Bonding the Social: Experience and Everyday Life. PDF

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Bonding the Social: Experience and Everyday Life Lecture Notes....

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BONDING THE SOCIAL: EXPERIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Experience is connected to epistemology  

Epistemology - study of knowledge. Experience and knowledge are connected – but in complicated ways.

Mainstream epistemology has tended to assume:  Objective is better than subjective.  It is possible to obtain objective knowledge = free from bias caused by individual subjective perspectives. Experience as a source of knowledge:  Common-sense view - we use experience as a key source of (good, true) knowledge.  If experience is the source of knowledge, then it’s people’s experiences that build/make possible their culture, forms of expression, ideologies, etc. Experience and knowledge: a more complex view:  But, experience as a source of meaning is impossible.  Cultural and signifying systems predate the individual; they form the resources from which meaning is constructed for/by each person.  Without these systems there wouldn’t be anything to make sense of experience with.  Experience is not the precondition for meaning, but vice versa: meaning is the precondition of experience.  But, (less obviously) this also means that knowledge also affects how you experience and the meaning/sense you make of experiences (i.e. the knowledge generated). Situated knowledge and knowers:  Donna Haraway introduced terminology of ‘situated subjects/knowers’ and ‘situated knowledge’.  Argued that everyone is situated, therefore ‘God’s-eye view’ is impossible for anyone.  ‘Situated’ means the sociological, historical, geographical, biological context etc. Whose experience? Whose Knowledge?  First definitions of experience appeared in the discourse of Liberalism in the 17th century → experience was seen as a property of the individual.  But remember that in early liberalism, not every person was an individual. o Only those with the ‘correct’ experience and located in the ‘correct’ social place - proper ‘individuals’ and therefore owners of real knowledge. o White, English, bourgeois, male; women, children, Black people, the poor, the criminal, other socially marginalised groups did not ‘know’ enough (or the right things).

Social power and knowledge:  Critical feminist approaches to social theory were sensitive to the power relations within experience/knowledge.

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Some people’s experiences don’t get documented. o Epistemic exclusion and injustice. (Perhaps) subjugated peoples have a better vision from ‘below the brilliant space platforms of the powerful’ (Haraway 1991, 190-191). o May be preferred because the subjugated have less to lose.

Individuals, experience and knowledge:  So, experience becomes a political issue o The politics of who has the status of an ‘individual’ able to produce real ‘experience’ and ‘knowledge’ – and who does not?  The production of knowledge is a political practice  “All knowledge is produced from social and cultural relations, underpinned by economic and institutional organisation (…) Knowledge is a process, a product, a resource and increasingly a commodity.” (Skeggs 1995, 3). Experience then…  Is not simple data or information about an event that an individual ‘went through’.  Experience is constitutive: to experience something is to go through a process that contributes to making that individual.  Meanings and understandings already exist that allow those events to be understood as particular experiences, and which are, at the same time, continuously updated (new things happen).  Understanding experience shows how subjects come into being within their particular social positions. What use is experience for sociology?  Links the private and the public, the concrete lives of subjects and the broader symbolic and cultural meanings that societies work with.  Accounts of experience help understand ‘situated subjects’ because they offer a means through which to observe and decode how subjects have constructed a sense of themselves, their environment, and their understandings of their lives, in particular social contexts.  They don’t give access to ‘truth’. Everyday life:  Historically trivialised and dismissed.  Why should we waste our time examining ‘trivial’ matters of everyday life when there are more important/urgent/serious matters in the world?  Focus on the wider picture.  Scott (2009): are we really missing the wider picture?  Everyday life is the wider picture.  Sites where people ‘do’ (perform, reproduce, and challenge) social life, day to day.  Everyday life is mundane, habitual, routine, repetitive: doing the same thing, at the same time, again and again, produces social life.  Everyday life appears as personal and private, the product of our own individual choices: but those patterns reflect the public, social world.

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Sociology practices a dual focus examining how micro-level, small-scale practices related to, and shaped by, macro-level patterns.

Experience and everyday life:  Experience and everyday life are central concepts in contemporary sociology.  Particularly relevant to critiquing sociological dichotomies of public/private, subjectivity/objectivity, micro/macro.  Investigating everyday life were once looked down on by (some) sociologists, but has now gained status within sociology because it can enable challenging such easy dichotomies.  By doing so it offers a way of rethinking the basis and foundation of what sociology can know (i.e. epistemology) and how we do sociology (i.e. methodology)....