The New Angel and the Future of Mankind
Below is a passage from thesis IX of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” or also known as “On the Concept of History.” Following it are my notes from Chris Cutrone’s class on the subject.
IX
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieh ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
-Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”*
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are starring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
*My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
Walter Benjamin has been misconceived as the philosopher of history, when in fact he is the philosopher of the future. This was the central point in his criticism toward Marxism in his time so warped in historicism. His take on the past is to seek the emancipatory potential so that it would function for the present. It does not mean bringing the past to present to the future (and vice versa), but:
“… rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: Image is dialectics in a standstill.” [Benjamin, Convolute N, The Arcades Project, 463]
The present accumulates the past, its potential and possibilities of what it could have been. It concerns the issue of the present containing its own actuality as well as the past’s “what were” and “potentials.” Benjamin is then interested in the future — what does the future of the past contain? He seeks in redeeming the potential of the past. It is partly Benjamin’s attempt to legitimate the present by recovering the potentials of the past. Therefore, Benjamin’s philosophy is the philosophy of the present as determined.
In Convolute N, Benjamin propagates awakening, invoking the new, everything new — nature as given. In treating the “new” as “natural” and as evoked in children, he is endorsing reification. For the child, the new is enchanting, reified. Benjamin is interested in what would it “mean” to preserve that and not what is concealed (the negative is the child’s ignorance of history), instead what is revealed. And what is revealed is the continuity of history. See the object for what it is. Wonder why this object occurs at all. It is the determination of every presence.
How can new meaning happen? How can the past attain meaning? How can the past have future? For Benjamin, the past can gain recurrence (see Nietzche), it can have an afterlife.
In the Angelus Novus passage, the angel of history is propelled by the storm of progress. The angel as an entity beyond nature is the force that man cannot apprehend. As such man cannot apprehend history in its entirety, thus only the angel can. Even so it is propelled by progress. Progress then happens, but it does not need to happen.
Man can only recover the past in flases, involuntarily (see Bergson and Proust).
If for Benjamin the 19th century becomes available for his present then history is in service of the present. The past acts as function of the present, the past convoluted in the present. Historicism should then be in service of the existence of the present. Paraphrasing Nietzche: “the past is infinitely mineable — history is infinite, which amounts to the paralysis of the present.” This statement paralels the Angelus Novus passage:
“Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet.”
In redeeming the categories of the past, we redeem the present. History is meaningful only if it opens the emancipatory potential of the present. If the man of the present sees history as chains of events, as flashes, or involuntary memory, the way to recover (and task) is to be receptive to it.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
You write very well.