What Is Experience? Foucauldian Perspectives

Sanna Tirkkonen

doi:10.1515/opphil-2019-0032

Abstract

Abstract Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) thought is widely used in the humanities and social sciences for investigating experiences of madness, illness, marginalization and social conflicts. However, the meaning of the word “experience” is not always clearly defined, and the French word expérience has a whole variety of meanings. In this article I explicate Foucault’s most relevant concepts of experience and their theoretical functions. He refers to experience throughout his career, especially in his early texts on existential psychiatry from the 1950s and 1960s and in his late work from the 1980s. Texts such as Mental Illness and Psychology and Dire vrai sur soi-même have received less attention than Foucault’s most famous books, but they show that references to experience form significant theoretical and thematic links between his earlier investigations of mental distress and his late work on ethics. When Foucault reorganizes his work in the 1980s, he looks back to his early work in his search for a new concept of experience. I argue that in these contexts, experience cannot be understood as an outcome of activity that organizes perceptions and leads to objective knowledge, but experiences are not defined as events produced by discourses, either. I demonstrate in this article how Foucault uses the concept of experience to structure his research on ethical subjectivity and cultural practices of care. At the same time the article questions some standard interpretations of his work.

Highlights

Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) thought has played a central role in the debate on the status of experience in qualitative research in the empirical sciences
In this article I explicate Foucault’s most relevant concepts of experience and their theoretical functions. He refers to experience throughout his career, especially in his early texts on existential psychiatry from the 1950s and 1960s and in his late work from the 1980s. Texts such as Mental Illness and Psychology and Dire vrai sur soi-même have received less attention than Foucault’s most famous books, but they show that references to experience form significant theoretical and thematic links between his earlier investigations of mental distress and his late work on ethics
Foucault often refers to experience as a spatial abstraction that demarcates a field of knowledge, but in his late work he develops a concept that includes the first-person perspective of experience without overlooking the societal, cultural and political conditions of the subject’s self-understanding

Summary

Introduction

Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) thought has played a central role in the debate on the status of experience in qualitative research in the empirical sciences. It has been claimed that Foucault operates with two contradictory concepts of experience: first, the “objective” structures of experience that condition the ways in which subjects perceive themselves; and second, the “subjective” notion of experience that implies the possibility of reflecting on and questioning the objective structures.[4] But he uses many different concepts of experience, such as “lived experience”, “background experience”, “contradictory experience”, “transformative experience”, “forms of experience”, “fields of experience”, “limit-experience” and “experience of the self” These different concepts include intersubjective and personal, societal and political, spatial, abstract, and very concrete features depending on their meanings and contexts of usage. References to experience form significant theoretical and thematic links between his earlier investigations of medical, especially psychiatric, knowledge and his late work on ethics In his early texts Foucault focuses on experiences of mental distress and their conditions, investigates the margins of society, and at the same time seeks ways to speak about experiences in their own terms. I show that a Foucauldian investigation of dietary instructions, physical and mental exercises and recommendations to keep oneself in good health should include an analysis of relationships, knowledge and values that sustain the so-called culture of the self, but one should pay attention to the ways in which subjects are present to themselves and seek new forms of subjectivity

Experiencing and Contradictory Experience in Foucault’s Early Essays

Forms of Experience and Limit-Experience in History of Madness

The Illusion of Objective Experience

Experience of the Self

Care of the Self as a Form of Experience

Conclusions