SO427 - week 4

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These are my notes from January 29 for SO427 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Benjamin 1

Readings

Theological-Political Fragment

Best lines

Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic: it cannot be set as a goal.

but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.

this totally feels accelerationist but maybe that’s just cus i have an accelerationist hammer so everything looks like a nail etc

The Arcades Project (p456-488)

On the theory of knowledge, theory of progress

Theses on the Philosophy of History

from illuminations

• links to the force-opposite-force thing in the first reading. historical materialism as a counter-agent (making fun of it?)
• empathy with the victors
• “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” (7)
• 8: emergency situation is the norm
• 9: progress and the angel
• 14: “leap into the open sky of history”

Lecture/seminar

• on benjamin as critic, gap between knowledge (as a pursuit) and truth (as a revelation, not attainable in the episteme in which we’re operating, cannot be “pursued” as such, outside our control)
• alienation experienced as fragmentation esp linguistically
• reaches for theological ideas to understand language which seems to be fundamental in his work
• with the arcades project, there’s a perfect moment where you perceive a sense of completeness, wholeness and unity
  • making something out of the fragments (of debris, quotes etc) reminds me of Salvage
  • same thing he’s doing with the mourning plays, break down to build up a more truthful whole?
  • arcades project is 19th ct history, but really pre-history (in an epistemological sense), debris to link to greater whole
  • gives us the opportunity to see things in a different way
• on his fascination with images
  • if he were to present his biography it would be as a series of postcards
  • quotes in the arcades project meant as image citations
• benjamin’s perspective on history: if we were to think of it through heroes, victors etc it’s problmeatic
  • contributes to a mistaken understanding of it as sequential and additive and progressive
  • (strongly connects with foucault here)
  • lets us think we’re at the pinnacle, gives us a certain status/role in relation to history
  • links to goethe’s understanding of nature: cant break it down, look at it holistically instead
  • in the arcades project, benjamin is doing to history what the cameraman does to reality (cutting it up)
  • some systematic arrangement, not arbitrary order; instead, a montage
  • meant to affirm our connection to the past which has been lost in contemporary capitalism
  • remember that on the concept of history was written in response to the hitler-stalin pact, in a rage
  • they are citations not quotations
    • what does it mean to cite?
    • quote from on the concept of history: “The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume.”
    • also: “Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable.”
    • to reference, to redeem
    • in a legal sense: when you’re being accused of something (called to judgement)
    • so when you’re citing history you’re both referencing it and calling it to judgment, the last judgment
    • ripping out of context another important sense. in one-way street, he likens citation to robbery, mugging, destructive
  • so the arcades project is a montage of time itself, subjecting it to the gaze of the cameraman in order to judge it
  • he’s attacking the future-orientation aspect of various ways of looking at history (marxist, hegelian, etc)
    • our debt is to the past not to the future
    • specifically, germans accomodating hitler cus they were looking toward the future
    • “There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide”
  • on the concept of history written at a moment of despair/anger/hopelessness, but there’s a link between this and the arcades, similar methodological undercurrents
• on remembrance
  • connection to jewish idea of breaking of vessels, light of god put into vessels which broke cus they couldnt contain it
  • resulting fragmentation, which you rearrange? put them back together in a different way
  • we know this influenced him cus of conversations with scholem
  • also linked to his essay on proust, the way proust tries to uncover deep memory, not just about the past but now
  • his reading of proust: proust had the right idea but wrong aim (proust was despairing of the present, buried himself in the past)
    • whereas benjamin says that a deep connection wtih the past can reignite the present
    • basically there’s a strong connection between the present and the past (think robespierre and rome)
    • and yet we live in a perpetual present so we’ve lost idea of sense of role in history?
    • benjamin looking for connection to very distant past
    • so when he talks about remembrance it’s not just about memory but marking a connection between now and past
    • especially interested in ideas of days of remembrance (anniversaries, commemorations etc) which specifically connect now and a particular moment in the past
• on the concept of history
• 1: mechanical turk imagery
  • is he being sarcastic here? (yes seems like it)
  • also aligns with Hobsbawm’s critique of marxism (too mechanistic, like a machine)
  • but also links to opposite reaction thing (maybe he’s saying it doesn’t work except in a theological way)
  • puppet called “historical materialism” does he mean stalin’s version of it? attacking it here
• 2: something weird going on with the use of “happiness”
  • the “absence of envy” quote, turning us away from a future-oriented attitude?
  • basically saying that our acts now have an effect on the past retroactively?
• 3: “Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity” or alternatively “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past”
  • ie an unalienated one, prelapsarian, theological element
  • past as monad?
  • is this a circular understanding of time? do we have to go back? my q. his answer: 14, “Origin is the goal” from karl krauss
    • links to the angel in 9 and also to the force opposite direction thing in the first reading
    • taps into a classic debate in jewish theology, whether it’s a circle, whether paradise is something we can go back to
    • also marxist ideas of communism have a resonance with christian ideas of paradise
  • link to judaic eschatology?
• 4: connection between material history and ideological/theological history
  • the rulers representing themselves as universal
  • benjmain criticising the idea of there being one people who are the deliverers of humanity
• 5: when he talks about recognisability does he mean our ability to recognise ourselves?
• 6: is there a real history, or is it always a tool
  • attacking the idea that you understand history by reconstructing the past, the moments, and also an empathetic understanding of what it was like to be a roman etc
  • interesting dichotomy between language and image, articulating the past, turning image into language, that’s when history becomes a tool of the ruling classes
• 7: historical materialist against the grain, empathy with the victor, also “sprawled underfoot”
  • “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism”
• 8: when nigel reads this he sees benjamin as an anarchist?
  • referring to martial law etc
  • resonance with adorno and schmitt’s state of exception
  • “The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.” -> what does by “no means philosophical” mean?
  • one interpretation: against the progress-oriented view of the present
  • astonishment that arises is that our understanding of history is flawed
    • possibly another translation of astonishment (amazement in the other translation) is not right
    • maybe should link to plato, which he attributes to socrates, of awe/wonder as the origin of thinking
    • so maybe benjamin here is saying we need to move past wonder, cus it’s a tool of ruling classes
• 9: angel of history one, everyone loves this (maybe mistakenly so, lol; nigel caricatures this here)
  • “He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” -> reference to redemption here
  • angel comes from talmudic myth
  • an interesting take which is obvs not something benjamin knew about at the time: bombing of dresden angels?
• 10/11: critique of socdems, prepared to accomodate
• 12: echoes of lenin here who said that revolution cannot just be driven by sacrifice and looking toward the future
  • you also need hatred, pure hatred, which can only come from looking at the past
• 14: “homogenous and empty time” ->
  • cus disconnected from past?
  • empty vessel where you just fill it with your own meaning
  • or empty cus secular, lacking theological element, or acts of remembrance
  • think about the fashion thing more. is it a dig?
• 15: time-lapse camera, calendar associated with regularity of remembering historical moments compared to homogenous empty time of clocks (equalisation)
  • monuments of historical awareness
  • links to revolutionaries shooting clocks, not just stopping time but moving away from what they represent: an empty sense of time
• 16: “The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill”
  • what benjamin’s doing here has been described as “dialectics at a standstill”
  • time as a perpetual cycle links to baudrillard
• 17: “Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history.” -> links to what i was saying about objective history? (obvs benjamin is saying this is bad)
  • no dialectical method here, just adding facts etc to fill up this empty clock-based time
  • whereas by contrast HM offers a constructive principle, results in a fullness
  • from this you can derive the way he wants you to read the arcades project
  • bridge between theology and struggle: “the sign of a messianic zero-hour” aka “a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past”
  • line: “He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work” -> up until here he treats history as social relations but here he treats it almost as artwork
• 18: translation issues over illuminations using cancelled (aufheben) instead of sublated
• A: history is posthumous

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