Imagine sitting on your couch and doom-scrolling through your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feed. Someone who has never done any of that asks you what you are doing. How do you describe the experience of sitting at home on your couch, looking at a device that is showing you live or recent updates of thoughts, feelings, and actions from hundreds of people who are all over the world? Equally strange might be one philosopher’s account written back in 1978 making sense of this disparity. Giorgio Agamben opens his essay “Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience” saying:
The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us. For just as modern man has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been expropriated. Indeed, his incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the few self-certainties to which he can lay claim.
Walter Benjamin diagnosed the poverty of experience of the modern age back in 1933 but, Agamben says, found its origin in catastrophe, that of the First World War. Agamben continues,
Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the nether world of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street. Neither the cloud of tear gas slowly dispersing between the buildings of the city centre, [Surprisingly spot on for 2020, right?] nor the rapid blasts of gunfire from who knows where; nor queuing up at a business counter, nor visiting the Land of Cockayne at the supermarket, nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.
It is this non-translatability into experience that now makes everyday existence intolerable- as never before- rather than an alleged poor quality of life or its meaninglessness compared with the past (on the contrary, perhaps everyday existence has never been so replete with meaningful events).
What a depressing view of reality, right? Yet, this seems to capture the essence of many people’s sentiments towards the hum-drum of life today. Agamben argues that in the past, the everyday occurrences made up the experience of each generation and that is what would translate to the next generation. Travelers’ tales of dragons and cities of gold demonstrated that the unusual couldn’t be translated into experience. Experience, he argues, has its necessary correlation in authority, in the words and narrative, rather than knowledge. Today, no one wants to claim authority nor do they realize that their authority is founded in their experience. Instead, Agamben claims that today all authority is founded on what cannot be experienced, and no one will accept the validity of an authority whose sole claim to legitimacy was their experience. Experience no longer is an authority. This is epitomized in anecdotes not constituting evidence (even in large numbers) in scientific and medicinal experiments.
Now, this isn’t to say that there are no more experiences, but that they are enacted outside of the individual. The individual merely observes them second-hand. This occurs in two ways. In the first, we see a picture of a breathtaking view and admire it, but have no desire to be there ourselves. The second way is by taking pictures of the view rather than simply experiencing the view. One stays just long enough to get a picture, just to move on to the next picture-taking location. Experience is relegated to tools outside of the individual. Why is experience no longer an authority?
Agamben argues that it is because modern science’s origins are founded in a mistrust of experience. Science tries to verify experience through the experiment and this is what displaces experience from the individual into the tools. Montaigne’s Essays demonstrate that experience is incompatible with certainty, and once an experience has become measurable and certain, it immediately loses its authority. You cannot tell a story where a scientific law holds sway. In other words, you cannot tell a story that holds authority about gravity because a listener can just invoke the law of gravity to encompass the totality of authority.
Agamben’s task at hand is laying the groundwork for the “coming philosophy” that Walter Benjamin proposed. Benjamin was trying to discover or create a concept of knowledge by relating experience to Kant’s transcendental consciousness. In doing so it makes not only mechanical but religious experience logically possible. He argued that Kant’s knowledge is based on empirical experience alone, which is restricted to the Newtonian paradigm of the Enlightenment. This was grounded in the strict distinction between a subject and an object. However, up until this time and the beginnings of modern science, experience was separate from knowledge and each was connected to different subjects! The subject of experience was common sense (in the Aristotelian sense).
The subject of pre-modern science is the nous, the intellect, which is separate from experience. The intellect was separate and divine, it was not a faculty of the soul in the Classical sense, but communicates with the soul in order to bring about knowledge, which comes from the divine. So, in Antiquity the question of knowledge is not a relationship between a subject and an object but rather a relationship between the one and the many. It is a question of how the relation between a particular separate intellect and certain individuals works, or in other words, between an individual human in relation to other humans and the divine/universal. It is this difference that characterizes human knowledge as a pathei mathos–something that can only be learned from personal experience and is the genesis of learning, it also excludes any possibility of foresight, or of knowing anything with certainty.
To describe this as a psychedelic experience, an individual does psychedelics and enters an experience, they connect with the divine and bring back knowledge. Many times in the psychedelic experience, an individual comes back with information regarding the relationships they are a part of. These might be familial in nature, regarding friendships, or their place in society or the world. The information regards themselves (the one) and others (the many). They learn divine knowledge and understand it via their relations with other people and the world.
Returning to Agamben, he argues that traditional experience, as Montaigne argues, is true to the separation of experience and science, of human knowledge and divine knowledge. Experience for Montaigne, is the boundary between the two spheres, the goal of which is nearing to death which is the extreme limit of experience (death being representative of divine knowledge/pure science). Death is not necessarily something that can be experienced but only can be approached. (Montaigne must have never taken mushrooms then!) Experience is what mediates human knowledge and divine knowledge. It is what allows for divine (roughly objective) knowledge to be enacted in the world. This does not provide certainty though. It is merely wisdom gained through experience.
Modern science abolishes the separation between experience and knowledge found in antiquity by looking for certainty, It makes experience the place or method for knowledge. But it does so, by changing the rules. It negates the separation between the subject of the intellect and the subject of experience, combining them into one, a new subject. It turns knowledge and experience into one subject, the Cartesian cogito, consciousness. Modern science does not get the credit for making this synthesis occur however. Credit belongs to the astrologers and the Neoplatonic Hermetic mystics. Astrology, according to Agamben, connected the heavens of pure intelligence with the earth of individual experience.
Likewise, Neoplatonic Hermetic mysticism was able to bridge the Aristotelian separation of nous and psyche with the Platonic separation of the one and many using an emanationist system. In this system there is a hierarchy of intelligences, angels, demons, and souls all connected to the One. Because of these two groups, it became possible to create a single subject as the foundation for experimental science. He then makes the fascinating claim that astrology was only abandoned because it had been assimilated so fully as a principle of science in science’s creation of a new subject that astrology’s mythic-divine apparatus became superfluous. And! that a critique of mysticism, astrology, and alchemy must necessarily imply a critique of science. The stringent rationalism/irrationalism opposition that exists between the two can only be overcome by a recovery of a dimension where science and experience each find their own, separate place of origin.
Agamben argues that in the mystery traditions, the conjunction of experience and knowledge consisted of an event without speech. Not only an ineffable event, but an event without speech. In other words, it was a noetic event, much like the peak of the psychedelic experience where one’s experience is enacted as knowledge. It isn’t just an abstraction as scientific knowledge is, but lived experience combined with knowledge. This event in the mystery traditions culminated in the death and rebirth of the silenced initiate. This sounds an awful lot like the ego-death found in the psychedelic experience. It is the rebirth of an individual, connecting the human and divine. In alchemy, it was enacted in the process of Creation whose fulfillment it was.
However, this conjunction in the new subject that became science is no longer unutterable. It is something that is already spoken in every thought and utterance. Here Agamben is referring to Descartes’ cogito. He points out a subtlety though, that the Cartesian subject , in its original state is just the subject of the verb. “I think, therefore I am.” Here a new subject is born, one where “veridical” experience is no longer grounded in experiential authority but in abstract “knowledge”. This is the subject we and modern science inhabit today.
Imagination, Quests, and Experience
As a side note Agamben posits that the clearest place one can see the change of the meaning of experience is the change in the meaning and status of imagination. In Antiquity, imagination was the prime medium of knowledge. It was the intermediary between the senses and the intellect. As such, it provided a union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, the same role that so-called experience is assigned in our culture. Rather than being something unreal, imagination’s full reality exists between the senses and the intellect and the condition of their communication or, in other words, knowledge. Imagination was what mediated the human and the divine. It was what allowed for experience and knowledge to coalesce. Imagination begat knowledge. And, because imagination is what created images in dreams, it explains the relationship to truth that dreams had in the ancient world. This is the same function of shamanistic trances. Rather than being purely a subjective thing, imagination was the co-incidence, the intersection, of the subjective and objective. Here we might also find the thing psychedelics enhance. Imagination–but in this more refined sense. They reinvigorate the imagination to the role it played prior to its relegation to fiction.
Agamben then turns to Kant and the question of experience. Kant makes a distinction between the transcendental subject which cannot be given substance or psychologized as the “I think” and the psychological consciousness of the empirical I. The “I think” (transcendental consciousness or the synthetical unitary source of it) is what allows for the multiplicity of one’s representations. Without it, experience could never be knowledge, it would just be disorganized perception. But, Kant says, you cannot reduce this duality of the “I think” and the empirical I into a single subject, you cannot collapse it. The transcendental subject cannot know an object, it can only think it. So the “I think” cannot know its own empirical I. It can only think the “I”. This means that it cannot know itself as a substantial reality, which could make it the object of any sort of reason-based psychology. This, like Hegel’s dialectic, means that consciousness can never grasp itself as an entirety. It cannot transcend itself. It can only grasp itself in the becoming. Experience is always being what it has not yet become.
An example would be of the medieval quests. A quest is the recognition of the absence of the road to go on. You figure out the road as you go. This is the only experience possible for man. Scientific experiments are the construction of a sure road, a method to knowledge, the opposite of a quest. Likewise, quest is the opposite of adventure. An adventure presupposes that there is a road to experience and this road is both extraordinary and exotic (rather than familiar and commonplace). In the realm of the quest, instead, the exotic and extraordinary are only the sum of the quests of every experience–the sum of the absence of the known road or path to experience (an Event in Badiou’s terms). This makes explicit the negative character of experience. It is something one can only undergo but never have. It isn’t accessible as a totality.
The next point Agamben argues is that it is this overriding of the Kantian opposition of the transcendental and empirical I, and on materializing of the subject in a “psyche” that the 19th century psychology is founded on. The scientific psychologies of Fechner, Weber, and Wundt tried to sidestep the impossibility of the subject being materialized by rational psychology. What this psychology tries to do is reach the subject by making itself a science of “conscious facts”. These are derived from the parallels between the psychic phenomenon and the accompanying physiological phenomenon (identity theory). This of course, has its roots in Cartesian metaphysics.
In 1916, Eugene Beuller opened his Textbook on Psychiatry by saying that we can’t define consciousness. The most we can say is it is “the subjective element of a psychic process.” This element though, can only be grasped in its interiority. This paradox is the foundation of the critiques by Dilthey, Bergson, Husserl, and Scheler. They were attempting to understand “life” as “pure experience”. While the psychologists posited conscious facts constructed by their identity theory, Dilthey and Bergson were proposing a non-substantial and purely qualitative character of consciousness which was revealed in immediate experience. In their philosophy the innersense that Kant claimed had no cognitive value was the source of authentic experience. There was, however, a problem with this. Agamben points out that Dilthey’s inner experience which is revealed as a current of consciousness, is purely qualitative, and cannot be stopped or measured and Bergson’s characterization of it was utterly elusive are problematic for those reasons. Thus, he says, philosophy of life is delegated to poetry and gets taken up by the mystics and the theosophical revival. This is the background for Husserl, who tried to place the transcendental experience of the I within the current of experience.
Husserl writes that we misinterpret life as a complex of external and internal data which gives us the form to combine the data into wholes. Or, to avoid atomism, we might posit that the wholes are prior to the parts. But, a descriptive theory of consciousness begins before data and wholes. “Its beginning is the pure–and, so to speak, still dumb–psychological experience, which now must be made to utter its own sense with no adulteration. The truly first utterance, however, is the Cartesian utterance of the ego cogito.” This concept of mute experience, Agamben says, is anterior both to subjectivity and to any alleged psychological reality. What is interesting, is that Husserl starts from a mute experience to a voiced experience. A truly origin-based theory of experience has to start before the first expression with experience “still mute”, says Agamben. And, it would have to ask “does a mute experience exist?” Does an infancy of experience exist? What is its relationship to language?” It is this question that motivates the next section of Agamben’s essay.
Language, Experience, and Self
Agamben points out that it was Kant and Husserl’s situating of the problem of knowledge on the mathematical model (this was a critique of Kant by Johann Georg Hamann and is a subject for another time) that prevented them from realizing that the original place of the transcendental subject was within language. This would have allowed them to trace the boundaries that separated the transcendental and linguistic. Agamben, utilizing Benveniste, shows that it is through language that the individual is constituted as a subject (which might explain why the psychedelic experience and ego-dissolution are said to be ineffable). He suggests that subjectivity is nothing but the speaker’s capacity to posit him or herself as an ego. It cannot be defined through a wordless sense of being oneself nor by deferring to an ineffable psychic experience of the ego. It must be through a linguistic “I” that transcends any possible experience. Benveniste further states that “there is no concept I encompassing all the I’s uttered at every single moment by every single speaker, in the sense that there is a concept ‘tree’ on which all individual uses of tree converge.”
Both of these claims might be contested by psychedelic users. Subjectivity, or a form of it, dissolves during ego-death. The individual is no longer able to posit any linguistic sense of “I”. This sense returns, albeit weaker than before the experience in many cases. Many experiences had might contest his claim that there is no universal concept “I” that converges like there is for “tree”. If everything is one, then wouldn’t all claims of “I” be converging on the universal “I”, of which we are all part of? Benveniste continues on a path that might commit him to the concept of a universal “I” or at least the view that someone experiencing ego-dissolution who says “I” might be referring to this larger whole: “To what does I then refer? To something very singular, which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is uttered, and it designates its speaker. It is a term that can only be identified within an instance of discourse . . .. The reality which it invokes is the reality of discourse.”
According to this view espoused by Benveniste, Agamben can declare, “The transcendental subject is nothing other than the ‘enunciator’, and modern thought has been built on this undeclared assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge.” And it is this exchange that allows psychology to give psychological substance on the transcendental consciousness. Yet, the transcendental cannot be the subject unless transcendental simply signifies “linguistic”. And so if the subject is just an enunciator, then we cannot attain the original status of experience which is “pure and mute”. This is where it gets interesting though. Agamben says that a primary experience, which is far from being subjective, could only be what in human beings comes before the subject. Before language. It is a wordless experience in the literal sense. It is a human infancy whose boundary is marked by language. But! But, this would mean that a theory of experience could only be a theory of infancy. If that were so, then its central questions would have to be “is there such a thing as human infancy? How can infancy be possible? If it is possible, where is it situated?” This view is problematic though. The infancy isn’t just something found in a psychic reality which is anterior to and independent of language. This is because there are no subjective psychic facts of consciousness that one can attain outside of the subject due to the fact that the flow of consciousness has no other reality than itself as a monologue, a language.
Some might also conceptualize human infancy as being Freud’s unconscious, the submerged part of the psyche. But the Id, a third “person”, on Freud’s account is actually a non-person, a non-subject which has its sense only in opposition to the person. And, as Lacan argued, the Id has no reality other than language. This means that infancy as a pre-subjective “psychic substance” fails. A pre-linguistic subject with both infancy and language end up referring back to each other in a circle where infancy is the origin of language and language the origin of infancy. One cannot exist without the other.
For all that, perhaps it is in this tension that the site of experience exists for Agamben. Experience or infancy cannot be something that chronologically precedes language and then ceases to exist in order to become what we would call speech. It is not existing in one space and then leaving it for the next in an order like: experience -> language -> speech in chronological order. It is not some moment where we leave forever in order to be able to speak. Instead, it coexists in its origins with language. It is constituted through language setting it aside in each fleeting moment in order to produce the individualized subject. Is it possible that this is what meditation is recovering? Instead of language setting aside the infancy, language is suspended, allowing for pure experience to continue. That is a question for another post.
Agamben argues that we cannot reach infancy without encountering language. He invokes the imagery of language as the guardian like the cherubim guard Eden. The question is then, when did the human exist but language did not? This is simply not possible. The origin of a being of the kind discussed cannot be historicized. Why? Because it is itself historicizing and itself, the being, is the only reason there is possibility of there being any sort of “history.” This is why every instance of language as a human invention can be countered by one that views it as a divine gift. The point is to realize that the origin of language is located at the break of the continual opposition of diachronic and synchronic, historical and structural. The example Agamben illustrates this concept with it that of the Indo-European root of language. It is the origin. An origin that isn’t just represented in the past, but is equally represented in the present. It is the convergence of the diachronic and synchronic. It is located at the historical “never spoken language”, as the root, but is still real and living. It guarantees the ability to trace the linguistic history and the synchronic coherence of the language system. This means that as an origin it can never be completely resolved through certain events that historically occurred and it is something that hasn’t stopped occurring.
This dimension, a dimension suspended between two other dimensions, is transcendental history. This is the model that we base the relationship between language and transcendental experience. It isn’t simply an event we can isolate. Nor is it something that could be constructed as a human event independent of language. The psychedelic experience can, and does, evoke this transcendental experience. As humans are presently situated, we experience the chronological perception of time. Each moment has a anterior and preceding moment. History is thus fixed. We view an event as bound in time and space. We might suggest than an event shapes us into who we are today, but the event is past. In the psychedelic experience, one enters the domain of eternity and timelessness. It allows one to enter transcendental history. In this domain events can occur simultaneously with the event from which they came, just as Agamben’s example of the root of Indo-European language occurs. A singular event is made multiple. Events can be relived, reinterpreted, and reintegrated. Each moment no longer ceases to exist in the past but becomes alive in the present.
For Agamben, in terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant. Experience is the transcendental limit of language and rules out language as being itself totality and truth because human infancy constitutes and conditions language in an essential way. If there was no experience/infancy then language would just be a game as Wittgenstein said. It’s truth would just be in the correct usage according to the logical rules. But, where there is experience and infancy, then language is the place where experience becomes truth. Wittgenstein, at the end of the Tractatus, argues that the mystical limit of language is not a psychic reality outside of language but that it is the transcendental origin of language, it is nothing other than this infancy! So, Agamben argues, the ineffable is, in reality, infancy. Experience is the mystery that every individual gains from having an infancy. This mystery, Agamben says, is the vow that commits an individual to speech and truth. And as infancy brings truth to language, language makes truth the result of experience.
Infancy does more than just this. It sets up a split between language and discourse or speech (which is fundamental for much of Agamben’s thinking). Traditional Western metaphysics sees man as an animal that is endowed with speech. But, Agamben argues, the split between language and speech, between a system of signs and discourse is what is fundamental. Animals, he says aren’t denied language, they are always and totally language. They are always inside it. Humans though, because they have infancy and by preceding speech, has to constitute themselves as the subject of language. They have to say “I”.
It is infancy and the transcendental experience of the difference of language and speech which opens the space of history. Finally, he says, to experience means to re-accede to infancy as history’s transcendental place of origin. Humans are constantly falling from experience into language and speech. And, remember Walter Benjamin? His project, and Agamben’s continuation of it, shows that language is a medium of experience. It binds subject and object together in a “profound, perhaps mystical, relationship of underlying kinship.” Agamben and Benjamin both attempt to return (at least some of) the primacy of knowledge back to experience. Giving authority back to experience. Not necessarily taking it all away from modern science, but returning to a more complex approach.
References/Further Reading
Giorgio Agamben. Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. transl. by Liz Heron. (Verso, 1993).
Giorgio Agamben. What is Philosophy? transl. by Lorenzo Chiesa. (Stanford University Press, 2018).
Walter Benjamin. “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” transl. by Mark Ritter, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/