10 min.
Dead Slow Ahead
In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mechanized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “experience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one who has historically made experience understandable—grounding all things (narrative, morality, practical know-how, history, tradition, and politics) in a telling of specific experiences—was thus necessarily disappearing from (Western) life. For Benjamin, where what will come to replace experience—information—disavows context to claim to be “understandable in itself” (all the better for its commodification), storytelling lives in specificity, avoiding the (informational) pull towards explanation. Storytellers report their own experiences or others’; they bring tales from faraway travels or they pass on local tales and traditions, all in the service of communicating experience. And as storytelling fades, Benjamin writes, so too…
