The crisis of experience in the age of algorithmic attention

In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, theorists, most notably Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, observed how the temporal registers of capitalism were tendentially
severing subjective experience from its structural and historical determinations, reducing Erfahrung—full, accumulated, and comprehended experience—to Erlebnis, wherein
temporally atomized subjects merely live through disjunctive moments. As Benjamin put it, consciousness was forced to act ‘as a screen against stimuli,’ as the relentless influx of
information did ‘not survive the moment in which it was new’ and impressions, rather than deepening into cumulative experience, increasingly remained confined to ‘the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life.’

In recent years, this crisis of experience has only intensified, with everyday life fundamentally shaped by social media, algorithmic feeds, and digital surveillance. Theorists and philosophers as diverse as Jonathan Crary, Byung-Chul Han, Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui, Wendy Chun, and Anna Kornbluh have all stressed how contemporary capitalism deepens the fragmentation of subjectivity, replacing sustained attention, memory, and historical continuity with compulsive immediacy, algorithmic habituation, and the relentless extraction of cognitive and affective labor.

Many of these contemporary theorists call for an effective recovery of Erfahrung—whether through cognitive mapping (Kornbluh), reclaiming shared attention (Crary), rethinking
individuation (Stiegler, Hui), or resisting the compulsions of immediacy (Han, Chun). However, for Benjamin and Adorno, any such attempts risked asserting by fiat the recovery
of a mode of experience whose social and historical conditions of possibility had been irreversibly dismantled. They instead affirmed that substantive experience must
paradoxically be grounded in the experience of Erlebnis, in the form of ‘dialectical images’ for Benjamin, and the wholly reified work of art for Adorno. In this spirit, this stream invites proposals which interrogate whether and how fragmented, immediate, and reified forms of experience could paradoxically become sites of critical mediation in contemporary theoretical, aesthetic, or political practices.