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THE PREDICAMENT OF EXPERIENCE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

HAROLD MAH
HAROLD MAH*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queen's University, Canada
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Extract

Every discipline has its foundational terms, those words that practitioners use to name what they study, or how they study, or why that study is valid. These terms often go unscrutinized when a discipline is up and running, but in the formative stages of a discipline and in periods of contention or crisis they often become subject to intensive criticism and attempts at redefinition. Challenging foundational terms is no simple task. Because they are foundational, they are difficult to do without, even by those who would reject them. They are often used or assumed by those who question them, and after intensive questioning is done they often simply recur, even in their most unquestioned, naive form. The “foundational” nature of foundational terms, one begins to see, is not just a matter of a basic organizing concept or a description of some natural process, but of a term that is invested with aspirations of different sorts. The term also offers authorization to interpret, enacts a wish, suggests a cultural utopia, or puts in place a political program. The density of functions found in foundational terms guarantees that even the most questioned term will return.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 97 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Other such terms might include “reason,” “nature,” “self,” and “God”—although the last has clearly lost most of its foundational status in the last two hundred years.

2 Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Theory 17 (summer 1991), 797.

3 Quoted in Jay, Martin, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 256Google Scholar, note 117. Jay is hereafter cited in the text in parentheses.

4 Ireland, Craig, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Ankersmit, Frank, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 10Google Scholar. These books are hereafter cited in the text in parentheses.

5 Jay, Martin, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar and idem, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993).

6 Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, trans. Cohen, J. M. (London, 1958), 235Google Scholar.

7 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, The Limits of State Action, trans. Coulthard, Joseph and Burrow, J. W. (Indianapolis, 1993), 10Google Scholar.

8 Ankersmit likes certain contemporary historical works, of a crossover (from academia to greater popularity) type: Simon Schama on landscape in art, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's Montaillou, Ferdinand Braudel on the Mediterranean. He does not refer to more recent historical studies nor does he explain why some of these very professional histories should escape his charge against such historical writing.

9 Not all Romanticism, of course, is like this, but the emptiness of rhetoric is sometimes evident in surprising places, as is the case with Nietzsche's idea of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Ankersmit's Romantic notion of direct historical experience also results in a significant factual error. Although sublime historical experience, like Erlebnis in general, is often triggered by some quotidian experience, in Ankersmit's book there is one striking exception to this principle. He tells us that the French Revolution traumatized some observers, ushering in an entirely new way of thinking about history; in Germany, he says, it reoriented historical writing to produce German historicism (which he calls “historism”) and its relativist appreciation of cultural and historical differences. Ankersmit does not seem to know that this historicism well precedes the French Revolution. The single most thoroughgoing theoretical statement of German historicism is Herder's essay of 1770, “Auch einer Philosophie der Geschichte.” In the case of Herder, the Revolution in fact brings out the universalist, Enlightenment streak that was also evident in his writings. On these aspects of Nietzsche and Herder, see Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 2003).

10 Initially, Ireland not very convincingly tries to qualify his argument with the disclaimer that he is speaking only of a striking “correlation” and not of a causal relationship between capitalism and this kind of experience, but the rest of the book then argues for precisely that causal relationship, showing how modern capitalism is the necessary condition of that experience's possibility. As we will see, this is more of a logical argument than a historical one.

11 See Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies.

12 The one indication, an allusion to Marxist wishfulness, is in the title in the prefix to the word modernity. Following the one-time Marxist description of twentieth-century capitalism as “late” capitalism, Ireland calls his modernity “late”—why it is is never established. This gesture in twentieth-century Marxist writing arose to indicate how capitalism had not quite become what had Marx expected but still indicated a belief in Marxist teleology—in the ultimate course of its development to its demise. The same significance is carried over in calling modernity late but now even more problematically, since that teleology and predicted demise seem even more unlikely. How can one know if capitalist modernity is now in its “late” stage? It might just be in an “early” stage or a “middle” one of finally globalizing itself as Marx predicted prematurely in the 1840s. There is no way to determine such stages without some assumption about the overall course of capitalist development, precisely what Ireland's book says is now unknowable. That predictive knowledge is precisely what Marxist teleology guaranteed, and that guarantee is now gone.

13 Montaigne, who believed—wrongly—that he was near the end of his life, does not assume anything particularly new and unexpected will happen to him. His advanced years here cancel out further susceptibility to uncertain experience, as he knows how he will respond to a wide range of situations.