Lived experience
Last month’s Sherds column asked the question: how do we find some way of articulating the real value of heritage – that is to say, its intrinsic value rather than its supposed economic value? Put another way, technocrats can work out roughly how much wealth the Beatles have created directly and indirectly since 1962. They cannot explain the much more important point, which is why their music has enriched our lives and had such a lasting and universal impact (for the Beatles, read Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, or whatever your favourite cultural phenomenon happens to be).
Sherds has since come across two possible alternatives to the pounds and pence approach. First, there is the concept of ‘lived experience’, which we are hearing increasingly these days in the discourses around social justice. The phrase is attributed to the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831), who wanted to distinguish between knowledge gained by being taught something (music or Latin, for example), and knowledge that comes through the vicissitudes of life. Google Books Ngram, a search engine that charts the frequency with which words and phrases occur in publications, shows that use of the phrase has been on the rise since Simone de Beauvoir used ‘lived experience’ (l’expérience vécue) in The Second Sex (1949) as the basis for her analysis of the constraints placed on women by ‘patriarchal social structures’; since then, the number of references has rocketed.
The concept is controversial, on the grounds that people who lack ‘lived experience’ cannot fully understand what it is like to be black, gay, a woman, transgender, a victim of sexual assault or racial harassment, to live with disability, and so on. Those who lack that lived experience, it is claimed, therefore have no right to argue with or contradict those who have, or even to frame public policy on these issues.
