Benjamin’s Angel — Critical Theory

Recapitulation

Adorno and Benjamin (BEN-yah-meen; /ˈbɛnjamiːn/): was theirs a conversation without a conclusion, or an unresolved dialectic? Benjamin left a dictum that belongs to both of them: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Today we read his last testament, written in 1940, months before his death.

Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940)

Preliminary remarks

The text is often called the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” though that is not its actual title. Its form, a sequence of numbered theses, has antecedents in Gotthold Lessing’s (LESS-ing; /ˈlɛsɪŋ/) The Education of the Human Race (1780) and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach (FOY-er-bahkh; /ˈfɔɪ̯ɐbax/).” It works through “dialectical images” (the chess player, the angel) rather than arguments laid end to end. It is a critique of historicism and an argument for historical materialism, and it is a set of general reflections on the philosophy of history and on our concepts of time.

The critique of historicism

Benjamin’s first target is historicism, the German tradition of Historismus (hiss-toh-RISS-mooss; /hɪstoˈʁɪsmʊs/): Leopold von Ranke (RAHN-keh; /ˈʁaŋkə/), Wilhelm Dilthey (DIL-tye; /ˈdɪltaɪ̯/), Friedrich Meinecke (MY-neh-keh; /ˈmaɪ̯nəkə/).

Ranke, the great German nationalist historian, famously declined the office of judging the past or instructing the future; history, he said, merely wants to show wie es eigentlich gewesen (vee ess EYE-gent-likh geh-VAY-zen; /viː ɛs ˈaɪ̯ɡn̩tlɪç ɡəˈveːzn̩/), “how it actually was.” (Quotation 1.) Dilthey’s method was historical empathy, Verstehen (fair-SHTAY-en; /fɛɐ̯ˈʃteːən/), “understanding” the past from within. The French medievalist Fustel de Coulanges (fews-TEL duh koo-LAHNZH; /fystɛl də kulɑ̃ʒ/) advised the historian who wishes to relive an era to “blot out everything he knows about the later course of history.” Empathy, in short, tries to isolate a past moment as a whole, sealed off from us.

According to Benjamin, historicist empathy is empathy with the victors. Why? Because the past as it “actually was” is the past as its rulers made it and recorded it; to enter it sympathetically is to take their side.

Benjamin’s second target is closer to home: the evolutionary socialism of Eduard Bernstein (BAIRN-shtine; /ˈbɛʁnʃtaɪ̯n/), socialist revisionism. Gradualism repeats the error of theodicy: if history is steady progress toward a good end, past suffering is justified by what it leads to, and once again we sympathize with the victors. The third target is vulgar Marxist economism, with its faith in technological development. Its economism imagines history as a machine that will deliver socialism. And its image of history as the mastery of nature is one that underwrites fascism.

The argument for historical materialism

Historicism and socialist revisionism share a concept of time: continuous, “empty,” “homogeneous” time, in which moments follow one another like beads counted on a rosary. Against them Benjamin sets the genuine historical materialist, for whom no past suffering is justified by the ends it brought about.

So the historical materialist must brush history against the grain. Every cultural treasure has an origin the historical materialist cannot contemplate without horror; it owes its existence not only to the great minds who made it but to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism.

The past is “citable” in all its moments. Past moments “flash up” in a moment of danger, and seizing them is the historian’s task. Revolution is possible at any moment. Genuine historical materialism has a concept of discontinuous time.

The messianic in historical materialism

Revolutions know this. The French Revolution made a new calendar, starting time over. In the July Revolution of 1830, Benjamin tells us, people in several parts of Paris fired at the clocks in the towers.

Against empty time Benjamin sets Jetztzeit (YETST-tsite; /ˈjɛtstsaɪ̯t/), “now-time,” something like the theologians’ nunc stans (noonk STAHNSS; /nʊŋk stans/), the “standing now” of eternity. Every moment is the small gateway through which the Messiah might enter.

This is why the essay opens with a dialectical image of historical materialism and theology. There once existed, the story goes, a chess-playing automaton: a puppet in Turkish dress, with a water pipe in its mouth, that could win any game. Mirrors made the table look transparent, but in fact a hunchbacked dwarf, a master of chess, sat inside working the puppet’s hands. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win every time. It can, Benjamin says, so long as it enlists the services of theology, which today, as everyone knows, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight. (Quotation 2.) Vulgar materialism is mere mechanism, and it must draw on theology for its animating power. Secularization encrypts theological insight: it carries it into secular thought in hidden form.

The storm from Paradise

Benjamin owned Paul Klee’s (KLAY; /kleː/) painting Angelus Novus (AHN-geh-looss NOH-vooss; /ˈaŋ.ɡe.lʊs ˈnɔ.wʊs/) (1920), and in the ninth thesis it becomes the angel of history. The angel’s face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, piling wreckage on wreckage at his feet. He would like to stay, to wake the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings so violently that he cannot close them, and it drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. “This storm is what we call progress.” (Quotation 3.)

Read through the image:

Paradise, utopia, is not ahead of us; its storm drives us forward into the historical continuum, destroying as it goes.
History is catastrophe, a continuum of suffering.
Marxist critique is anamnesis, remembrance of that suffering.
Each generation has been given a “weak messianic power”: the power to redeem the past, to “make whole” what was broken, which is to say to realize a true utopia.

Its afterlife

The theses reached Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/) and Adorno after Benjamin’s death, while they were writing Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that the text contained Benjamin’s final concepts, and that none of his works showed him closer to their own intentions: history as permanent catastrophe, the critique of progress and of the mastery of nature, the place of culture. Horkheimer answered that the theses would keep them busy for some time, “and he will still be with us”; the identity of culture and barbarism had been the subject of one of his last conversations with Benjamin, in a café near the Gare Montparnasse (gar mohn-par-NAHSS; /ɡaʁ mɔ̃paʁnas/). (Quotation 4, from Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School.) That book is next.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation

Adorno and Benjamin: a conversation without conclusion, or an unresolved dialectic?
Benjamin’s dialectical dictum: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
the memory of Benjamin and his last testament

II. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940)

A. Preliminary remarks
- form of “theses” (NB: not its actual title); antecedents: Gotthold Lessing, “Education of the Human Race” (1780); Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”
- use of the “dialectical image” (chessplayer, angel, and so forth)
- a critique of historicism and an argument for historical materialism
- general reflections on the philosophy of history and concepts of time
B. The critique of historicism
- Fustel de Coulanges (medieval French historian): “blot out everything he knows about the later course of history”
- empathy aims to isolate a holistic historical moment in the past
- the tradition of historicism or Historismus (Ranke, Dilthey, Meinecke) [quote 1]
- Leopold von Ranke (German nationalist historian): “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it actually was)
- Dilthey’s method of historical empathy or Verstehen
- according to WB, historicist empathy means empathy with the victors… but why?
- a critique of Eduard Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism, or socialist revisionism
- gradualism reiterates the error of theodicy: justifies suffering, hence sympathy with the victors
- vulgar Marxist economism and its faith in technological development: (a) economism of vulgar Marxism; (b) image of history as mastery of nature that underwrites fascism
C. The argument for historical materialism
- both historicism and socialist revisionism subscribe to the same concept of continuous time: “empty” or “homogeneous” time, e.g., “counting beads on a rosary”
- for the genuine historical materialist, no past suffering is justified by the ends it brings about
- “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
- against evolutionism and theodicy: to brush history against the grain
- the past citable in all its moments, past moments “flash up” in a moment of danger
- revolution at any moment
- genuine historical materialism and its concept of discontinuous time
D. The role of the messianic in historical materialism
- the new calendar of the French Revolution and the broken clocks of the July Revolution (1830)
- the Jetztzeit or “Now-Time” (nunc stans): every moment as the “gateway” through which the messiah could arrive
- the chess-playing automaton: a dialectical image that conveys relationship between historical materialism and theology [quote 2]
- vulgar materialism as mere mechanism that must appeal to theology for its animating power
- secularization as the encryption or incorporation of theological insight
E. The storm from Paradise: Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus (1920)
- Benjamin’s “angel of history”: paradise-utopia “destroyed” forward into historical continuum [quote 3]
- history as catastrophe, the continuum of suffering
- Marxist critique as anamnesis (remembrance) of suffering
- Marxism’s “weak messianic power”: to “make whole,” i.e., to realize true utopia
- impact on Adorno and Horkheimer while composing Dialectic of Enlightenment [quote 4 and next lecture]

On the back: (1) Ranke, preface to the Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (1824); (2)–(3) Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940); (4) letters between Adorno and Horkheimer (1941), from Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (MIT, 1995), 311; Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.