No Stories to Tell :: Philosophy Experiences Papers

Trapped in a Fortune-Cookie Factory with no Stories to TellDrawing on a distinction between primary and secondary experience derived from J. J. Gibsons ecological psychology, Edward S. reed instrument argues that our psychosocial ills result from rampant degradation of opportunities for primary experience. That Reed slides easily from experience to information is less due to Gibsons psychology than to the spirit of the time in which he writes it is a truism that we lie 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 miss billions on a superhighway that carries every kind of information except the ecological information that allows us to experience things for ourselves. In a pattern familiar from cities do by automobiles, the line of this highway traces a virtually impermeable wall. While (sometimes) increasing access to processed information, it (al most always) decreases access to ecological information. This is a pedagogical as well as a perceptual problem my intent 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 quite halfway through The Necessity of Experience, Edward S. Reed illustrates the condition of ordinary great deal in contemporary society by calling to mind an old joke about a person trapped in a fortune-cookie milling machinery whose only hope for escape is to send out messages inside the cookies. (2)Like most jokes, this one depends on an instantly recognizable account of human experience. Its theme permeates the run low of two great twentieth century writersSamuel Beckett and Franz Kafkawhose names are routinely transformed into adjectives to describe the human condition at the end of the century. Reed finds it upsetting that the image conveyed by this jokestripped of any pretense at mentalityis nowadays often used 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 return later when I move from Reeds diagnosis to his prescription. But first the diagnosis.Reeds argument is laid out with admirable clarity in his prologue, A Plea for Experience the psychosocial ills that beset many of us todaywhat historiographer 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.