by Cayo Honorato, Brasilia/Sao Paulo working group
To do such comparative studies adequately [between developments in different languages] would be an extraordinary international collaborative enterprise, and the difficulties of that may seem sufficient excuse. […] it should be recorded that while some key developments, now of international importance, occurred first in English, many did not and in the end can only be understood when other languages are brought consistently into comparison. (Williams, Keywords)
In different situations I have been taking part as a teacher and investigator (meetings, panels, workshops, etc.) to discuss art and cultural mediation in Brazil, it seems recurrent the declaration of an specific interest by the participants, in reference to their will to paticipate. That interest can be summarized in a single word: exchange. They say: “I am/ We are here to exchange”. And basically what they declare to exchange are experiences. Moreover exchanging experiences has become, in the common sense, a prevailing role for mediation. But what do they mean for experiences?
Before that, what does it mean exchanging? First, it suggests that there is a variety of experiences; that it is intended to consider such variety in terms of an interchange or a cooperation; also that it is intended to establish democratic or non hierarchical relationships between the different participants; that it is about a voluntary form of interaction, from which the participants could only be benefited. Hence the exchange seems to attribute a non suspected positivity to those situations, neglecting a receptivity to the dissent.
Similarly the exchange seems to presume that one could be indefinitely fulfilled with diverse experiences; that it would be possible to choose ones and refuse others, without any perspective of a conflict between them. It looks as if having experiences was a cumulative process, according to each one’s convenience. But that doesn’t consider that experiences, more than divergent or contradictory, can be eventually traumatic, violent or disruptive. So it is not by chance that, in those situations, a naive conception of experiences prevails.
Yet is it possible to exchange experiences? What if experiences, according to Jorge Larrosa, in a text quite well know by the mediators – entitled Experience and passion –, more than “what passes within us, what happens to us, what touch us”, are “the flow of existence, the flow of a being that has no essence nor reason or fundament, but simply ex-ist in an always singular form, finite, immanent, contingent”. Thus, something related to a kind of passiveness – made out of passion –, on which one cannot operate, unless receptively, or then, what cannot be reified, a life. What would it mean, in that sense, the intention of exchanging experiences? If that was possible, what would be our availability to live the other’s experiences? What are the implications of the will that the others live my experiences? Is it yet sufficient to say that each one lives his/her own experience?
Larrosa has probably become a major reference for the debate on experience in Brazil. His proposal for an education based on experience – which means neither based on applied science nor on political praxis – denounces four obstacles that have been making experiences rare: the excess of information, opinion and work, and the lack of time. Besides the rationality of his arguments, the author suggests that experiences are possible after a “gesture of interruption” – although the author advises that such gesture is “almost impossible in the current time”. Actually that gestures seems to depend on a simple individual decision, only possible for those who can dispose of their own time. Moreover, a gesture that promotes a sense of heteronomy as commitment to the outside, the others and the world, yet neglecting heteronomy as submission to exploitation.
Some derivations of that proposal attibute relevance to experiences, based on the perception that we can’t predict nowadays what professional skills will be required in the future. At the same time, experiences in this context are regarded as new skills to be teached, in order to lead individuals to become more flexible and adaptable to multiple contexts. (See: Orloski, 2015: 76) Still in this context, experiences seems to be elicited as something remarkable, between memories and the sensational – a kind of combination between the two main senses of experience, developed after the XVIII century, according to Williams: (i) experience past, as knowledge gathered from past events, and (ii) experience present, as a particular kind of awareness or consciousness; but in a very diluted way.
