No Stories to Tell :: Philosophy Experiences Papers

Trapped in a Fortune-Cookie F morselory with no Stories to splitDrawing on a distinction between particular and secondary experience derived from J. J. Gibsons bionomical psychology, Edward S. Reed argues that our psychosocial ills result from rampant degradation of opportunities for primary experience. That Reed slides easily from experience to information is slight due to Gibsons psychology than to the spirit of the time in which he writes it is a truism that we live in an age of information, where every experience is an act of communication. But, as Reed notes, progress in information technology has been matched by regress in communication. We spend billions on a super path that carries every resistant of information except the ecological information that allows us to experience things for ourselves. In a pattern familiar from cities shaped by automobiles, the line of this highway traces a virtually impermeable wall. While (sometimes) change magnitude entrance money to proc essed information, it (almost always) decreases access to ecological information. This is a pedagogical as well as a perceptual problem my confined in this paper is to pose the problem clearly as a first step toward addressing it adequately. I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.John Cage, Lecture on Nothing (1)Not rather halfway through The Necessity of Experience, Edward S. Reed illustrates the condition of ordinary state in contemporary society by calling to mind an nonagenarian gag about a person trapped in a fortune-cookie factory whose only hope for escape is to send out messages interior the cookies. (2)Like most jokes, this one depends on an instantly recognizable account of valet experience. Its theme permeates the work of two great twentieth century writersSamuel Beckett and Franz Kafkawhose name calling are routinely transformed into adjectives to describe the human condition at the end of the century. Reed finds it disconcerting that the im age conveyed by this joke scanty of any pretense at humoris nowadays often apply to describe our lives. (3)That neither Beckett nor Kafka abandoned humorboth deepened the humor of this joke until it became inescapably bleakis a point to which I will yield later when I move from Reeds diagnosis to his prescription. But first the diagnosis.Reeds billet is laid out with admirable clarity in his prologue, A supplication for Experience the psychosocial ills that beset many of us todaywhat historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the increasing barbarism of daily lifestem largely from the degradation of opportunities for primary experience that is rampant in all developed and developing societies.