“Experience of an experience” is tinged with a pseudo philosophical air. It is also the most enigmatic phrase in the hypothesis. Experience in the singular, unrepeated and not reflected upon, is a complex and at best ill-defined process. It is unclear, at first blush, how doubling such a term enhances clarity. In fact, it seems to obscure rather than clarify – rephrased casually, it gives no greater insight than “mysterious cognitive awareness of a mysterious cognitive process.” Why then the repetition? And why this word?
The word choice is one of convenience. Setting aside the affect crowd’s over-hype of the term as something quasi-mystical and the effect crowd’s denigration of the term as passé, experience is generally recognized by non-architects as the accumulation of data through the senses at the micro scale and, at the macro, as the accumulation of repeated experiences – as in, “I have experience in word processing and doing laundry.” The repetition is useful as a way to record this reflexive aspect of consciousness, or awareness if consciousness is too loaded a word. Experience is both the intake of raw data as well as the parsing of that data into information that is interesting or useful or deemed potentially useful and thus stored for some later recall. From this perspective the couplet, experience of an experience, is not mysterious at all. It is a well-worn linguistic trope tracing at least to René Descartes’ formulaic strategy for recording the reflexive character of awareness – one who is x is conscious that s/he is x (x, here, representing hearing, seeing, thinking, walking, even the state of being conscious) – and arguably to much earlier formulations, such as Aristotle’s “thought of thought” or “thinking of thinking.”
The phrase turns enigmatic again when it is asked what it provides in addition to the familiarity or stodginess of an academic linguistic trope. What does the above tell us really? That experience is, in a manner of speaking, experience of experience – or phrased a little more precisely, meaningful experience is the meta-experience of sensory experience? Left at this level of detail, the phrase suggests only a Narcissus-looking-at-his-reflection kind of self-absorption. Three questions seem essential to determining the value of the phrase and for clarifying or perhaps modifying its use in later hypotheses: Is anything lost by eliminating the repetition, ala – Architectural meaning is an experience in and of architectural space? Does overtly acknowledging the reflexivity of experience modify the original experience in some way? And is the original experience – if such a thing exists – knowable?
The last question is easiest to answer. The original experience (Husserl’s originary experience, for the affect crowd) is beyond the reach of knowing, despite philosophy’s dreams. Sensory experience is opaque to Truth, to knowledge, to thought in general, insofar as it – whatever it is – not only precedes judgments of thought, knowledge, and Truth but is the basis of their establishment even if, and this is critical, even if sensory experience is illusionary. Sensory experience can be made manifest in truths and beliefs but neither philosophy nor any other form of introspection provides tools to dig behind sensory experience to discuss its reality. Original experience, in other words, simply must be assumed.
The earlier questions in particular and their larger implications – that is, what are the effects of language and thought applied to an assumed but ultimately unknowable ground? – lie within reach of philosophical thought and introspection. In lieu of pure abstractions, however, I turn to exemplary experiences in the Pantheon and my grandparents’ basement to draw some preliminary conclusions.
1. Is anything sacrificed by eliminating the repetition of the word “experience”?
2. Does overtly acknowledging the reflexivity of experience modify the original experience in some way?
To question #1, neither the emergence of a near-supernatural experience of my grandparents’ basement over time nor the overwhelmingly emotional first experience of the Pantheon were simple experiences. Neither were mental recordings or naïve reflections of direct sensory experience. This is obvious for my grandparents’ basement in which I had accrued life experiences for a decade or more but less obvious with the Pantheon. The latter, as I admitted, was a first encounter. But was it?
In reality, I had experienced the Pantheon numerous times – in lectures, in books, in television programs, in myth and legend. I brought to the Pantheon a history of familiarity and mystery similar to that acquired about dark cellars from novels and crime dramas. In both cases, to call my experience simply an “experience of an experience” is already a sacrifice. A more correct phrasing might be an “in-person experience of the confluence of both direct sensory and historico-narrative experiences,” but that’s a bit too wordy to use more than once.
Still, this new phrasing suggests the answer to question #2. My first, teary-eyed experience of the Pantheon as well as the discovery of my grandparents’ basement as a strange underworld to be explored never were originals. They could not have been simply naïve or direct “original” experiences and still stood out as exemplary because exemplary experiences exhibit what novelist Walker Percy, following Charles Pierce, called thirdness.[i] That is, an exemplary experience is a synthetic experience that is more than direct sensory intake reflected in consciousness. Exemplary experiences are amalgams of direct intake, narrative frameworks, and the unifying reflection of both in consciousness. As such, they are not truths – and can support no claims in that regard – but exist as emergent phenomena that demand attention.[ii]
[i] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 3-45.
[ii] Elaine Scary says something similar of beauty, noting that experiences of it prompt the mind to search the past for parallels and precedents and to create relations in the future. See Elaine Scary, On Beauty and Being Just, (New York: Princeton University Press, 2001,199), 30.
Architecture is Fiction 