I briefly mentioned here Adorno's understanding that something historical has undercut the possibility of experience. The sense Adorno suggests is one of a loss of something--actual lived experience?--- that had once been existed and which has been seriously damaged.

Has it something to do with narrative of the old (pre-industrial) story teller? Is that romantic nostalgic dreaming of a robust notion of experience prior to the alienations of a damaged, modern life? Walter Benjamin's turn back to a happy and innocent childhood, before the split between subject and object and the fall into language, most certainly romantic nostalgia.

Tis fantasy.

Has lived experience become disconnected from a narrative continuity which has been replaced by information and spin, and become a series of shocks?

Is that traumatic shock and general unintelligibility what we see when we listen to the stories of those caught up in the London bombings on the media? There is no general narrative that makes sense of this kind of shock, or that of the Bali bombings. These events are shocks.

What is most noticeable about the conservative politics of terror in the mass media is that it is little more than a manipulation of public opinion through fear to keep conservative governments in power.

Yeah, I know, that's crude. But let us put that politics to one side for the moment and get back to understanding the crisis of experience.

Is that what Benjamin and Adorno were getting at with their argument that a coherent and unified understanding of a pre-reflective experience was no longer possible?

That encounter with death could be seen as a primal experience.Is that experience of modern life worth rescuing? It suggests happiness in a world free from terror. Is it undamaged experience? Or is the meaning of life an image of life without history?