Experience (Critical Essay‪)‬

The entry "experience" in Keywords seems to me one of the more cryptic, even obscure ones in the collection. Williams's technique of sketching an often confused word-history with just a few strokes is only partly responsible for the impression this entry gives of shedding as much shadow as light on its topic. Nor is it just that Williams writing shows here and there too little concern for the reader's comfort by setting several demonstrative pronouns afloat in a small sea of possible antecedents, with the result that s often left puzzling out exactly which "this literally, he is talking about. All of the entries are potentially affected by these same limitations, but few come out of the experience as badly as "experience:" Perhaps the simple wordplay just indulged in can give a hint as to why this should be the case. Differently from the examination of other terms, the effort to present the history of "experience" is hampered almost to the point of incoherence by the abstraction from any history of experience-that is, from shifts not only in the uses or meanings of this term, but in the very "thing" that it could betaken to name. To see how this might be a problem specific to "experience; consider a contrast with the entry on "work," a term that names a certain kind of experience. Here, Williams has little difficulty conveying, in a briefer essay concerned with a more ancient word, how the changing fortunes of the term index a change in material conditions and thus in the very experience so-named: work. When it comes to the more general and inclusive term, however, it is as if experience itself, the possibilities or impossibilities of experience, had no history to speak of. Unlike "work, a word whose vagaries are shown to track the history happening to the thing, "experience" seems essentially, in Williams's account, to have named the same experience since the late eighteenth century when it entered the language in its modern sense.