Relations of Mutual Constitution

Abstract

It is a truism that experience is both what people make happen and what happens to them, and yet many of the problems in social and historical theory, in cultural studies and in sociological analysis, stem from this differentiation. In his entry on the term in the revised edition of Keywords, Williams notes that the direct and engaged participatory sense of experience contrasts most of all with the idea of experience as ‘the product of social conditions or of systems of belief; experience in this contrasting sense constitutes ‘evidence of conditions or systems which by definition it cannot itself explain’ (1987: 128). The opposition this sets up to the active sense of the term involved in the generation of structures of feeling, or the Diltheyan emphasis on the dynamic of experience pressing out through existing structures to a new defining expressive form or social figuration as part of the process of cultural innovation and change, could hardly be more striking. While in practice analysis has often taken intermediate positions, such opposition has reinforced the polarised distinctions made between culture and ideology, individual and society, expression and the commodification of expressive forms, or creative possibility in the face of economic forces and constraints, with the greater stress on one or the other side of these oppositions then contributing to breaks and demarcations between different theoretical approaches and positions.

But cultural studies is not just about theories or texts: it deals with lived experiences, and with the intersections of social structures, systems of representation, and subjectivities — intersections which are, of course, relations of mutual constitution. Here it does matter if the interpretation does not fit experience.

(Janet Wolff)