Primacy of vision The privileging of vision as source of knowledge Writing is in the service of vision Enlarging or completing the picture making the invisible visible illuminating the lives of others ID: 626866
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Slide1
Joan Scott
“Experience”Slide2
Primacy of vision
The privileging of vision as source of knowledge
Writing is in the service of vision
Enlarging or completing the picture; making the invisible visible; illuminating the lives of othersSlide3
Evidence of experience
Referential notion of evidence—reflection of the real
Experience as uncontestable evidence—evidence for the fact of difference
Originary
point of explanation
Foundation on which analysis is based
Identity taken as self-evident
Meaning as transparent
Agency reified and
decontextualisedSlide4
Historicising experience
--stemmed from a critique of empiricism
--precludes analysis of the ideological system; reproduces its terms
--ignores that difference is constituted relationally
--historical processes position subjects and produce their experiences (p. 25)
--subjects are constituted through experience
--experience: that which we seek to explain, about which knowledge is produced (p. 26)Slide5
Experience as a foundational trope
Takes people as already constituted;
naturalises
categories
--subjects seen as fixed and autonomous;
--reliable sources—access the real by means of experienceSlide6
Between
social structure and social consciousness (E P Thompson)
Experience as social being—the lived realities of social life,
incl
the affective domains of family, religion and the symbolic domain of expression
--escape from strong structural determination, via feeling, agency, defies prediction
--relations of production are the common denominator, a unifying phenomenon: a common identity of class (that pre-exists politics)
--other subject positions subsumed: gender, race, sexualitySlide7
A critique
Contradictory and contested processes of identity formation
No smooth translation from the personal to the political (lived experience of women does not necessarily lead to feminist consciousness)
Politics is about
organising
and interpreting experience
Experience is necessarily discursive (not outside signification and discourse)
Identity not simply foundSlide8
Critique, contd.
Processes of identity production
Discursive
nature of experience
Politics of constructing experience
Experience is both an interpretation and in need of interpretation
Experience is not the origin of explanation but that which we want to explain