation, which from the early nineteenth century to this day have often summoned literary and cultural history as a testimony to the future-oriented unfolding of national identity102 – a model of growth that persists even in recent variants of cultural studies and subaltern historiography, which, although they may have expunged from their vocabulary such terms as Volk and Geist and although they may have replaced histories of national identity with the microhistories of subaltern groupuscules, nevertheless ape, ironically enough, the very historiographical practices of those nationalist narratives they set out to debunk.103 But although future-oriented growth has permeated modernity as a whole, from realms economic to concerns aesthetic, it is experience that has most frequently named that process, insofar as self-formation is at stake, whereby encounters with unexpectedness entail fortification and enrichment. It is just such an affinity between experience and Bildung that persists to this day, informing as it does those strains in cultural studies and subaltern historiography that wager on experience as a future-oriented process that consolidates subaltern specificity by reflexively reworking (and in so doing, allowing for the appropriation of) the past. With good reason Taylor tells us that there is “a deep continuity between us and the romantic era.”104 The experiential process, then, is closely entwined with both the future-oriented temporality of modernity and its consequence, a reflexive rapport with the past. By structurally encouraging the conflict between unexpectedness and expectation, between the given and the new, future-orientedness unleashed a complexity unballasted by the palliatives of tradition and the past. As a result, the self required that complexity 102 See, for example, chapter 4 of Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture. 103 In this regard, see Terri Cochran’s study “Culture in its Sociohistorical Dimension,” in which he shows how, in the manner of earlier national historiography, “the subaltern historian combs the past to identify moments of ‘autonomous initiative’ on the part of subaltern groups; one might almost say, to identify inklings of self-consciousness that according to the underlying understanding of history will later emerge in full force. Knowingly or unknowingly, much of so-called oppositional theory, history of the ‘people,’ or the empirical histories of daily life, dating from the last fifty years, share the basic assumptions of this theory of history” (141). 104 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 429.

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be managed in new ways, lest it lose a sense of difference between itself and its environment. This is where experience comes into play: the experiential process assists in maintaining a diachronically extended sense of self precisely because it reduces complexity through reflexively renewed narrative operations in the face of unexpectedness. Should modern future-oriented temporality submit to historical change, the role of experience in complexity reduction and self-formation will also be correspondingly altered. But while it is true that the role of reflexivity and experience in issues of self-formation is a historical matter, such a role can nevertheless be considered an anthropological category, much in the manner of the Koselleckian categories of Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation): just as these latter categories can be considered anthropological constants that historically vary only in terms of how they are coordinated with one another, likewise is reflexivity a constant (premodernity was hardly altogether bereft of reflexivity)105 that nevertheless historically varies in terms of the centrality attributed to it in the construction and sustaining of a sense of self. And one of the names given to such a historically contingent reflexive process has been experience.

105 While unexpectedness was not altogether absent from premodernity, it was nevertheless kept within manageable proportions. As we saw earlier, premodern society was dominated by what Luhmann calls a “normative” approach to the new whereby prior dispositions or orientations are maintained in spite of conflicting evidence, disappointments or unexpected turns of events – the given is after all divinely sanctioned and thus hardly subject to revision. From the lack of a premodern future-oriented temporality ought not to be inferred, then, the lack of unexpectedness, let alone the lack of a recourse to reflexivity so as to manage it. As Giddens put it, “Tradition offers time in a manner which restricts [and not which abolishes] the openness of counterfactual futures”(Modernity and Self-Identity, 48). By the late eighteenth century, however, the unexpected, or, as Giddens prefers to phrase it, “counter factual futures,” so besieged the modern self that reflexivity became not only a thematized problem but also an essential operation in sustaining selfidentity along a diachronic axis – a reflexive operation that increasingly came to be dubbed “experience.”

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Experience and the Temporal Logic of Late Modernity Une trop longue histoire et trop chargée produit des effets comparables à ceux d’une absence d’histoire. Autrefois, dans une société peu historique et presque sans histoire, rien ne finissait et rien ne commençait. Aujourd’hui, tout meurt à peine né et disparaît à peine surgi. Henri Lefèbvre, Introduction à la modernité

s wa l l o w i n g t h e p i l l o f h i s t o r i c i t y A confluence of sociohistorical vectors so impinged on processes of selfformation, then, that by the mid- to late eighteenth century the self increasingly becomes a narrative of events, or, to use Taylor’s expression, a “chain of happenings.” And these events, or happenings, insofar as they are reflexively reworked into a self’s horizon, are what experience is all about. But it is legitimate at this point to ask whether the continuity between the late eighteenth and the late twentieth century noted by Taylor still holds – whether, in other words, those late-eighteenth-century sociohistorical preconditions for an accentuated role of experience in the reflexive forging of the self are still with us today. After all, although experience began some two centuries ago to increasingly assume this role, such a role appeared self-evident at the time and hardly sparked widespread controversy or bitter recriminations. This starkly contrasts, however, with the Erfahrungshunger decades some two centuries later that have witnessed ardent manifestos and vitriolic polemics on the matter of experience – polemics so strident that something more ominous seems afoot than an obsession with semantic rectitude alone. Whence this insistence on experience since the 1970s? Is it a denial of the eroded role of experience in self-formation, just as current resurgent nationalisms are a reaction formation to the powerlessness of the nation state in the face of transnationalized capital? Or is this insistence, on the

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contrary, an index of the increased importance of experience in modern (or late modern or postmodern) self-identity? Does this insistence testify to the emergence of a new subject or does it instead portend the demise of the subject? Such are the questions raised by the Erfahrungshunger decades. These are hardly idle questions. At stake is the very condition of possibility of the modern sense of self, in which experience plays a vital role in complexity reduction. Suspicion has indeed been growing for some time about the extent to which the historical developments of modernity are adequate to the current sociohistorical situation. Whether they are to be seen as the result of the cultural contradictions or, conversely, of the cultural logic of late capitalism and whether they are regarded as the outcome of a modernity exacerbated into its purest form, or surmodernité, or, on the contrary, as the result of the salutary displacement of modernity by a new era or postmodernity, the considerable systemic socioeconomic transformations of the last twenty years, rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, have seen death certificates (or, at the very least, doctor’s notes attesting to serious health problems) lavishly meted out to modernist leitmotifs, from ideology and the state to the “centred” or “Cartesian” subject, to say nothing of the phallocentric ways of oedipally forged libidinal economies. As just such a modernist leitmotif, experience, then, may turn out to be an issue that goes beyond its suitability for counterhegemonic selfformation, for providing an enclave impervious to strong structural determination or even for providing a viable cultural, political, or aesthetic category. Experience may instead turn out to be a problem revolving around whether it is in fact still possible, whether, as Agamben once phrased it, contemporary man’s “incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the few self-certainties to which he can lay claim.”1 Such a line of questioning is not unwarranted. After all, if an accentuated role of experience in self-formation historically emerged, then likewise can such a role historically decline. What is needed at this point, then, is that not the pill of conceptual rectitude but the pill of historicity be swallowed. What must be addressed, in other words, is the historicity of those very concepts that for the last two centuries have designated the no less historical processes at work in forging and sustaining a modern sense of self.

1 Agamben, Infancy and History, 13.

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Yet at hand in much theorizing on experience in the Erfahrungshunger decades to this day has been precisely the propensity for hypostatizing as psychologically or anthropologically innate or as transhistorically given what is, on the contrary, socioculturally specific and historically contingent. In an era where until recently ahistorical neoformalist or textualist considerations have held considerable sway over the humanities, where neoliberal economics has naturalized into transhistorical laws the dictates of a hastily rehabilitated Adam Smith, and where the historical genesis of social inequality has been increasingly glossed over by neophrenological tendencies thinly disguised as research into the genetic determinism allegedly behind racial personality traits, it is of course hardly surprising that much cultural theorizing, as one observer puts it, should be “characterized by inadmissible metahistorical generalizations.”2 This failure to historicize the role of experience in self-formation may be understandable, say, for the identity politics of subaltern groupuscules, which, after all, are motivated by a sense of urgency and for which “strategic essentialism” à la Spivak can serve as an alibi until more immediate matters are tended to and pressing wrongs addressed. Such ahistorical maneuvering on the part of theoretical enterprises, however, whether it stems from mauvaise foi, as Jameson would maintain, or whether it is symptomatic of the times, as Huyssen would more charitably suggest, is a dubious strategy that informs the impasse against which such theorizing must inevitably stumble. Recent strains in cultural or subaltern inquiry indeed turn out to be but so many projects that, however commendable their intentions and however impeccable their political pedigrees, are doomed to failure if some of their central premises (of which the centrality of experience in self-formation is but one), far from being transhistorically given, are instead exposed to historical change and, like all things historical, are potentially susceptible to disappearance or, at the very least, to profound transformation. As such, the difficulties besetting the subaltern appeal to experience shift from a conceptual problem to a historical issue. The point here, however, is not to settle such a historical issue by either celebrating or lamenting the persistence or the erosion of experience as a constitutive process of modern self-formation; the point here is instead to shift the burden of proof. Rather than presume the continuing centrality of experience in matters of self-formation, those who would appeal to experience must instead first demonstrate the extent to which 2 Schulte-Sasse, “Theory of Modernism,” 103n64.

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the sociohistorical preconditions for such a role for experience still subsist today. And such a burden is, well, quite burdensome – to say the least. Indeed, one such condition of possibility – the future-oriented temporality of modernity – has since the 1970s become the centre of much speculation: if there has been one particular issue that has commanded minimal consensus in spite of divergent stances on other matters, it has been that modern future-oriented temporality is either dead or dying or at the very least undergoing a fundamental mutation. Because it was in tandem with the consolidation of such a temporality that experience assumed a more pronounced role in self-formation, any change in the former can but occasion changes in the latter and, as such, the current status of experience must first be at least tentatively diagnosed before appeals to experience can be made. It may not be the place here to establish whether experience continues to occupy a central role in issues of self-identity or whether the future-oriented temporality upon which it is predicated has been as functional over the last two decades as it has been over the last two centuries; nevertheless, it is legitimate to at least raise such questions and, in order to do so, to have as a working hypothesis that what may have held sway for the better part of modernity may no longer be prevalent today. The current status of future-oriented temporality certainly warrants such a working hypothesis. A wide spectrum of cultural and social theorists who agree on little else indeed share the view that the future has not been faring as well over the last two to three decades as it did over the last two centuries. Some tell us that the future has already arrived and that we can, at best, expect an infinite repetition of the given.3 Those of a more neoliberal temper, for whom the Invisible Hand of the Market is as eternal a law as that of gravity, tell us that History itself, after a few peripatetic delays, has come to an end or rather, to its end, its telos – the Market;4 others of Marxist persuasion tell us that the transition from diachronically extended Fordism to synchronically organized flexible accumulation has so compressed space and time that the capacity for sustained future-orientedness has disintegrated over the last two decades.5 Such an elimination of the future, or rather, of the propensity for 3 See, for example, Baudrillard, “The Year 2000 Has Already Happened.” 4 Such is the thrust, of course, of Francis Fukayama’s infamous thesis – a thesis all the more strangely influential that, as Wlad Godzich rightly puts it, “it is universally acknowledged that Fukayama’s interpretation of Hegel is rudimentary and does not go beyond a Reader’s Digest version of Alexandre Kojève’s standard reformulation of the problem” (foreword to Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, viii.) 5 Such is David Harvey’s position, expounded at length in The Condition of Postmodernity.

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future-orientedness, not only haunts the corridors of academia but also manifests itself in the recent proliferation of regressive, as opposed to future-oriented, political projects – regressive projects embodied not only by those fundamentalist, traditionalist, and nationalist movements that, with their tales of decline, would have us seek redemption in a return to pristine past origins but also by a general tendency that one observer has diagnosed as a temporal shift in utopian imagination from its futuristic pole towards memory and the past.6 In a similar vein, dominant judicial and political discourse is directed less towards the righting of present and future wrongs stemming, say, from a crushing third world debt (resulting from imf (International Monetary Fund)-imposed economic policy) – wrongs that amount to a form of neo-colonialism – than towards the symbolic righting of past wrongs under the Holocaust and under Pinochet. Even with regard to individual self-identity of the last few decades one can detect a shift in temporal priorities from the future to the past, as can be seen, for example, in what Huyssen calls the “obsessive self-musealisation per video recorder,”7 and as can be seen in an increased interest in genealogical roots. As one theorist sums it up in her survey of recent theories of time, “our contemporary approach to the future has shifted from colonisation to something resembling elimination.”8 Regardless of how or why modern future-oriented temporality has been manhandled as of late, the consensus nevertheless remains, as a piece of graffiti recently scrawled on a Berlin house wall puts it, that “the future is no longer what it used to be.”9

the assault by the present on t h e r e s t o f ti m e There is much disagreement about the genesis of what many consider to be the eclipse of or demise of modern future-oriented temporality – yet this will not be addressed here. Addressed instead will be a problem internal to the very dynamic of modern temporality – a problem that, when pushed to the limits of its own inexorable logic, paradoxically transforms the very future-orientedness from which it initially sprang into a futureless extended present that now undermines it: the problem

6 7 8 9

See Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 3–35. Ibid., 14. Adam, Time and Social Theory, 140. Nowotny, Time, 50.

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of unexpectedness and the new – precisely that temporal problem with which the conceptual history of experience is closely entwined. We have seen how the unexpectedness and the new of an open future have as their corollary the need for complexity reduction and that reflexivity, when seen as a historical phenomenon rather than as an epistemological issue, has been a response to just such a corollary. And just as the reflexivity of modernity, from historiography to the formation of nations, can be seen as a process that heeds the new while at the same time integrating it within reflexively revised past and present horizons, likewise does experience refer to the reflexive integration of the new within the supersedable past, provisional present, and indeterminate future of the modern self’s horizon. The status of the new has changed considerably over the last few decades, however. Indeed, if Daniel Bell could confidently claim, in an observation that has since become commonplace, that specific to modernity as a whole, and to modern art in particular, is a relentless orientation to the future, a “dominant impulse toward the new and original,” and a search for the disruption of present horizons and if he could still claim, only a few decades ago, that the period spanning the end of World War II and the 1970s was but the extension of the new from avant-garde aesthetic considerations and from a limited elite class to all facets of life and to increasing segments of the population,10 these observations can hardly be said to apply to the last three decades. In art and architecture not only is the new no longer the summum bonum of aesthetic endeavour, replaced as it has been by ironic pastiche and collages of citations, but likewise in popular cultural productions, from Harlequin romances to Hollywood blockbusters, does the impulse to innovation yield to the repetition of formulae and to citations of the past, as can be seen in the growing popularity of would-be historical films restaging Victorian novels and Shakespearian plays or nostalgic reprises of everything from comic super-heroes of the 1950s to television series characters of the 1970s, from the Hulk to Charlie’s Angels. Such a perplexing temporal shift continues to puzzle theorists of modernity.11 How, indeed, can we explain the paradox that novelty has in10 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 33. Bell is, of course, not alone in maintaining that the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, the Trente Glorieuses of Keynesianism, or what some call “welfare capitalism” or “Fordism,” represents the percolation to the population at large of what for the preceding two centuries had been confined to a small elite bourgeois class and certain declassés bohemians and artists. See, for example, Ehrenberg, L’individu incertain. 11 See, for example, Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 5–6, and Jusdanis’s recent The Necessary Nation.

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creasingly been associated with the past rather than with the future? For all its apparent association of novelty with the past, recent temporal change after all testifies not to the attenuation but to the exacerbation of the new and the unexpected. Characteristic of unexpectedness and the new since the 1970s has indeed been their exponential acceleration: over the last three post-Keynesian (or what some prefer to call postFordist, or neo- or ultraliberal) decades, the steady expansion of longterm investment and relative predictability and stability in employment of the Trente Glorieuses (thirty glorious years) following World War II have increasingly shifted to the instantaneous and volatile mobility of capital, an accelerated turnover rate in the production and consumption of material and cultural commodities, and an increasingly rapid obsolescence of skills, services, and goods in favour of unbridled innovation. Such unbridled innovation and temporal acceleration, however, have created a situation in which, paradoxically enough, the new is no longer new, the unexpected has become what is most expected, and the future has become passé. The future in such a temporality is not smothered, as in premodernity, but neither does it remain a dominant organizing temporal phenomenon, as in modernity. The result of such temporal acceleration is instead that the future exhausts itself, so to speak, and that “our fascination with the new is always already muted,” as Huyssen puts it in a Benjaminian spirit, “for we know that it tends to include its own vanishing, the foreknowledge of its obsolescence in its very moment of appearance. The time span of presence granted the new shrinks and moves toward the vanishing point.”12 Regardless of their ideological stance on other matters, regulation school economists, Marxists, postmodernists, and neoliberal apologists alike have noted that so overwhelming has become the new over the last three decades that “a present geared to accelerated innovation is beginning to devour the future,” as Helga Nowotny put it in her now influential diagnosis, and that “the future is disposed of as if it were the present, and an extended present is thereby produced.”13 If this devouring of the future has spawned not so much a return to the past as what can be called an extended present, it is because unbridled unexpectedness and innovation no less undermine the prospects of the future than they undermine the presence of the past. Without a 12 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 26. 13 Nowotny, Time, 11, 52–3. To Nowotny’s notion of “extended present,” Manuel Castells of course prefers the idea of “timeless time” – but the effects remain the same. See his Rise of Network Society.

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discrepancy between the future and the present – a discrepancy that we earlier saw has been behind a sense of historicity and the invention of tradition to begin with – there are few opportunities for perturbing the given, and as a result, the past can present itself only as an extension of, not as distinct from, the given. For all their apparent past-orientedness, current “returns” to the past and other mnemonic convulsions turn out to be but aestheticized enhancements of the present. Past events in an extended present at best constitute a mere repertoire of equally significant events from which can be gleaned citations and references according to present whim – past events become what Augé aptly calls an “inexhaustible stock of an unending history of the present.”14 Unlike the situation critiqued by the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Mediations, in which the archival excesses of the historiography and philology of his time so burdened the present with undifferentiated positivist data that they foreclosed the future and fostered passivity, what is at hand in the temporality of the last three decades is instead the dissipation of both the future and the past. Indeed, in a temporality deprived of a divergence between present and future and at the same time bereft of a past that differs from the immediate present, the future and the past can hardly be said to significantly extend beyond the exigencies of an ubiquitous present. There appears to be, to use Kluge’s famous phrase, an assault by the present on the rest of time. The effects of such an assault can best be gauged if we recall that at stake in modern future-oriented temporality, as we saw in an earlier chapter, is not merely a stress on certain temporal priorities; at stake is instead the very manner by which complexity is to be contained, the past, present, and future coordinated, and a diachronically extended sense of self maintained. Should future-orientedness succumb to the assault of the present, as many suggest it has, then there can but be a corresponding erosion of the very selective mechanisms or hierarchizing principles that allow for the selective retrieval (in the Gadamerian sense of applicatio) of the past in terms of both present concerns and future considerations. Far from being a source of meaning for intelligibly framing unexpectedness while at the same time submitting to potential reflexive reassessment, the past of the extended present instead becomes a senseless aggregate of undifferentiated brute data, all of which are equally retrievable, yet none of which are specifically selectable. Accelerated innovation must indeed reject the past before it is even past, and this not in order to reflexively rework it but instead to consign it to a 14 Augé, Non-Places, 104.

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growing archival record only tenuously related to present concerns. In an extended present, the past is neither unproblematically given, as in premodernity nor any longer to be reflexively reappropriated in terms of future-orientedness, as in the last two centuries. The temporality to be expected from an exacerbation of unexpectedness is one where the new, instead of eclipsing (or, conversely, being eclipsed by) the past, becomes so prevalent that both past- and future-orientedness end up collapsing into an extended present. Striking in all this is that while unexpectedness, innovation, and temporal acceleration have been the lot of modernity from the very beginning, it has only been in the last three decades that future-orientedness has been eroded instead of consolidated. For all the testimonies by contemporaries of late-eighteenth-century temporal change, which from the Frühromantiker to Burke have warned against the potential consequences of unbridled unexpectedness and accelerated change, futureorientedness was reinforced rather than weakened: Bildung and Erweiterung were the order of the day, forward-looking national histories were in the making even as traditions were being invented in order to buttress them, and future-oriented utopias continued to be imagined with abandon. Nor has such future-orientedness shown signs of subsiding over the following 175 years, supplemented as it has been by various visions of les lendemains qui chantent, from future colonial expansion to national grandeur and from a classless future society to the more recent implementation of Keynesian expectations of future-oriented growth as a general social project rather than as the prerogative of a privileged few or as the gamble of determined entrepreneurs. Even in the period of the Weimar Republic, which was possibly the most turbulent of periods to punctuate a generally turbulent modernity, we find that for all the impasses against which the republic stumbled, from the unfeasibility of its ambitious social-democratic aspirations in the face of the Great Depression to its eventual paralysis in the face of centrifugal factionalism – both of which helped create a vacuum promptly filled by the nsdap (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) – a predisposition to future-orientedness never entirely deserted the horizon of expectations. The prospects for qualitative change fueled the hopes of those attracted to both the kpd (Communist Party of Germany) and the nsdap, both of which, in contrast to the immobilism of the Weimar coalition, made a different future seem possible, and most certainly desirable. In fact, it was precisely the future-orientedness of the nsdap, with its grandiose claims to the millennial rule of a Third Reich, coupled with its corollary, the hearkening to a reworked mythical

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völkisch past, which made its siren’s call all the more seductive to the disconcerted new white-collar Mittelstand, or the Angestellten,15 to say nothing of the Lumpenproletariat and other declassés, whose future-oriented expectations of upward social mobility had been dashed by the stagnating effects of Weimar tergiversation and whose earlier nationalist narrative had been shattered by the Treaty of Versailles. Change, such as the increased innovations in automation that accelerated the obsolescence of many forms of skilled labour, while unwelcome in certain sectors, was nevertheless envisaged as desirable in the longer term, and it was the uncanny strength of the nsdap to have better tapped into the futureoriented utopian hopes of the disgruntled than had socialism – a strength that has been the one of the most perplexing of modern phenomena and that has since haunted theorists of modernity from the Frankfurt School and Ernst Bloch to Alexander Kluge and Eric Hobsbawm. Specific to the temporality of the last few decades, then, is not the sudden advent of temporal acceleration or overwhelming complexity as such – these are instead coterminous with modernity. Nor can the extended present be seen as the result of some sudden crisis – crises have always beset modern temporality. In fact, modern temporality, if not modernity as a whole, ought perhaps to be seen less as some stable entity occasionally disrupted by self-destructive crises than as a perpetual crisis occasionally saved from itself by periods of stability. What has been specific to these decades, however, has been the exacerbation of complexity and acceleration coupled with the erosion of the various palliatives that formerly kept them in check. Whereas in premodernity complexity was held at bay through the sway of the past over the present and future, and this to the point that earlier horizons were retained even in the face of unexpected counterfactual evidence and whereas in modernity – even in the extreme case of Weimar Germany – selectivity shifts instead to future-orientedness, the last few decades, on the other hand, have been gradually depleted of temporal strategies for complexity reduction. In an extended present, neither the past nor the future provide any longer the selective mechanisms needed for reducing complexity. 15 As Detlev J. K. Peukert reminds us, “white-collar workers, for all their apparent traditionalism, were largely a tabula rasa on which the effects of the process of modernization were being particularly vividly imprinted.” And if they joined the nsdap in droves in spite of their initial support for the republic and trade unionism, it is because “Modernity, a fictive status of non-proletarian superiority, aspirations to upward mobility and fears of the opposite – this combination of factors underlying white-collar attitudes made for a volatile mixture” (The Weimar Republic, 157–8).

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Recent returns to the past are not exactly the stuff of some resurgent premodern Historia Magistra Vitae, but neither do current attempts at future-orientedness contain complexity through the reflexive coordination of the new within a revisable past and provisional present. Instead, what we have over the last three decades is a modernity that has outrun its capacity for absorbing the harvest it has sown. As Luhmann notes, “by virtue of the restructuring of time which has occurred during the last 200 years, the present has become specialized in the function of temporal integration,” and what is characteristic of the present in the temporality of the last few decades is that “unfortunately, it does not have enough time to do its job.”16 Recent temporal changes, then, ought to be seen less as a radical break from all things modern or as some sudden loss of faith in metanarratives than as the inexorable unfolding of the very essence of modernity.17 By so wagering on the new and unexpected, the orientation to the future has turned upon itself, and at hand in temporal changes over the last few decades is the case of a modernity unable to save itself from its own consequences, of a modernity exacerbated beyond its infamous capacity for forestalling its demise, of a modernity, in short, that has run out of alibis.

th e c o n s e q u e n c e s o f a n e x t e n d e d p r e s e n t Since future-orientedness has for the last two centuries informed the operations of selectivity that help contain an otherwise overwhelming surplus of possibilities, it goes without saying that an erosion of futureorientedness can but occasion serious disturbances not only in temporality but also in the very organization of a sense of self, let alone in a sense of agency that might impinge upon and change the given. One of the more salient effects of the change in temporality over the last three decades, which has been noted by theorists and apologists of modernity and postmodernity alike, has been the paradoxical situation of late (or postor super-) modernity in which accelerated innovation is coupled with stagnation, unexpectedness becomes expected, and the proliferation of 16 Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin,” 283. For more on how change and unexpectedness have become so rapid that “the environment created by individuals and societies thus outruns the adaptive capacities of their creators and leads to a loss of temporal horizons,” see J.T. Fraser, “An Embarrassment of Proper Times,” 5. 17 See Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, for more on how we are entering a period “in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than ever before” (68).

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the new has as its corollary the omnipresence of the same. Because it both forecloses the past and foreshortens the future, the extended present precludes the possibility that anything distinct from itself might manifest itself otherwise than punctually. After all, without a past distinct from the present, no lasting traces are left behind that might testify to the occurrence of some unsettling encounter with unexpectedness; conversely, without future-orientedness, there can be no inclination to let the new perturb the given of current praxis to begin with. In such a temporal context, it is difficult to see how the experience to which so many appeals have been made over the last three decades can actually play the role expected of it in the reorienting of horizons, in fostering subaltern agency, or in effecting change. Change, if not the very possibility of envisioning change, cannot fare well in an extended present. Although the accelerated innovation and change of modernity has been exacerbated within such a temporality, the result has not been the reinforcement of the change characteristic of modernity. The latter, as exemplified by the dynamic of the avantgarde, indeed maintains a rapport with the past, if only to break with it and to transform and thus impinge upon – if not enrich – past and present conventions by proposing new modes of perception. With the extended present, however, the past is rejected before it has a chance to distinguish itself from the present, and the new is discarded before it has a chance to impinge upon the given. The result is that we end up not so much with change, future-oriented or otherwise, as with a quantitative extension of the given, as can be seen in various recent discourses, from the economic to the academic: the former tells us that we need but continue to unshackle the eternally given laws of the Market from current obstructions in order to allow for the given to yet further extend itself;18 the latter finds refuge in such categories as “excellence,” which 18 True, some have argued that the current neoliberal metanarrative of the Market seems future-oriented. As Jeffrey C. Alexander sums it up: “In response to economic developments, different groupings of contemporary intellectuals have reinflated the emancipatory narrative of the market, in which they emplot a new past (antimarket society) and a new present/future (market transition, full-blown capitalism) that makes liberation dependent upon privatization, contracts, monetary inequality and competition” (“Modern, Anti, Post and Neo,” 87). Nevertheless, current economic discourse is so bathed in an aura of inevitability and is advocated with such millennial fervour that it is akin more to eschatology than to the scientific discourse it presumptuously mimics. For more on the theological import of current economic discourse, consult any recent edition of the Le Monde Diplomatique, although of particular interest is Bourdieu’s “L’Essence du néolibéralisme,” 3.

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merely clamours for endless excelling for the sake of being yet more excellent and which can propose but a quantitative extension of the given – the purpose, origin, and nature of which it has yet to fathom or even address.19 Such a discourse likewise holds for the new postmodernist self advocated by certain academic trends according to which the self, decentred and presumably liberated as it is from the constraints of oedipally forged libidinal economies and from the incorrigibly totalitarian ways of logophilia, can find a sense of purpose in the purposeless “intensification of its possibilities,” as Honneth puts it in his diagnosis of postmodernist thought, whereby “human subjects … independent of all normative expectations and bonds … [can] creatively produce new selfimages all the time.”20 At hand in such instances – and there are many more – is a mere quantitative extension of the given, and this much in the manner of the Aufklärung, for which an immutable tableau, itself beyond tampering, demands mere self-perpetuation: the market is not to be altered, only further unleashed from luddite and protectionist fetters, and this in order to allow for yet further unfettering in the name of its timeless manifest destiny; the postmodernist self is not to change but merely to further its frenetic search for ever-renewed self-stylization, and this in the name of unhindered aesthetic self-invention, which has as its telos its own self-perpetuation; “excellence” is merely to promote further excellence in the name of nothing else but the fact itself of being yet more excellent. In an extended present, then, modern future-oriented notions of change, which are predicated on the reflexive revision of the given in the face of the new, shift to the stasis of quantitative accumulation and to the self-perpetuation of the given. Such a state of affairs is not exactly conducive to the consolidation of temporally extended histories, whether dominant or subaltern, or to the capacity for initiating change, or agency. And such a state affairs can but undermine the very raison d’être of the subaltern appeal to experience. 19 For a symptomatic reading of the recent faddish use of the term “excellence” in academia and elsewhere, see Readings,“The University without Culture?” As Readings notes, the general applicability of excellence “is in direct relation to its emptiness” – it is but a “purely internal unit of value, which effectively brackets all questions of reference and function” and thus serves as “the unit of currency within a closed field” (468, 472). It is of course difficult to see how such a category can justify itself otherwise than tautologically–as Hegel himself of course pointed out long ago with regard to the similar category of “perfection”(see his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 124–6). 20 Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, 224–5.

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True, certain bricolage theories of culture à la De Certeau have tried to impute to various daily practices the elements of agency and change and have duly castigated the Kulturindustrie model (often accusingly traced to the Frankfurt School and its alleged offspring) for its unduly apocalyptic, if not elitist, underestimation of the masses’ capacity for “resistance.”21 This is a misguided way of framing the question, however: indeed, if the capacity for envisioning and effecting change fares poorly in an extended present, this stems not from the hegemonic sway of the media as such, undeniably concentrated though the media may be within fewer and ever more monolithic transnational corporate hands; instead, it is at the level of temporality, and not ideology, that agency and change are eroded. As Luhmann rightly suggests in reference to the mass media, “it is not so much the supposed uniformity of opinions as it is the shrinkage of temporal horizons that restricts the range of possibilities available in other subsystems.”22 The primary culprit behind restricted frames of debate, narrowed horizons of possible signification, or prospects for change and agency is neither the mass media nor the hegemony of any given ideology as such; it is instead the very accelerated tempo with which are produced endless disparate images and units of information – a tempo that reduces the time at one’s disposal for reacting to them and that, in so doing, narrows the gap between past, present, and future that is required for processing the punctually disparate into temporally extended meaningfulness. After all, “when instantaneous reactions are required,” as Barbara Adam notes, “the difference between the present and the future is eliminated.”23

21 Such a position is of course best exemplified by John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture. While it is true that certain cultural theories may overestimate the sway of the media-apparatus over the capacity for critical thought, it is no less true that bricolage theories of culture tend on the other hand to underestimate this sway. The latter’s sanguine overestimation of the “subversive” import of certain daily cultural practices is no less misguided than is the former’s propensity for resigned hibernation in the face of a presumably monolithic and impregnable dominant discourse. It is indeed important not to forget, Nicholas Garham tells us, that “there is a left cultural romanticism, increasingly prevalent in media and cultural studies, that sees all forms of grassroots cultural expression as ‘resistance,’ although resistance to what is not at all clear.” It is perhaps because of the very vagueness of the term “resistance” that “the relative autonomy of the meaning-creating agent and the possibilities of cultural bricolage … are at present much exaggerated by media and cultural analysts” (“The Media and the Public Sphere,” 372–3). 22 Luhmann, “The Differentiation of Society,” 247–8. My emphasis. 23 Adam, Time and Social Theory, 140.

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Because it involves neither a strong rapport with the past, which disappears before materializing into anything, nor an accentuated orientation to the future, which has been foreclosed, the extended present restricts any significant temporal divergence from itself. Homogeneity and passivity are not the source but a symptom of the problem of a temporality accelerated into stasis. Such a stasis in turn encourages a fatalistic naturalization of the given in which, as Eduardo Galeano phrases it, “time projects the future as its own repetition, tomorrow is another today: the inequitable organization of the world, which humiliates the human condition, belongs to the eternal order, and injustice is a fatality which we must accept or … accept.”24 The extended present has consequences that are not only temporal. No less at stake is the very capacity for envisioning, let alone effecting, change. This latter problem brings us back full circle to the issues that began this entire inquiry: the subaltern appeal to experience as a means to buttressing counterhistories and counterhegemonic agency. Why indeed have the last three decades witnessed ardent subaltern appeals to experience just as experience no longer appears to be a sufficient guarantor of changed horizons, let alone of subaltern agency? How indeed does – or rather, how can – experience fulfill such expectations if the very future-oriented temporality with which it is entwined is itself dissolving? Once the past and future fail to significantly diverge from the present, not only does the unexpected become expected and the future passé, but the past is relegated to an archival record tenuously related to the present. The result is that unexpectedness, rather than lead to experience, instead remains at the state of the brute punctual shock bereft of lasting consequences. The unexpected indeed spurs to experience only insofar as it remains related to a past from which it demarcates itself and in terms of which it leads to a reflexively reworked given horizon of signification. But in an extended present, where the given is not subject to negotiation but instead constitutes the alpha and omega of all possible signification, the past fails to diverge from the present, the future is foreclosed, and as a result, the minimal temporal extension required for the experiential process is effectively sabotaged: anything potentially unsettling hardly leads to reflexive revision, let alone bequeath any testimony to such unsettling having ever taken place. Bereft as it is of the means for lending itself to a temporally extended thematization, incapable as it is of leaving traces within the modern self’s psychic economy, 24 Eduardo Galeano, “Mémoires et malmémoires,” 3.

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the horizon of which cannot even be unsettled, experience can no longer be said to be a process one undergoes. In an extended present, unexpectedness and the experience to which it gives rise are reduced to unprocessed brute stimuli that fail to arouse anything beyond a fleeting disturbance that is as quickly forgotten as it is produced. At this point, the capacity for undergoing experience, let alone any accentuated role of experience in self-formation, can no longer be presupposed. But why, then, does experience – disqualified as it has been from the mission expected of it – continue to this day to arouse such vitriolic debates when it comes to issues of agency and self-formation? Before such questions can be answered, we must first reconsider the problem that has informed the subaltern appeal to experience from the very beginning, namely, the appeal to and the appeal of immediacy as a means to fostering the counterhegemonic.

th e c u lt u r e o f i m m e d i acy Various recent cultural and sociological theories of course offer differing prognoses regarding the status of experience and its imbrication in cultural, aesthetic, and other social spheres. Nevertheless, one particular theme has overshadowed the others, namely, the tendency to favour the immediate and the regional over the temporally and spatially extended. Such a tendency has been particularly flagrant in the aesthetic sphere, where various programmatic theories of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Warenästhetik and minimalism, have contended that because of the tentacular penetration of commodification into all forms of social mediation, including the temporal extension of experience itself, resistance strategies have no choice but to “attain a maximum of immediate experience with a minimum of social mediation.”25 Redemption, so the argument runs, accordingly resides in the immediate, the punctual, or the instantaneous as opposed to the mediate and the temporally extended; and the utopian self proposed by minimalism is, appropriately enough, a dispersed, anti-Cartesian and nonbiographical subject that, Rosalind Krauss notes, “coheres, but only provisionally and moment by moment, in the act of perception.”26

25 Martin Lüdke, “Der Kreis, das Bewusstsein und das Ding,” 152. 26 Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 9.

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But whereas only a few decades ago such a punctually dispersed self represented but a utopian projection of various aesthetic and social theories of the 1960s and 1970s, it appears to have all too well materialized into reality since the 1980s – so much so, in fact, that this shrinking of the temporality of experience into punctual unintelligibility has been reckoned with since the 1980s by hermeneutic, Marxist, postmodernist, and cultural theory alike.27 Whether the reaction to such a state of affairs has been one of jubilation, vituperation, or hibernation, a consensus has nevertheless emerged regarding the extent to which the self of the last few decades, to use Jameson’s formulation of the issue within Husserlian terminology but in a Benjaminian spirit, is one that “has lost its capacity to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience.”28 Jameson’s formulation of the late-modern or late-capitalist status of the self and experience helps shed light on the temporal implications of the extended present: just as the extended present allows only for minimal divergence between itself and both the past and the future, likewise does the late-modern self appear increasingly unable to extract itself from a narrow band of time – it is as if the late-modern self were trapped within instantaneity or an ubiquity of the immediate. The convergence of past and future into an extended present indeed restricts the time at one’s disposal for tending to exigencies other than those immediately at hand. But far from being an eschatologically eternal present or an overabundance of time, the extended present is instead the result of so accelerated a rate of turnover and so exacerbated a tempo in innovation that the very ability to allocate resources beyond the short term and the immediate has been undermined. The extended present is in other words not some eschatological absence of extended temporal horizons – it is instead a narrowing of temporal horizons unto the punctuality of

27 See, for example, Vattimo, The Transparent Society, and Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 3, part 2, chap. 7, for the hermeneutic camp; Jameson, Postmodernism and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, for the Marxist camp; and Lübbe, Zeit-verhältnisse, for the somewhat conservative camp. 28 Jameson, Postmodernism, 25. For more on how the “disjointed and discontinuous mode of experience,” as Douglas Kellner puts it, has become “a fundamental characteristic of postmodern culture” and for an overview of theories dealing with this issue, see Kellner “Popular Culture.”

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the immediate. By so contracting its temporal horizon, the extended present has fostered what could be called a culture of immediacy.29 If the late-modern self seems at pains to diachronically extend itself beyond the immediate and if the unexpected begets not the temporal extension of the experiential process but instead the punctual intensity of the shock, this stems from the erosion of the future-orientedness that, for the better part of the last two centuries, has allowed for the unexpected to conflict with the given and for experience to come about and that has provided the means for complexity reduction, without which a modern temporally extended sense of self cannot be sustained. Once the future fails to sufficiently diverge from an increasingly extended present and once future-oriented narratives thus no longer allow for the new to be worked into a reflexively revisable past, time can but present itself as an aggregate of unsequential and inconsequential instants bereft of temporal duration, as “a series of discrete moments,” as Giddens puts it, “each of which severs prior experiences from subsequent ones in such a way that no continuous ‘narrative’ can be sustained.”30 This evacuation of the future, then, has very real consequences that resonate beyond the theoretical inquiry of academia. This can be seen no more clearly than in the shift over the last few decades from temporally extended Fordism to the instantaneity of flexible accumulation, from the long-term projection of Keynesianism to the short-term returns of economic ultraliberalism. The culture of immediacy stemming from an extended present tallies with such a socioeconomic shift – a shift during which the need for short-term planning, instantaneous adaptability to market fluctuations, and the cultivation of short-term economic gains has gradually fostered, both within and beyond a strictly economic realm, what can be described as “the loss of a sense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discounted into the

29 I borrow this term from Michel Freitag’s notion of culture de l’immédiateté. For more on how, in such a culture of immediacy, “life loses all references to its own past and any orientation to the future,” see his Le Naufrage de l’université, 156. For more on what he calls the “tyranny of immediacy,” see also Bindé, “L’Avenir du temps,” 28–9. 30 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 53. Such a diagnosis is not new. Bakhtin also noted some seventy years ago, although as a working hypothesis at the time rather than as a description of any state of affairs, that without an orientation to the future, “my own givenness loses its yet to be unity for me, and disintegrates into factually existent, senseless fragments of being” (Art and Answerability, 126).

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present.”31 It is no coincidence that the Erfahrungshunger decades of the 1970s should to this day have witnessed what Negt, Kluge, and Lothar Hack call a “new immediacy” whereby “the postponement of drives in the interest of long term success is no longer unproblematically accepted.”32 The erosion of future-orientedness indeed affects the economic concerns and material well-being of increasing segments of the general population – and no longer just of unskilled labour – as can be seen in the substitution of precarious Mc-jobs and sporadic contractual work for lifelong careers, or at least stable, predictable, and futureoriented employment.33 By fostering precariousness, this increasingly generalized phenomenon has disabled all but short-term goals and has cultivated a distrust not so much in Lyotardian metanarratives – the neoliberal narrative about emancipated markets continues to fare remarkably well in spite of the occasional anti-wto (World Trade Organization) jacquerie – as in the future itself. Such an erosion of futureorientedness is at work even in the realm of high finance, where the virulent resistance to a Tobin tax on capital flux (which would stabilize markets and stimulate domestic demand through the equitable redistribution of wealth) stems less from the interests of those concerned – these would indeed better be served in the long run by the substitution of increased domestic demand for the flagging external demand of now deflated “Asian Dragons” – than it testifies to the incapacity apparently inherent in late capitalism (to use Jameson’s Mandelian expression)34 to envision the sacrifice of immediate short-term gains in the name of long-term benefits to be reaped from temporally extended socioeconomic policy. Unlike fixed capital, the increased importance of which (as we saw earlier) correlated with the late-eighteenth-century rise to political and economic prominence of a bourgeois class with a strong predisposition towards the future, the speculative capital of neoliberal laissez-faire, like its earlier homologue, merchant capital, is instead predicated on immediate returns and not on long-term, diachronically

31 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 291. 32 Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 199, 156. 33 A rigorous sociohistorical analysis of the current status and future prospects of work can be found in Aronowitz and Difazio, The Jobless Future. 34 Much of Jameson’s work on late capitalism is buttressed by the solid historical and economic work of Ernst Mandel, in particular his Late Capitalism.

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extended or future-oriented development.35 Moreover, as predictable long-term wage-based employment shifts, as it has been exponentially doing since the 1970s, to precarious contractual work or disposable part-time labour, the exigencies of immediate economic survival literally absorb the time of increasing sectors of the general population, thereby compromising the ability to allocate resources beyond the short term and the immediate and, in so doing, ultimately wreaking havoc on an extended sense of self – a situation recently diagnosed by Richard Sennett as a “corrosion of character.”36 In such a state of affairs it is difficult to conceive how self-formation could have room or time – let alone use – for the temporal extension required for the undergoing of experience. It is this shrinking of temporal horizons and not, as some have argued, a general loss of faith in the sequentiality provided by various metanarratives, that informs the problematisation of the late-modern self. At hand in the extended present of late- or post-modernity is not the sudden loss of the capacity for narration – neonationalist, neoliberal, neoethnic, and techno-utopian metanarratives of progress or emancipation, although they may lack the decidedly future-oriented gaze of their modern predecessors and although they have been rightly denounced and renounced by academics, have rarely fared better over the last two decades within both popular imagination and dominant political discourse, as but a cursory glance over recent turns of events makes all too clear. But as we saw in preceding sections, current narratives tend to be but an extension of the present, or a spurious return to the past, rather than future-oriented. Any loss of faith in metanarratives – which is itself of course debatable – is a symptom or effect of, or perhaps a reaction to, but certainly not the cause of, an extended present. When speaking of late- or post-modernity, it is important to keep in mind that modernity did not “invent” narrativité – narrative operations can be said to be always already at work even in the most minimal of cognitive acts. As we saw earlier in the parenthetical caveat of the third 35 While in the short term, stocks may rise following a shift from a permanent workforce with purchasing power to ill-paid temps or to cheap third-world labour with little or no disposable income, the long-term effect is a drop in general purchasing power and thus in demand, which in turn translates into overproduction and thus the eventual bursting of over-inflated speculative bubbles. It is indeed with good reason that Habermas, Nowotny, Harvey, and others see a correlation between the erosion of future-orientedness and the rise over the last three decades of neoliberal socioeconomic policy. See especially Habermas, “The Crisis of the Welfare State.” 36 See Sennett, The Corrosion of Character.

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chapter, and as North American pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey and Mead pointed out early on, and as phenomenologists were later to do and, later still, systems theorists, the narration into continuity of the temporally disparate is not a problem as far as the immediate environment is concerned – and this for the simple reason that each “present” is present precisely because, and not in spite, of the manner by which it always already carries with it the immediate past (retention) and future (protention). As has been repeatedly pointed out – and one need not be initiated into the now unfashionable ways of phenomenology or hermeneutics in order to agree with this – the presence of the present has as its condition of possibility or (as current parlance puts it) is “possible as an effect,” only by virtue of those very temporal elements (in Husserlian terms, the retention of the just past and the protention of the about to be) from which the present or the “now” distinguishes itself. So although temporality has undergone various significant changes throughout history, this protention-retention dynamic, which many consider to be a narrative operation, has always been around. It is not the fact itself of narration that is subject to historical change, nor is it the capacity for retaining the immediate past and the short-term future so as to work them into coherence – the ability in other words to construct a horizon out of one’s immediate environment; what does historically change, however, is the extent to which narrative operations can venture beyond the immediate horizon of minimal cognitive acts in order instead to encompass the distant past and future. The current problem of temporality is not so much one of narration or temporal discontinuity as it is one of overburdening time to the point of constricting temporal horizons to the immediacy of an extended present. In a temporality that is neither past nor future-oriented, time stagnates within an extended present – time has not so much become discontinuous as it has come to a halt. If, then, the extended present compromises the very possibility of envisioning how a long-term future might differ from what is currently at hand and if it likewise compromises the capacity for registering change meaningfully and lastingly, then serious misgivings can but be entertained about the possible role today for experience in self-formation. Furthermore, because the appeal to immediate experience has been beset by both theoretical and political ambiguity, the question can but be raised as to why currents in subaltern theory so vehemently appeal to experience in the first place. Could the Erfahrungshunger appeal to experience turn out to be less a categorical imperative than the expression of a desire? Could the insistence on experience stem less from its presumed

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centrality in self-formation than from what seems to be its imminent demise – and this much in the manner that religious fanaticism reached its apogee in the early to mid-seventeenth century, culminating in the devastating Thirty Years War, precisely at the time when the divine transcendental anchoring of reality was losing its moorings?37 It would seem that, in the manner of the queen in Hamlet’s play within a play, the subaltern insistence on experience of the Erfahrungshunger decades “protesteth too much.” If it is true, as Walter Benjamin once put it, that the essence of a phenomenon truthfully appears – as if in protest – only when it is threatened with extinction, then it may very well be in its excessive protesting that the insistence on experience most readily lends its unavowed motivations to diagnosis. It is to just such a reading of the subaltern insistence on experience that we now turn.

37 Religious fanaticism has of course always punctuated the European landscape, in one form or another, since the fall of Rome. But whereas until the High Middle Ages it tended to be directed against either external enemies (the Crusades) or domestic minorities (the campaigns against heretical sects such as the Waldensians and Albigeois) and whereas both political stability and economic benefits were to be reaped by the ruling elite as a result of such adventuring (the self-destructive rivalry of competing noble families were indeed channelled towards plundering a common external enemy or a designated internal minority), by the mid–sixteenth through the mid–seventeenth century, in contrast, religious quarrelling led to domestic economic devastation, whether in the German Länder, which bore the brunt of the Thirty Years War, or in France, which with its revocation of the Édit de Nantes, condemned itself to ruinous economic backwardness well into the nineteenth century by depriving itself of the burgeoning French bourgeois class – the Huguenots. The point here is that religious fanaticism reached its peak, and this to the point of self-destructiveness, just as the divinely sanctioned legitimation of the given order of things was no longer unproblematic, increasingly supplanted as it was by other, more secular considerations.

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6

Reassessing Experience Der Mann, dem die Erfahrung abhanden kommt, fühlt sich aus dem Kalender herausgesetzt. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen Jede Nähe macht schwierig, und ist sie allzu grob, dann blind, mindestens stumm. Ernst Bloch, “Über Gegenwart in der Dichtung”

th e a p p e a l to a n d t h e a p p e a l o f i m m e d i acy At hand in the temporality of the last two to three decades is not, as Ricoeur would have it, the exacerbation of temporal divergence beyond the mediating capacities of narratives;1 at hand instead is the contraction of temporality within the narrow horizons of an extended present where a culture of immediacy, not temporal extension, becomes the order of the day. It is just this apparent culture of immediacy that brings us back to our initial problem – the Thompson-inspired subaltern appeal to immediate experience. We have seen in the first chapter that because Thompson-inspired cultural, feminist, and subaltern theory regards temporally extended meaning as easy prey for dominant ideology or metanarratives, such theory has frequently argued that immediate experience can momentarily suspend both temporal and discursive operations, while in a second maneuver it can allow these operations to resume their course – only this time in terms of the counterhistories enabled by the building blocks of uncontaminated subaltern experience. We have also seen how it is this dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, and not some quest for the unmediated and prediscursive, that informs the appeal to (if not the 1 For more on Ricoeur’s stance, see his Temps et Récit, 3, 300–13.

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appeal of) experience in such theorizing. By capitalizing on disruptive unexpectedness, the experience to which such theories appeal does not stray far from the etymological and post-Hegelian conceptual history of experience, as well as from the manner by which experience, as Heidegger phrased it, has “been generally understood.” Such subaltern theorizing, however, paints itself into an epistemological corner and partakes of the culture of immediacy when it conflates the disruptiveness of experience with its perceived immediacy. When carried out to its logical conclusion, such a conflation ends up fetishizing the supposed immediacy of the spatial and the material (such as that of the body), as if such material immediacy were the last possible enclave of resistance to the temporally extended ways of dominant metanarratives and as if it were the only legitimate ground from which counterhistories might be erected or counterhegemonic action mustered. Now what is puzzling in all this is that subaltern theorizing should so insist on immediacy just as a culture of immediacy already seems all too ubiquitous and that immediacy should be expected to buttress the temporal extension of counterhegemonic micronarratives in the first place. More puzzling still is that the very concept of experience, beset as it has been by ambiguous political ramifications, should be so vehemently insisted upon by theories professing to be politically minded and that the role of experience in self-formation, subject as it is to the vicissitudes of historical change, should be paraded as the panacea for all subaltern ailments regardless of sociohistorical context. Because the temporal extension and mediation presupposed by experience can no longer be taken as given and seem instead to have shifted over the last few decades to a culture of immediacy, it is legitimate at this point to ask the following question: is it not possible that the subaltern appeal to immediate experience, instead of representing a laudable attempt to foil dominant discursive mediation and instead of proposing immediate experience as the material out of which is to be inductively constructed temporally extended counterhistory, in fact symptomatically represents an eroded capacity for sustaining mediation and temporal extension tout court? But before we can answer this question, we must first consider yet another one: what is it that distinguishes the subaltern appeal to immediacy from similar theoretical enterprises? The hope that immediacy somehow holds the promise of the ideologically irreducible, after all, no less subtends other currents in theory of the Erfahrungshunger decades – currents that, by sharing a common concern for immediacy in spite of

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their otherwise incompatible tenets, suggest that the subaltern wager on immediate experience is not just the result of some Anglo-American empiricist heritage traceable to Locke. The appeal to immediacy seems instead to involve a more encompassing problem to which even recent currents in German aesthetics, for all their notorious disdain, since Hegel, for anything smacking of premature immediacy, themselves also testify. The Warenästhetik of the 1970s, for example, maintains that since temporal mediation itself harbours the potential for reification and commodification, resistance ought to be sought in the immediate and the punctual2 – a sentiment later echoed in Karl Heinz Bohrer’s attempt of the 1980s to reinstate the counterhegemonic potential of aesthetic experience with the category of “suddenness” (Plötzlichkeit), which he describes as “a discontinuity in the consciousness of time.”3 Minimalism has likewise advocated a dissolute and decentred subject whose disparate punctual experiences, by the fact of their immediacy, can resist the coercive temporal sequentiality of social mediation,4 and of course for many of those who could be loosely referred to as poststructuralist, duration and temporal extension are but coercive operations bent on manhandling the singular and muffling heterogeneities, as can be seen from Lyotard’s neo-Nietzschean defense of ephemeral “libidinal intensities” to Deleuze and Guattari’s later celebration of “the schizophrenic fragmentation of experience and loss of identity … as a liberation from the self forged by the Oedipus complex.”5 But although subaltern experience-oriented theories and certain currents in aesthetics and French philosophy all wager on immediacy, subaltern cultural theory of the Thompsonian vein stands out on one crucial point: immediacy is not proposed as a new summum bonum that would allow for an anti-oedipal self to punctually escape commodification or as a novum organum that would foster what some, in reference to the more extreme of poststructuralist excesses, have called “the ontologisation of irreducible plurality.”6 Immediacy is proposed instead as but

2 For a concise survey of the debates in German aesthetics since 1965, see Hohendahl, “The Politicization of Aesthetic Theory: The Debate in Aesthetics since 1965,” in Reappraisals, 156–97. 3 Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit, 43. 4 For more on the subjectivity advocated by minimalism, see Krauss, “Cultural Logic” 8–17. 5 Dews, “Critique of Identity,” 4. 6 Ibid., 7.

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a moment (whether “strategic”or not) to which must be appended the retrospective devising of counterhistories – histories without which an agent of political change cannot emerge and without which subaltern specificity cannot yield a sense of identity. John Berger, Thompson, and others, to whom much of subaltern theory is in debt, tirelessly stress that “a people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history”7 and that “if we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences.”8 The immediacy advocated by certain strains of cultural, North American feminist, and subaltern theory is not meant to supplant or evade temporal extension as such, and even less does it propose a new postmodern self dispersed within punctual immediacy; it wagers instead on immediate experience in the hope that such a disruption of dominant historiography and ideology might assist in the forging and consolidation of subaltern counterhistories. Since such subaltern experience-oriented theories are after all concerned with problems of agency, it is to be expected that they should have little sympathy for the temporally dispersed self proposed by some as a subversive alternative to temporally extended phallocracy or logophilia. A self so dispersed, however deferential it might be to the heterogeneity of the irreducibly particular, is not exactly amenable to even the semblance of concerted political action – indeed, “such an agent, in some of its versions at least,” as Terry Eagleton wryly puts it, “would hardly seem self-collected enough to topple a bottle off a wall, let alone bring down the state.”9 However subversive it claims to be and whatever it exactly is that it claims to subvert, the logophobic fetishization of discontinuity and dispersal has little in common with the sort of selfformation that subaltern appeals to experience hope to foster. Such appeals to experience indeed seek to reinforce, and not dissipate, the temporal continuity required for forging counterhistories. But at hand in the subaltern appeal to experience is not just the proclivity of a certain school of thought for the temporal extension needed for praxis and agency. By the fact of their popularization and prevalence in mainstream discourse, let alone their concrete embodiment by new

7 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 33. 8 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 11. 9 Eagleton, foreword to Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, ix.

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social movements, such experience-oriented theories also testify to a generalized social demand for the sustaining, not the “subverting,” of temporal extension. It is indeed significant that while theories of experience of the Erfahrungshunger decades have all been concerned with immediacy and temporality in one form or another, it has not been the celebration of immediacy for its own sake that has caught or driven the popular imagination: the frisson of libidinal intensities, the titillation of anti-oedipal schizophrenic depersonalization and plötzlich aesthetic experiences have aroused the euphoric enthusiasm of only a very few – an academic and artistic few, at that – and have galvanized yet fewer into taking to the streets in their defense or tossing about confetti in their celebration. What has galvanized entire populations, on the other hand, and what is seductive about various social movements, whether in the neoconservative-traditionalist vein of national history and foundational myths, in the subaltern vein of counterhistories, or even in the regressive neo-eschatological vein of other-worldly cults, from born again Christian fundamentalists to Solar Temple initiates, has been the semblance of temporal extension provided by such social movements – an extension without which not only are national history, counterhistory and history tout court unlikely but also without which the very structure of the modern self becomes precarious at best. Andreas Huyssen rightly observes that current obsessions with the past – museum mania, returns to Tradition, ethnic tales of origins and genealogy, or even the recent fad of historical films catering to literary classics or to legends – turn out to be but “an expression of the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality, however they be organized.”10 The magnetism of many of the new social movements resides less in the resistance to hegemony such movements claim to offer than in the semblance of temporal extension they provide. Rather than perpetuate the notion that various forms of identity politics are attempts at cultural resistance, it is perhaps more appropriate to view them instead as a response to an increasingly generalized condition, namely, the erosion of the sociohistorical preconditions for a modern sense of self. It is this latter problem that is both at work and at stake in the subaltern appeal to experience, and not some poststructuralist stance that celebrates, with much fanfare but little substance, the subversive potential of a self that, presumably

10 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 9.

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unshackled from the manhandling ways of temporal extension, logophilia, and other insidious ontotheological schemes, can at long last say “Yea” to Dionysian becoming within an ubiquitous immediacy.11 That a certain obsession with temporal extension should so permeate academic and para-academic identity politics ought not to surprise: although the self of the last few decades may not have reached the state of disorganization comically portrayed above by Eagleton, it has nevertheless become more dispersed than its modern homologue. An extended present indeed so narrows the temporal horizon and thus so fosters a culture of immediacy that the diachronically extended temporality of modernity unavoidably gives way to what Daniel Bell was the first to diagnose some four decades ago as an “end of linearity.”12 Such a situation is hardly conducive to forging a sustained sense of self across the temporal manifold. In the synchronous space of an extended present, which is marked by the evacuation of all but immediate or short-term considerations and where the past is consigned to a mere archival record unrelated to present concerns, individuals, let alone the larger entities of ethnic groups and classes, readily lend themselves to dispersal into a “series of pure and unrelated presents in time.”13 It is to such changes in the organization of a sense of self that various theorists of (late) modernity point when they remind us of parallel changes in the dominant patterns of late-modern psychopathology: dysfunctions in the typically modern depth/surface opposition at work in the conflict between a tyrannical superego and a hapless ego in the face of a yet insufficiently tamed id, expressed in such Victorian pathologies as the 11 There is of course a curious affinity between, on the one hand, the logophobic tale that, following the disillusionment with the 1968 student uprising in France, has been singing the neo-Nietzschean virtues of a flexibly carnivalesque or anarchical (non-) self unfettered by the rigidities of mean ontotheology, if not of history itself (which is to be equated with the repressive ways of Hegel-inspired Marx), and on the other hand, the tale spun by the Chicago Boys and their disciples, particularly after the overthrow of democratically elected Allende on 11 September 1973 (which handed them Pinochet’s Chile as a laboratory experiment), that has been telling us that the market, unshackled by the rigidly regulatory ways of meddlesome social democratic safeguards and by the infantile romanticism of pesky dread-locked luddites alike, can at long last revel in its inscrutably flexible ways and bring to humanity the end of history (in both the subjective and objective genitive, as Fukayama would have it). Although this issue cannot be addressed here at length, it is interesting to note in passing that many have suggested that the similarity between neoliberal market ideology and certain postmodernist and deconstructionist strains in theory is not coincidental but on the contrary stems from their structural affinity. See, for example, Wang, “Structural Affinity”, 261–82. 12 Bell, “The Postindustrial Society,” 58. 13 Jameson, Postmodernism, 27.

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hysteria that Freud studied at length, have been lately displaced by an increased incidence of pathologies not of a strong ego but of depersonalization, such as anxiety, schizophrenia, and psychosis.14 With good reason it has repeatedly been suggested that the dispersed self of poststructuralism ought to be seen less as a desideratum to be cultivated and still less as a subversive entity to be celebrated than as a factual description of how the self, over the last three decades, has increasingly become organized (or rather, disorganized) into a temporally uncoordinated aggregate of the disparate.15 At this point, Lacan’s clinical definition of schizophrenia as a breakdown in the syntagmatic chain of signifiers that constitute meaning and Deleuze and Guatttari’s subsequent edification of this definition into the regulative ideal of a new and presumably subversive form of subjectivity seem useful less as a diagnostic tool for psychopathology or as an emancipatory ideal than as a suggestive metaphor for the current state of the self. But that the past, present, and future may be tenuously related to one another, if not altogether engulfed in an extended present, does not entail that narratives can no longer be mustered and deployed. What it does imply, however, is that without the selectivity provided by a futureoriented temporality, without a means to reduce complexity, modern temporal divergence and extension can so contract that narratives may no longer truly help in the organization of the self beyond the immediate and the short term. The paradox of the temporality of late modernity, which Huyssen, Jameson, and others rightly prefer to call late capitalism, is indeed that “the more the present of advanced consumer 14 See, for example, ibid., 14–15; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 19, and Malcom, Psychoanalysis. In fact, as Jameson has repeatedly argued throughout his writings, the individual subject has itself become so dispersed that the temporal coordination, let alone the ideological narrativization, of its sense of self, has become quite pointless. If ideology, then, can be considered as dead or dying, it is not (as end-of-ideology ideology would have it) because there has never been such a thing and that we have finally been accordingly enlightened; nor is it because there has been a loss of faith in metanarratives (indeed, the neoliberal, nationalist, and various völkisch metanarratives have rarely fared better); rather, it is because ideology, whose fate is tied, as are so many other modernist phenomena, to the structure of modern self-identity no longer matters once this self-identity itself succumbs to historical transformation. But since Minerva’s owl apparently persists in spreading its wings at dusk, it is only once ideology no longer makes a difference that groupuscules become obsessed with it in the manner of a child with a newly found toy. 15 See, for example, Jameson, Postmodernism, for more on how the call for the “shedding of any illusion about psychic identity or the centered subject, for the ethical ideal of good molecular ‘schizophrenic’ living, and for the ruthless abandonment of the mirage of presence may turn out to be a description of the way we live now, rather than its rebuke or subversion” (339).

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capitalism prevails over past and future, sucking both into an expanding synchronous space … the weaker is its grip on itself, the less stability or identity it provides for contemporary subjects.”16 For subaltern experience-oriented theories and their para-academic homologues, then, resistance to dominant mediation is to be mustered by an appeal to, and certainly not the appeal of, immediate experience: a group’s immediate experiences are sought not for their own sake but as a means to the inductive construction of counterhistories, which, in turn, will “empower” a group by articulating its interests and enabling its agency. But just as the dispersed poststructuralist self is more a description of the current state of the self than it is a subversive ideal to be reached, likewise is the subaltern insistence on immediate experience less a programmatic statement than it is a symptom of the current state of temporality. When invoked as a counterdiscursive and counterhegemonic ground for resistance, the perceived immediacy of experience, as we saw earlier, becomes readily endowed with the palpable concreteness of materiality, the very resilience of which is seen as a source of resistance to the meddlesome ways of temporally extended dominant discursive regimes. But this very insistence on nondiscursive and material immediacy, and this even to the point of retreating to the perceived irreducible immediacy of material bodily experiences (or, in a para-academic parallel, to the physical marks of ethnicity), underscores the increased disconnection of such immediacy from the second term of the subaltern equation, namely, that such immediacy lend itself to the mediating operations of temporally extended counterhistories. The presumed spatial immediacy of the materially concrete can indeed only tenuously lend itself to temporal mediation, however local the operation or subversive the manoeuver, if temporal extension itself has been narrowed, as it has in an extended present, to the point of an ubiquitous immediacy. Since the result, after all, of an ubiquitous immediacy is that we are left to wallow in an aggregate of the disparate (in the manner of a Lacanian schizophrenic reduced to “pure material signifiers” bereft of signification or to a series of “pure and unrelated presents in time”) and since an extended present has increasingly become the dominant mode of temporality over the last few decades, then it seems that the appeal to immediate experience is less a categorical imperative enjoining us to boycott the ideologically tainted schemes of temporally extended mediation than it is instead a symptom of the result, already at hand, of an ubiquitous immediacy. 16 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 26.

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The subaltern appeal to immediate experience is not merely a reaction to the swashbuckling ways of dominant discursive regimes, nor is it a matter of purifying or cleansing mediation by inductively or empirically reconstructing it anew, grass-roots style, from the material ground (of a groupuscule’s immediate experiences) upwards; still less is it an attempt to flee a proliferation of disembodied media images by seeking refuge in palpable nondiscursive materiality; nor, finally, is it a nostalgic yearning for “presence” within a long and ignominious history of metaphysics. If anything, the subaltern insistence on immediate experience instead symptomatically testifies to the inability to go beyond inchoate immediacy, and the wager on immediate experience ought accordingly to be seen less as an attempt to foster the immediate than as a testimony to the growing incapacity of the late-modern self, today, to be otherwise than immediate. After all, an extended present not only narrows temporal horizons and, in so doing, undermines the role of experience in the modern diachronically extended sense of self; by so undermining future-orientedness, which for the last two centuries has assured a horizon from which selections can be made, complexity contained, and a sense of self maintained, the extended present also erodes the capacity for reckoning with what is temporally distant and extended, whether towards the past or towards the future and whether in the name of metanarratives or of biographical narratives. As Gadamer put it, “he who is without horizon is he who cannot see far enough and who thus overestimates what is close at hand.”17 It is just such an overestimation of “what is close at hand” that informs the subaltern appeal to immediate experience. An extended present not only undermines the centrality of experience in self-formation; it also raises doubts about how the very structure of the modern self can last today under the guise that it has had for the preceding two centuries. The continuity suggested by Taylor between the late-eighteenth-century and the present sense of self spans, at best, the period from the late eighteenth century to the 1970s. The last three decades have, after all, witnessed a shift from the temporally extended Fordism or Keynesianism of fixed capital to the narrowed temporal horizon of flexible accumulation and the unfettered laissez-faire of speculative (or “casino”) capital and from the unproblematic presupposition of experience in self-formation to a vituperative defense of, hunger for, and appeal to experience. The appeal to immediate experience involves more than a concern for guaranteeing subaltern agency or for changing 17 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 307.

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the given: the very insistence with which this appeal is bandied about by both academic and para-academic politics of identity instead testifies to a more encompassing problem to which it attempts to respond but which it fails to directly name or thematize – the problem of the latemodern self and whether the role of experience in self-formation may no longer have been as predominant over the last three decades as it had been over the last two centuries.

sociohistorical reprise Those who appeal to experience in the name of subaltern agency, no less than the neo-Althusserians and poststructuralists who deride such maneuvering, all point à leur insu to a historical issue that cannot be addressed by simply tinkering with current cultural problems or epistemological paradigms. But such a failure to historicize the role expected of experience in self-formation begets yet another unaddressed problem – the problem of socioeconomic class. We have earlier seen that modern future-oriented temporality, along with the accentuated role of experience in self-formation that it enables, is not only a historical phenomenon that surfaces with consistency at the turn of the eighteenth century – it is also a phenomenon that initially manifests itself within a very limited segment of the population, namely, the rising late-eighteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie. Although such an issue has yet to be dealt with by those most ensconced in debates over experience and agency, the class origins of an accentuated role of experience in self-formation has already been pointed out by various theorists of modernity, albeit only in periphery to their larger argument. Habermas’s Habilitationschrift, concerned as it is with tracing the origin and prospects of rational argumentation within a public sphere, shows en passant that as a result of an interaction between the emergent Intimsphäre of the bourgeois conjugal family and the budding literary public sphere, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie could articulate its own experiences for itself and, in so doing, eventually consolidate itself and rise to prominence as a specific class with identifiable interests.18 Others 18 See Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, part 2, chap. 4–7. A more recent account of the imbrication of experience within the public and private spheres, which focuses on what it calls “the new technologies and pathologies of the self,” is Ehrenberg’s L’Individu incertain. Studies of the novel with similar arguments are too numerous to enumerate here, but the classic formulation can of course be found in Watt, The Rise of the Novel. Works on the imbrication between aesthetics and the bourgeoisie are also legion. But for a (rightly) caustic account, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic.

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have since shown that it was only when the mid- to late-eighteenthcentury bourgeoisie, through the mediation at first of the literary and later of the political public sphere, began to understand itself as a specific class that a specifically bourgeois sense of self emerged – a sense of self characterized, inter alia, as an interior enclave of irreducible individuality opposed to an external world, as an inner core in need of futureoriented expressive development, and as a reflexive self-narration sustained by the integration and processing of the unexpected into a biographical narrative of cumulative experiences.19 Others still have shown that early-nineteenth-century national literary historiography did much, with its tales of emergent nationhood, to manufacture what Jusdanis calls a “network of shared experiences” that in turn played no negligible role in the consolidation of that other bourgeois phenomenon, the modern nation-state.20 Beyond the specific issue of experience, numerous other theories concerned with the historical emergence of the modern self, from studies of the history of private life and civil society to works on the rise of the novel and aesthetic discourse, have likewise traced specifically to the late-eighteenth-century bourgeoisie that which, in certain quarters, often parades itself today as modern self-identity tout court. Such a focus on the historicity, as well as the class origins, of the modern self are not recent – they can be found no less in Lukács’s later work and Goldmann’s Pour une sociologie du roman than in the early work of Habermas and the recent work of Charles Taylor. Why, then, has such selfprofessed interdisciplinary and historically minded inquiry as that of E.P. Thompson and the History Workshops of the 1970s, of the Alltagsgeschichte of the 1980s, and of the subaltern inquiry of the 1990s to this day so far failed to consider, in their attempts to foster counterhistory, the class origins of the very modern self to which their appeals to experience essentially cater? Does such an oversight represent a denial of the current self’s prospects for agency, or does it simply point to the inevitable shortcomings of “presentist” tendencies in much of recent cultural and subaltern theory? Whatever the case may be, and although at this point such questions are best left open, it nevertheless remains that what is by convention called modern self-identity and modern temporality, far from representing a 19 See, for example, the work of Luhmann, Taylor, Ehrenberg, and Lowe, to name but a few. 20 For more on what Gregory Jusdanis calls “the maintenance of national unity through a network of shared experiences,” see chap. 2–4 of his Belated Modernity.

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generalized social phenomenon to be vaguely imputed to the advent of modernity, on the contrary turns out to have initially been a specifically bourgeois phenomenon. If it is within the mid- to late-eighteenth-century bourgeoisie that the contours of what many call the modern self or modern subjectivity were first delineated and if such an initially bourgeois phenomenon has frequently been equated by the history of ideas with the modern self as such, it has nevertheless been only gradually over the last two centuries that this sense of self and temporality eventually imposed itself upon the rest of the population, slowly percolating downward to an emergent working class no longer tied to (or rather ejected from) the land, migrating upward to a declining nobility that was eventually assimilated by the bourgeoisie through intermarriage and economic necessity, and finally, expanding laterally to Eastern Europe (and, later, to colonies across the globe) as a precondition at first for capital accumulation and, later, for cooperative entrepreneurial ventures.21 So while it is true, as Taylor puts it, that “by the turn of the eighteenth century, something recognizably like the modern self is in process of constitution,” it is also no less true that those initially under its sway, as Taylor hastens to add, were “drawn from the educated classes of Europe and America, and were even a smaller proportion of these as one proceeded eastward, where these were in turn less significant in their societies. Our history since 1800 has been the slow spreading outward and downward of the new modes of thought and sensibility to new nations and classes.”22

21 In order to manage both turbulent lower classes as well as recalcitrant traditional local ruling elites and in order to assure Western European capitalist enterprise of free rein, a native bourgeois-bureaucratic class mimicking the ways of their West European mentors had to be and was created within the less industrialized European and North American colonies. In the case, for example, of the French meddling in what is today called Vietnam, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 124–127, which shows how the aim of the French colonial education system (including the imposition of quôc ngu–– a romanized phonetic script contrived by seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries) was twofold: first, to promote a break with the earlier Chinese influence, if not with the indigenous past itself, by making ancient literature less accessible to the recently colonized population; second, “to produce a carefully calibrated quantum of French-speaking and French-writing Indochinese to serve as a politically reliable, grateful, and acculturated indigenous elite, filling the subordinate echelons of the colony’s bureaucracy and larger commercial enterprises” (126). Such developments would of course eventually backfire against those who instituted them, as the recently created native “bourgeoisies” eventually developed their own sense of independent nationhood and decided that their own economic aspirations were best met by subjugating their populations directly, without the intermediary of their now cumbersome West European and North American mentors. 22 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 185, 394. My emphasis.

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The future-oriented temporality initially at work within the emergent bourgeoisie, after all, differed not only from the temporality of the courtly and court-aspiring classes, whose vested interests lay in the perpetuation of the present social order through the continuing legitimation of the past; it also stood in sharp contrast with the temporality of the craftsman and artisan, who, well into the eighteenth century, were no less materially insecure and no less entrapped within a narrow temporal horizon than were the peasant or migrant labourer, as the work of Braudel has of course shown. The Verlagssystem, or “putting-out system,” may well have shifted from domestic seasonal wage labour, as dictated by lulls in agricultural activity, to a more permanent form of wage labour during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; yet those working in the new but increasingly predominant cash nexus differed little from their predecessors working in the framework of customary feudal law. So class specific has been bourgeois future-oriented temporality and the sense of self it informs, in fact, that before it became so hegemonic by the early to mid-twentieth century as to be conflated with the modern self as such, it tended to spark violent reactions during periods of revolutionary ferment, as can be seen by the routine shooting of clocks, whether in 1830 or 1848, and as can be seen more tellingly still in the first symbolic gesture, in 1871, of the Commune de Paris, which sought to establish a radically new form of nonbourgeois temporality by toppling the Colonne de Vendôme – a move bemoaned by the Parnassian poet and anti-communard Catulle Mendès, who was of irreproachable bourgeois sympathies, as an abolishing of history that “makes for a timeless present, an annihilated past, and an uncertain future.”23 Alternative forms both of temporality (such as exemplary, cyclical, or eschatological time) and of self-formation (such as that of the extended family of agricultural society or of the caste system of premodern society) persisted within the nonbourgeois population well beyond the late eighteenth century. Future-orientedness and the modern self it informs were, after all, not some cataclysmic mutation that suddenly ensnared a hapless population in its entirety: “if modernity was to mark a condition of experience,” Peter Wagner reminds us, “then the qualifications required to show its existence were largely absent in the allegedly modern societies during the nineteenth century, and for a still fairly large number of people during the first half of the twentieth century.”24 To be sure, with the intensification of enclosures in the seventeenth and eighteenth 23 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 7. 24 Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity, 3.

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centuries, with the resulting influx of landless migrant workers into burgeoning industrial zones, and with the generalization of functional differentiation as a mode of social organization, the circumscription of individual identity in terms of function instead of caste began to extend to increasingly large segments of the population. But such a process did not, overnight, extend the bourgeois sense of temporality and self to these increasing segments of the population: for many during this period, on the contrary, the migration from the country to the city changed very little with regard to their actual experience or expectations; one mode of labouring was merely exchanged for another, and, as David Landes remarks, the “factory worker could be, and usually was, as tradition-bound in his expectations for himself and his children as the peasant.”25 And such tradition-bound milieux, as we have seen, hardly encouraged the opening of the future, and still less did they foster an accentuated role of experience in self-formation. Regarding this gradual extension of bourgeois subjectivity to the general population, Ehrenberg’s work goes so far as to maintain that what in the early nineteenth century had remained the province of a few literati and a small bourgeois elite – that is, individual future- oriented itineraries based, inter alia, on expectations of upward social mobility and individual futureoriented self-development – was so gradual in its percolation to the population at large that it became a generalized phenomenon only during the trente glorieuses of welfare capitalism, at which point the futureoriented predictability of bourgeois returns from investments was duplicated in the worker’s state-sponsored predictable pension plans, unemployment guarantees, and access to postsecondary education and at which point the last vestiges of traditional or premodern sociability and subjectivity gave way to their modern homologues.26 The relation between experience and self-formation ought not to be edified, then, from a sociohistorical phenomenon into an anthropological constant that ignores class boundaries. Yet it is just such an edification that has been at work in those strands of subaltern theory that most vocally appeal to experience. Just as much of subaltern theory anachronistically mimics early-modern nation-building by resorting to a Gramscian notion of subalternity that, in the name “of constructing a historical movement and providing for its self-awareness as a historical protagonist,” as Terry Cochran notes, unknowingly “operates according

25 Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 9. 26 Ehrenberg, L’Individu incertain, 18–19, 85–7.

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to the same economy of hegemony as the state,”27 likewise do subaltern appeals to experience presume that the modern sense of self is a universal human condition instead of a historical product and that there is a necessary correlation between experience and group specificity. Such subaltern maneuvering essentially, but unintentionally, maintains that what initially applied to the emergent eighteenth-century bourgeoisie holds for today’s subaltern groupuscule. Experience has been so inextricably entwined with issues of modern self-formation that, by retrospective projection, it appears to many as an anthropological constant beyond the vagaries of historical change. But even those who acknowledge the historicity of modes of self-formation have often fallen prey to yet another historical oversight: they implicitly endorse an association between, if not a conflation of, the bourgeois self and the modern self tout court. It is here that subaltern appeals of the Thompsonian persuasion most flagrantly err. By transposing into a current context or, worse, by naturalizing what took place at a specific historical juncture within a specific social class, such maneuvering fails to consider the extent to which may or may not be viable today those very sociohistorical vectors that, at first for the late-eighteenth-century bourgeoisie and, subsequently, for Western industrial populations at large, allowed for experience to play a constitutive role in self-formation to begin with. It is in just such a failure to recognize the class origins of this relation between experience and self-formation that the erring ways of much of subaltern theory are not only at their most flagrant but also at their most self-defeating. For all its claims to being historically minded and for all its initial debt to problems of class (later to shift to ethnic and gender issues), the subaltern appeal to experience itself remains beyond the reach of historical and class analysis. The ironic twist to this is that the structure of bourgeois (let alone of eurocentric or albinocratic) selfformation ends up being unwittingly reproduced and mimicked, albeit on a smaller and more regional scale, within those very counterhistories and micronarratives that were supposed to differentiate the subaltern from bourgeois hegemony to begin with. At this point, the very raison d’être of the subaltern appeal to experience, namely, that subalternity discover and reinforce its own specificity, ends up effectively sabotaged – 27 Cochran, “Culture in its Sociohistorical Dimension,” 148. This twist is of course not without a certain irony: as Cochran adds, “retrospectively, it seems ironic that the existing state, the object of Gramsci’s critical analysis, was rejected even as its form was to be duplicated” (148).

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unless, of course, such subaltern theory recognizes, which it rarely does, the extent to which subalternity may be increasingly difficult to demarcate from the bourgeois (or albinocratic or phallocratic) version of the self that over the last two centuries has, after all, no less supplanted alternative modes of self-formation than capitalism has replaced alternative economic systems. By failing to sufficiently historicize the association between experience and self-formation and, worse, by failing to consider the class origins of such an association, much of subaltern theorizing unsurprisingly finds itself increasingly disconnected from those in whose name it professes to speak.28 In the case, say, of feminism – which has recently come under increased scrutiny by class-oriented and historically minded feminists themselves, from Rita Felski and Roxanne Rimstead to Barbara Ehrenreich – attempts at countering the effects of gender inequality by proposing, say, that seminars be renamed ovulars may have done much to appease the conscience of those concerned with being subversive, yet they have done little for improving the economic and social lot of those women who continue to earn roughly seventy cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts for the same work and with the same qualifications and who, as members of a workforce only slightly cheaper and less docile than the child labour that the West now subcontracts for many of its industrial tasks, from Nike to Wall-Mart, continue to be nickled and dimed to death, to use Ehrenreich expression.29 Cultural issues can, admittedly, help redress certain wrongs, but they can also shield those promoting such cultural redress, with their professional academic status and relatively stable salaries, from the socioeconomic realities of precisely those whom they claim to represent along ethnic or gender lines yet whom they neglect along class lines – from the socioeconomic realities of the secretaries, janitors, house cleaners, child day-care workers, and imported nannies who directly or indirectly serve them yet whose need for a less precarious living wage has been supported and publicized, tellingly enough, not by academic colloquia dealing with différance or postcolonial otherness, but by labour and student activism. Statistically and demographically speaking, few have been liberated by a tinkering with language and culture alone, and cultural determinism is no less one-sided, hegemonic, and narrow-minded than the economic determinism that it has diabolized over the last three de28 Studies on this issue have begun to surface – at last. For a recent ground-breaking work on this issue, see Rimstead, Remnants of Nation. 29 I am referring here of course to Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed.

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cades. It is indeed important not to forget that many of the notions devised with the initially laudable intent, in the 1960s and 1970s, to “give a voice” to the oppressed have since the 1980s (and particularly glaringly since the 1990s) become, as Masao Miyoshi somewhat caustically put it, little more than academic and middle class chic: self-proclaimed subversive theoretical disciplines such as subaltern studies and postcolonialism are indeed but “a luxury largely irrelevant to those who live under the most wretched conditions,” for “neither nativism, nor pluralism are in their thoughts, only survival.”30 It is not without a certain ironical twist of fate that the very concept of experience deployed by E.P. Thompson back in the 1960s and 1970s to rehistoricize class and to reendow it with a modicum of agency – the very concept to which much of subsequent subaltern inquiry is indebted – should have come back to haunt him and turn against him since the 1980s and 1990s. In the current wave of what some have called “the 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 resurrection of class issues is simply not de bon ton, and particularly so for those very experience-oriented theories and social movements directly or indirectly spawned by the work of the History Workshops of the 1970s – those very movements, in other words, to which are attributed or which frequently lay claim to a Marxist lineage yet for which, as Jameson put it, “the denunciation of the concept of class has become an obligatory gesture today, as though we all know that race, gender and ethnicity were more satisfactory concepts or more fundamental, prior, concrete, existential experiences.”31 But for all its limitations, the Thompson-inspired subaltern appeal to experience in the name of agency and change is not entirely misguided, and this on two counts: first of all, we have seen how the experiential process can indeed potentially change the given, informed as it is by the disruptiveness of the unexpected; second, an accentuated role of experience in self-formation refers to a cluster of historical processes specific to modernity, not least of which is the increased complexity unleashed by the late-eighteenth-century opening of the future. Where the Thompson-inspired appeal to experience errs, however, is both when it mistakes the recalcitrance of experience for its immediacy and when it then transposes the historical role of experience in self-formation into the timelessly given and the anthropologically innate. 30 Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?” 748. 31 Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” 92.

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o te m p o r a ! o m o r e s ! The extension and generalization over the last two centuries of an initially bourgeois sense of self and time beyond class and geographical lines seems, in retrospect, so seamless that even those who recognize the historicity of self-formation often fail to acknowledge its class origins. The result has been the conflation of the modern bourgeois self with the modern self as such. But to refer to this self as modern, as has been done, for example, in this investigation, is not entirely misguided: such a sense of self has throughout modernity so penetrated class distinctions and geographical boundaries and has so successfully supplanted its earlier homologues that few alternatives have survived – and the few that still remain have been declining as rapidly as have been alternative and local economies in the face of globalized economic neoliberalism. The modern self, if not modernity itself, originated in and was propelled by the bourgeoisie; and as Bourdieu, Jameson, Eagleton, and others have suggested, if it were not for the need for euphemisms following the jaundiced eye with which certain influential trends in theory gaze upon Marx, modernity should be called by its true name: capitalism. But the problem of the self, today, is not one of terminological rectitude; it is instead one of history. It is a problem in which, as Taylor has pointed out, the modern self must be seen as “a function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modern West and which may indeed spread thence to other parts of the globe, but which had a beginning in time and space and which may have an end.”32 It is to this latter issue that the subaltern appeal to experience obliquely, yet most insistently, points. The subaltern appeal to experience does not so much represent a continuing controversy surrounding the specific term of experience as it represents an appeal to a certain historical way of assuring a diachronically extended sense of self. By unknowingly testifying to the growing incapacity, today, to be otherwise than immediate, the appeal to experience testifies to how the modern self may no longer have been faring as well over the last three decades as it did over the preceding two centuries. While it may not yet have succumbed to generalized schizophrenia and rhizomic dispersal, as some suggest it should or one day will, the modern sense of self, for better of for worse, is undoubtedly ailing. As the future-oriented temporality upon 32 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111. My emphasis.

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which this self is predicated so relentlessly pursues its dynamic, to the point of dissipating into a futureless extended present, the disruptiveness of the unexpected and the reflexive revision of the given – experience in other words – can but see its role in self-formation attenuated. It is here that the truth content of the Thompson-inspired appeal to experience resides, to use Adorno’s expression: this appeal indeed testifies not merely to a failure to historicize and still less to a penchant for political expediency, which Spivak prefers to call “strategic essentialism”; more significantly, it testifies to an unavowed but strongly felt need – the need for maintaining a sense of self in the midst of an extended present where modern modes of self-formation, now that they have effectively supplanted their earlier homologues, are no longer faring well but have yet to be replaced by alternatives. The modern self, variously referred to in shorthand as Cartesian, bourgeois, centred, albinocratic, logocentric, phallocratic, or Oedipal, has of course been besieged by various schools of thought – and this not without good reason. The history of the modern self and of modernity as a whole is not an illustrious one, beset as it has been by repression and coercion – although it should not be forgotten that this is no less true for the history of their premodern predecessors, if not of their postmodern successors. Moreover, if epistemology is the issue at hand, then any pretensions to truth, let alone to self-transparency, by the modern subject can hardly withstand Marxist, Freudian, or Wittgensteinian scrutiny. But should critiques of the modern self or subject unilaterally propose, as not a few schools of thought have done from the 1970s to this day, that such a self rid itself of its logophiliac fetters and instead embrace, as one critic of these schools derisively puts it, “a blunt prioritization of particularity, diversity, and non-identity,” and “just say yes” to the “schizophrenic fragmentation of experience and loss of identity,”33 then the failure to historicize characteristic of Thompson-inspired subaltern and cultural theory would merely be reproduced in a reversed mirror image: just as the latter unwittingly and ahistorically proposes that the subaltern self and counterhistoriography mimic the bourgeois model, likewise do one-sided critiques of such a self no less ahistorically propose the dispersed self as a timeless moral imperative and desideratum. Much as neoliberalism tells us that the true nature of man – the desire to trade unimpeded by the coercive and totalitarian ways of state regulation – will 33 Dews, “Adorno,” 17, 4.

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one day flourish if only the nostalgically inclined, with their obdurate clinging to such rigid archaisms as minimal economic security, would forego their obtuse ways and instead embrace the exhilaration of unbridled flexibility, likewise do certain postmodernist and other logophobic critiques of the modern self, in more or less sophisticated versions, tell us that the centred or unified sense of self is but a reassuring (but uncouth) fiction owing its “effect” to the ontotheological or phallocratic manhandling, throughout the ages, of fluid becoming and heterogeneity – a situation, we are told, that can, indeed must, be remedied through the courageous abandonment of our rigid logophiliac ways and infantile desire for stability or decidability in favour of flexible Nietzschean Yeasaying to Heraclitean becoming. The problems with this latter stance are twofold. On an epistemological level, any claim to resisting or subverting the logophiliac ways of abstraction, temporal extension, and mediation by catering to the singular, the punctual, and the immediate, as has been frequently pointed out, actually “mistakes for immediacy [what] will in fact be highly mediated.”34 On a more political level, it also remains unlikely that a punctually dispersed self, however laudable the intentions motivating its celebration, any more subverts the given than does the “unified” self of modernity that it is supposed to dispel. In the case, for example, of minimalism, the immediacy of experience, understood as bodily immediacy, has been seen as a means of resisting the serializing of commodity production. Yet such a maneuver actually backfires, as Rosalind Krauss reminds us, for such a “Minimalist subject of ‘lived bodily experience’ … unballasted by past knowledge and coalescing in the very moment of its 34 Ibid., 13. “The hyperconcrete,” Henri Lefèbvre reminds us, is indeed “as abstract as are philosophical generalities” (Critique de la vie quotidienne, 184). The fetishization of singularity indeed backfires. As can for example be seen in the case Lyotard’s Économie libidinale, which Dews rightly suggests can stand as a representative for most poststructuralist critiques of the self, “the notion of a libidinal band composed of ephemeral intensities is an attempt to envisage a condition which, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘no moment would be for the sake of another.’ But if every moment is prized purely for its uniqueness, without reference to a before or an after, without reference to anything which goes beyond itself, then what is enjoyed in each moment becomes paradoxically and monotonously the same” (Dews, “Adorno,” 13). Bill Readings himself, otherwise a devout disciple of Lyotard, likewise points out Lyotard’s ill-fated attempt to oppose the commensurability of the interchangeably commodifiable with the intense singularity of the event. The result of such an attempt is that “all events would then be indifferently, interchangeably, commensurably meaningless and incommensurable resistances to the organic whole of history” (Introducing Lyotard, 104).

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encounter with the object could, if pushed a little farther, break up entirely into the utterly fragmented, postmodern subject” and, in so doing, merely “partakes very deeply of that formal condition that can be seen to structure consumer capitalism: the condition, that is, of seriality.”35 If indeed, as we saw earlier with Jameson, the dispersed self is more a description of how we now live than it is some subversive ideal to be reached and if the repressed centred self is on the other hand a historical product and thus possibly already anachronistic in today’s context, then Felski has a point when she asks, “If … late capitalism has already deconstructed the subject more efficiently than meditations on écriture, does feminism wish to assent unconditionally to such a project?”36 This is an important question to ask. It must indeed be remembered that the modern self and the experience out of which it sustains itself in the face of increased complexity are not some timeless ontotheological illusions; instead they arose historically out of a certain necessity – the necessity for survival.37 We have already seen how the modern self, following the late-eighteenth-century opening of the future, had to devise strategies for staving off overwhelming complexity – a complexity that threatened its very survival, or, to use Luhmanian terminology, its sense of difference between itself and its environment. Although the

35 Krauss, “The Cultural Logic,” 8–10. Rita Felski likewise reminds us in reference to poststructuralist versions of feminism that “the further issue of the relationship between ‘postmodernism’ and ‘late capitalism’ in turn raises questions which may overlap with and have significant implications for the feminist project. For example, feminist theories which assume the subversive quality of a decentered fragmented subjectivity as in some sense ‘feminine’ or oppositional may merely echo rather than challenge a cultural logic of conspicuous consumption and stimulation of desire in which the unified, repressed self of an earlier epoch of bourgeois liberalism is already in many respects anachronistic” (“Feminism, Postmodernism,” 55–6). 36 Ibid., 56. 37 This is precisely what Nietzsche, for all the one-sided poststructuralist readings to which he has been subjected, himself tirelessly stresses throughout his work. As Dews reminds us, Nietzsche of course deals with “the aversion of the human mind to chaos, its fear of unmediated intuition, and its resultant attempts to simplify the world by reducing diversity to identity. There is, however, an equally strong pragmatic tendency in Nietzsche, which suggests that this process of ordering and simplification takes place not simply because of an ‘existential’ need for security, but in the interests of sheer survival” (Dews, “Adorno,” 7). This approach can likewise be seen in the work of Adorno, as Dews has also noted: “Adorno perceives that compulsive identity, the sacrifice of the moment for the future, was necessary at certain stage of history, in order for human beings to liberate themselves from blind subjugation to nature” (ibid., 19; my emphasis).

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future-oriented temporality of modernity has undergone considerable change over the last few decades, this change has not, however, reduced the complexity at hand, let alone the need for experience in order to palliate its effects: on the contrary, the erosion of future-orientedness as a result of accelerated innovation in turn spurs yet more unmanageable complexity. Indeed, if in an extended present the unexpected becomes expected, this stems not from the colonialisation of the future; it stems instead from the failure to undergo experience in such a manner that a reflexive revision of past and present might accommodate the unexpected – the unexpected is no longer worked through and reflexively integrated but instead remains at the state of a brute shock. A spiral of mutual reinforcement is thus set into motion whereby an ever-decreasing temporal extension allows for the unchecked proliferation of the temporally unmediated, or the immediate, yet this unchecked proliferation of the immediate in turn reinforces the incapacity for temporal extension, future-oriented or otherwise. And once the capacity for futureorientedness, that is, the principle of selectivity that has prevailed throughout the better part of modernity is lost and once the experiential process for renewing self-narration in the face of the new is eroded, complexity can no longer be contained, and the self, deprived of an allencompassing premodern past, yet no less deprived of modern futureorientedness, finds itself unable to extend itself beyond the immediate. Time can thus only increasingly appear as “a series of discrete moments, each of which severs prior experiences from subsequent ones in such a way that no continuous ‘narrative’ can be sustained,” as Giddens describes it, and the result is “anxiety about obliteration, of being engulfed, crushed or overwhelmed by externally impinging events.”38 Complexity in other words reaches such proportions that rather than encourage “yea-saying to Becoming,” it instead stimulates the frantic search for temporal extension, be it in the progressive terms of subaltern particularist historiography or, in its more desperate manifestations, in the regressive terms of neoethnic tribalism or, more desperately still, in the neo-eschatological terms of Christian, Jewish, or Muslim extremist fundamentalist cults. It would be a mistake, then, to dismiss as nostalgic the misgivings expressed by various historically minded theorists, such as Lefèbvre, Felski, Krauss, or Jameson, who, while hardly harbouring sym-

38 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 53. My emphasis.

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pathy for capitalism and the modern self with which it is entwined, nevertheless also warn against premature celebrations of the current state of affairs.39 If the role of experience in self-formation seems to be on the wane, this stems not from some schizophrenic inability to narrate or from some loss of faith in metanarratives; it is instead because experience, while still a central component of modern self-formation, no longer enjoys a temporal divergence that might foster it. But so vital has experience been for modern self-formation that it cannot be peremptorily dismissed as the mere stuff of ontotheological hoodwinking. Although the centrality of the experiential process within self-formation has been undermined within an extended present, the modern sense of self has yet to find a substitute for sustaining itself in the face of increased complexity. True, the bourgeois, or modern, self is coterminous with the rise to prominence of a socioeconomic order marred, to say the least, by an unflattering history; it nevertheless remains that by so effectively replacing earlier forms of self-formation, this modern self has left behind few alternatives. There cannot be a return to earlier forms of self-formation, since the economic base for these forms has disappeared and, besides, they were hardly less coercive than the bourgeois form that supplanted them. But neither can we revel in the current state of affairs, where we are left with a vacuum that can as readily be filled by the politics of identity as by the politics of ethnic cleansing. But if the subaltern appeal to experience has a truth content, this content is not limited to its unconscious reference to a sociohistorically circumscribed phase in human history that may no longer be as applicable today as it has been over the last two centuries. More important still, it points to what has in fact been a perennial need – the need for a sense of identity. The celebration of a dispersed state of the self is at best a theoretical construct abstracted from history and at worst a description of 39 As the current state of affairs appears less and less worthy of celebration – even for academic departments in the human sciences – it is not surprising that the novelty of oracular discourse about deaths and endings has lost much of its lustre over the last few years and that little confetti has been tossed about in celebration of yet another modern concept being discovered as dead. Controversies surrounding most concepts identified with modernity have considerably subsided – to speak today of ailing metanarratives, dead subjects, or posthistoire begets yawning, not manifestos. And the “post” mania of the last few decades, far from inaugurating posthistoire, has instead revitalized a sense of historicity. Various concepts and practices, from the self and the sense of interiority to the very processes at work in the production of meaning, are indeed studied less in terms of their timelessly incorrigible propensity for logophilia than in terms of their historically contingent conditions of possibility.

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the current state of the self rather than its rebuke or subversion; more important still, it is not a viable solution – except perhaps in the context of postsymposium chats within a small academic coterie. Implicated as they are within issues of self-identity, the insistence of and the hunger for experiences may after all be very real, and appeals to experience have very real consequences. The sense of self within which, since the advent of modernity, experience has played a constitutive role, may not be the motor of history, but neither is it a mere superstructural appendage to some more fundamental socioeconomic process, nor even a mere by-product of some metaphysical fetishization of presence. When it comes to central modern concepts or processes such as experience, it is often tempting to join in the now predictable ritual of prefixing such Big Modernist Concepts with “post,” to vociferate apocalyptic decrees and oracular declarations, and then to indecorously discard these concepts as but so many dustballs fit for the proverbial trash can of history. True, such cathartic gesticulation, along with its flamboyant rhetorical flourishes, can imbue the more intemperate among us with the titillating sense of being subversive and à la page; it is also true that such discourse can foster a sense of historicity by reminding us that the concepts and institutions that govern our current selfunderstanding and practices are historically produced and not transhistorically given. But it is also no less true that such discourse can lull us into historical complacency. To speak of endings can indeed imply that an earlier state of affairs has been superseded or demystified and that we have finally rent the veils of illusion by recognizing them as mere inventions. What is truly ironic about the “post” mania of the last few decades is that the very “postmodern ideology of the rupture, the apocalyptic appeal to deaths and endings,” as Rita Felski and others remind us, “merely reinforces the very tradition which it is trying to subvert, reenacting one of the most enduring topoi of modernity, the radical negation of the past.”40 Perhaps this is why, for all the giddy prefixing of various modern phenomena with “post,” these phenomena seem not only not to have disappeared from our horizon but to have increasingly, and rightly, been reprefixed with “neo.” Talk about postcolonialism is yielding to growing concerns about the neocolonial net transfer of wealth from the South to the North and the East to the West, and the Dickensian sweatshops and child labour of yesteryear have become the neo-Dickensian sweatshops and child labour of today. Those authors who once decreed the death of 40 Felski, “Feminism, Postmodernism,” 53.

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the author now (posthumously) peddle their wares precisely through the brand-name recognition their neo-authorship guarantees. And for all the proclamations hailing the end of metanarratives, these metanarratives continue to fare remarkably well, from neonationalisms and techno-utopian visions of progress to the neoliberal revival of Adam Smith’s two-hundred-year-old narrative about invisible hands and unshackled markets. In short, to abuse the prefix “post” is to invite the prefix “neo,” and the summary dismissal of history confirms the old adage that to take history lightly is to assist in its repetition. The premature dismissal of concepts or problems such as experience only allows these to subsist all the more tenaciously now that they operate clandestinely behind our backs. And in the manner of posttraumatic stress disorders for past blows not yet durchgearbeitet, or in the manner of “blowback” for past blows inflicted on others, the past all the more insistently revisits those who most fancy themselves beyond its reach. What is needed, then, is not that certain modernist concepts such as experience be debunked as “false” but instead that we gauge the extent to which the historical processes or phenomena named by such concepts, for better or for worse, continue to inform our self-understanding.

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Mead, G.H. “The Definition of the Psychical.” In Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, first series, vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1903. – The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Lasalle, ill: Open Court 1932. Meiskins Wood, E. “The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics.” Studies in Political Economy 9 (fall 1982). Menke-Eggers, Christoph. Die Souveränität der Kunst: Äshthetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1988. Messer-Davidow, Ellen. “The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 19 (autumn 1987). Miller, James. The Passion of Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster 1993. Miyoshi, Masao. “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State.” Critical Inquiry 19 (summer 1993). Montaigne, Michel de. Essais: Livre III. Paris: Garnier Flammarion 1969. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso 1987. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi et al. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1993. Nerlich, Michael. The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100– 1750. 2 vols. Translated by Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1987. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983. Novalis. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Bilingual edition. Paris: Aubier Montaigne 1965. Nowotny, Helga. Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Translated by Neville Plaice. Cambridge: Polity Press 1994. Oakeshott, Michael. Experience and its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1933. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge 1982. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso 1995. Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics. Evanston, il: Northwestern University 1969. Parry, Milman. L’Epithète traditionnelle dans Homère. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928. Peukert, Detlev J. K. The Weimar Republic. Translated by Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang 1993. Piché, Claude. “Expérience esthétique et herméneutique philosophique.” Texte: Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire 3 (1984). Pickering, Michael. History, Experience and Cultural Studies. New York: St Martin’s Press 1997.

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Index

Abrahams, Roger, 64, 89 Adam, Barbara, 75, 143n8, 152 Adorno, Theodor, xiv–xv, 27, 31, 33, 66, 181n37. See also Frankfurt School Agamben, Giorgio, 46, 59n4, 130, 140 agency, xiii, xvii–xviii, 6, 15–16, 22, 26–7, 170–1; and class, 8–11, 19, 28, 30, 43, 177; and experience, 38, 44, 134, 153– 4, 165, 169; in an extended present, 151–3; and future-orientedness, 149–50; subaltern, 7, 13, 16–17, 31, 39–40; and temporality, 152–3, 164 Allende, Salvador, 166n11 Alltagsgeschichte, 3, 6, 16, 171 Althusser, Louis: on agency, 8; on class, 19; on experience, 4, 7, 10, 11n20; on ideology, 8, 10; and E.P. Thompson, 4–8 Althusserian, xiii, 22, 68; neo-, xv, 24, 170; structuralism, xiii, 4, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 172n21 appeal to immediate experience, xiii–xiv, xviii; as an academic and nonacademic issue 6–7, 26; in aesthetics, 154; and counterhistory, 43–4, 164; and the dialectic of unexpectedness and reintegration, 29–31, 129, 161–2, 164; and the failure to consider class issues, 171, 174– 7; and the failure to historicize, 141–2, 170, 175; and German aesthetics, 163; and logophobia, 163–4; and mediation, 28–9; and possible political consequences, 7–9, 15–19, 22; as a symptom of a culture of immediacy, 162; as a

symptom of late-modern self and temporality, 165–70; and temporal extension, 162, 164–6; and temporality, 69–70; undermined by an extended present, 151, 153–4, 169. See also insistence on experience Aquinas, Thomas, 60 Aristotle, 37, 57–8, 60, 77, 136 Arnoldian project, 63n19, 98 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 109 Auerbach, Erich, 73n44, 114 Aufklärung, 76–7, 90, 151 Augé, Marc, 76n56, 146 Bacon, Francis, 12, 36–7, 88, 131 Bakhtin, Mikhail: on Aristotle’s notion of growth, 136; on the Bildungsroman, 122, 123n67, 124; on change in the hero, 115; on classification of literary genres, 115n49; on the epic, 114–15; on eschatological time, 73–4; on temporality in literature 114 Bataille, Georges, 53–4 Beiser, Frederick, 125n71 Bell, Daniel, 94, 144, 166 Bellamy, Elizabeth, and Artemis Leontis, 13, 25 Benjamin, Walter, xiv–xv, 23, 47, 104–5, 160; on trauma, 131–2, 132n90 Berger, Peter, 40, 164 Bergsonism, 28. See also Lebensphilosophie; vitalism Berman, Antoine, 62–3, 136

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Beyer, Peter, 100n14. Bildung: conceptual history of, 62n14, 62– 3, 65n26; and Erweiterung, 136–7; and experience, 62–3; and idealism, 51; and Lyotard, 54, 62n16; and modern temporality, 89 Bildungsroman: and modern socialization, 64, 122n65; and reflexive self-formation, 64, 117, 121–6; and temporality, 124n68 biologism, 16–18, 21. See also naturalization; tribalism blowback, 185 Blumenberg, Hans, 74n48, 75n49, 88, 118n55, 119 body: fetishization of, 14–16; and historical materialism, 14–15; as immediacy, 14, 168, 180–1; as resistance, 13–14, 14n28, 162 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 163 bourgeoisie, 66–7, 144n10, 160n37; and colonialism, 172n21; and current status of the self, 181n35, 182–3; differentiation from merchant class, 88n86; and nostalgia, 91n93; and the origin of the modern self, 170–5, 177–9; and predisposition to future-orientedness, 85–9, 157; rise of, 86n82; and transition to functional differentiation, 110n40. See also capitalism; modern self-formation Braudel, Fernand, 75, 173 bricolage, 152 Bruner, Edward, 134 Burke, Edmund, 91, 107, 126n74, 147 Calhoun, Craig, 6 capital: fixed, 84–6, 88–9, 157–8, 169; speculative, 86, 157, 158n35, 169; working, 84–5, 157–8 capitalism: and deferred gratification, 85– 6, 89, 157–8; defined, 83n76; and early European towns, 83n75; and effects of improved distribution networks, 83–4; and the erosion of stratified differentiation, 82–3; and feudalism, 82–4; and future-orientedness, 84–9; and increased mobility, 145, 157; industrial, 85n79, 86, 88n86; late, 167–8, 181; and longterm investment, 84–5; merchant, 84, 86, 88n86; and the opening of the fu-

ture, 76, 83–4; as a synonym for modernity, 178; and traditionalism, 85–6; and transnationalization, 63n19, 139 Cartesian subject, 59n4, 104n24, 179 Carvounas, David, 92n97 Caruth, Cathy, 130n84, 132 Chain of Being, 77n59, 108, 111, 125n71 class, 170; analysis of, 175; conflict, 10, 92n97; courtly, 86, 173; and demarxification, 177; differentiation, 8, 20–1; and ethnicity, 177; and gender, 176–7; interests, 9, 20–1; and local culture, 9, 19–21; Marxist essentializing of, 19; merchant, 86, 88n86; rehistoricized, 8, 19, 177. See also agency, class; bourgeoisie; consciousness, class; specificity, class Clifford, James, 31 Cochran, Terry, 137n103, 174–5 Colbert, 75 commodification, xiv, 154, 163 commodity aesthetics. See Warenästhetik Commune de Paris, 173 complexity reduction: defined, 80n68; and experience, 95–6, 112–14, 129–35, 181; and the future, 101–2, 146–9, 156, 167, 182; historicity of, 56n78, 137–8; Luhmann’s notion of, 86n82; 101n17, 103n20, 103–4, 104n22; and narratives, 80–1, 104, 105n29, 110, 118–21, 135, 167–9; premodern, 108–10, 118–19, 148; as a problem of modernity, 104–6, 148; and psychic economy of urban man, 104– 5; and reflexivity, 92–3, 100–1,103–6, 121, 144; and trust, 104. See also Luhmann, Niklas; modern self-formation and complexity reduction; selectivity; system; trauma concepts: historicity of, xiv–xix, 12, 140–1, 162; eighteenth-century semantic changes in, xvi–xvii, 87–8, 90–1, 128–9, 135–6; prefixed with “post,” 140, 183n39, 184–5; relation to reality, 25, 55–6, 65, 68–9 consciousness, 28; class, 8–15, 19–21, 28, 39; philosophy of, xiii, 10; subaltern, 14– 15, 18–21, 63, 137n103 conservatio, 109–10 Corneille, 115 counterhistory, xvii, 3–8, 11, 30, 63, 70, 165, 171, 175, 179; and experience,

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Index xvii–xviii, 4–7, 11, 42–4, 153, 161–4, 168. See also determinism, ideological Crites, Stephen, 78–9 cultural studies, xv, xviii, 66, 137 culture of immediacy: in aesthetics, 154–5, 163, 165, 161–2, 166, 168; logophobic fetishization of, 163–5; and postFordism, 156–9 curiosity, 88 Dasein, 81 Davies, Ioan, 4, 16 deferred gratification, 85–6, 88–9, 157 Deleuze, Gilles, 163, 167 Descartes, René, xvi, 98. See also Cartesian self Descombes, Vincent, 10 determinism: cultural, 17n36, 176; economic, 4, 17n36, 176–7; and empiricism, 28; and experience, xviii, 8–13, 15, 17–21, 27, 40; genetic, 141; ideological, 8–13, 15, 20–1; structural, xviii, 8–12, 17, 19, 21 Dewey, John, 44–5. Dews, Peter, 163, 179–80 dialectical experience, 24n53, 30, 35, 96; after the late eighteenth century, 57–8, 62–5; and anti-Hegelians, 53–5; before the late eighteenth century, 58–62; and complexity reduction, 129–34; as Erlebnis, 47–51; and Hegel, 51–3, 55; and Husserl, 34n20; and modern temporality, 77, 93–4; and narrativist theories of the self, 78–9; and self-formation, 65–7; and subaltern appeals to experience, 161; and reflexivity, 106–7, 112–14. See also Bildung; Erfahrung dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. See dialectical experience Diderot, Denis, 117–18 Dilthey: and vitalism, xiv; and Erlebnis, 35– 6, 46, 48, 50, 55–6, 129 Dobb, Maurice, 83nn75–6. Dupré, Louis, 66, 125n71 Eagleton, Terry, xiv, 164, 166, 170n18, 178 Ehrenberg, Alain, 174 Elias, Norbert, xvi, 69, 132n90 Eliott, 76 Elton, G.R., 88

203

enclosures, 173–4 Enlightenment: see Aufklärung epistemology: in debates on experience, xvii, 6–7; in theories of reflection, 96, 100–2. See also experience: and knowledge Ereignis, 5 Erfahrung: and Bildung, 62–3; and counterhegemony, 12; etymology of, 45; and the Frankfurt School, xiv, 12, 47; poststructuralist critiques of, xiv, 23–4. See also experience; dialectical experience Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont, 71, 138 Erlebnis: and adventure, 49–50; and counterhegemony, 12; etymology of, 49; and neoromantic anticapitalism, 23. See also experience; vitalism eschatology: in late modernity, 155; after the Peace of Augsburg, 74; in pre-Renaissance exegesis, 73n44; temporality of, 71–4; after the Thirty Years War, 74 Evans, Richard, 3 event, 5, 53–4 experience: after Althusser, 10; as buzz word, 6; as cognitio singularium, 60; counterhegemonic, xiii–xiv, 3–7, 9–17, 27–9, 42, 140, 154, 162–3; etymology of, 12n22, 45; and feminism, xviii, 5n9, 9– 10, 13–14, 176, 181; and group identity, 4, 9, 11, 15–22; and group specificity, xiv, 4, 8–11, 13, 15–22; and knowledge, 10–13, 31–5, 38n31, 52, 60–1; after the linguistic turn, 10–11; lived, 9–12, 22–3, 28–9, 33, 37, 46; and materiality, 11–18, 27–9, 36, 129, 162, 168; narrativisation theories of, 78–82; as nonideological, 11–15, 20; as not just a word, 24–5; and political action, 5–7; as resistance, 3–5, 12–13, 20, 27, 31, 154, 162–3, 168; as semantically and politically ambiguous, xiv, 6–8, 22–6, 26, 159, 161; temporality of, 69–72, 77–8, 89–90, 93–4; as Vorhandenheit or Zuhandenheit, 36. See also appeal to immediate experience; complexity reduction, and experience; dialectical experience extended present, 143, 161, 167; and diminished temporal extension, 153, 155–

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8, 165, 167–70; as dysfunctional complexity reduction, 148–50; and eroded capacity for narratives, 158–9, 167–8; and erosion of agency, 151–3; and experience, 153–4, 158, 169; and the past, 146–7, 150, 153; as a quantitative extension of the given, 150–1; as a result of temporal acceleration and exacerbated unexpectedness, 145–8, 155–6, 182 fanaticism, religious, 160n37 Felski, Rita, 14n28; on deconstructionist feminist theory, 181; on identity politics and ethnicity, 17; on late capitalism, 181; on postmodern ideology, 184 Ferry, Luc, 127n75 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 64, 98–9, 125 flexible accumulation. See neoliberalism; post-Fordism Forbes, Duncan, 52n67 Fordism, 142–3, 156, 169–70 Foucault, Michel, xvi, 5; on classical episteme, 76–7; on episteme, 76n55; and experience, 53–5; on the historicity of knowledge, 68–9; on modernity and premodernity, 57n1; on premodern exegetical practices, 73n44; on reflexivity, 97n4 Frankfurt School, xix, 12, 23, 47, 66, 152 Fraser, Nancy, 17 Freitag, Michel, 156n29 Freud, Sigmund, 130–2, 166–7 Fuller, Peter, 9 Gadamer, Hans Georg: and anticipatory understanding, 81; and applicatio, 146; on Erfahrung, 32; on Erlebnis, 48–50; on experience as disappointment of expectations, 37; on experience as negative and productive, 134; and Hegel, 52–3; on Husserl’s notion of experience, 34; on immediate experience, 22; on lack of horizon, 169 Galeano, Eduardo, 153 Garham, Nicholas, 152n21 Gasché, Rodolphe, 98–9 Geertz, Clifford, 24 Giddens, Anthony: on biographical narratives, 135n97; on counterfactuals, 92–3,

138n105; on experience and narratives, 81; on late-modern self, 156, 182; on modernity as self-reflexivity, 106, 127; on modern reflexive self, 81, 118n57; on modern temporality, 71; on premodern self, 61; on self-identity, 104n24; on tradition, 102n19, 138n105; on trust, 104 Gitlin, Todd, 16 Godzich, Wlad, 142n4 Goethe, 65, 124 Goldman, Lucien, 171 Gramscian turn, 4 Green Party, 4 group: differentiation, 8, 20–1; identity 7– 8, 10–11, 13–15, 17–21; ideology of, 21; polarization 20–2. Guattari, Félix, 18, 163, 167 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 121n64 Habermas, Jürgen: on the bourgeoisie, 170; on Hegel, 54n75; on modern temporality, 71, 80; on the new in premodernity, 74n45; on philosophy of the subject, 100; on reflexivity, 97–8 Hansen, Miriam, 3, 22 Harvey, David: on the body 14n29; on invention of tradition, 110n39; on loss of the future, 156–7 Hegel, G.W.F.: and dialectical experience, 43, 46, 51–6, 63–4, 66–7, 129–30; on immediacy 27; and reflexivity, 98–9, 99n12 ; on romanticism and bad infinity, 125, 137; unfairly critiqued, 52n67 Heidegger, Martin: on experience as the product of Naturwissenschaft, 33–4, 36; on experience as a transforming process, 32n15, 34–5, 44; on general meaning of experience, 33, 55, 162; on Hegel, 52; on Umkehrung, 42, 112 Henrich, Dieter, 128n77 hermeneutics, 73–4, 92, 108–9, 111n42 Historia Magistra Vitae, 72–5, 91–2 history from below. See Alltagsgeschichte history of difference. See Alltagsgeschichte Hobbes, Thomas, 60 Hobsbawm, Eric, 107 Honneth, Axel, 29–30, 151 Houde, Sylvain, 14 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 63n19, 105

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Index Hume, David, 27–8, 110–11 Husserl, Edmund, 34, 81, 121n64 Huyssen, Andreas: on capitalism, 167–8; on modernity, 91; on modern temporality, 92, 143; on the need for historicizing Freud, 132n90; on the need for temporal extension, 165; on the new, 145 immediate experience. See appeal to immediate experience industrial revolution. See capitalism, industrial insistence on experience, xviii, 5–8, 19, 23–8, 30, 33, 38, 114, 139–40, 154, 159– 63, 168–70, 184. See also appeal to immediate experience irrationality. See Lebensphilosophie; vitalism Iser, Wolfgang, 40 Jameson, Fredric: on the body, 14–15; on experience, 155, 177; on the ideology of groups, 21, 177; on materialism, 15n30; on naturalizing, xiv; on obsolescence of ideology, 167n14; on postmodern self, 155, 166, 167n15 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 5, 31; on Bakhtin, 44; on modern temporality, 78; on premodern temporality, 72; on reflexivity, 97n3 Jay, Martin, 23; on debates over experience, 5n6, 52–4; on dynamic of experience, 32, 35; on lived experience, 4 Jünger, Ernst, 47 Jusdanis, Gregory, 171. Kant, Immanuel: and judgments of taste, 126; and the philosophy of reflection, 98–9, 99n12; and his precritical notion of experience 12; on transcendental apperception, 111 Kerby, Anthony, 78–9, 81, 133, 135n96 Keynesianism, 144n10, 145, 156, 169–70. See also Fordism Kisiel, Theodore, 53 Koselleck, Reinhart: on consequences of modern temporal divergence, 105; on history, 96–7; on modernity, xvii, 57n1; on modern temporality, 71–2, 105; shortcomings of his work, 82–3 Krauss, Rosalind, 154, 180–1

205

Kristeva, Julia, 42, 95, 112 Kruks, Sonia, 5n6 Kulturindustrie, 152 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, 21 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 5 Landes, David, 174 late modernity, 140, 149–51, 165; and identity narratives, 158–9, 167–8. See also extended present late-modern self, 140, 151, 153–5, 163, 167–70; and agency, 164; and diminished temporal extension, 156–8, 167–9; and failure of complexity reduction, 182–3; logophobic fetishization of, 163– 8, 179–80, 183–4; pathologies of, 166–7 late-modern temporality. See extended present Leavis, F.R., 8n12. Lebensphilosophie, xiv, 28, 47–8, 128. See also vitalism Lefèbvre, Henri, 180n34 Leibnitz, Wilhelm Gottfried, 76, 99, 111, 119 local culture, 3, 8, 11, 13, 19–22, 28–30 Locke, John, 13, 28, 98–9, 163 Lovejoy, Arthur, 77n59, 108, 136 Lowe, Donald: on development, 87n85, 136; on nostalgia, 91n93; on temporality after the French Revolution, 87, 89 Löwith, Karl, 74n48 Lukács, Georg, xiv, 23, 171 Lüdke, Martin, 154 Luhmann, Niklas: on bourgeois temporality, 86–7, 110n40; on conservatio, 109n37; on disappointment of expectations, 37; on German idealism, 100; on eventness, 53–4; on experience, 32; on experience as transforming process, 40; on the future, 121; on the historicity of the modern self, 117n54; on the historicity of reflexivity, 100, 100n16; and Husserlian phenomenology, 121n64; on individuality, 59n3; on innovation in premodernity, 74n47; on meaning, 100n14, 101n17; on the media, 152; on modernity, xvii, 83n77, 97, 105n29; on modernity and functional differentiation, 83n77; on modern temporal

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divergence, 93; on normalization, 61, 138n105; on the present, 149; on reflexivity, 97, 100, 103, 106. See also complexity reduction; system; temporal complexity Lyotard, Jean-François, 44n43, 54; on libidinal intensities, 163, 180n34; on modern temporality, 71; and metanarratives, 157 Magnus, Albertus, 130–1 Marcuse, Herbert, 132n90 market ideology, 16n33, 141, 150n18, 150–1, 156–7, 166n11, 184–5. See also neoliberalism Marx, Karl, 91–2, 104, 166n11, 178 McInerney, Peter, 72n42 Mcjob, 157 Mead, G.H., 51n62, 96; on the present, 158–9; on reflexivity, 101–2 Menke-Eggers, Christoph, 5 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 88 Merleau-Ponty, 11 Messer-Dawidov, Ellen, 9 Miller, James, 130 minimalism, 154, 163, 180–1 Miyoshi, Masao, 177 modernity, 57, 91, 94, 96, 178–9, 184, 107; advent of, xvi–xvii, 57n1, 62, 171–2; and differentiation, 105n29; defined, 57n1; dynamic of, 97–9, 102, 106, 112–13; enduring topos of, 184; as euphemism for capitalism, 178; exacerbation of, 140, 147, 149n17, 150; problems of, 105, 109–11, 113, 147–9; and secularization, 75n49. See also modern temporal divergence; reflexivity, of modernity modern self-formation, xvi, 57–9, 69, 110, 171; and complexity reduction, 81, 92– 3, 103, 113, 118–21, 128–9, 131, 133–4, 137–8, 177, 181–3; erosion of, 165–71, 178–9; and experience, xvii–xviii, 38–9, 45, 61–8, 70, 89, 92–4, 113–14, 126, 135–9, 144, 154, 170, 183; and functional differentiation, 116–18; gradual extension of, 171–4, 178; historicity of, 71–2, 140–1, 169, 171–2, 178; logophobic critique of, 179–81; and memory, 110–11; and modern temporal diver-

gence, xvii, 70–1, 81–2, 91, 111, 113, 146; and narratives, 79–80, 82, 103, 118; pathologies of, 166–7; as a reflexively forged narrative, 80–1, 113, 118– 22, 124–6, 129; and survival, 103, 113, 118–20, 181–3. See also Bildung; Bildungsroman; bourgeoisie; Giddens, Anthony; naturalization, of the modern bourgeois self; public sphere; temporal extension, and modern self-formation; trauma modern temporal divergence, xvii, 70–2, 75, 78, 146, 170; eclipse of, 143–9, 152– 5, 161–2; historicity of, 71, 142; and narratives, 79–80, 82; and opening of the future, 71, 75, 83–5, 87, 92, 144; secularization thesis of, 75n45. See also temporal extension Montaigne, Michel de, 58, 60 More, Thomas, 88 Moretti, Franco: on the Bildungsroman, 117, 122; on experience, 61, 62n15; on modernity, 105 Nachträglichkeit, 131–5 National Socialism, xiv, 23, 147–9 naturalization, 7, 16–19; and dehistoricization, 32–3, 41, 141, 175; of the modern bourgeois self, 170–2, 174–7; and passivity, 153; and social Darwinism, 16n33; and tribalism, xiv ndasp. See National Socialism Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge, 3–4, 28, 34, 157 neocolonialism, 143, 184 neoethnicity. See tribalism neoliberalism, 16n33, 141–2, 145, 150n18, 156–7, 166n11, 167n14, 169, 181n35, 184–5. See also post-Fordism New Left, 8n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 146, 180n34 Novalis, 124–5 Nowotny, Helga, 110, 145 Oakeshott, Michael, 6, 38n31, 46, 130 Osborne, Peter, 128n77 pantheism controversy, 111n42 parole: 10, 73n44 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 31, 51n62

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Index Peukert, Detlev J. K., 148n15 phenomenology, 11, 37, 53–4, 100n14, 101n17, 159. See also Husserl Pickering, Michael, 5n6, 30, 38n31, 45n45 Piore, Michael, 16 Plessner, Helmut, 58 political action. See agency politics of immediacy. See appeal to immediate experience Popper, Karl, 31–2, 37 postcolonialism. See neocolonialism post-Fordism, 145, 156–7. See also neoliberalism postmodernity. See late modernity postmodern self. See late-modern self premodern temporality, 71–7, 148, 173; and experience, 74n47; and present representation theory, 72n42; as quantitative and spatial extension, 75–7, 84. See also eschatology; Historia Magistra Vitae premodern self, 114–16, 118–19, 122–3, 173–4 ; and experience, 60–1; and oral culture, 79; and ordeal, 61–2; persistence of, 173–4 public sphere: and the bourgeois self, 170– 1; counter, 3–4; differentiation from private sphere, 67; and experience, xviii, 3; and Intimsphäre, 67, 170; and modernity, 6; and the novel, 170n18, 171 Pyrrhonian skepticism, 118–19 reflexivity: of aesthetics, 98; as anthropological, 96, 101–2; as consequence of modern temporality, 96–7; as epistemological issue, 96, 100–2; and experience, 95–6; historicity of, 96, 100–5; and knowledge practices, 96–7; and Mead, G.H., 96, 101–2; of modernity, 97–8; and philosophical discourse, 98–100; of Russian formalism, 98, 113; of tradition, 107–8. See also dialectical experience; Giddens, Anthony; Luhmann, Niklas revolution: of 1830 and 1848, 173; Cromwellian, 86n82; French, 87, 90–1 Richardson, Samuel, 122–3 Ricoeur, Paul: on experience and narratives, 79–81; on modern temporality, 71n38, 161 Rimstead, Roxanne, 176

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64n24, 90 Russian formalism, 98, 113 Saint Augustine, 72n42 Sattelzeit, xvi, 62n14 Sauerland, Karol, 49–50 schizophrenia, 163, 166–8, 183 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 23n50, 75n49, 141 Scott, Joan: on experience, 7, 17–19, 38n31; and the insistence on experience, 24–5 Shusterman, Richard, 5 Seel, Martin: on experience and complexity reduction, 130; on experience as transforming process, 39–42; and reflexive aesthetics, 98n7 semiology, 8, 10 selectivity, 103, 104n23, 119–21, 148–9. See also complexity reduction; system, and selectivity Semler, Johann, 111n42 Sennett, Richard, 158 Simmel, Georg, xv, 49, 105, 132n90 Smith, Adam, 141 Smith, Barbara, 5n6 Sombart, Werner, 83n76 specificity: class, 8–9, 19–22, 28; group, 4, 7–8, 15–22; subaltern, xiv, 7, 14–15, 28, 32–3, 70, 137, 164, 175 Spinoza, Baruch, 111n42 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18, 98, 141, 179 subaltern appeal to experience. See appeal to immediate experience subaltern experience. See Thompson, E.P. subaltern identity. See group identity subaltern specificity. See specificity, subaltern sublime, 126 system: and environment, 100n14, 101n17, 103n20, 104, 119–20, 181; Luhmann’s notion of, 100n14; and meaning, 100n14, 101n17; psychic, 100n14, 101n17; and selectivity, 100n14, 103; social, 100n14, 101n17; and survival, 101n17, 104, 119, 181. See also complexity reduction; Luhmann, Niklas Taylor, Charles: on the Bildungsroman, 122n65; on the historicity of the self,

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178; on late-eighteenth-century aesthetics, 126; and modernity, 57n1; on the modern self, 69n34; on modern temporality, 71; on romantic era and our contemporary horizon, 137, 169, 172 temporal acceleration: consequences of, 149–50, 153, 155, 182; in the last three decades, 145–8, in modernity, 147–8; as a result of modern temporal divergence, 105. See also extended present temporal complexity, 105–6. See also complexity reduction; modern temporal divergence temporal contraction. See extended present temporal extension: of Dasein, 81; and Erfahrung, xiv, 23, 47; and experience, 105; and the late-modern self, 155–7, 182–3; long-term, 84–6, 89, 159, 169; and modernity, 166; and modern self-formation, 102–4, 111, 128, 135, 138; and narratives, 93, 110, 129, 167–8; the need for, 165–6, 179; short-term, 84–6, 88n86, 155, 158, 166; and subaltern theory, 161–2, 164–5, 168–9; and Warenästhetik, 154, 163. See also capitalism, fixed; capitalism, merchant; extended present; modern temporal divergence temporality: and the Aufklärung, 76–7, 90; defined, 69; historicity of, 71–2. See also modern temporal divergence; premodern temporality Tilly, Louise, 5n6 Thompson, E.P.: and empirical determinism, 28–9; on experience, 7–9, 11–15, 21, 28–30; and demarxification, 177; and the disruptive aspect of experience, 4, 30–3, 36, 51; and immediacy, 161–4, 168–9, 177–9; influence on cultural studies 7–9, 19, 21; and naturalization, 17–22, 175–7, 179; and the reflexive aspect of experience, 95; and temporality,

70, 75, 161–6; truth content of his notion of experience, 33, 179, 183–4; as useful paradigm, 7–8; on violated expectations, 29–33, 36, 43 Thompson, J.B., 120, 127n76 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 75 Toews, John, 70 tradition: and complexity reduction, 107– 8, 110, 138n105, 146; as a consequence of modern temporal divergence, 107, 109–10; invention of, 107, 110n39; in late modernity, 165; and the new, 74n45; premodern dynamic of, 108–9. See also Historia Magistra Vitae trauma, 131–3 tribalism, xiv, 7, 15–22, 182–3. See also naturalization Turner, Victor, 5, 31, 112 utopia, 88, 90–1, 143, 147–8, 154–5 utopian socialists, 92, 92n97 Vattimo, Gianni, 31 Verlagssystem, 173 vitalism, 23n50, 28–9, 47–8, 50–1, 128. See also Lebensphilosophie Voltaire, 77 Wagner, Peter, 173 Warenästhetik, 154, 163 Warnke, Georgia, 129 Weber, Max, 83n76, 85–6 Weimar Republic, 147–9 welfare capitalism. See Fordism; Keynesianism Welleck, René, 47 Wellmer, Albrecht, 44, 63 Wundt, Wilhelm, 34–5. Zammito, John H., 126n73 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 5