Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come

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Nostalgia For An Age Yet To Come

Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History

By Jim Fearnley.

The following is the author’s final installment in a new three part series for 3:AM, exploring the modern relevance of Walter Benjamin. Read the first article,‘Phantamasgoric Capitalism: Benjamin’s Arcades Today’ here, and the second ‘The Audience’s identification with the Actor is really an Identification with the camera’

here.

Nostalgia For An Age Yet To Come » 3:AM Magazine http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/nostalgia-for-an-age-yet-to-come-2/

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“Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re-collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It istherefore a matter of…what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something

new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis.”

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Why discuss the philosophy of history now, and why by means of a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s work? Benjamin had a romantic’s view ofhistorical materialism, as a cultural critic and theorist who designated himself a Marxist, yet only read Marx late in life. His instincts weresound, namely to challenge a dry, teleological historiography with the elusive, the overlooked, and the fragmentary, as opposed to themonolithic. To implicitly (and arguably unwittingly) challenge historical materialism from outside the coterie of capitalist


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historiographers remains a priority in the present age.

Benjamin attempted this while neither devaluing the role of memory, current experience, and anticipation, nor the relationship betweenthese elements. Arguably, Benjamin’s flawed understanding of Marx allowed him to succeed in this endeavour, in that it enabled him toavoid orthodoxy and dogmatism.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord identified the false ‘seasonal cyclicity’ of capitalist production, based on the continualre-presentation of commodities, which are themselves alienated representations and repositories of our lived experiences and capacities.This cyclicity creates a ‘non-immanent now’, a flat present. But we cannot have a ‘lifestyle’ without a life, which consists of the subjectiveexperience of the present, together with an embodiment of our individual and social past as factors contributing to the future formation ofeach of us as perceiving subjects.

Co-terminously, we predict, imagine, speculate, hope, fear, and seek to plan what is to come. And finally, we act as conduit for thecorrespondences and synchronicities that run through a notionally linear time, but which act to subvert linearity in favour of immanence,the pleroma (fullness) of life.

Why tie these philosophical observations down in an attempt to construct an alternative historiography? Ultimately, because in classsociety, history is indeed “written by the victors” (Winston Churchill). Those of us who seek a new world are thus obliged to undertake acontinual process of disinterment, in order to both correct falsehoods and to unearth occulted fragments of the past, in the service of afuture that will enable us to realise the unmediated, and live in an authentic present. These tasks have become even more urgent followingSeptember 11. From that point on, the Spectacle used all the means at its disposal to consciously and deliberately re-write history (and‘flatten’ time) in the service of a hegemonic, i.e., consented, re-ordering of global space, expressed as political geography.


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Benjamin starts the Theses by setting out his historical-materialist stall, using an analogy to describe the contention of social classes ofan automaton that conceals a hunchback, who is a champion chess player, repeatedly beating a human adversary who believes they areplaying an infallible machine-computer. Despite its imagistic flavour, the analogy exemplifies the (theological) pre-determinist andeschatological assumptions that underpin historical materialism in order to contest capitalist inevitability, and could be interpreted asfollows:

The game of history has a predictable outcome, namely the victory of apparently impersonal forces (the automaton), which are in fact aTrojan horse, namely a dissimulated proletariat in the guise of a concealed hunchback, whose insurrectionary activities (chess moves) willdemolish class society.

In nailing our standard to the flagpole of contingency rather than determinism, beyond certain basic principles of social organisation, weare obliged to reject both any form of prescriptive utopianism or historical determinism. It is a truism that the new world is constructed inthe act of destroying the old, that is to say, in the forms our struggles take, and the qualities we bring to the tasks of destruction andsupersession. These are what we enact, not what we aspire to enjoy in a future mythical ‘post-revolutionary phase’. These qualities also actas the benchmark by which we measure the qualitative superiority of the struggle as compared with the rest of our experience, and that ofthe world we aspire to create, as compared with the death-cult of our rulers.


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The past is thus attuned to the possibilities of the future, through a community of approach and social qualities or values. The stream ofexperience runs in both directions, and Ariadne’s thread, which enables proletarian Theseus to defeat the Minotaur of the bourgeoisie, isnothing less than this current that runs in both directions: into the Labyrinth to follow the route of Theseus, and back out, in order to securehis escape.

In sociological and economic, rather than narrative terms, it is legitimate to aver that the proletariat has the capacity and potential toredeem our species, by fulfilling a ‘historic obligation’. This promise to the past, based on the progressive role of the class as the ‘oldmole’ created by capitalism, is the only possible means of destroying class society.

Losing the truths of the past enables the ruling class to calumniate revolutionaries now dead or otherwise silenced, and thus unable todefend themselves, by attributing to them false motivations and invented actions. As Benjamin notes, “that claim [the creation of a newworld] cannot be settled cheaply”. However, the importance of the task does not presuppose its success.

The proletariat is therefore only de facto “messianic”, to the extent either that we believe it capable of being so, or the level of inevitabilitywe assign to the conclusions of the ‘science’ of historical materialism. In Benjamin’s view of the co-terminous currents of history from pastto present and future and vice versa, our messianic potential is a redemptive gift from the past, and justifies the insurrectionary’s presentexistence in terms of what they can offer the future.

As an adherent of the Surrealist ‘method’, Benjamin would have approved of recent developments in the field of historiography, notably thehistory of the ‘overlooked’, micro-history, and what might be termed the ‘methodology of the fragment’. What these approaches share is aconviction that there there is no innate hierarchy of importance in the playing out of human activity over time. A variant of this view, notuninstructive in a global economy based on the production, distribution, and exchange of commodities, is the trend of histories of specificgoods, such as tulips, salt, and cod. The cause of colonialism in the Indian sub-continent was attributed to Salman Rushdie by theascription of one word, ‘pepper’, for example.

Such subaltern or alternative studies include histories of marginalised communities (e.g., of gender, class, or ethnicity). They are potentiallaboratories of widely-applicable methodological and sociological innovations (e.g., examining the construction of social narrativesthrough the interplay between text and oral description, the assessment of the mediation of human relations by commodity production andexchange, etc.). Micro-histories can extrapolate ‘big’ themes and correspondences far wider than their immediate field of analysis.

Is history discontinuous and episodic, or does it conform to a trajectory, even if it is one that runs in two directions? According to SusanSontag, Benjamin regarded history in many respects as a series of freeze frames, and her comment that he did not actually start reading


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Marx until shortly before his death is sure to be relevant to the evidence of his eccentric understanding of historical materialism.

A punctuated view of history risks simply reinforcing the dreary and endlessly-repeated brutality of class society (Orwell’s boot in the face)forever. To live without conscious memory of or psychic relation to the past is to be forever susceptible to committing the same key errors,namely a tolerance of the intolerable and a gullibility in the face of lies. A true understanding of history resides in the moment of greatestrisk, when durable truths are closest to extinction. Achieving that understanding is a practice that must be ‘kept oiled’, or the weapon at ourdisposal becomes unusable.

The Angel of History invoked by Benjamin, Angelus Novus, can perceive no continuous or logical thread of historical development, butsimply bears witness to an accretion of trash and disaster, amassed in unconnected episodes. For Benjamin, positive advances into thefuture do not consist of making sense of this mess, but of seeking to escape it, propelled by an elemental force originating from outsideoneself, pushing the subject forward.


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Permanent crisis, or ‘exception as the norm’, is the standard operating procedure of capitalism. Think of 2001 and the State’s presentationof the war without end and injunctions in favour of eternal vigilance. The tape-loop footage of the aeroplanes crashing into the Twin Towersenforced a perception of events as occurring in a constant, non-immanent, anti-historical present, a repeated insult to be avenged. Violencewithout explanation, context, or comprehensible cause. Any dissension from the narrative of the Spectacle (no matter what its form andcontent) has become an effective invitation to annihilation, both projected (from ‘the enemy’) and in the vacuum of the deep silence of theanti-Spectacle.

‘Positive’ forward motion, or escape from our current misery, is sold to us by the politician’s promise of progress (in the form of thepost-colonial imperium, which is a dishonest one, designed to entrap the naïve and non-aligned into the service and perspective of therulers). It is the ‘progress’ of capitalist development, of the refinement of the means of production and the creation of new fields ofexploitation and consumption, both in terms of territory and of human subjectivity. Where progress dominates the discourse, a negation ofits falsity can only be expressed in one of three ways: quietism, nihilism, or insurrection.

In which direction does one face in order to find the sustenance to destroy the old world? To put it another way, what impels revolutionaryactivity? An anticipation of the possibility of a new world, or the memory of exploitation, and the desire to both avenge and abolish it? Theformer defers action, the latter drives it on. Part of the ideology that belittles history, and thus makes us weak, is a conflation of the pastwith the regressive, and a belief that any reference to a better future (which never arrives) is positive per se. In the lexicon of the politician,‘new’ has the same talismanic (and meaningless) significance as ‘freedom’.

Benjamin critiques the view of the homogeneity and emptiness of present times, a mere empty vessel within which the classes contend.And yet, historical materialism assumes this state of affairs when it characterises the current period as a vacuum through which societiesare compelled to travel in superseding the pre-history of the present.

There is a conflict between the teleology of historical materialism and the immanence of revolutionary time. Marx posited the (future)revolution as the expression of a potentiality incubating in the time before its arrival, and he also insisted that the past could only beunderstood in terms of its gift to the future. Nonetheless, his determinism put limits on the “open air of history”, in denying contingencyand insisting on effectively foregone conclusions.

A reinterpretation of the relationship between past, present, and future could either run from then to now and beyond, as suggested in Marx’sown work, or masquerade as a disrespect for ‘history’, substituting an a-causal Foucauldian ‘genealogy’, professing to chop up time andtranscend a conventional view of time, in the form of post-modernism. However, ‘freezing’ history into a set of discrete episodes congeals a


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moment, ‘taking the Present out of the present’ and ridding us of context or point of reference.

An appreciation of the fragment is distinct from an adherence to the discontinuous. By definition, a fragment once formed part of somethingbigger than itself, and a fractal perspective, according to which the whole is ‘compacted’ in the fragment blurs the distinction between the‘grand’ theory of history and an ‘examination of shards’ as discrete items.

The alternative route, escaping both historicism and a-causal ‘spontaneous occurrence’ is the subterranean North-West Passage out ofpre-history, a tunnel dug by the old mole of revolution. This third option, which is the only radical one, is aufheben. It involves thesuppression, incorporation, and transcendence of time itself, foreshadowed by Hegel as a genuinely immanent act that simultaneouslysuppresses, incorporates, and transcends temporal categories.

An understanding of and a stake on immanence subverts. After all, the clock is a powerful weapon of capitalist production, as was knownfrom before Frederick Taylor. The insurgents of an earlier phase of capitalism who shot the clocks were aware of all this. They were not‘regressive’, as enemies of capitalist technology have been characterised since Captain Ludd, but were seeking to put an end to pre-historyas segmented time, and replace it with the immanent timelessness of a realised subjectivity. How many (remaining) self-proclaimedhistorical materialists are ‘adepts of the immanent’? We would suggest very few.

There is no apparent attempt in Theses to reconcile historical materialism with, for example, the pessimism implicit in Benjamin’smetaphor of Angelus Novus. This contradiction is perhaps Benjamin’s greatest contribution to the study of the wide range of topics thatpreoccupy us here, and allows for the formation of tangential and unpredictable connections, although we have to concede that, on a badday, he risks slipping into incoherence.

In the grand scheme of things, the notions of history. genealogy, narrative and ‘punctuation’, are simply anthropocentric constructionsapplied to events, human or otherwise, which occur in time. Theories of relativity applicable to physics deal with the connection betweenspace and time, and clarify that both elements form indivisible parts of the weft of the universe, rather than owing their ‘reality’ to differingcategories of human interpretation.

In particular, the fact that we measure distance in units of time, and are able in the ‘here and now’ to perceive galactic phenomena thathave occurred light-years ago, demonstrates the phenomenon of immanence in a very concrete fashion. Perhaps, ultimately, placing socialdefinitions on events in time within this ‘infinite environment’ will enable us to draw out the ontologically-petty scale of our concerns.


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Coda

To make predictions was heretical for the Jewish mystic, because the future is contingent and subject to God’s will (or whims). Contrary toBenjamin’s assertion, this does not “strip the future of its magic”. Far from it, as the mystic’s injunction retains the element of surprise assuperordinate to the predictability of ‘science’.

In the mid-1990s, a builder based in the Catalan province of Girona was refurbishing a rural house. He discovered a seventeenth-centuryKabbalistic text, written in Castilian, but likely to have been influenced by fifteenth-century Christian neo-Platonism, one of whose mainexponents was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, fluent in Hebrew.


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By chance, an English friend of the builder was carrying out a programme of research into Kabbalism at the time, and the book changedhands. The student had encountered the figure of Isaac the Blind (Isaac el Cec), whose disciples had established a Kabbalistic school inthe later twelfth or early thirteenth century in the city of Girona.

So what comes to light is the development and trajectory of strands from a web of mystical thought across two or three languages, twentymiles, and approximately five hundred years.

Coincidences, accidents, and micro-evidence accumulate according to chance in demonstrating the trajectory of ideas through time. Thistrajectory is still ‘linear’, but the line is not straight, and could not have been drawn with any degree of plausibility before the journey tookplace.

For the record. Gershom Scholem, acknowledged expert on and lifelong student of the history of Kabbalism, was a close friend of WalterBenjamin.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORJim Fearnley used to reach for his gun every time he heard the word ‘culture‘, but time is running out for him to participate in the


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suppression and realisation of art. He now finds himself on the Clapham omnibus of social space, digital hegemony,cultural unheimlichkeit,and meta-temporal immanence.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, October 7th, 2014.


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Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come

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