Storytelling vs Information

by Vida Kashani

“With the advent of the first cities in the Middle ages, West European culture gave rise to the idea that the square or market square was the place where public opinion was formed, and literature was practiced.”

(Bax et al. 21)

Though this quotation by Bax et al. focuses on how public opinion was formed in market squares in Middle-age Western Europe, it is also true that, at around the same time, similar activity was taking place in the public squares of the Middle East: particularly in Persian culture. The medium through which this was done was mainly that of poetry and storytelling. After several centuries, the culture of poetry in Persia enhanced and became a significant tool for forming public opinions. For instance, in the late 19th century, minstrels, clowns and magicians were creating a kind of comic public show in market squares, which entertained while also forming various political voices. The groups of performers responsible for this roamed the cities, staging scenes and performing small theatrical pieces. In these pieces, they would often openly mock and criticize authority in public domains. As Yahya Aryanpour (1907-1985) mentioned in his book From Saba to Nima (1971):

“The songs and compositions they used, particularly after the Constitutional Revolution, replaced the “free language” of the press, which was compatible to the nature of the nation, and as soon as they were released to the public, they became popular among the people, and these songs/poems awakened their sense of self-awareness and motivated the masses to mobilize and fight for their rights.”

(Aryanpour 29)¹

Returning to 2020, in our neo-liberal, capitalist world, everywhere is privatized or nationalized; therefore, there is almost no public sphere in the city to share experience. Instead, the city, as the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells (1942) claims, has become an Information City (Castells 1989). We are living in a post-truth era in which facts, the truth, and reality are increasingly destabilized, while fiction is given a status upgrade. An example of this can be found in the presidential election of America in 2016, in which objective facts proved to be less important than emotion-driven public opinion (Wynants 10). With the technological developments and rise of social media in society, spreading any kind of information is now easier than at any other time in the history. Castells says: “the term information refers to a specific type of social organization in which the production, processing and transmission of information, due to the new technological conditions that have arisen in this historical period, are the main sources of productivity and power” (Castells 57). The advertising and mass media industries find many applications in this context because, in addition to reducing the time between production and consumption of goods and aiding the distribution of goods in the global capitalist system, they provide a suitable platform for ruling consumer life for people.

Almost a century ago, while the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was working on his masterpiece essay The Storyteller (1936), the writer, of course, did not have a laptop but he nevertheless assumed himself to be a citizen in the communication era. The essay meditates on the role of storytelling in society, the dangers it is facing, its decay, and how our relationship with truth—both general and specific—is shaped by stories. Benjamin argues that because of rise of information— through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news—we no longer care for the experience of others.

Benjamin directed his complaint towards the commodification of experience in the newspapers, but, most of all, strongly complained about the news industry: “[e]very glance at a newspaper 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” (Benjamin 83). This applies to such (online) entertainment today. As Castells claims, “[t]he paradigm shift in the present age can be considered as a transition from technology based cheap energy inputs to technology based on cheap information inputs” (Castells 92). Consequently, experience loses its value and information has become the truth of the twenty-first century.

According to Benjamin, pervasive wars and inflation are the direct causes of the devaluation of experience: “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” (Benjamin 83). As a result of the truly awful things they had seen in the early 20th century, people no longer wished to talk about what, a hundred years before, might have made a ballad or, a thousand years before, an epic poem. In fact, experience—the perception of the world through living rather than experimentation—loses its authority.

The story also loses its source of inspiration. But on another level, the “dispersion of information” has a deceptive effect on experience and has led to a crisis in storytelling and the novel. In the newspapers, “no incident is narrated unless descriptions are specified in advance” (id. 89). While the value of storytelling, which is deeply rooted in oral culture, leaves many events unsaid, thereby giving the reader the opportunity or interpretation, “the value of information does not go beyond that particular moment when it happened. The news must completely surrender to that moment and explain himself in every way without wasting time” (id. 90). Since perceiving truth is very much dependent on the time and place in which it has been given, the meaning and role of fiction is therefore facing a crisis by the engines of advertisement and information.

In the decrease of stories from our lives, fiction has found its place in information and become a tool for various advertisement companies and political organizations to pursue their goals. Fiction is a domain of the writer and the artist, not of the journalist or the politician. It does not mean that fiction has nothing to do with the truth. On the contrary, we know that a story arranges facts into a narrative— often, exaggerating and rationalizing them. Precisely because fiction does not claim to be truth, it is honest and leaves interpretation up to its audience. But just because stories are stemming from the imagination realm, this does not mean that they are inherently untrue. Perhaps stories actually reveal a deeper truth about the world in which we live than statistical facts. As Benjamin says: “the effect of the storyteller’s work on the story remains as the effect of the potter’s hand on the potter’s clay” (id. 90-92).

Artistic storytelling is a connection that does not present itself as an objective reality, but as a social process. Since we bombard ourselves with unauthorized information, lacking the emotional context that only skilful storytelling can convey, the role of storyteller in helping us to cultivate wisdom in the age of information is an increasingly challenging and important one. This wealth of available information has also created an environment causing neglect towards our surrendering. We can almost never be sure about any thoughts, since everything is changing at the speed of light. In order to seem aware, we form our so-called ideas by relying on detailed information and superficial perceptions. The most dangerous by-product of the trend of information and the greatest threat to storytelling is something that Benjamin recognized: our sensitivity to boredom.

“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Borden is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom — are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listener disappears.”

(id. 90)

Psychoanalyst Adam Philips (1954) in his essays on the Unexamined Life (1994)² calls boredom capacity a growth success for the child, and said it is essential to creative life (Popova). The brevity of the story is the most important factor that causes it to be remembered. Listening to the retelling of a story is a part of its nature, which requires the emptiness of wings and lethargy that is achieved less and less every day.

Thus, in our financialized, capitalist world, in which oral storytelling has lost its place, storytellers have become journalists, editors, filmmakers, or curators who help people to understand not only what is important in the world but also how to apply them to our own experience. The great storytellers of today are transforming information into knowledge and experience, mostly in the framework of fiction.

Through symbolism, metaphor, and communication, the storyteller helps us interpret information, integrate it within our existing knowledge, and turn it into wisdom. Though they are creating information as well, a great story of expanding understanding also invites the audience to reflect.

The work of art, on the other hand, evokes fictional truths. American philosopher of art Kendall Walton (1939), in his work Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), argues that “fact can be fiction and fiction fact” (Walton 73). According to Walton, the representational arts can be considered props that stimulate specific imaginations, in the way that kids’ toys serve as props in the fantasy world of children (Walton 34).

The ambiguity of stories which emphasize personal experience—unlike information, which tries to explain everything—led to stories using any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles because they are not defined by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. Therefore, we ought not to let stories disappear from our lives without a fight, for, stories (as Benjamin hinted at) allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives: most notably, capitalism itself. Unlike information, they also bring us closer to other people. Telling stories is a perpetual act of rebellion: claiming freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we contribute to information.

Vida Kashani, 2021

¹ All Aryanpour quotations are translated into English from Persian/Farsi, by Vida Kashani
² Full title: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

Bibliography:

Sander Bax, Pascal Gielen, Bram Ieven (eda.). Interrupting the city: Artistic constitutions of the public sphere. Valiz Amsterdam, 2015

Aryanpur, Yahya. Az Saba Ta Nima: Tarikh-i Sad-u Panjah Sal Adab-i Farsi. Vol. II: 540 Pp. (From Saba to Nima). 4th ed., Kitabha-yi Jlbi, 1972. (Originally in Persian: unofficial translation by Vida Kashani.)

Castells, Manuel. Infomational City, Voll I. Wiley 1992, 1989.

Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representation of Arts. Harvard University Press; Revised ed. edition (October 15, 1993).

Wynants (ed.), Nele. When Fact Is Fiction. Valiz, Amsterdam, 2020.