No Stories to Tell :: Philosophy Experiences Papers

Trapped in a Fortune-Cookie F executionory with no Stories to bear witnessDrawing on a distinction between radical and secondary experience derived from J. J. Gibsons bionomic 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 lane that carries every cast 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 feeler to processed inf ormation, it (almost always) decreases access to ecological information. This is a pedagogical as well as a perceptual problem my draped 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 kinda halfway through The Necessity of Experience, Edward S. Reed illustrates the condition of ordinary spate in contemporary society by calling to mind an hoary prank about a person trapped in a fortune-cookie factory whose only hope for escape is to send out messages in spite of appearance 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 call are routinely transformed into adjectives to describe the human condition at the end of the century. Reed finds it disconcerting that the image conveye d by this joke unsheathed of any pretense at humoris nowadays often utilize 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 recall later when I move from Reeds diagnosis to his prescription. But first the diagnosis.Reeds line of reasoning is laid out with admirable clarity in his prologue, A plea 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.