Maria Popova, ‘Walter Benjamin on Information vs. Wisdom and How the Novel and the News Killed Storytelling’
The cultivation of ‘wisdom’ is increasingly important:
as we find ourselves bombarded with bits of disjoined information, devoid of the sensemaking context that only deft storytelling can impart” (¶1)
... Social media algorithms do not convey a coherent and balanced story, despite an apparent diversity of sources > and, “besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking?” // Need to re-read Chronicling Life’s White Machine / these two articles (and the previous quote) are related in my practice in ways that I don’t yet understand > is it just that Lerner et al are a symptom of what Benjamin describes?
How does my painting relate to writing within novels etc. .?
What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. (Benjamin, in ¶7)
... maybe it’s useful to consider how painting and poetry are compared within Lessing’s Laocoon? Time is certainly aspect of it.
Benjamin argues that the gap between “wisdom and information [... is] driven by the illusion that the latest and the loudest are the most significant and most deserving of our attention”:
It is no longer intelligence coming from [a spatial or temporal] afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest that gets the readiest hearing. The intelligence that came from afar [...] possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’. (Benjamin, in ¶10)
Once more, authority.
THIS is what my paintings are about:
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. 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. (Benjamin, in ¶11)
Re: “In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information", that is that the foremost aspect of contemporary communication is that is appear understandable in itself [my emphasis].” (¶10) > and, also, Benjamin’s quotation of Paul Valéry’s assertion that “modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated” (¶15).
THIS: “this fashioning of experience into something 'solid' and 'useful' for human life is precisely the transmutation of information into wisdom that we, a century after Benjamin, are increasingly losing and desperately need” (¶17) // my paintings are a transmutation of information into... not wisdom, but maybe a kind of story-telling / Via “Susan Sontag’s monumental 1964 case against interpretation”: "there are no facts, only interpretations” (Nietzche).
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. 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.
^^ devastating and beautiful.