The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

[w]e need to attend to the historical processes that, through
discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences. It is not
individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted
through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not
the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative ... evidence that
grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain,
that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience
in this way is to historicise it as well as to historicise the identities it
produces. 92
Seeing experience through the methods of social history led its practitioners to see the
individual as a transparent category, rather than ask how conceptions of selves ‐ subjects
and identities ‐ were produced. Instead, subjects were produced through the imposition
of universal, naturalised categories, (the worker, the peasant, the black). The very
processes of subject construction were precluded, with subject positions constructed as
“ready made unities with firm, all‐encompassing identities”. Questions of cognition,
discourse, the production of knowledge, and the relevance of the position of subjects to
the knowledge they produced were avoided. 93
Following Joan Scott, the processes by which subject positions are assigned, “the
complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or
embraced” are in need of explanation. To argue that the formation of new identities is a
discursive phenomenon and that subjects are constituted discursively is to insist that
‘experience’ and language are connected. 94 Experience is neither straightforward, nor
self‐evident. In redefining its operations beyond its usage in social history as the origin
of explanation, is to insist that it is always contested, and always political. For Joan Scott,
the focus needs to be on the processes of identity formation, with an insistence on the
92 Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, pp 369‐370.
93 Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, pp 373, 382; Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz,
‘Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles: Journeying through South African Hidden Pasts and Histories in
the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century’, Paper presented to the Conference on The Future of the Past:
The Production of History in a Changing South Africa, 10‐12 July 1996, pp 4‐5.
94 Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, pp 382‐383.
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