Experience requires narrative embedding unavailable in accelerating modern life.

Evidence

Benjamin diagnoses an advancing loss of experience (Erfahrungsverlust) in modern society that results from the inability of subjects to transform the variety of abrupt lived events (Erlebnisse) in everyday life (which was paradigmatically embodied for him as for Simmel in metropolitan life) into genuine experience (Erfahrung). Experience is for Benjamin ineradicably linked to the embedding of what has been lived in an experienced history and a lived tradition. It emerges in an “appropriation” of what has been lived with the help of stable, narrative patterns anchored in memory and in the light of historically established, antecedent horizons of experience. So lived events can become experiences only if they can be placed in a meaningful relationship to an individual and collective past and future. As one can derive from this, genuine experiences enter into the identity of a person, his or her life history; memory traces of them are largely resistant to erosion. However, they become impossible in a world of permanently changing horizons of expectation and continuously reconstructed spaces of experience. Therefore, the shorter the period of time in which the space of experience and the horizon of expectation are congruent (the present), and the greater the number of lived events per unit of time, the more improbable the transformation of lived events into experiences becomes. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 408

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Contextless screen experiences erase memory traces, unlike identity-linked ones. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 403; Narrative patterns knit the three levels of lived time into a coherent whole. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 97; Modern life erodes integrated experience, replacing narration with information and shocks — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 623 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern life erodes integrated experience, replacing narration with information and shocks #corroborates (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 623
• Modern shock experiences undermine the basis of traditional lived experience #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861