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Re: [xmca] Collective Experience vs. Individual Experience? (Help, anyone?)



Ah, I have to correct my error. What is more productive of a "we" than a shared experience is *doing* something together, a shared project.
andy

Andy Blunden wrote:
I think nothing makes a "we" more effectively than a shared experience, and yes Mike, I take it that there is very much a temporal dimension here. It could be as long as "the protest movement of the 60s" or "in the war," or "growing up in xville," but archetypically, it is Tony's earthquake - being there on that day.

Andy

mike cole wrote:
That helps, tony. It sent me back to re-read Andy's note.

Andy wrote:

You have an experience, and then you find that everyone else experienced the same thing and that event then becomes a central focus of your collaboration
with other people.

Re-reading reinforces my intuition of the time dimension. "In the instant" (which can fell likes hours and even be hours) it is quite localized in an individual life. In daily life it comes to known to be shared (we had a huge blackout here- similar sequence) and spreads out and across people. In the longer run it comes to have a kind of "precipitated" enduring presence that
shades into collective memory.

(I know, I am prone to threes, but something like this?)
mike

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:

What I mean by "shared experience," as something between individual and
collective experience, is perfectly captured by how Andy characterizes
shared experience. I experience something & find out you and I have both had
that experience in common, and it has the power Andy describes.

What I mean by collective experience is experience in which the experience of others participates in the experience of any one, in the course of the
experiencing. Temporal aspects are certainly crucial for this.

A single mother who has lost her job in "the great recession" and who is worried sick -- literally, to the point of being unable to sleep, and maybe
even vomiting from stress-induced gastro-whatever -- is experiencing
something somatically in a way that is particular to her own individual
body; but, at the same time, it is not just an individual experience, like my experience of the shaking that I realized only after a few seconds must
be an earthquake. That mother's experience, through and through, is her
involvement in an experience that is irreducibly collective.

Herder is relevant, but not the same -- he's more about culturally
(nationally) accumulated shared experience.

I'm wondering if there's something in the literature of social
phenomenology (Schutz, maybe?).

So, Larry, it's more or less up to people on the list what they will take
up, and what they will pass by.


On Mon, 19 Sep 2011, mike cole wrote:

 Tony- I am unclear about how your comments point to something between
individual and collective experience.

Yes, the term experience evokes misunderstandings, but have you tried
culture recently as a problem free alternative? :-)

Might temporal aspects of "an experience" play a role in the
individual:collective
distinction? Would that be an avenue to distinguishing an intermediate
process?

mike

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:

 Thanks, Andy, that is helpful.
The Dewey is posted here:
https://tw-curricuwiki.**wikis**paces.com/Dewey--culture%**2C+**
experience<https://tw-**curricuwiki.wikispaces.com/**
Dewey--culture%2C+experience<https://tw-curricuwiki.wikispaces.com/Dewey--culture%2C+experience> On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Andy Blunden wrote:

Herder, as I understand him, saw collective experience as an important

facet in the formation of the character of a people. I think part of the
problem is that "experience" has been such a contested term, Tony.
Generally
it has been co-opted by Empiricism, which is by its nature individualist
and
by definition the philosophy of experiene, but Dewey used the word in formulating his view. But didn't he later say that he regretted using
the
word "experience" because it led to misunderstandings? Personally, I
think
/shared/ experience is the most powerful force in changing Zeitgeist and individual mninds en masse. You have an experience, and then you find
that
everyone else experienced the same thing and that event then becomes a
central focus of your collaboration with other people. What could be
more
world-changing?

Andy

Tony Whitson wrote:

 This query is prompted by a new book:
Peck, Don. Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures
and
What We Can Do About It. New York: Crown Pub., 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Pinched-****Great-Recession-Narrowed-**<http://www.amazon.com/Pinched-**Great-Recession-Narrowed-**>
Futures/dp/0307886522<http://**www.amazon.com/Pinched-Great-**
Recession-Narrowed-Futures/dp/**0307886522<http://www.amazon.com/Pinched-Great-Recession-Narrowed-Futures/dp/0307886522>
            /

in which the author looks more deeply into predictable ramifications of
the
current economic situation than I have seen in other recent work.


Based on historical, sociological, and other literatures and modes of
research, the author argues that what we're dealing with now is not
just
a
wave in a recurring cycle. He predicts lasting changes that he expects
to
deeply impact different generational cohorts for decades to come.


His argument is plausible, at least, to me. But it prompts me to wonder about experience that is really collective experience, as opposed to
individual experience.


Exposing my ignorance, I realize that I can't think of literature on
the
nature and structure of collective experience. It seems like there must
be a
lot; but I can't think of it. It also seems like xmca is a likely place
to
find people who would be interested, and would know about such
literature
(although it's not on-topic in the current threads).


I'm thinking of my first earthquake experience last month as an example
of
an individual experience. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever
experienced before, and it took me a few seconds to even recognize that
an
earthquake is what was happening (we don't have those in Delaware). I
was
at
my desk, at home, by myself when it happened.
Of course, the experience was mediated after the fact from my
sociocultural
awareness of earthquakes. Still, I think it was an individual
experience
in
the moment, compared with the collective experience that Don Peck is
writing
about -- an experience of events and developments over time, in which
the
experience of others participates, throughout, in the experience of any
one.


I am thinking that there might be something else that could be called
"shared experience," intermediate between individual and collective
experience.


Does this make any sense? Is this question of interest to anyone? Or am
I
naïvely wondering about things that have been well developed in the

literature?


I would be interested if anyone has ideas or references to share on
this.

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