§60. The Illusion of Experience

What Foucault calls the “illusion of experience” is the illusion of sponta­neity, of an unconditioned, natural presence more originally significant than speech or other signs. Other critics call that the metaphysics of presence, or the myth of the given—the fond belief that pure experience, if we could recover it, attains a cognition undistorted by culture or history.

He does not deny the reality of experience. He denies its authority, a pu­tatively probative character independent of history and its differences, exercising control on concepts. He discursifies experience, subordinating it to the rules and regulations of a discursive formation. Experience does not constitute knowledge; rather, what we “know”—a prevailing epistemic economy—determines what difference experience can make to someone's knowledge. “Knowledge,” that is, the economy of knowledge, the syntax of savoir, “determines the space in which science and experience can be separated and situated in relation to one another.”⁹³

Foucault appropriates the concept of archaeology for his approach to epis­temology in his 1969 work, The Archaeology of Knowledge. This discursive archaeology sifts the archive rather than the desert sand, seeking relics of knowledge in the repetition and variation of statements deposited there. The archive shows layers of change in the discursive rules that define the objects these statements refer to, as well as the concepts that condition theoretical disagreement and set limits to the seriously sayable. Foucault depicts their discontinuity as so many archaeological strata, Layer I, Layer IIa, and so on, with fractured continuity.

The historical consolidation of a prestigious discourse whose statements pass for true arises through the enforced regularity of discursive economy, where affiliated objects are referred to and perceptions confirmed. It does not feel like that to consciousness, which is the illusion of experience, or one of them—an illusion of spontaneity and independence from unconscious conditioning. Hence Foucault's studied indifference (in this work) to subjec­tivity. We don't play the game, it plays us. Our subjectivity is pre-structured by unconscious historical syntax.

By design, this archaeological approach to knowledge precludes Kant's idea of the understanding, whose a priori forms “anticipate all content in­sofar as they have already rendered them possible.” After Kant the best days of concept invention are over: there will be no innovation at the level of cate­gories. Foucault wants to plunge understanding back into history; the history of knowledge is a ceaseless invention of fundamental concepts and catego­rical change. There is more to a concept than an abstraction; it is an instru­ment, a virtual act. “Forming concepts is a way of living and not a way of killing life; it is a way to live in a relative mobility and not a way to immobilize life.”⁹⁴

For all his fascination with discourse and contempt for originary subjec­tivity, Foucault is not a merely negative critic of experience, which he depicts as a historically conditioned effect of fields of knowledge, types of norma­tivity, and forms of subjectivity. Experience arises when discourse and its rules entwine with subjectivity. He describes a human being as “an animal of experience, he is involved ad infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him, and transfigures him as a subject.” That, he says, is “experience in the full and strong sense of the term, that is to say, experience as that which qualifies the subject, enlightens it about itself and about the world and, at the same time, transforms it.”⁹⁵

He gives the instance of his own experience as an author.