Crossing the Asses’ Bridge

Abstract

So far I have been preparing the ground for a broader consideration of the category of experience in historical and cultural analysis. This will involve thinking around some of the problems which are raised by the ways in which the meanings made of any object of study are influenced and coloured by our social and historical experience. But the first question that needs to be addressed is how experience itself may be conceptualised and understood as a constituent in the production of cultural and historical meanings. Experience as an analytical category in cultural studies and social history remains slippery and elusive. It seems to defy any attempt to use it with precision, and always to become stubbornly tangled in wider senses and associations. It is because of this that it generates both fascination and frustration. This chapter will therefore explore the term conceptually in an attempt to clarify and sharpen up its various references and meanings. I shall begin by tracing certain aspects of its historical usages and development.

The basis of our consciousness of self is the abiding fact that without a world we would not have such a consciousness, and without this consciousness no world would exist for us. What occurs in this contact is life, not a theoretical process; it is what we call an experience, that is, pressure and counter-pressure, expanding towards things which in turn respond, a vital power within and around us which is experienced in pleasure and pain, in fear and hope, in grief over burdens which cannot be shifted, in delight over what we receive as gifts from outside. So the I is not a spectator who sits in front of the world’s stage, but is involved in actions and counteractions in which the same actualities are overwhelmingly experienced whether kings figure in them or fools and clowns. This is why no philosopher could ever persuade those involved that everything was appearance or show and not reality.

(Wilhelm Dilthey)