The Knowledge/Practice Disjunction and the Question of Intervention: Beyond the Enlightenment Strategy1

I have chosen to approach the topic “Theory & Experience” from the perspective of social change. I am interested in how theory relates to issues of intervention, whether legal, political, or cultural—interventions in the name of an Ideal which aim at some sort of change at the level of experience. More specifically, I am keen to investigate circumstances in which current strategies of intervention fail ox are at least problematic. I want to suggest that these anomalies, studied more closely from a psychoanalytic point of view, may provide a lever with which to revisit and rearticulate traditional approaches to intervention.

I want first to be clear about the kind of experiences I am interested in. We might think, for instance, of the experience of drinking a cup of coffee, of an argument with a colleague or parent, of striking a tennis ball, of being arrested, of smoking a cigarette, of going through a divorce, etc. We could even say that it is the totality of such experiences that shape, and are shaped by, our society, our institutions, and our identities—an idea that has almost reached the status of a cliché.

However, these background experiences that we recognize as shaping our institutions and theories are not exactly what I want to focus on. I am interested in the kind of experience that resists assimilation into conventional theoretical knowledge and understanding, what I will call the real of an experience. In this way I am establishing an opposition, at least for the purpose of this presentation—an opposition between experience on the one hand and the real of an experience on the other; or, to put it another way, between structured or symbolized experience on the one hand and, on the other hand, the kind of experience that remains enigmatic, even bothersome, insofar as it either persists in being ignored by standard world views or stubbornly insists on tripping up our theoretical attempts to grasp it. T