Experiencing

Abstract

This chapter will consider some of the relationships between feelings and experience. In recent years, there has been a small trend amongst psychologists to focus primarily upon experience itself, as opposed to focusing on the components (cognition, affect, memory, perception) from which it is constituted. Middleton and Brown (2005) study how experience is produced by dynamic processes of remembering. Drawing on Halbwachs and Bergson they argue against static, ‘container’ notions of memory, proposing instead that remembering continuously ‘gnaws into the present’. The past is a virtual realm constantly getting actualised in the present, where its invocations co-constitute experience by giving it temporal direction and personal meaning. By contrast, Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2007) are more overtly concerned with power. They develop a post-Foucauldian notion of experience within which disciplinary practices continuously and contingently generate excesses that subvert their own force: this means that experience is always shaped by power relations, but never wholly determined by them. Taking another perspective, Bradley (2005) explores the relations between time, contingency and experience, drawing on psychoanalysis to understand some of the ways in which our experience of ourselves is always somewhat obscure and lacking transparency.