Ideologies of Experience

Matthew H. Bowker offers a novel analysis of "experience": the vast and influential concept that
has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium.

While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not
relied in some way on the notion of "experience" in defining its assumptions or aims, no study
has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of
experience. Doing so reveals that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience
over the centuries particularly its unthinkability, its correspondence with suffering, and its
occlusion of the self are part of unlikely fantasies or ideologies. By analyzing a series of
related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory,
the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book
builds a convincing case that ideologies of experience are invoked not to keep us close to lived
realities and things-in-themselves, but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of
ourselves and others.

In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as
Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the
ideologies of experience ultimately discourage individuals and groups from creating, resisting,
and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, deprivation, and self-
abandonment.

Matthew H. Bowker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Medaille College in

Buffalo, NY. His work applies psychoanalytic and literary-critical approaches to topics in
political philosophy.
 Ideologies of Experience
Trauma, Failure, Deprivation, and the Abandonment of the Self

Matthew H. Bowker
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First published 2016
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For Julie and Zoe, my beloveds
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Experience, Failure, and Thinking

Chapter 3: The Incorporation and Transmission of Traumatic Experience

Chapter 4: Misunderstood and Repeated Experience in Le Malentendu

Chapter 5: Experience and Control in Higher Education

Chapter 6: Aloneness and its Opposites

Chapter 7: Hikikomori: Deprived, Isolated, and Disfigured Selves

Chapter 8: Natural Experience and the State of Nature

Index