Ricardo Gaspar Müller (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil), "E. P. Thompson - Experience and Emancipation"

This paper deals with some concepts and arguments asserted by the work of E. P. Thompson, and the contemporary debate concerning the relations between historical research, linguistic turn, and the issues of class, experience and class consciousness. Thompson understands that the idea of experience, as a junction-concept, must be related tohuman agency, to a specific notion of culture and to the emancipative project. As “emancipatory theory takes experience as its starting point and its substance (...), the concept of experience is at the heart of the issue of emancipation” (Bonefeld and Gunn, 1995, p. 3). In this sense, for Thompson, the concept of experience means the mediation between social relations of production, the process of class formation, class identity, class consciousness, class struggle, and hegemony. The concept of experience though expresses concepts and processes dialectically related. According to Thompson’s approach, one can find out the relations between the concepts of mediation and experience, especially, those concerned with class consciousness and emancipation. In “The Politics of Theory”, for instance, Thompson calls the attention to some issues concerning the concept of experience, and its relations to the concept of culture: “experience is exactly what makes the junction between culture and not-culture, lying half within social being, half within social consciousness. In The Poverty of Theory (1978, p. 200-1), Thompson gestured to the kind of collective experience within social being: "(...) changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness, proposes new questions, and affords much of the material which the more elaborated intellectual exercises are about". Thompson asks then: "how else can a materialist explain historical change with any rationality at all?" (Samuel, 1981, p. 406). As Thompson says in "History and Anthropology": "(...) Change in material life determines the conditions of that struggle, and some of its character: but, the particular outcome is determined only by the struggle itself. This is to say that historical change eventuates, not because a given 'basis' must give rise to a correspondent 'superstructure', but because changes in productive relationships are experienced in social and cultural life, refracted in men's ideas and their values, and argued through in their actions, their choices and their beliefs". (Thompson, 1994, p. 224 - in italics in the original).