Book of Jay.

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: MODERN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN VARIATIONS ON A UNIVERSAL THEME

BY MARTIN JAY

BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. 431 PAGES. $35.

When writers appeal to "experience," what exactly do they mean? This is the central question that structures the argument of Martin Jay's Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Early on in his account of the intellectual history of experience, Jay celebrates Michel de Montaigne's sixteenth-century attempt to remain open to every new possibility. Cheerfully asking "What do I know?" Montaigne accepted the invitation to learn from his encounters with others, even as he realized that there was no way truly to experience ultimate otherness-since that would be tantamount to death. Montaigne strove to be utterly open to the world while recognizing that there was plenty he would have to miss. But this openness is only one dimension of Jay's subject. He also considers various attempts to isolate those experiences from which one can reliably learn, to pin down those experiences that might serve as the basis for the development of a rational science. In the thought of Descartes and Bacon, Jay finds a theme that carries through to our own time: the effort to protect certain experiences from contamination in order that one might use them as evidence. Epistemology first attempts to make experience safe for science, and then, with Kant, to identify the conditions of possibility for the very having of experience.

Following these preliminary thoughts, Jay shows how various thinkers have "divided up" the concept of experience, perhaps in reaction to the fracturing of our lives from one another. After considering the development of epistemology, Jay devotes chapters to religion, aesthetics, politics, and history. For each subject area, he demonstrates elegantly how writers have continued to use the idea of experience to capture a specific kind of intensity and otherness. Theologians, philosophers of art, and historians have been eager to anchor their discussions in an appeal to the specificity of our ways of taking in the divine, the beautiful, even our own pasts. But with every fresh appeal to experience, there have been attacks on its authenticity, on its slippery or deceptive qualities, and in general, a casting of doubt on the capacity of experience to serve as a foundation for knowledge. Given the range of material Jay serves up here, it may seem gluttonous to ask for more. But I do regret that he did not consider those thinkers focused on the way in which technology has transformed the nature of objects experienced, as well as that of the subjects who experience them. How do the contemporary use of avatars and the paradoxical notion of "virtual experience" fit into Jay's historical account?

After examining these "branches" of experience and the disciplines that have grown up around them, Jay turns to three major intellectual movements of the twentieth century--pragmatism, critical theory (the Frankfurt School version), and post-structuralism--and the way in which these movements reconsidered the concept of experience in relation to the changes brought about by modernity. Among the pragmatists, James and Dewey drew on Emerson to develop a robust concept of experience that did not depend on a powerful self or homogeneous subject having the experience. The pragmatists posited experience as a kind of never-ending experiment, a way of trying things out without committing to any particular result. Jay is attracted to their vision, though he is critical of Richard Rorty's contemporary appropriation of it. Rorty deromanticizes the pragmatist quest when he emphasizes the mediated nature of all encounters with otherness. Of course there is otherness out there, the philosopher has argued. But when we have experiences, we bring that otherness "in here"--that is, into our linguistic or conceptual schemes. Rorty challenges our celebration of otherness by emphasizing how we must, of necessity, make things our own.

Jay prefers by contrast the pathos and politics of German critical theory. His account of Walter Benjamin's wrestling with modernity's destruction of experience is incisive and compelling, even if Benjamin's own ideas never reached conceptual clarity. Benjamin longed for a notion of experience in its unity, a unity that has been lost in the fracturing of modernity. But even if he struggled toward a redemptive perspective, he knew there was no possibility of simply recovering an imagined wholeness from the past. Instead, Benjamin sought to find--through the shocks and traumas of modernity--a path to a new form of experience, one that would acknowledge both the passive and the active dimensions of encountering the fullness of the world. Jay is clearly sympathetic as well to the attempts of Theodor Adorno to maintain the secular, political vitality of the perspective of redemption. For Adorno, it is our aesthetic experience that reminds us of what our lives might be, and it is art that keeps our hopes alive for a radical openness to the unexpected.

After his stirring account of Benjamin and Adorno, Jay's final chapter, covering Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault, is anticlimactic. Although the French poststructuralists are rightly associated with an emphasis on linguistic mediation and a suspicion of appeals to experience, Jay turns to these three authors because of their infatuation with the ecstatic, or limit, experience. All three explored the ways in which the body can take one out of language, even if they were never able to explain how the cultivation of such intensity could possibly make a difference to those who were, after all, only reading them. The poststructuralists' perilous gestures at politicizing their pleasures and pains did not amount, as Jay tries to argue, to a "reconstitution of experience"; rather, Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault had simply learned the lesson of Emerson; "The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway."

Songs of Experience is at once modest and extraordinarily ambitious. The erudition on display in this sweeping account of a central concept in Western philosophy over several hundred years is a wonder; the writing is clear, and the scholarship breathtaking. But it is modest in the sense that it does not announce its own point of view with any emphasis. Instead, the reader benefits from the author's openness to thinkers as unalike as Schleiermacher and Rorty, Oakeshott and Bataille. Jay makes sense of each thinker on his own terms--and that's because with his intellectual openness and his conceptual mediation, Jay indeed practices what he is so lightly preaching. An intellectual historian at the top of his game, he has shared his own experience of these ideas, texts, and writers. After reading his book, we can, too.

Michael Roth is president of the California College of the Arts in Oakland.