Subjective experiences part of ‘the facts’

Eusebius McKaiser

How best should we respond to claims about the subjective experiences of people whose inner life we could never access?

This question has been gnawing away at me recently in the light of some public debates here and abroad about subjectivity.

In many ways 2015 has been the year of first-person narrative. Individuals and excluded groups have been reporting their subjective experiences of being excluded from institutions and various social spaces.

There are countless examples. One Wits University student posted on his Facebook wall the story of his struggles against financial exclusion, food insecurity and homelessness. She reported how she feels about her shattered dreams as her academic journey keeps coming up against injustices that are institutional and systemic. Her post was shared several thousand times across Facebook, testimony both to how many others the story resonates with and testimony to the power of first-person narrative.

Subjective accounts of our lives have incredible emotional purchase because there is instant believability, which is a basic ingredient of successful storytelling.

In the US, too, we have seen a tapestry of stories emerge this year in which subjectivity is centred. Accounts of how the black body is assaulted by police, and the state more generally, have travelled far and wide. In fact, the essay, as a writing form, is beginning to get the kind of discursive respect it has long deserved but not always enjoyed.

Yet, some people are profoundly scared of first-person narrative. And this is worth puzzling through.

First, there seems to be a fear that any subjective account of an experience is indubitable. In other words, if someone says that he has experienced racism, by way of example, you cannot doubt their claim.

In fact, you risk being called a bigot if you doubt other people’s subjective experiences that are sincerely reported or, rather, that is the fear. But this fear really is unfounded and an insult. Those of us who enjoy subjective accounts of how we go through this world aren’t less committed to evidence and sound reasoning.

Some critics of subjectivity write as if anyone using first-person narrative is evidence-insensitive. And that is the insult here: the presumption that any basic training in logic or argumentation has been abandoned by thousands of people who want to self-indulgently merely report experiences of pain.

But, actually, subjective accounts are important data points in understanding how the world works. You can’t both claim to take seriously homophobia, and yet be averse to accounts of how homophobia affect specific individuals in their daily journeys through a homophobic world. The same goes for sexism, racism, classism and the myriad other variations of oppression that remain our social truths we’ve not yet dealt with.

But there is also a fetishising of aggregate numerical data among a subset of these critics of subjectivity. They often think you get a wholly adequate and most complete account of social reality if you have a few slides in a presentation with aggregate data about population groups rather than stories about individuals.

There are two important points here: It is, of course, a false dichotomy to imagine we must either abandon all subjective accounts of people’s experiences and only focus on aggregate data; or that we must ignore “the facts”.

Related, subjective experiences are part of “the facts” and so should not be lampooned or trivialised.

Which brings me to the other fear of subjectivity from some critics. They also worry that they cannot challenge reports of subjective experiences. This is an exaggerated fear.

One reason for the exaggeration is that subjectivity is, yes, in the first instance about me. That’s not self-indulgence. That’s because my subjective experiences just are mine and have social and discursive value.

So of course I will have a degree of epistemic authority about my inner life that you have to accept. If I say that I am in pain, you are not in a position to be unduly sceptical unless you think I’m joking.

Nevertheless, of course, you can critically engage someone when they give you an account of their subjective experiences. It is simply rubbish to pretend that first-person narrative is invented to stop debate. Or to stop you from showing me up.

The most generous attitude to adopt towards first-person narrative is that it is one kind of speech act on a range of acceptable speech acts that we can and do perform.

And all speech acts in public discourse should be taken seriously (which is not to say that what gets expressed is immune to criticism).

Finally, it is worth thinking through why subjective accounts seem to threaten some people. And I can’t help but shake off one obvious reason: If you benefit from hegemony then you do not want to talk about the impact hegemonic structures have on individuals who are the losers in hegemonic structures.

And so when victims of oppression start telling us what they feel and experience, it is the beneficiaries of oppression who get uncomfortable most quickly.

That’s unsurprising.