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Walter Benjamin and John Berger on the Concept

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Walter Benjamin and John Berger on the Concept The concept of experience: a transformation in ”the politics of educational method” Øivind Haaland Lillehammer University College In John Berger's book "King" we are led to a place we haven't been - from where few stories come. We are led to a wasteland beside the motorway. Here at the end of the twentieth century, amongst smashed lorries, old boilers and broken washing machines live the homeless. This time, with this book, it is the homeless people Berger is forcing us to see. John Berger is the storyteller of the marginalised: peasants, migrants and the homeless. I will try to lead him into the quarters of social science convinced that he belongs here, too. The main purpose is to discuss the problem of communicating experience. I believe the learning process, even for the intellectuals, basically is an act of mimicry. The scientists’ mimetic “factories” might probably be the universities, colleges or the research centers. John Berger has mimed - Walter Benjamin - the German philosopher, essayist and European vagabond in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The fact that the latter lacked and the former is lacking, specific scientific community support and direction are not what I had in mind. Comparing the one with the other, we find in relation to experience and the communication of experience, them both to have similar comprehension. In that respect I think John Berger has demonstrated that he is in possession of what Walter Benjamin (1979 a,b) once called "the forgotten mimetic faculty of becoming similar". John Berger's main ambition with his writing has been to help us find a way "home" in times when that would be an impossible endeavor. Just listen to what he tells us about "home" and the effect of homelessness. The book that perhaps comes closest to be labeled theoretical and from were some theoretical position might be extracted would be: "And Our faces, my heart, brief as photos." (1984 p55-57) In a part of this book, John Berger's narration focuses on the ancient human beings and their nomadic activity. Mircea Eliade (1969) has demonstrated that in these ancient/ archaic societies the word "home" (Old Norwegian heimr) was synonymous with a place where the world might be founded. A "home" originally meant the center of the world – not in geographical, but in ontological sense. A home was established at" the heart of the real". In these traditional societies everything that made sense of the world was real. The surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home where reality was, the man was not only without shelter, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without “home” everything was fragmentation. Berger draws a horizontal line representing the nomadic traffic of the world, and a vertical line connecting the gods in heaven and the dead in the under world. Home was the center of the world because it was the place were the vertical line crossed with the horizontal one - the coordinates of the human beings reality. Wherever they moved along the horizontal line they carried their vertical line with them, as they might carry a tent pole. This pole supporting their tent made "home" become more than a shelter. It became the center of the earth - the space of reality - the place where the past and the future is connected by the dead in the underworld, the gods in heaven and their own activity in time and space. 234 Reality was the space of activity. The surroundings were frightening and without meaning. It was unreal. John Berger’s conception of man seems to be in correspondence with theories related to pragmatism or activity theory (Enerstvedt 1982). No wonder – old Marxist that he is. It is through activity – praxis - that knowledge, conscience, meaning and identity develop. John Berger’s point is that it is of fundamental importance for man to find home in the original meaning of the word. The amount of wars, mass deportations and exploitation of people in the modern world has rendered the safeguarding, the establishing and the reconstruction of home as “the center of the world” an impossible task. Man never finds a place where the two lifelines cross. The vertical line exists no more; there is no longer any local continuity between him and the dead, the dead no simply disappear; and the gods have become inaccessible. The vertical line has been twisted into the individual biographical circle, which lead nowhere but only encloses. As for the horizontal lines, because there are no longer any fixed points as bearings, they are elided into a plain and pure distance, across which everything is swept. At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name – whilst to most people one is nameless. Homeless meaninglessness rules. Loss of meaning and loss of home is parts of the same matter in John Berger´s conception. John Berger the storyteller has learned from, mimed, Walter Benjamin the philosopher and essayist understanding of experience and communication of experience. Let us see what Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The storyteller” published in 1936, tells us about the storyteller and the relation between storytelling and experience. The storyteller is dead. In the modern society there is no longer room for his existence. The original storyteller, his stories and his role, was created from to lines of development. The one in the image of the farmer: The man with long and close contact with the local community – knowing the histories and the local condition of life. The other in the image of the sailor: The man who told stories from above the ocean. The former communicated along the vertical line and the latter along the horizontal one. The images of the farmer and the sailor represent the foundation of two different categories of stories still traceable although they melted into one storytelling figure. He was embodied in the craftsmen of the medieval. Benjamin says something like this: “If the farmer and the sailor were the old masters of stories – then the rank of craftsmen represented the university of stories.” It is this storytelling figure and the faculties he developed that are disappearing. With it the human being looses its ability to communicate experience. Experience is devaluated. It is concurred by new from of communication of the high-capitalistic society – information. Information has to be understandable in itself; it demands almost an immediate verification and high level of abstraction. The story or the communications of experience on the other hand have practical interests. Benjamin states as a fact that the real stories always openly or disguised contain something useful. The usefulness might be a moral statement or a practical one. The storyteller has advice for the listener. But what is an advice in Benjamin’s mind? “Advice is not as much an answer to a question as it is a suggestion concerning a story – a story that unfolds whether the advice is taken or not. To give this advice you have to know how to tell the story. (How a man conceives advice depends on his ability to see his own situation clearly.)” 235 The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. Wisdom, for Benjamin, is advice woven with living life. The ability to listen to stories is lost. To tell a story is the art of reproducing and this ability is lost when there is no-one remembering. The story does not focus the matter “an sich” as it is with information and reporting. The story dips the matter into the narrator’s life. When it is later brought up again the story contains the narrators “fingerprints”. When the listener becomes narrator the story will be imprinted with his experience and may even have had an effect upon his life as advice. I think Walter Benjamin (1975) with his essay “The Storyteller” conceived the “narratory principle” in social theory and in social science. “The narrative-tradition” has lately been influential on the debate in social science generally (Sarbin 1986, Chambers 1984) and in educational research specifically (Eisner & Peshkin 1990, Eisner 1992). The theme is wide drawing on literature and a vast body of discourse from the field of social science. I will try to bring some central points into focus. The Russian Formalists were the first to state that the study of all stories, every meaningful text, was possible with the aid of the distinction between fabula and susjett (Shklovsky 1969 p245). In English the distinction was translated to story and discourse. (Culler 1981) Story is a “sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestations”. Discourse on the other hand is “the discursive presentation or narration of events.”(p169) As Culler (1981 p187) has pointed out the distinction between story and discourse is a tricky one. On the one hand the analysis of story/fabula is founded on a common sense assumption that the events or actions logically and temporally exists before their presentation in the discourse/susjett. Analysis of discourse on the other hand has demonstrated that the narrated events or the actions of the narrative quite often are the product of discursive forces. They seem to be constructions supporting demands from the discourse. The one who selects and describes events or actions is under the influence of a discursive idea. This makes an impact on both the selection and description. Discourse/susjett is activated both earlier in the process and activated differently from what one first believed to be true. This means that neither the analysis of discourse/susjett nor story/fabula are standing for themselves.
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