CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

Following Benjamin’s theory of the change of Erfahrung into Erlebnis, Adorno
thinks that there is in modern life a “loss of experience [Erfahrung]” characterized by the
fact that the structures that determine individual experience are far removed from the
concrete individual; they are rather dictated by the rhythm and emptiness of the unskilled
worker’s tasks in the assembly line. 88 As Marx had already noted, in the factory the
working conditions and the worker’s experience of work are dictated by the rhythm of the
machine, so that the worker becomes an appendage to the machine rather than vice versa.
Not only is the temporality of the worker’s experience directed by the tempo of the
machine, but the content of that experience too is determined externally, for it consists in
a mindless succession of repeated, identical tasks that do not reach fulfillment or
completion by building on the worker’s preceding tasks. Rather, the worker’s activity is
just a fragment in the process of production, which is mindlessly repeated again and
again. 89 The experience (Erlebnis) of ceaseless and unsubstantial repetition dictated by
Cf. E.F.N. Jephcott’s translation in Adorno, Minima Moralia (London and New York, Verso: 2005):
The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from
time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s
conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally
oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the
sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the
process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to
know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers
that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the
immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone
passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of
machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on
their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there
is life no longer.
88 See Benjamin, Walter, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.2
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), esp. §8-9, pp. 629-636.
89 This ceaselessly renewed repetition of the same tasks thus falls outside the temporality of
“eternity” [Ewigkeit] or heaven, which completes or fulfills, but rather corresponds to that of “time in hell”
[höllische Zeit], “in der sich die Existenz derer abspielt, die nichts, was sie in Angriff genommen haben,
84