No Stories to Tell

Trapped in a Fortune-Cookie Factory with no Stories to Tell

Drawing on a distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary' experience derived from J. J. Gibson's ecological 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 less due to Gibson's 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 '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 shaped by automobiles, the line of this highway traces a virtually impermeable wall. While (sometimes) increasing access to 'processed' information, it (almost 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 people in contemporary society by calling to mind an old joke "about a person trapped in a fortune-cookie factory 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 work of two great twentieth century writers—Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka—whose names are routinely transformed into adjectives to describe the human condition at the end of the century. Reed finds it disconcerting "that the image conveyed by this joke—stripped of any pretense at humor—is nowadays often used to describe our lives." (3)That neither Beckett nor Kafka abandoned humor—both deepened the humor of this joke until it became inescapably bleak—is a point to which I will return later when I move from Reed's diagnosis to his prescription. But first the diagnosis.

Reed's argument is laid out with admirable clarity in his prologue, "A Plea for Experience": "the psychosocial ills that beset many of us today—what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the increasing barbarism of daily life—stem largely from the degradation of opportunities for primary experience that is rampant in all developed and developing societies.