ABSTRACT
Modernity impoverished experience. Benjamin called for ‘owning up to it’. Not only that, he radically professed it. Benjamin penned a short text entitled ‘Experience and Poverty’ in 1933 on the eve of his departure from Nazi Germany for Prague. For Benjamin, ‘The order of the day was rather to collaborate in the work of destruction’ and in anticipating the charge against it, he defiantly embraced the term ‘Barbarism’: ‘Yes, indeed’—the ‘good kind’—the ‘new, positive’ barbarism. In ‘Experience and Poverty’ Benjamin famously favored architectural manifestations of this ‘positive barbarism’ in the work of avant-garde architects. For him architecture at this time not only expressed this new structure of experience [Erfahrung] but directly affirmed it and contributed to it. He aligned Bertolt Brecht with the architect Adolf Loos. The programmatic statements in ‘Experience and Poverty’ represent ‘an abiding liquidationist moment in Benjamin thinking’. Underlying Benjamin’s thinking at this period was a new theory of technology linked to ‘poverty of experience’, which I will explore in this chapter.
