John Berger on originality

Let's begin from far away. We are living today in a culture of information. I use the word "culture" in its anthropological sense; the information-culture has in practice no place for cultural heritages of any kind. It stimulates calculation but consistently discourages reflection. Thus it substitutes information (and misinformation) for knowledge or wisdom. This is alarming, yet it's a culture that sooner or later will spin out of control; it will not endure.

I start here so we may remember that knowledge, as distinct from information, always allows for and reckons with the unknown. As bodies and disciplines of knowledge extend, so does the extent of the unknown. Perhaps the relative dimension of the two is a cultural constant. Yet the frontiers between the two (the known and the unknown) are continually being contested. Forays are always being made into the unknown in the hope of adding to our knowledge. Many forays are scientific, and other more intuitive but no less important ones are made by mystics and artists. When an insight brought back from an intuitive forays seems to stand up, hold water, or prove its paces, we are in the face of what can properly be termed an original work.

True originality is never something sought after or, as it were, signed; rather it is a quality belonging to something touched in the dark and brought back as a tentative question.


[from "A Jerome of Photography", John Berger's review of Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, in Harper's Magazine, December 2005]