Three Paradigms of Experience

Abstract

In this chapter we consider the relationship between experience and socio-political change from a historical perspective. Hence, our purpose is to situate a series of broad concepts and critiques of experience in relation to historical transformations in modes of thinking and doing politics (rather than to give an in-depth account of the complexities and debates within each of the positions we are discussing). We start with a discussion of what is considered to be the dominant paradigm in contemporary understandings of politics: this paradigm privileges forms of political engagement which target the state and draw on a notion of experience as universal. The limitations of state politics have led to a second paradigm, micropolitics, which entails a radical questioning of foundational notions of experience. Instead, experience is understood as situated. Yet the efficacy of micropolitics is open to question: as this position has developed so too have the reach and the strengths of neoliberal state powers. Seen historically, micropolitics and neoliberalism can be understood, not only as related movements, but as constitutive of each other. Is it possible now to rupture this connection, to think politics beyond our current socio-political conditions? In Chapter 6 we introduced the notion of outside politics.