Joan Scott on Experience

Experience is not a word we cannot do without, although, given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is tempting to abandon it altogether. But experience is so much a part of everyday language, so imbricated in our narratives that it seems futile to argue for its expulsion. It serves as a way of talking about what happened, of establishing difference and similarity, of claiming knowledge that is "unassailable." [43] Given the ubiquity of the term, it seems to me more useful to work with it, to analyze its operations and to redefine it meaning. This entails focusing [sic] on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of "experience" and on the politics of its construction. Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightfoward; it is always contested, and always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. Such an analysis would constitute a genuinely nonfoundational history, one which retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories. [44] It also cannot guarantee the historian's neutrality, for deciding which categories to historicize is inevitably political, necessary tied to the historian's recognition of his or her stake in the production of knowledge. Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain. This kind of approach does not undercut politics by denying the existence of subjects; it instead interrogates the processes of their creation and, in doing so, refigures history and the role of the historian and opens new ways of thinking about change.[45]

-Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience" in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago, 1991), p. 387.