rhetoric of experience

My reading of Yeats this afternoon was somewhat diverted by the debate on Experience at antigram & elsewhere.

“Even the things that once excited me beyond measure seem to me mere rhetoric” (Yeats, 1910, to Lady Gregory, re reading Swinburne).

Another way of putting this might be: what I once mistook for pure immediate emotion was in fact produced by identifiable rhetorical devices. Or: when I thought I was responding to content, I was in fact reacting to the formal devices in which that content was ‘couched’.

Experience is produced by forms, structures, categories that only later, or by labours of estrangement or analysis, make themselves visible. The value sometimes put on experience – ‘you can’t take away the fact that I experienced it that way, that that is how I experienced it’ – can be at the expense of such labour, which precisely does ‘take away’ this self-evidence/ self-authorisation (which is sometimes thought to indicate some irreducible individuality), and so it should.

Moreover, and I think this goes back to the post on cultural difference, people often regard themselves as experiencing raw data, brute facts – thus, the proverbial English person who thinks that ‘American loudness’ is immediately given in experience rather than being that ‘objective mirage’, that effect of difference, I mentioned before. What constitutes experience is culturally, and categorically, determined.

n.b. It’s presumably not only the mediated, culturally saturated nature of experience that needs examining, but the category of ‘experience’ itself and its historical variability (recall the key role of the Erlebnis/Erfahrung distinction in 20th C German thinking).

Having got all that out of the way, I’m a little puzzled by antigram's initial claim that ‘arguments from experience are always arguments from fantasy’. How so? Any attempts (in the comments thread) to elicit from DM how he arrives at this idea, or why we should find it plausible is blanked, as far as I can tell. As it stands, then, I see no reason to pursue it. (Jodi Dean seems to second DM's proposition, even though her own post on British ‘spatial navigation’ would appear to be an object lesson in illegitimate arguments form experience.)

It seems to me that the first thing to be done here is sort out different kinds of ‘argument from experience’.

If, having only experienced one kind of toilet, I tour the continent and experience several different kinds and thus begin to see that my, English, toilet is culturally interesting, then this seems fair enough to begin with at least. If as a child I am humiliated by a French teacher and develop some general idea about the sadism of the French, then that’s something altogether different. Or if I assume that my experience – of anger, say – is automatically representative (eg of class or ethnic anger). ‘Experience’ covers too variegated a range of experiences, and ways of arguing ‘from’ these experiences are similarly diverse. I’m assuming that antigram is only talking about a particular kind of argument from experience. But i'd also like to make another point...

One sometimes gets the idea that experiences are only some sort of ‘private’ affect that bear no necessary relation to the structures ‘around’ them. But experience should be thought of, rather, in terms of durable dispositions, Bourdieu's ‘habitus’, ways of seeing and reacting which are fully part of those structures, which because they are not simply private can be rounded on and read as social hieroglyphs.

So for Bourdieu, the visceral disgust that a French haute-bourgeois feels at the way a worker eats their dinner is of course part of a system of such dispositions, linked by homology, and reposing on a certain categorical structure; this structure reproduces certain social divisions. So it is that the haute-bourgeois should be able, given certain shocks, estrangements or whatever, be able to read this ‘raw experience’ as socially and ideologically eloquent. And so it is that any of us should be able to argue or theorise ‘from’ our own experience… which is what I suspect K-Punk was doing in the first place.