Dude, that's totally A.O. Scott's mom

I'm crushed a bit by the amount of thinking that is required do wade through theoretical articles relevant to life writing, but I'm also energized by this one...

Scott, J. W. (1991). The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773-797.

Documenting the experience of others in this way has been at once a highly successful and limiting strategy for historians of difference. It has been successful because it remains so comfortably within the disciplinary framework of history, working according to rules that permit calling oldnarratives into question when new evidence is discovered. The status of evidence is, of course, ambiguous for historians. On the one hand, they acknowledge that "evidence only counts as evidence and is only recognized as such in relation to a potential narrative, so that the narrative can be said to determine the evidence as much as the evidence determines the narrative."

This is very much 'food for thought' -- my mind will continue to munch on these ideas for awhile. Particularly the pitfalls Scott points out:

When the evidence offered is the evidence of "experience," the claim for referentiality is further buttressed-what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is based-that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured-about language (or discourse) and history-are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.

It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience.

Raymond Williams assumes that we are all individuals. R. G. Collingwood assumes we can be objective analysts of our experience. E. P. Thompson said class was a product of experience, but never explained experience directly. Feminists demand attention to their experience, but forget to explain what "their" means. Toews is worst of all, since experience is for him a universal, always used but never defined.

Talking about experience in these ways leads us to take the existence of individuals for granted (experience is something people have) rather than to ask how conceptions of selves (of subjects and their identities) are produced.

The concepts of experience described by Williams preclude inquiry into processes of subject-construction; and they avoid examining the relationships between discourse, cognition, and reality, the relevance of the position or situatedness of subjects to the knowledge they produce, and the effects of difference on knowledge.

The question of where the historian is situated-who he is, how he is defined in relation to others, what the political effects of his history may be-never enters the discussion.

Thompson's brilliant history of the English working class, which set out to historicize the category of class, ends up
essentializing it.

The kind of argument for a women's history (and for a feminist politics) that Riley criticizes closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible, the ways in which race and sexuality intersect with gender, the ways in which politics
organize and interpret experience-in sum, the ways in which identity is a contested terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims. In Riley's words, "it masks the likelihood that ... [experiences] have accrued to women not by virtue of their womanhood alone, but as traces of domination, whether natural or political." I would add that it masks the necessarily discursive character of these experiences as well.

A refusal of essentialism seems particularly important once again these days within the field of history, as disciplinary pressure builds to defend the unitary subject in the name of his or her "experience."

It ought to be possible for historians (as for the teachers of literature
Spivak so dazzlingly exemplifies) to "make visible the assignment of subject-positions," not in the sense of capturing the reality of the objects seen, but of trying to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced, and which processes themselves are unremarked and indeed achieve their effect because they are not noticed.

The question then becomes how to analyze
language, and here historians often (though not always and not necessarily) confront the limits of a discipline that has typically constructed itself in opposition to literature.