99consciously a text is constructed, and the more motivated the words,
the less arbitrary the words become, and their abstract and haphazard
relation to things declines. The experience of things becomes tangible
as it were in the text, although no separate word can be held respon-
sible by itself for this presence.^49Human beings’ faculty for mimesis, as Benjamin understands it, has two aspects: in
its original sense it has to do with one’s faculty for comparing or identifying oneself
with something else, as a child at play will identify with a baker or a footballer, or with
a train or a donkey; in a weaker derivative form it can be seen in our faculty for dis-
covering correspondences and similarities between things that are apparently dif-
ferent. Genuine “experience,” in the sense that Benjamin gives the term, should be
seen as a mimetic gesture because “similarity is the organon of experience.”^50
This concept is crucial to Benjamin’s theory of experience, in which he distin-
guishes between the two German words for experience, Erlebnisand Erfahrung. Er-
fahrungmeans life experience; it refers to an integrated stock of experience wherein
the individual assimilates sensations, information, and events. The ability to estab-
lish such a stock of experience owes much to the existence of a tradition. In that
sense experience can be said to be collective and unconscious. Erfahrunghas to do
with the ability to perceive correspondences and similarities and to act them out. Er-
lebnis, on the other hand, refers to sensations that are reduced to a series of atom-
ized, disconnected moments that are not related to each other in any way and that
are not integrated in life experience.^51
These ideas play a role throughout Benjamin’s work, but it is in his study on
Baudelaire, which was a byproduct of his labors on the Passagenwerk, that he ex-
plores them in detail. Benjamin begins his argument by stating that the “structure of
experience” has undergone a change: in the “standardized, denatured life of the civ-
ilized masses” in “the inhospitable blinding age of big-scale industrialism,” true ex-
perience has become a rarity. For experience (Erfahrung) is “a matter of tradition, in
collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly an-
chored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently
unconscious data.”^52
Whereas Erfahrunghas to do with a gradual initiation into tradition, Erlebnis
refers to superficial sensations. These are intercepted by an alert consciousness and
responded to straightaway: there is an immediate response and the impression is
more or less saved in conscious memory (Erinnerung); it leaves no trace, however,
in the (unconscious) remembrance (Gedächtnis). Impressions that form part of re-
membrance, on the contrary, are the material from which Erfahrungis built. They are
repetitive in character and often consist of impressions with a sensory content;^53 in
the long run they have far more impact on the individual’s experience than do the mo-
mentary and superficial impressions resulting from Erlebnis.98