Is there anything beyond experience? Behind experience? Other than experience?
Can or should we explain experience away?
These are challenges posed by reductionistic and formalistic theorists.
Is God a delusion? Can God be explained away as “the opium of the people,” or as a by-product of human physiology? Or do we have to take religious experience seriously, on its own terms, as William James urged?
If whiteness is experienced as something shameful, as something to feel guilty about—as I believe it does for many white folks—then what does a structural explanation that (rightly) points out the normative power of whiteness achieve?
Does the concept of white privilege—as important as it is—lack some degree of power if white folks don’t live out their whiteness as privilege? Can we come to our participants and say—“no, no, what you are feeling and experiencing is actually privilege?”
Phenomenology and narrative approaches require that our analyses take experience seriously, and not attempt to “explain it away.” This is a huge challenge. A phenomenological grounding of our concepts means that we have to reconstruct everything in line with how it is lived. It means that structure signifies little apart from the way in which it turns up in our everyday experiences—the insight that is brought to us from ethnomethodology.
These are controversial and hard discussions. I don’t have any hard answers to them. Structure matters, but so does experience. Those writers who can keep the two in dialogue are those I value most.
They teach me to truly despise our social sins (the unjust structures I find myself in), while at the same time, embracing my brothers and sisters, with whom I am a social sinner (our shared human experiences).
Kyle, I'm struggling with this post a bit in the discussion of privilege. I understand, I think, the concept that for a person to live whiteness as privilege, they must consciously do so, without someone interpreting their life as one of privilege. Here's my conflict - even if a person does not choose to live a privileged life, the system they live in could be privileged, and others could live their lives in reaction to that. So, the person in question could still be living a life of privilege even if they are not actively seeking that privilege, based on all the life experiences that came before that person.
ReplyDeleteHope to unpack this more in class.