In an essay titled “Der Erzhäler,” translated into English as “The Storyteller,” philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) offers a stunning proposal concerning experience and wisdom. Taking a work by Russian storyteller Nicolai Leskov (1831–1895) as an example, Benjamin makes the following hypothesis: “The art of storytelling is coming to an end.” This is so, he suggests, because the “the ability to exchange experiences,” to transmit wisdom through the voice, is less and less transferable. In Benjamin’s view, what keeps art from telling stories and stifles oral tradition is the “progress” of information. Limited to describing the most immediate realities, information turns away from the marvellous, from “noteworthy stories.” Benjamin was writing in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, when use of the voice, amplified through microphones, was becoming an incredible instrument for galvanizing huge crowds, and he knew that storytelling, an “artisan form of communication,” needed new energy within modernity.

Written in 1935, one year before “The Storyteller,” Benjamin’s celebrated essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a reminder of the importance of avant-garde artists in their wish to resist the value-based system of art production. Benjamin discusses the Dadaists and their desire to challenge the inoffensive reception of an artwork by producing, among other things, poems consisting of “every imaginable waste product of language.” Some of these artists, such as Kurt Schwitters, were interested in shouting, noise, and “sound poetry,” and explored the materiality of the voice, bypassing phonocentrism. This deconstruction of

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