Beyond Knowing: Experience(s) and Possibilities in Contemporary Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: Capitalism, Knowledge, and Democracy

Abstract

Experience is a central concept of pedagogy, implicated in the construction of knowledge and subjectivity. It is also, therefore, a point of contestation between orthodox Marxist and neo-Marxist pedagogies. The writer analyzes this contestation, explaining the competing theories of experience: neo-Marxism understands experience as unknowable and unrepresentable, an excess resulting from encounters with multiple and contingent cultural contradictions that generate affect presumed to escape the reaches of capitalist commodification and thus thought to be a source of transformative possibilities; orthodox Marxism understands it as the mediated and mediating effects of material contradictions originating in the social relations of production. The writer elaborates the stakes in the contestation and argues for the necessity of a historical materialist understanding of experience.

Author

• Deborah P. Kelsh, College of Saint Rose