Walter Benji

[Anonymous No.15034269]

Could someone please explain Walter Benjamin's 'Poverty of Experience' to me?

I'm quite slow and it takes me a while to wrap my mind around concepts, for some reason this one isn't sticking. It's from his essay "Experience and Poverty"

>No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience? And what poured out from the flood of war books ten years later was anything […] remarkable about that.
>For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.

>With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely – ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanisation.

[OP No.15034285]

As far as I understand it, Benjamin is saying that our collective 'experience' (that which is passed down generationally through parables etc) is disintergrating. This is because we have too much experience, at which point he mentions the horrors of WWI and how those experiences can't be meaninfully communicated.

But what has this got to do with the 'tremendous development of technology'? And what is the "oppresive wealth of ideas?"

Is this really simple? Am I just a retard?