In a previous post, I pointed out that though Walter Benjamin knew about Godel type 'incompleteness'- which is why the 'Olan' can't be conceived since it is 'complete' by definition- he did not understand why 'tikkun Olam' could be just piecemeal social-engineering without any need for a break or resetting of the 'frame of reference' (i.e. Time). This was because of what we would call the 'axiom of determinacy' but which, for Benjamin (had he bothered with such things) would have been based on Kalmar's 1928 paper in which he elucidated the notion of 'backward induction' and 'sub-game'. His result applied to finitary games but there was already the intuition (fleshed out in the determinacy axiom) that decidability arose in the infinitary context. However, decidability does not mean determinacy. There could be 'lawless choice sequences'. For economists, this is not a problem because neo-classical econ is ergodic. Not so, Marxian 'classical' econ which is hysteresis ridden.
Benjamin, who incarnated the zeitgeist of the interwar interregnum, is the not Spinoza, but Schlemiel emblematizing that somnambulist epoche of stupidity.
Consider the following
‘One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ writes Lotze, ‘is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.’
Though posing as a teleological idealist, Lotze was mechanistic. He didn't notice that most of us so envy the leisure we will enjoy in retirement that we scamp our work, or get fired, so as to enjoy that felicity immediately.
Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.
It does no such thing. One can build castles in Spain which are centuries in the future or the Past or in a Universe where the sky is purple and the moon is green.
The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed,
which is why I can't be jealous of peeps who live in a City where it doesn't rain ALL THE FUCKING TIME!
among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.
I'm as envious as fuck of George Clooney. Amal is so nice. If she were married to me, I'm sure she'd cook me nice idli-sambar.
In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.
No. It is bound up in having lots of nice things and being loved and admired by those we find lovable and admirable. Redemption is unnecessary unless you believe you are predestined to eternal Hell-fire or have the mark of Cain upon you or something bizarre of that sort.
The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.
Nope. The past has a chronology. It is unredeemed. True, one could say 'such and such event or historical personality of whom we thought poorly is 'redeemed' from that judgment by some subsequent evidence or perspective which has become available'.
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.
Only in the sense that it is also a highly publicized orgy between various generations to which horny dolphins from the Andromeda Galaxy showed up un-invited.
Our coming was expected on earth.
Only in the sense that the earth kept saying 'I'm certain a species will turn up sooner or later which will keep jizzing on my tits'.
Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.
unless it swaps that claim for a chance to jizz on the tits of earth.
That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
Nor can the claim of Andromedan dolphins to jizz on the earth's tits. But this does not matter at all.
Historical materialists are aware of that.
No. Historical materialists thought that the economic substructure influenced the superstructure even though this clearly wasn't true.
III A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones
lets the reader decide what is major or minor.
acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.
Nope. Chroniclers seldom included information about who farted and how often.
To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.
Redeemed mankind will often mention who farted and when they farted because it will be very proud of such sanctified flatulence.
Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
Because God is really interested in our farts.
IV Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you. Hegel, 1807
Because you will die. It is only death which makes God interesting for us.
The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.
No. It is a struggle over Labor's share of National Income. If this falls too much, there could be an under-consumption crisis. If it rises too much there may be inadequate capital formation or public good provision. Also, some classes may want to do stupid shit and, if so, the commonweal benefits if their economic and other power falls.
Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle.
'Spiritual things' have nothing to do with economic or military or sociological struggles. There is a market for the thing or, at least, an endogenous supply.
They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.
or farting in a ruminative manner while contemplating an apricot.
They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.
Only in the sense that ruminative farts do so.
As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.
Just as farts emanate from the anus, so too does the secret flatulence of the future strive to enter our arseholes as the aural equivalent to that 'black sun' which the Hindus say shines upon the reverse of all things within the net of causality.
A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.
Otherwise, the fellow might say something sensible. That would never do.
V The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
The present may vanish before it is grasped. That is not the case with the past. Incidentally, astronomy is about looking at what happened many years ago. The nearest star to us is 4.2 light years away. When we look out at the Night Sky we are looking thousands of years into the past. Andromeda is visible to the naked eye on moonless nights but what we are looking at is Andromeda as it was two and a half billion years ago. People with telescopes have been looking at pretty much the same things in the night sky for centuries.
‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller
a novelist- not a historian
mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism.
Nonsense! Historical materialism is one variety of historicism. Essentially, it emphasizes hysteresis effects over the ergodicity of economism.
For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Only in the sense that it also threatens to tell your wife you showed it your dick.
(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)
More particularly if the Past threatens to shove its dick into his open mouth.
VI To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke).
Not for nutters like Benjamin who thought such articulation included threats of various sorts.
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Which memory? That of the krav maga move you were taught? Or the memory of pissing yourself the last time you faced danger? In the former case, there may be some point in 'seizing hold' of the thing. Since Benjamin had run away pretty quickly from danger first in Germany and then in France, I suppose he thought he was good at 'seizing hold' of useful memories. But, he panicked and topped himself because he mistakenly thought the Spanish would deport him back to France. Thus, his memories or intuitions or whatever weren't actually much cop.
Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.
That's the great man theory of history. Hisorical materialism is about present economic circumstances. In Engels' words it ' seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.' What it doesn't understand is that there is more cooperation between classes than there is conflict.
The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.
Benjamin was simply a tool.
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.
and thus force it to do sensible things.
The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.
He doesn't come at all to Hindus or Confucians or Buddhists. Also, when he comes, either the Christians or the Muslims are wrong or else it is the Jews who will get it in the neck.
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.
The Abrahamic Religions have a notion of bodily resurrection. There could also be a final battle in which the resurrected are re-slain. Got to say, that's fucked up.
And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
only because that enemy has not ceased to be the fart which anally rapes its own Messianic possibility as the aura of its originating asshole.
VII Consider the darkness and the great cold In this vale which resounds with mystery. Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
Or avoid Brecht and go watch the Three Stooges. Seriously, Brecht was shit.
To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges
who wrote well. But his ideas were the polar opposite of 'historical materialist'.
recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history.
He warned against viewing the past through the lens of the present. In particular, we need to take the religious ideas of ancient people at their own, not our, estimation.
There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia,
in which case there is no empathy or sympathy. Accide means mental sloth or apathy. Benjamin was incapable of writing a single sensible sentence. I suppose, he thought this qualified him as some sort of mystic.
which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness.
Nonsense! Medieval theologians understood that bereavement, or having your fucking dick chopped off, made you way sadder. What some did say was that this type of apathy was a dangerous temptation, or 'noonday demon' for the monk. Basically, if you stop getting thrills or chills from talk of Christ or Satan, then you are a shit monk. Just fucking cornhole an altar-boy already and get back with the problem.
Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.’
I guess the dude was sad coz he had syphilis and this helped him to, not resuscitate Carthage but write an unreadable and shitty book.
The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize.
Sadness is occasioned by defeat. Carthage was defeated
The answer is inevitable: with the victor.
Benjamin would have felt very sad if he had lived to see the Allied victory. He truly had shit for brains.
And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them.
No. A hereditary monarch may be the heir of the heir of the heir of a conqueror. But neither a conqueror nor a usurper is.
Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.
Nonsense! The Bourbons felt no empathy for Napoleon though he was a victor most of the time. They were happy enough to replace him.
Historical materialists know what that means.
Nobody knows what Benjamin means though we can be sure it is shit.
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
This nutter thinks that William the Conqueror would have been happy to participate in the triumphal procession of Welsh or Scottish origin Kings of England.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.
Not at the present day. Incidentally, even Hitler didn't 'step over' people lying prostrate.
They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment.
No. He views them as a figment of a nutter's imagination.
For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.
We view Benjamin's essay with derision, unless we are as stupid as shit.
They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them,
No. If they are 'treasures', they owe their existence only to extraordinary minds and talents.
but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.
No, the anonymous or mediocre productions of their contemporaries owe their existence to their mediocre toil. On the other hand it is true that Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi are equally responsible for Benjamin's shite as was a fart which Charlie Chaplin emitted while on the set of the 'Great Dictator'.
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Only in the sense that is not at the same time a prescription for piles or a fart which was emitted by Goldie Hawn that time she dreamed she was sodomizing Charlie Chaplin but then woke up the next day and forgot all about it.
And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.
Only in the sense that, from this moment on, the entire project of universal literature has been tainted by the fart Goldie Hawn emitted when she dreamed she was sodomizing Charlie Chaplin.
A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible.
As we must all, henceforth, disassociate ourselves as far as possible from Goldie Hawn's fart if we are ever again to savor the splendors of Shakespeare or the grandeur of Goethe.
He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
i.e. tug at his todger the wrong way
VIII The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
In other words, even if there is no Hitler still we might get loaded on to cattle trucks at any moment. I now understand why shitheads who teach worthless subjects have a thing for cretins like Benjamin & Hannah's Aunt.
We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.
In other words, we should be batshit crazy. America lucked out in that this nutter topped himself before he could get there.
Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.
His own position in that struggle involved running the fuck away.
One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.
It was better than Communism. But McCarthyism was even better. You don't need Black Shirts or Brown Shirts to beat up Reds in the streets if the police and the FBI can just round up Comintern agents and deport the fuck out of them.
The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical.
It was disingenuous. The Bolsheviks had done worse in Russia. Hitler and Musso were pussycats in comparison. Still, even Stalin didn't use gas chambers to kill the disabled. Apparently that shite began in 1939 before Jews were targeted.
This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
There was nothing 'untenable' about the Anglo American, or Whig, view of History.
IX My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück. Gerherd Scholem, ‘Gruss vom Angelus’This is a translation of Scholem's poem which he wrote for Benjamin when he acquired Klee's print.
Greetings from Angelus
I hang nobly on the wall
and look no one in the face
I’ve been sent from heaven
I’m of the angelic race.
Man is good within my realm
I take little interest in his case
I am protected by the Almighty
and have no need of any face.
The world from which I come
is measured, deep and clear
what keeps me of a piece
is a wonder, so it here appears.
In my heart stands the town
where God has sent me to dwell.
The angel who bears this seal
Never falls under its spell.
My wing is ready to beat
but I would gladly return home
were I to stay to the end of days
I’d still be this forlorn.
My gaze is never vacant
my eye pitchdark and full
I know what I must announce
and many other things as well.
I am an unsymbolic thing
what I am I mean
you turn the magic ring in vain
there is no sense to me.
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 staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.
No it isn't. During the Katechon (i.e. the period when the end of days is held at bay) holy angels take note of all of mankind's transgressions. At the Eschaton- i.e. Day of Judgment- the wicked 'shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.'
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
I suppose Eden was really nice and everything since simply can't match up more particularly because us humans keep doing messed up stuff and thus will end up being tortured in Hell.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
that is not in an angel's power
and make whole what has been smashed.
see above
But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.
why? Is it because it is shit? Birds can write themselves and turn around and get out of the squall so as to resume their flight.
The storm irresistibly propels him into the future
we are all propelled 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.
No. The storm is what we call the passage of time. It continued even during the Ice Age when, for example, humans abandoned the British isles.
X The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs.
And towards God and the life to come
The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations.
No. Historical materialism has no God or Paradise. I suppose Benjamin was working his way up to endorsing suicide as an effective way of combatting Fascism or Capitalism or people who sodomize cats or whatever.
At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate
In Germany, it was Thalmann and the Communists who opened the door to Hitler. They wanted Hitler to destroy all legality so that they could take over once he came a cropper. This worked out well enough for Walter Ulbricht.
and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
This imbecile couldn't disentangle shit.
Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.
Benjamin, being ignorant of economics, did not get that Weimar was based on 'extend and pretend'. Because of the Wall Street crash, the money ran out. Since the Communists considered the Social Democrats their main enemy, it was inevitable that the Army would take over. What few suspected was that Schleicher would fuck up so massively. How do you alienate the Right, the Centre and the Rural League all at the same time? Hitler was actually a better Chancellor than Bruning, Papen, or Schleicher.
It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking
Benjamin and his pals were incapable of thinking as opposed to ranting in a paranoid pseudo-intellectual fashion.
will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
Adenauer was one of those old fashioned Centrum politicians. He did a great job as Chancellor after the war.
XI The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown.
This shithead still thought the S.Ds were the true 'Social Fascists'. Thankfully, Angel of History persuaded him to top himself.
Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current.
Benjamin's daddy was rich. Rich kids like lecturing the working class.
It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving.
Benji didn't get that his own ancestors were working class. They did make technological or other innovations which is why they were able to move into the upper middle class. Apparently Benjamin's dad was an entrepreneur in the skating rink business. This was quite a new technology at the time.
From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress
some guys who did factory work made innovations and became entrepreneur. Edison and Ford and so forth hadn't been to Uni. They rose by their own ability to make technical innovations.
constituted a political achievement.
Only political activity can lead to political achievements. The German working class had many such. It wasn't their fault that Bruning- a Centrum economist who had studied at the LSE- decided to pursue deflation at precisely the moment when the Depression hit hardest.
The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form.
Catholics and Jews were very lazy- right? Wrong. Don't be so fucking silly.
The Gotha Program already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…’
Marx hadn't noticed that plenty of people are self-employed. Moreover, if they gain a skill, they can set up their own business employing others. In any case, Marx's theory only works for goods. He himself says that it excludes services- e.g. digging ditches or playing the piano. But only a small proportion of the working population works in factories. As for agricultural products, in Germany there were plenty of peasant proprietors in the South and West. Even in Prussia, such people existed.
However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’
Nothing wrong in that. There are all sorts of work. Financial Capital too isn't evil. A lot of it is just Pension and Insurance funds
This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal.
The answer is obvious. Stuff like aircraft carriers and lectures on algebraic topology benefit workers by contributing to National Defense and technological innovation.
It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature,
Man is part of nature. But groups of men compete with other groups of men for control of territory. Raising productivity is one way of staying in the race.
not the retrogression of society;
says a retard
it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism.
Fascism had no technocratic features. It was stupid shit. Getting rid of Jewish scientists was a big mistake.
Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution.
There was no 'conception of nature' before or after. Only idle shitheads bothered with any such thing.
The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat.
Getting coal and oil out of the ground to replace man and horse-power was the road to higher living standards for everybody. The alternative was to have coolies carry the rich around in palanquins.
Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding.
Science is in fact an efficient type of cooperative labor.
All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.
Nature doesn't have a womb. Incidentally, the Stars and Galaxies are part of Nature. Biology too is part of Natural Science. Benji wasn't smart enough to study Science. He wrote nonsense but that was okay because his daddy was rich. Even after his family cut off the money supply, he was posh and part of a bunch of self-promoting pseudo-intellectuals.
XII We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
Nietzsche didn't need history. He needed a cure for syphilis.
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge.
Says richie rich Benji.
In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.
Marx thought that a nicer Revolution would be spearheaded by factory workers. He didn't get that factories are about endogenous growth in productivity which can indeed make things better for everybody.
This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats.
because it is silly.
Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century.
No it hadn't. Illiterate proles didn't know Blanqui from a hole in the ground. The truth is Napoleon III was popular. Had he not lost a war to Germany, his dynasty would have endured.
Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength.
Nope. S.Ds thought redeemers belong in Religion, not Politics. So did everybody else. Killing and eating the rich might be part of a Revolution but confession of, and redemption for, such sins was only required in articulo mortis.
This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
The trouble here is that the working class was aware that most of the middle class had risen from their own ranks. Even the aristocrats had started off as cattle raiders or pirates or whatever. The guy best at killing people got elected Chief though, at a later point, the smartest guy might have usurped his office.
XIII Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter. Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie
Sadly, Commies got more crazy and more cunning. In East Germany, they came to power and got the Soviets to build a wall so the workers didn't escape.
Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims.
This nutter knew shit about reality.
Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge).
Mankind should have wings and should be able to fly about the place pooping on the heads of lesser beings.
Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism.
But is less ludicrous than the notion that redemption or a Messiah is required.
However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time.
Nor can physics or chemistry or economics or history. As for 'historical progress', the fact is less productive people get killed or chased away from resource rich territory.
A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
But that criticism would be stupid and useless.
XIV Origin is the goal. Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1 History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].*
Karl Kraus had krap for brains. Time is not filled with the presence of the now. It has a past and a future as well as a present.
Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.
But Robespierre had shit for brains. Who cares what he thought?
The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.
It found its Augustus soon enough.
It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical,
D'uh!
no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.
Rome was once a Republic. France had become a Republic. Connect the dots.
This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands.
Robespierre's dad was a lawyer. His mother's dad was a brewer. That's scarcely ruling class.
The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
Revolutions only happen if the administration is shit. But the outcome may be shittier.
It may be that for God, or some mystic sage there is a nunc stans or even a hic stans- i.e. a viewpoint from which all history is simultaneous or else a place, like Borges's aleph, where all places can be viewed simultaneously. But this has nothing to do with politics or history of anything else of interest to ordinary people.
. XV The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is
evidence they were as crazy as bedbugs and thus bound to fuck up big time
characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.
They will soon rue their 'revolution'.
The great revolution introduced a new calendar.
Which disappeared quickly enough.
The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera.
Nope. Calendars don't greatly matter. They solve a coordination problem. That is all.
And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.
Nope. Last Sunday was different from this Sunday.
Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.
Because calendars don't actually have any magical properties.
In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows: Who would have believed it! we are told that new Joshuasat the foot of every tower, as though irritated with time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day. Qui le croirait! on dit, qu’irrités contre l’heure De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour. *
The new Joshua was shit. Shooting at clocks is silly. The June attempted revolution, a couple of years later, didn't bother with any such thing. The French were beginning to realize that Revolutions are useful as a way of getting rid of stupid or incompetent rulers. But they can't usher forth a new Millennium.
XVI A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.
Nope. A materialist has to accept the laws of Physics, Biology, Chemistry etc. Gassing on about Messiahs and 'redemption' is silly.
For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.
Nope. History is based on research. As more research is done, more facts will be uncovered and history will be rewritten.
Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past;
Nope. However, it may be teleological- i.e. hold that History is bound to develop in a particular manner and towards a particular end-point.
historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past.
Uniquely shit- maybe.
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello.
Because it is totes gay.
He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
No. He takes it up the arse.
XVII Historicism rightly culminates in universal history.
It culminates in nonsense.
Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind.
Nope. It can be just as teleological. If you have a structural causal model which fits the past, it can fit the future too.
Universal history has no theoretical armature.
In which case it has no structural causal model. It isn't history. It is merely an archive.
Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time.
Which is all that exists. It isn't the case that Time at some places suddenly turns into a duck.
Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Benji was a case of arrested development- that's true enough.
Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad.
It crystallizes into madness.
A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad.
Monads don't exist save in theology. But that is about Spiritual not Material things.
In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.
He thinks we should do stupid shit because History has just bared her gorgeous breasts and is about to give the proletariat a titty wank. Sadly, this is never the case.
He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.
Not Benji, who made a habit of running away.
As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history.
Running away is a good idea- provided you head West, not East. Benji had been to Moscow in the Twenties. He knew things had got a lot worse there. Sadly, he topped himself before he could get to America- where Commies were swiftly dealt with.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood
isn't as nice as American candy.
contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Which is why, if you are going to play at being some sort of Lefty, do it on a nice American campus.
.XVIII ‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth,’ writes a modem biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’ The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
It has no stature. Our light-cone- i.e. stuff to which we can be causally related- is estimated to be about forty percent of all there is. But it may be a lot smaller.
A. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.
In which case it isn't 'historical' but rather some fad or fashion or fairy tale which gives rise to a bit of political theater of which people soon get tired.
A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.
He tells a 'just-so' story. At one time there was a Golden Age. Thanks to the benevolence of the Beloved Leader, the Golden Age will be re-established once we kill a lot more people.
Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
He tells a fairy story.
B The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty.
They were either crazy or were lying their heads off.
Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way.
People like to think the past was nicer than it was.
We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future.
Sadly, nobody stopped Sabbetai Zevi or Jacob Frank from claiming to be Messiahs.
The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.
Which is why some Jews thought that Zionism was heretical. Israel can only be re-established by the Messiah. Had Benji not topped himself, he would have seen that Marx was right about one thing- only Economics- i.e. productivity- matters. Messiahs and historical fairy-tales don't matter. Israel survived because its people were productive. Indeed, Reagan's tough-love- which forced Israel to embrace the market and become a Knowledge Economy- fundamentally changed its relations with its neighbors. They saw the country could be fiscally viable without conquering more territory.
The USSR, however, fell behind in terms of productivity because it was misallocating resources. That's why, once Gorby was foolish enough to surrender Party control of the economy, the Soviet Union collapsed.
It is true that crazy fairy tales can be instrumentalized by revolutionaries. But revolutions only succeed if the incumbent administration is utterly shit. That is the lesson of history. Sadly, it is a boring lesson which is why the angel of History- if there ever was such a thing- fucked off to Las Vegas where it got a job as an Elvis impersonator. What Walter Benjamin didn't understand is that only Economics matters. History is all about the Benjamins.
No comments:
Post a Comment