Posted on by Jordan

Office Hours #6: Let’s Exchange the Experience (Would’ve Also Been a Fun Title for This Paper But I Hadn’t Heard “Runnin’ Up That Hill” Yet)

Time: Fall, Junior Year

The Class: Philosophy of Happiness

The Assignment: “Walter Benjamin writes, ‘The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy.’ Benjamin ties the capacity for embodied, historical experience as a prerequisite for ‘having counsel’ (or wisdom) and for feeling this happiness as the ‘complicity with liberated man.’ Why does the possibility for happiness depend upon our capacity for experience for Benjamin? What defines the distinction between storytelling and ‘information’ and how does that distinction allow for, or prevent, the possibility of happiness? In responding to these questions, provide an account of what Benjamin could mean by happiness.”

Final Draft

Are You Experienced?:11 Walter Benjamin, Experience, and Happiness

“We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of ‘the contemporary;’” so writes Walter Benjamin in his 1933 essay, “Experience and Poverty” (735). In this paper, I will look at why experience is so important for Benjamin’s conception of happiness, and what his conception of happiness actually is. Then I will examine the case for whether happiness of a Benjaminian nature is possible in our own time.

There is no simple way to summarize the role of experience in Benjaminian philosophy. What follows is an attempt to weave the tapestry of ‘experience’ (that is, the idea, not the thing itself) from the relevant threads found in Benjamin’s writing.

Much of Benjamin’s writing on experience is in relation to storytelling.1 Indeed, storytelling can be loosely defined as “the ability to exchange experiences” (Benjamin, Illuminations 83). Thus, we can surmise that one value of experience is its exchangeability. Benjamin separates storytellers into two categories: those who bring stories from far away lands, and those who know the local traditions and folklore (84). A more specific definition of storytelling might then be ‘the ability to exchange experiences that would otherwise be removed from the reader2 by spatial or temporal distance’ (83-84). So we see that one value of experience is knowledge of the world, both horizontally (knowledge of foreign lands) and vertically (knowledge of the past).

Another aspect of storytelling is practicality. Every story “contains, openly or covertly, something useful;” it “has counsel for [its] readers” (Benjamin, Illuminations 86). The accumulation of counsel results in wisdom, which is “[c]ounsel woven into the fabric of real life” (86-87). Wisdom, then, is another value of experience.

Benjamin further defines storytelling as being in opposition to information. Information “proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling,” and thus with experience (Benjamin, Illuminations 89). Firstly, information is verifiable and “’understandable in itself;’” the story, on the other hand, gets its authority precisely from its unverifiability, that is to say, its distance (89). Thus, a value of experience can be said to be an authority which is inherent to its nature, not its content.

Secondly, information “does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time” (Benjamin, Illuminations 90). In other words, information is relevant only to its moment of novelty, and only, one can extrapolate, to its spatial locality. A story, on the other hand, does not contain an inherent meaning. Rather, the story’s meaning is interpreted by the reader, and thus it is not confined to any one time or place (90). Therefore, another value of experience is not just that of practicality that we saw previously, but of universal applicability to all places and times.3

At the risk of appearing disorganized, I would like to return to storytelling. Specifically, the telling of fairy tales. “The first true storyteller,” writes Benjamin, “is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales” (Illuminations 102). We can conclude, then, that fairy tales exhibit all the values we have already seen. To Benjamin, though, they are yet more powerful. The fairy tale satisfies “the need created by the myth” (102).

Before we see how the fairy tale does this, we need to understand what Benjamin means by ‘myth.’ When Benjamin writes about Nikolai Leskov’s stories being “a hybrid between fairy tale and legend,” he quotes Ernst Bloch: “A hybrid between fairy tale and legend contains figuratively mythical elements, mythical elements whose effect is certainly captivating and static, and yet not outside man” (qtd. in Benjamin, Illuminations 103). As these are not truly mythical, only ‘figuratively,’ one can conclude that truly mythical elements do exist ‘outside man.’ They are therefore not grounded in human experience, and thus anti-Benjaminian.

The fairy tale gives us tools for overcoming myth. I feel the need here to quote Benjamin at length, as I doubt I could say it more cogently:

In the figure of the fool [the fairy tale] shows us how mankind ‘acts dumb’ toward myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man.

(Benjamin, Illuminations 102; emphasis mine)

As fairy tale, being a story, is rooted in experience, so too, then, are these lessons. Combined with those values we found previously, it should be getting clearer now why experience is important to happiness, given all that it can teach us, through the proper medium.

Yet we still don’t know what happiness is. The reason I bring up fairy tales at this juncture is because Benjamin seems to say that they are, in fact, the key to happiness:

“The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.”

(Benjamin, Illuminations 102)

This is one of the rare times Benjamin explicitly refers to happiness, so one is tempted to take it quite seriously. And certainly, Benjamin does not seem like one to bandy around such philosophically significant terms as ‘happy’ casually. Yet this construction implies that happiness is a state of being which an adult achieves rarely, and yet is easily available to a child.

I find this interpretation unlikely. My argument is as follows, beginning with the premise that everything exists in contrast with its opposite. Without the presence of X, which is precisely ‘not Y,’ Y defines itself, and thus has no definition. To put another way, if there is no thing which is ‘not Y,’ then everything is Y, and Y then has as much meaning as saying, “This building is a building.”4 Folksinger Arlo Guthrie puts it rather succinctly: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.”

Let us accept this premise as true. The argument on the table is that happiness is a state of being. There exists, then, a state of being which is ‘not happiness.’ What is more, ‘not happiness’ exists outside of the person who has achieved happiness, i.e. out in the world, else how would they know they were happy? Let us assume, now, that there is a person who is happy. The only way for them to become ‘not happy’ is for the ‘not happiness’ out in the world to affect them. Thus, the only way for them to maintain happiness is to avoid experiencing the world.

Clearly this is antithetical to Benjamin. Happiness, then, in Benjaminian thought, cannot be a state of being. That is, it cannot be static. There is evidence for this interpretation in Benjamin’s writing. Remember Bloch’s implication that myth is static (qtd. in Benjamin, Illuminations 103). Remember also that experience has a decidedly dynamic quality, given its temporal nature.

The question is whether Benjamin shows us what dynamic happiness looks like. Assuming that Benjamin does not use ‘happy’ in its casual sense (which, again, seems like a safe assumption), then we are still left with the fairy tale as a, if not the, source of happiness. And so we come to that phrase so deeply embedded in the tradition of fairy tales: “And they lived happily ever after.” This would seem to be a Benjaminian sort of happiness, for him to be so attached to it.5 So, what is different for the protagonists of a fairy story that they can begin the tale unhappy, and end it assured of happiness? The answer is experience. Compressed as the fairy tale is, it gives its protagonists exactly those experiences which they will need to draw from going forward. Thus, the fairy tale is like a kernel of happiness. Of course, in reality, one must experience much more than what little experience is had in fairy tales.6 The principle, however, is the same. Experience is the key to happiness.

I said that I would examine the case for the possibility of happiness in modern times. Though I had planned a thorough examination,7 it no longer seems appropriate, so I will save that for some later essay. Suffice it to say that Benjamin saw many hurdles in the way of happiness. He discusses the problem of the overwhelming amount of media, as well as the problem of a-historical property (Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” 732, 733-734). He says that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end,” and blames, in part: the novel, which is not based in experience; information, which we have already discussed, and which we can see now is static, and thus antithetical to happiness; modern indolence and lack of craftsmanship; and the removal of death from everyday life (Benjamin, Illuminations 83, 87, 89, 92-94). That is merely the tip of the pessimistic iceberg.

Remember, though, that the fairy tale “to this day is the first tutor of children” (Benjamin, Illuminations 102). The fairy tale, that kernel of happiness, though minimized, is still with us. This, at least, seems to allow for the possibility, however faint, of happiness.8910

  1. It is important to keep in mind, though, that the values of experience discussed here are part of experience as such, not just experience as exchanged by stories. ↩︎
  2. I will refer to the receiver of a story as “the reader” throughout this paper. This is mainly to be consistent with Benjamin’s own terminology. However, it should be noted that storytelling is rooted firmly in the oral tradition; “[e]xperience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn” (Benjamin, Illuminations 84). My use of the term reader is not intended to plant storytelling solely in the written word. ↩︎
  3. Note that this universal applicability comes not from the universality of an inherent meaning in the experience, but the universal ability to interpret the story. ↩︎
  4. I am, of course, completely avoiding the subject of whether or not words have meaning. ↩︎
  5. This phrase also provides further evidence that happiness is not static. Benjamin says that “there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate.” If every story is infinitely continuable, then “and they lived happily ever after” surely doesn’t mean “and nothing else ever happened.” ↩︎
  6. To believe otherwise would be to fetishize the fairy tale, corrupting it with mythological aspects. ↩︎
  7. Possible subjects included Star Wars, graffiti, and Normcore (the mode of thought, not the fashion trend). ↩︎
  8. There is also Benjamin’s mention of happiness in “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” “[O]ur image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption . . . . Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply” (Illuminations 254). However, that essay does not, I think, fall within the purview of this paper, and even if it did, unpacking that quote would require at least another three pages. ↩︎
  9. Also, from his essay on Kafka: “[T]here is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us” (Benjamin, Illuminations 144). Again, not within the purview of this paper, but relevant. ↩︎
  10. Other things I wish I had time/space to talk about: Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories;” the tale of “The Death and Return of Superman;” Doctor Who; Blues Brothers (and probably Blue Brothers 2000, now that I think about it); Welcome To Night Vale, especially the people who say it helps with their anxiety; Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” specifically the line about his “barbaric yawp;” and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. ↩︎
  1. Alternate titles included: It’s All About the Benjamin; Once Upon A Paper; And They Lived Happily (N)Ever After; and Kilroy Was Here.

Grade: You know, I really thought I had the feedback for this one. Pretty sure it was a good grade, though. I mean, I think it’s at least an A-, don’t you?

Professor’s Comments: I’m sure they were very positive. Actually now I’m wondering if we even got feedback on this one…

My Comments: Personally I think this is one of the best papers I’ve ever written. I think I do a good job of synthesizing ideas from across Benjamin’s (often difficult to parse) writing, and I think my accounting of “Benjaminian happiness” is fairly convincing and also, as someone who spends even more time alone in my room now than I did on college, maybe a bit of a wake-up call (though, as I write this, I do have plans in a couple days…which I’m worried I’m going to have to cancel because as soon I committed to them I got sick; certainly there’s nothing to read into that, right?).

Admittedly, there are a couple times where I quote Benjamin in order to get around trying to interpret him, but still. I also don’t know why I insisted on making the title footnote be footnote 11, but I do know that my work-around for that in the word doc works better than my work-around for it here. But I do think in general I don’t mind any of these footnotes, even the self-indulgent ones, and footnote 3 is perfect use of a footnote: making an important clarification but one which would interrupt the flow of the main text. And clearly I was having fun; I definitely remember being actually sad that I didn’t have time to write more, which was definitely not true of any other paper.

Also, shout-out to my professor for sneaking not 1, not 2, but 3 Marxist philosophers into this course: Marx himself with The Communist Manifesto, Simone de Beauvoir with an excerpt from The Second Sex (this one, I think, which I just happened to find in my bookmarks), and of course DJ BenJAMMIN (“Experience and Poverty,” “Unpacking My Library,” “The Storyteller,” and “These on the Philosophy of History,” and not “The Work of Art in the Age of Everyone Having Read This Essay But Not Anything Else He Wrote”), which makes my professor indirectly responsible for the existence of this website.

Now go out and get some experience and also read Benjamin.

Pre-Production

  1. The Importance of Experience and Storytelling
    1. “[T]he art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. (83)
    2. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. (83-84) And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.
    3. Every glance at a newspaper [see: Information] demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible.
    4. With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? [see: Death]
    5. What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. [see: 1]
    6. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.
    7. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” (84)
    8. Information
      1. “[W]e recognize that with the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a form of communication which, no matter far back its origin may lie, never before influenced [storytelling] in a decisive way. But now it does exert such an influence. And it turns out that it confronts storytelling as no less a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and that it also brings about a crisis in the novel. This new form of communication is information.
      2. Villemessant, the founder of La Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. ‘To my readers,’ he used to say, ‘an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.’ (88-89) This makes striking clear that it is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest that gets the readiest hearing.
      3. The intelligence that came from afar – whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition [see: two kinds of storyteller; see also: Star Wars] – possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification.
      4. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that is appear ‘understandable in itself.’ Often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. Because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.
      5. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.
      6. Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.
      7. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it…. The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks…. (89)
      8. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” (90)
        • temporal importance
    9. Death
      1. “Valéry concludes his observations with this sentence: ‘It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort.’ The idea of eternity has ever had its strongest source in death. If this idea declines, so we reason, the face of death must have changed. It turns out that this change is identical with the one that has diminished the communicability of experience to the same extent as the art of storytelling has declined.
      2. It has been observable for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness. In its last stages this process is accelerated. And in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying.
      3. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house.
      4. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death [see: rooms], dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.
      5. It is, however, characteristic that no only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of [i.e. experiences] – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.
      6. Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back.” Refers to “Unexpected Reunion” by Johann Peter Hebel. A miner dies in the mine “on the eve of his wedding.” “His bride keeps faith with him after his death, and she lives long enough to become a wizened old woman; one day a body is brought up from the abandoned tunnel which, saturated with iron vitriol, has escaped decay, and she recognizes her betrothed. After this reunion she too is called away by death. When Hebel…was confronted with the necessity of making this long period of years [between his death and hers] graphic, he did so in the following sentences: ‘In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed. America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died also. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun…’
        Never has a storyteller embedded his report deeper in natural history than Hebel manages to do in this chronology. Read it carefully. Death appears in it with the same regularity as the Reaper does in the processions that pass around the cathedral clock at noon.” (93-95)
      7. Storytelling, i.e. the exchange of experience, which itself is an affirmation of life, must exist in the presence of death. [see: light/dark, Newton, everything exists in contrast]
    10. Memory
      1. In order to be inclined to repeat a story, one must remember it and integrate into one’s own experience
      2. This is best accomplished through boredom, “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling of leaves drives him away” (91)
      3. Boredom is no longer allowed to exist in modern times
      4. “[S]torytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory” (91)
      5. “…the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle; the second, to many diffuse occurrences.” (98)
    11. Meaning of life
      1. “The ‘meaning of life’ is really the center about which the novel moves. But the quest for it is no more than the initial expression of perplexity with which its reader sees himself living this written life. Here ‘meaning of life’ – there ‘moral of the story’: with these slogans the novel and story confront each other…” (99)
      2. “Actually there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate. The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis.’” (100)
        • again, importance of temporality
      3. “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” (101)
    12. Happiness and fairy tales
      1. “’And they lived happily ever after,’ says the fairy tale. [also: Once upon a time]
      2. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be [acknowledging possibility of continuation of storytelling and thus happiness?!], the teller of fairy tales.
      3. Whenever good counsel [see: counsel] was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest.
      4. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. IN the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind ‘acts dumb’ toward myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man. The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.
      5. The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.” (102)
      6. “’A hybrid between fairy tale and legend,’ [Ernst Bloch] says, ‘contains figuratively mythical elements, mythical elements whose effect is certainly captivating and static, and yet not outside man. …For instance, the couple Philemon and Baucis: magically escaped though in natural repose….at certain points it divorces the legend from the locality of the spell, rescues the flame of life, the specifically human flame of life, calmly burning, within as without.” (103)
      7. “And they lived happily ever after” Yet, no story truly ends [see K.ii.]. Thus, “happily ever after” surely isn’t static, but merely skips the first part of the fairy-tale, where are protagonist is incomplete, lacking in experience. To live happily is simply to have the benefit of experience.
    13. More about the storyteller
      1. “Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel – not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For it granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own).
      2. His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed (108) completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.” (109)
        • “The righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.” (104)
    14. From “Experience and Poverty”
      1. “Our childhood anthologies used to contain the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, fooled his sons into believing that there was treasure buried in the vineyard. They would only have to dig. They dug, but found no treasure. When autumn came, however, the vineyard bore fruit like no other in the whole land. They then perceived that their father had passed on a valuable piece of experience: the blessing lies in hard work and not in gold.” (731) [see: counsel]
      2. “For what is the value of all our culture if it is divorced from experience? Where it all leads when that experience is simulated or obtained by underhanded means is something that has become clear to us from the horrific mishmash of styles and ideologies produced during the last century – too clear for us not to think it a matter of honesty to declare our bankruptcy. Indeed (let’s admit it), our poverty of experience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human experience in general.” (732)
      3. “Hence, a new kind of barbarism. Barbarism? Yes, indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further, looking neither left nor right. Among the great creative spirits, there have always been the inexorable ones who begin by clearing a tabula rasa. They need a drawing table; they were constructors. Such a constructor was Descartes, who required nothing more to launch his entire philosophy than the single certitude, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And he went on from there. Einstein, too, was such a constructor…” (732)
      4. “Here and there, the best minds have long since started to think in these terms. A total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it – this is its hallmark.” (733)
      5. “It is no coincidence that glass is such (733) a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed. A cold and sober material into the bargain. Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession. The great writer André Gide once said, ‘everything I wish to own becomes opaque to me.’ Do people like Scheerbart dream of glass buildings because they are the spokesmen of a new poverty? But a comparison will perhaps reveal more than theory. If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well be, ‘You’ve got no business here.’ And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark – the ornaments on the mantlepiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us out here: ‘Erase the traces!’ is the refrain in the first poem of his…[Reader for City-Dwellers]. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite became the norm. And conversely, the intérieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits – habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself. This is understood by everyone who is familiar with the absurd attitude of the inhabitants of such plush apartments when something is broke. Even their way of showing their annoyance – and this affect, which is gradually starting to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuosity – was above all the reaction of a person who felt that someone had obliterated ‘the traces of his days on the earth.’ This has now been achieved by Scheerbart, with his glass, and by the Bauhaus, with its steel. They have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. ‘It follows from the foregoing,’ Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, ‘that we can surely talk about a “culture of glass.” The new glass-milieu will transform humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies.’” (734)
      6. “Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty – their outer poverty, and ultimately their inner poverty – that it will lead to something respectable. Nor are they ignorant or inexperienced. [?] Often we could say the very opposite. They have ‘devoured’ everything, both ‘culture and people,’ and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them.” (734) [see: memory/boredom]
      7. “No one feels more caught out than they by Scheerbart’s words: ‘You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan.’ Tiredness is followed by sleep, and then it is not uncommon for a dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day – a dream that shows in its realized form the simple but magnificent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality. (734)
      8. “The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for (734) contemporary man. His life is full of miracles – miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any machinery, to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea. Nature and technology, primitiveness and comfort, have completely merged. And to people who have grown weary of the endless complications of everyday living and to whom the purpose of existence seems to have been reduced to the most distant vanishing point on an endless horizon, it must come as a tremendous relief to find a way of life in which everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way, in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air ballon. And now we need to step back and keep our distance.” (735)
      9. “We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of ‘the contemporary.’ The economic crisis is at the door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war. Holding on to things has become the monopoly of a few powerful people, who, God knows, are no more human than the many; for the most part, they are more barbaric, but not in the good way. Everyone else has to adapt – beginning anew and with few resources. They rely on the men who have adopted the cause of the absolutely new and have founded it on the insight and renunciation. In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh. This laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. [LIKE A YAWP] Well and good. Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.” (735)
  2. Possibility of happiness in modern times
    1. “In short, despite the primary role which storytelling plays in the household of humanity, the concepts through which the yield of the stories may be garnered are manifold.” (101)
      1. “What may most readily be put in religious terms in Leskov seems almost automatically to fall into place in the pedagogical perspectives of the Enlightenment in Hebel, appears as hermetic tradition in Poe, finds a last refuge in Kipling in the life of British seamen and (101) colonial soldiers. All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier.” (101-102)
    2. Graffiti
      1. http://nellbeecham.com/2013/12/15/streetartandaura/
      2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti
        • “Graffiti as a memorial
          1. People often leave their traces in wet cement or concrete. This type of graffiti often commemorates the mutual commitment of a couple, or simply records a person’s presence at a particular moment. Often this type of graffiti is dated and is left untouched for decades, offering a look into local historical minutiae.” (Wikipedia)
            1. An example of information vs story?
      3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
    3. Welcome to Nightvale
    4. Normcore?
  3. Structure
    1. Experience
      1. History
      2. Memory
      3. Storytelling
    2. Opposite of experience
      1. Information
        • interpretation
      2. “surfeit”
    3. Happiness
      1. Fairy tale
      2. Redemption
      3. Happiness as a process
    4. Modern possibility
      1. Why Benjamin thinks experience has fallen in value / death of storytelling


        “[T]here is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us,” writes Walter Benjamin, paraphrasing Kafka (Illuminations 144).

Possible titles:

  • Kilroy Was Here
  • It’s All About The Benjamin
  • Once Upon A Paper
  • And They Lived Happily (N)Ever After
  • Are You Experienced?*

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Experience and Poverty.” Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. 731-736. PDF. <http://www.virginia.edu/humanities/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Walter-Benjamin-Experience-and-Poverty.pdf&gt;.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 2007. Print.

Guthrie, Arlo. “Amazing Grace.” More Together Again In Concert, Volume Two. Rising Sun Records, 1994. CD.

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