Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme

Berkeley historian and critic, Martin Jay, offers a roadmap to trace the many vicissitudes of the idea of "experience" from the Greeks to Foucault. No other book out there does so with the thoroughness and detail for which Jay is justly known. Showing its roots in the Greek stress on reason and its capacities, Jay goes on to describe the humanist appropriation of it in Montaigne (1533-1592), whose holistic concept inevitably splits off into epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political and historical variants. In a novel move, Jay then shows how various 20th-century traditions (dialectical, pragmatist, phenomenological and poststructuralist) all try to reconstitute a more holistic version of the concept with varying degress of success. Or rather, "success," he tells us, is not entirely the right word, for there is no putatively correct version toward which the story leads. Although Jay provides hints sometimes about why a variant of the idea should have taken the form it did, he generally eschews rooting the ideas in the life-experiences of the authors he considers. "Such attempts," he explains, "generally presuppose a given notion of the experience out of which the ideas are alleged to emerge" (5). His whole book is aimed against this presupposition. The book is very rich and fairly luxuriates in the many relevant primary and secondary texts turned up in his research. These are not just window-dressing but themselves play a large role in informing the reader about Jay's statements and judgments of specific authors and the peculiarities of their arguments. The last chapter on poststructuralism may come as a surprise, for it shows how Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault--who are usually taken to be destroyers of the centered self and its unproblematic inner experience--actually push for concepts and practices that yield a somewhat more positive notion of experience. In this new light, Bataille appears as a devotee of a Nietzschean experimental life that is not automatically nihilistic. An admirer of Bataille, the literary critic Roland Barthes offers an image of a desiring body drawn to whatever takes its fancy in spite of the specter of death that haunts his whole "cruising" mentality. Yet another supporter of Bataille, Michel Foucault, combines Bataille, Barthes and Nietzsche to propose a daredevil savant ceaselessly juggling "the subject, truth and the constitution of experience" (394). Although Jay wouldn't endorse Foucault's concept as the latest and thus correct verson, he does admire its combination of the moments contained within it: Bildung, aesthetic self-fashioning, prereflective existence and postreflective reconstruction. It is therefore not surprising that Jay ends his "experience-book" (Foucault's term) (409) with the idea that experience is a constant opening out to the world of the other, or the new, so that you may be transformed. It's a voyage he urges on us all even though we may encounter a shipwreck or two. The