Modern poetry is bought at the price of the aura’s disintegration in shock

Evidence

Having been betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowdwith the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of something lived through [Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of an experience [Erfahrung]. He indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegrationbut it is the law of his poetry. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 863

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how Benjamin’s Erfahrung/Erlebnis distinction functions concretely: Baudelaire converts shock-events into durable poetic experience.
• DEEPTHINKING: Captures Benjamin’s dialectic: modern poetry becomes ‘the law’ precisely through the destruction of aura rather than despite it — the shattering itself is productive.
• XREF: connects to: Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 861; Writers must administer linguistic shocks to overcome readers’ numbed sense of the concrete — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 63

Broader Connections

• Writers must administer linguistic shocks to overcome readers’ numbed sense of the concrete #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 63
• Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861