Critique, Ethics, and the Apparatus of Experience: A Foucauldian Framework

Abstract

The paper explores examples of contemporary experience in order to demonstrate the moralisation of new areas of behaviour (especially in relation to environmental issues). It sketches a Foucauldian framework for understanding the historical transformation of experience, in terms of the “apparatus of experience.” On that basis, it presents a novel account of critique, in which critique is seen as the potentially transformational, experiential practice of re-experiencing the contemporary apparatuses of experience. In other words, critique is “experience squared.” It is this re-experiencing of our everyday experience that permits us, to a certain extent, to “get over ourselves” and thus to reflect critically on the processes of moralisation and de-moralisation in which we participate.