Experience and the Dangers of Essentialism

In “The Evidence of Experience”, Joan Scott presents her critique of the “hallowed” position experience holds in the study of history. In her discussion of the relationship between vision and knowledge/evidence, she delivers a critique of the privileged status held by the visible, whereby knowledge is (presumed) gained by vision, then reproduced via writing (Scott 398). Utilizing this methodology, knowledge of “difference” or “other” is gained by witnessing and/or making this difference/ other visible; however, this visibility then naturalizes the difference/other and fixes it as a subject. In doing so, the subject’s difference is accepted as natural; Scott wants us to question this difference and how it was established. As “subjects are constituted discursively” (Scott 409), and there exists within discursive systems a myriad of experiences, events, and conditions, to fix a subject with one “visible” identity based on one member of the subject’s demographic is to essentialize that subject (population), naturalizing it as “different” without exploring how that difference is constructed. The result of this is that what Scott terms “ the discursive character of experience” (406) is left unexamined, and the now naturalized difference masks the various power structures, events, etc. that went into creating it.
Scott’s critique extends to the recent trend within the field of history to utilize this visuality/these visibility politics for so called “rescue missions”, wherein certain groups deemed “hidden from history” can be revealed, made visible, and, thus, given a history. Scott is rightly wary of such “missions”, both for reasons given in her critique discussed in the previous paragraph, as well as concerns regarding the complex terrain that is identity formation- which these “missions” leave untouched. Simply “making visible ” reveals only a fixed subject, and does not allow for questioning the systems that created the subject’s identity formation (which has now been naturalized as simply “difference”); since identity formation itself is acknowledged by Scott (and many other scholars) as a contested terrain in and of itself, Scott wants us to question the formation itself. Without examining the various discursive systems that went into creating the subjects being “made visible”, we are allowing those same discursive systems to remain invisible, unchallenged- natural. As such, questions must be asked: Who decides what is history and what is not? What voices are heard, and whose silence is demanded by these systems remaining invisible?
This is an area of Scott’s critique with which we can critically view Satrapi and Paronnaud’s Persepolis, the movie adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novels detailing her life in Iran and Europe from the late 1970s until her permanent relocation to France in the 1990s. While the film portrays some fairly significant moments in Iran’s history, it is pointedly autobiographical in nature and related in narrative from the perspective of the adult Satrapi. As such, while making the life of a young girl during the Iranian Revolution and Iran/Iraq War visible- and young women are certainly a group not widely “visible” in the historic narrative of any country- Satrapi runs the risk of being assumed to be relating the story, instead of a story (hers). Indeed, this is exactly what happened, in the case of at least one review (Hamid in Cineaste, Winter 2007). Not only did Hamid write portions of his review seemingly assuming that Satrapi’s portrait was of Iranian people (as opposed to being a portrait of Satrapi’s memory of her youth), he also indicates that his assumption is the “natural” reading of the film, and the one most audiences will walk away with. For her part, Satrapi has made no bones about this being her story, and hers alone; she has even gone so far as to attribute her usage of the graphic animation she chose to use for the film and the books it is based on as a conscious decision to limit the audience’s focusing on racial/religious aspects over the human story. While there are points within the film (crowd scenes, war scenes) where the masses of people seem to be generic- sometimes shown in profile only, sometimes with nearly identical faces- it seems one would be wise to remember that this is a memory, and the memory of a child, at that. The feel of these scenes is one of a story being told about events as viewed by a single person, rather than a revelation of the definitive history of a time and place.
One of the ways Satrapi reminds us of this is through very conscious use of framing, which cleverly removes us from the story via staged puppet shows, dream sequences, and fantasy/altered memory scenes that call attention to the fact that this is all coming from the mind of one woman, as opposed to being a definitive, “official” account. Her engagement of a puppet show to demonstrate her father’s lesson of the Shah’s “puppet regime” is an excellent example of this framing, as well as the visual we might expect a child to have given the explanation she receives from her father. The entire staging, although within Satrapi’s imagination, is clearly visible to us as a show- we see the curtain, the scenery, the flat marionette-like characterization of the Shah and the British government who controls him. In a similar scene, we see the theater curtains and columns as she and her grandmother watch Godzilla at the movie theatre- again orienting us to the idea that this is a personal memory, and not the collective story of an entire demographic. Below I have attached a link to a video by Sting (All This Time); at about the 03:15 mark, there is a similar interruption of the narrative (which reappears later) for a vaudeville type show. The stage, decoration, and lighting are all within our view, suggesting (like Satrapi’s work) that we are being given a glimpse of the protagonist’s view of a previously viewed episode (in this case, a metaphoric view of the folly that is the English education system and/or organized religion, depending on your reading).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LdUme7QZLY (Sting)