1) Stories have neither beginnings nor endings
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov sets out to characterise the nature and historical basis of storytelling. Amongst its many dialectical devices, the essay contrasts the chronicler and the historian. While the historian sets out to explain past events, the chronicler simply recounts. He or she is “not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world”. That course is accepted as divinely ordained, and thus the chronicler is relieved of “the burden of demonstrable explanation” [1] . The storyteller is a secularised version of the chronicler, Benjamin proposes: liberated from explanation or analysis, storytellers are free to spin tales into infinitely proliferating webs, and the end of one story may always serve as the start of another. Unlike novels, for example, “there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate” [2] .
So in stories, everything is (potentially) connected to everything else. That cliché is usually ascribed to Lenin, but a little Googling suggests the attribution is apocryphal [3] . The phrase is probably just a proverb. Maybe people like it and recycle it because it recalls the flavour of storytelling; offering no real explanation or analysis, it’s a very short story about stories.
The connection between the two tabletops shown here—one from Bosch’s The Conjurer, the other a detail of Melanie Jackson’s 2003 installation Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World—might be established through analysis and explanation. An earlier work by Jackson (After ‘The Conjurer’, 1996) juxtaposed Bosch’s painting of the conjurer-trickster, his tools and his audience, with the artist’s own video footage of Eastern immigrants playing three-card Monte in Berlin just after the Wall came down. Whether or not she made a conscious connection, Bosch’s tabletop was present in Jackson’s visual memory when she went to work on Some Things… in 2003. That’s the historical justification, but the paired images might also form the start of a story, in which present-day artistry is likened to older popular diversions and the artist’s persona starts to mirror figures from an earlier age: either the storyteller-moralist whose role is to counsel others on the ways of the world, or the entertainer whose dexterity creates around itself a small but discernible cloud of ethical uncertainty. The comparison might also reflect back on the activity of the contemporary art writer, caught between scholarly expectations that she’ll provide a methodologically consistent analysis, a correct historical context and an “explanation” of artworks on one hand, and on the other the much more traditional demand on critics to spin pregnant, absorbing stories about artists’ lives, their remarkable gifts and their wonderful creations.
2. Everything is connected, but there is no single vantage-point
Benjamin writes that in stories, the connections between events, people or things may be accounted for perfectly acceptably by means of magical, miraculous or supernatural agency. In contrast, modern forms of communication (Benjamin’s examples focus on novels, the press) deal in information, in which facts and events must be connected in reasonable, credible ways. Magic is banished.
Three-card Monte depends on exploiting the assumption that appearances will be reliable and connections transparent. The game’s “magic” lies in the operator’s sleight-of hand and the presence of “shills” or insiders who help him trick victims into betting money. A trio of playing cards, or three containers and some kind of spherical object, are shuffled around on a flat surface. The object of the game is for the player to pick the “money card” or the vessel under which the ball has been hidden. The mark watches the con man’s team winning and losing and finds he’s more able to follow the movement of the money card than they. He concludes the game is easy and tries his luck. The con man brings his repertoire of tricks into play—the “throw”, for instance, or the lively-sounding “Mexican turnover”— and thoroughly confuses the mark. “Done properly, the throw is virtually undetectable; even shills can’t reliably follow cards through” notes Wikipedia (though here, appropriately enough, the online dictionary’s transparency has itself been challenged [4] ). One wonders if occasionally even the con man loses track, and is forced to rely on blind guesswork to maintain the scam.
The postmodern propositions that explanatory “master narratives” are obsolete and that reality cannot be grasped from a single viewpoint have had several decades to lose whatever shock-value they once possessed. But Jackson’s animation A Global Positioning System invites reflection on another vantage point that has gone, this time a technological one. A Global Positioning System originated from the concept of mapping the totality of technologies and sites of production represented by a GPS device. However the range of components that constitute this apparatus turns out to be so complex and diverse that no single individual can have a comprehensive overview. The map is impossible. One assumes this must also be true of many other mass-produced devices on the market. It’s a less grandiose, but somehow more insidious, disappearance than the philosophical disintegration announced by postmodern theory.
In Jackson’s video, we briefly meet the boss of a Chinese factory that assembles GPS systems. Seated in his smart black leather chair, he shows us the integrated circuit that he identifies as the “heart” of GPS technology: a cluster of millions of transistors, “like a whole city of skyscrapers”. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of the director of a GPS factory in Guangzhou recorded by the artist on location whilst researching the work in 2005. In the finished work, the character’s facial image and mouth movements don’t lip-synch neatly with the recorded voice. Via Jackson’s animation technique, the tiny marks and lines that form his mouth shatter and regroup, solidify and liquefy. Albeit fleeting, the effect of the disconnection is subtle but decisive: something is not quite right, yet exactly right in its elusiveness. This man seems friendly and trustworthy and what he’s saying is perfectly reasonable. But connections are now visibly unhitched. The facts are dispersed and decentralised and can only be grasped collectively. This seems a cause for both optimism and anxiety. Technological production hinges on the sharing of practical expertise across collaborative networks. But part of the network may fail, or be destroyed, or opt to withhold its knowledge. What then?
3. You May or May not be Here
Benjamin observes that news “stories” are impoverished in relation to traditional stories, in that the events they detail are “shot through with explanation”. “…it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… the most extraordinary things, the most marvellous 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 in the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks” [5] . Benjamin’s assertion rests on a crucial opposition between information and experience. News trades in information. In contrast, stories arise from, communicate and endorse experience. At the heart of the essay is the warning that the historical and material conditions of modernity banish traditional human experience at every level and proscribe its communication. “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…” [6] . With the demise of experience comes the end of storytelling. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.” [7]
In the space of 10 minutes and 2 seconds, A Global Positioning System propels the viewer, in imagination, all around the world: from a Western living room via a call centre to a Far Eastern city; to the clean room of an electronics factory; to an African marketplace, a latex plantation, a coltan mine, a shipping container port; past a military-looking checkpoint, across an ocean, even into outer space. At one point a list of the dozens of elements used in making a GPS scrolls down the screen. Later, a singsong computer-generated female voice, seductive and chilling all at once, intones the names of all the 32 countries from which the GPS’s constituent parts may be sourced. The range of places and individuals depicted— workers, bosses, traders, carriers, consumers—draws viewers into considering another crisis in representation that most will be well aware of but may not often be prompted to visualise so vividly: the impossibility of grasping the incredibly complex network of micro-social, micro-political, micro-ecological and micro-economic relationships established by the GPS’s production process. What price “ethical consumption” in relation a commodity such as this?
Adopting Benjamin’s experience/information distinction, we might see this situation as doubly challenging to the contemporary narrator. The realities under consideration, in their extension and intricacy, will not yield either to storytelling (they seem to exceed our experiential capacities) or treatment as information (their complexities confound the self-containment and self-explanation of information). Nevertheless, Jackson’s works refuse to give up the goal of “amplitude” or the possibility of feeding viewers’ imaginations by traditional storytellers’ methods. It’s just that these contemporary fables draw upon and share a different type of experience from that of traditional storytelling. Even as they send words, images, facts and suppositions streaming through our minds, they don’t let us forget our often severe ignorance of the subjects depicted. The experience shared here is that of the unreliability of experience—that, but also the urgency of the need not to give up on autonomous experience altogether, even as the picture jitters and fragments, or subtle, tell-tale electronic honks, slurs and syncopations betray the less-than-human nature of the voice that’s addressing us.
4. The Psychological Connection of the Events is not Forced on the Reader
…writes Benjamin of traditional storytelling [8] . “There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than the chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience” [9] .
Jackson’s approach to narration sits at an interesting tangent to this. See, for example, the manner in which the artist’s animation technique renders her characters’ faces. The 2005 installation Made in China juxtaposes a video of a young Chinese classical musician who’s travelled to London to learn the Erhu, with a poignant digital animation showing a Chinese woman’s journey from the countryside to an Eastern city and into wage slavery: hours and hours, days and days spent making (of all things) false eyelashes from human hair. In the animated story, two sustained “shots” focus on the protagonist’s face, firstly at home in the countryside, secondly at work in the eyelash factory. In the first sequence we speculate about her idea of city life, of change, opportunity and prosperity. In the second sequence we read the blankness of deep depression and disillusion. But in both cases, the woman’s expression is relatively neutral and changes little. The direction of her gaze shifts and the lines around her eyes and mouth undergo many fractional adjustments. “Chaste compactness” seems to characterise this tactical inexpressiveness pretty well, yet its effect is certainly not that of seamlessly integrating the story into our own experience. Psychological projection is not precluded; it is asked of us, but with significant caveats.
A Global Positioning System’s animation technique and stylistic decisions work similarly, like a filter, mobilising viewers’ drive to imagine and sympathise yet heightening their awareness of distance from the subjects shown. For example, a short sequence briefly shows us an African child of maybe ten or twelve years old. His large watchful eyes swivel this way and that in his impassive face. The necessary simplifications of the graphic technique emphasise the youthful sweetness of his features, but his image is ultimately very disturbing. He is policing a coltan mine with a gun on his shoulder.
In interview, Jackson has highlighted her concern with the problems embedded in Western contemporary art’s representations of “the other”. For example, there’s a syndrome in which, in order to avoid over-identification with the other, or “picturing the victim”, artists fall into “banal, self-congratulatory or euphemistic” approaches (such as “visiting difficult or troubled places but at a safe distance—filming them at night, or empty… [because] the artist doesn’t want to seem to be “standing for” the resident population”). She sees her own task as that of finding a subjective but unsentimental register to test her own interconnection with the other lives and realities that she researches, representing “patently difficult conditions… as a living reality rather than an extraordinary act of suffering”. Ultimately, she summarises, “I’m searching for a way to… resist cleaning stuff up or editing out its complexity.”
5. Boredom May be Relative
Benjamin suggested that born storytellers were characteristically practical types. Artisanal storytelling, he wrote, “does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. [10] Both Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci maintained idiosyncratic ideas about the experience of repetitive labour and boredom. On theone hand, Gramsci speculated that the tedium of manual work on factory production lines would leave workers’ brains “free and unencumbered for other occupations”—presumably, talk and discussion, listening, productive introspection, philosophising and other kinds of mental work [11] . Benjamin associated productive boredom with traditional, repetitive craft activities such as spinning and weaving—activities that could act as a background to storytelling. “The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory” he wrote. He suggested that the decline of stories was in part to do with the decline in old, craft activities that (in his view) were “intimately associated with boredom.” [12]
Central to Jackson’s practice is the examination of manual labour. Many of her pieces show workers involved in repetitive and boring tasks. In parallel, the artist’s techniques: digital graphic animation processes, the manual printing of multiple images, the cutting and sculpting of sometimes hundreds of small, identical paper objects—often involve her in repetitive, finicky and (in itself) boring work. The friction that exists between the concept of Jackson’s own supposedly “non-alienated” repetitive labour and the working lives represented in her art work is pivotal to her practice’s significance. It prompts questions about our preconceptions of various categories of labour under the condition of late, global, capitalism.
One such is: whose evaluation of whose work counts? Global under-employment means that jobs per se are precious and for many in employment around the world, just to have a job is a basis for a sense of pride and relief rather than oppression and exploitation. This fact that resists easy accommodation with some Western critiques of globalisation and cheap labour. To suggest that exploitation is relative seems frankly obscene; yet to discount others’ judgements about their own lived experience and assert the correctness of one’s own seems nakedly imperialistic. For some, the very articulation of this dilemma constitutes a contemptible accommodation to “neo-liberal pseudo-democracy”—but unfortunately the condemnation doesn’t make the dilemma go away.
There’s also the problem of the perennial Western myth that artists’ work forms a social “gift” that can be produced cheaply or for nothing. The majority of Western artists (and indeed art writers) work for less than nothing, subsidising their manual, intellectual and imaginative labour by doing other part- or full-time jobs. Yet the social benefits of their “gifts” seem much appreciated, to the extent that their cultural-entrepreneurial survival tactics are being promoted as working models by Western governments under the label of “social enterprise”: a potentially excellent way of extracting hard, specialised, committed work from community-minded citizens in exchange for very low pay.
In interview, Jackson has discussed her particular interest in “hidden work” and the ways that economic migration enables the displacement and denial of labour and effort. She focuses on subjects who appear “totally identified [that is, misidentified] by the idea of ceaseless labour” (for instance, the Phillippina maids who feature in Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World). The foci are telling, as invisibility and ceaselessness (bearing very different valences) are also bound up with cherished Western myths of art production. The myths help artists sustain their efforts even as they disenfranchise them and mask the inequity of the Western art economy.
6. Storytellers’ counsel
“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out”. [13] The storyteller is able to offer wise counsel for all situations because he can call upon his experience of his whole life (and the narrated experiences of other lives, “including hearsay”) as story. In Benjamin’s account, the storyteller is a benign, righteous, sage-like figure.
Superficially it seems hard to think of a stronger antithesis to the storyteller’s voice than the sound of the GPS apparatus, parroting computer-generated vocal directions to distracted motorists. Yet the satellite navigation apparatus is benign, just like Benjamin’s storyteller. It offers counsel in absolutely any location to operatives (motorists) engaged in boring, repetitive work (driving). It narrates a story in which in which every turn in the road is mapped and made safe and one can no longer become lost. The GPS might even be seen as the real-life fulfilment of the fantastical map described by Jorge Luis Borges in the 1946 one-paragraph story On Exactitude in Science. It’s a virtual map that’s the same size as the territory—except that this map, unlike Borges’s, is absolutely functional; it maybe even supersedes the real. The passing landscape is reduced to a mere echo, a simulation of the vital data moving across the GPS’s miniature screen.
If certain aspects of stroies’ traditional “wisdom” are dying out then maybe that’s no bad thing. Women, for one, often got a brutally raw deal in traditional fables. (Laced with nostalgia, the concluding paragraphs of Benjamin’s text display the writer at his most indigestible.) But, as already argued, reports of the death of storytellers’ strategies seem premature. Genre, in all its forms, offers a good example of stories’ survival, albeit on the basis of a significantly changed view of the nature of experience. Much of today’s genre fiction turns on the motif of the conspiracy theory: appearances deceive, connections are not transparent.
The twentieth-century conjurer Borges is clearly a storyteller— a genial one, though he seems far from “benign” “righteous” or “sage-like”. He and his Gothic riddles are out to jinx the compass and break our faith in experience. If he is in any sense a counsellor, his apocalyptic advice often seems to be: be appalled. Jackson’s counsel is different. Her works urge us to confront the complexity of the contemporary global map but still to press ahead on the basis of experience, even though it’s a fragile ice-sheet, and may crack at any moment, and there’s no reassuring, magical electronic voice around to sing in our ear and guide us around the treacherous places.
Notes: