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Walter Benjamin & The Idea of History // 158 (preview) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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  And a lot of my undergrad and grad stuff has been kind of structured around
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  culture studies. And yeah, Ben, you means just a foundational figure.
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  And I'm sure many people are forced to read still the work of art essay
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  something everyone has to struggle with. So if you've been through an undergrad course
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  on culture studies or media theory or anything like that, then you've you've probably
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  been exposed to at least that text. And it's quite difficult. It's not
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  easy reading. He's he's he's a stylist and a beautiful writer, but it's
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  it's hard, but it's highly recommended, so very rewarding stuff to struggle with.
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  Yeah, I'll attach it and see. I'd recommend the listeners see how
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  far they get. I mean, I enjoyed it more than I expected.
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  I think I'm not inexactly sure what he's saying. You know, there's like
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  little bits and pieces that you know, kind of sounded history. You know,
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  he talks about how it's like told by the people by the victors,
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  right, which is like that old saying. But but then I guess he
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  seems to be saying that there's revolutionary potential in like uncovering like the bad parts
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  of history? Am I wrong about that? Because I don't know. It
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  seemed like he was saying that, Ah well, that wasn't my impression overall.
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  Okay, okay, so yeah, so I don't understand. I don't
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  like I enjoyed reading it. I thought that there was like moments where I
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  was like, oh cool, but I wasn't sure what he was saying.
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  The ending theses are not the same as the beginning ones either. But why
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  don't we why don't we try to parse this because the Marxist as we've been
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  caricaturizing it so far, we haven't done the Marxist end of history. It's
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  just assumed, you know, revolution comes one day. Now. This doesn't
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  apply to this text. And that's a very crude or vulgar Marxism, I
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  think when you're comparing it to to Benu Meete, which is, let's overthrow
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  capitalism. Capitalism will end and there will be no class conflict. That's the
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  favored position of the foil that we use on here known as the Internet or
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  the Twitter. Marxists take no prisoners. You can't do any reform, no
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  compromise. The contradictions are coming soon. Just wait. Yeah, so check
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  out your favorite Marxist YouTuber for more on that. But this is nineteen thirty
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  nine, his last work before he killed himself, so it was to not
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  be killed by the Nazis. But Benjamine, who no one can accuse of
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  being un Marxist, already thinks that that crude Marxism is stupid. And he's
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  gonna go over several times at least three different ways about why that is crude
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  and stupid. Yeah, I got that part. Yeah, that vulgar Marxism
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  calls it. It almost like simply glorifying the worker and glorifying labor and connecting
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  labor with progress, being like, look, technological progress enhances labor. You
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  know, we're all on the same team here, Ben, you means like,
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  no, that's ridiculous. It takes off after Marx as well. Marx
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  has some critiques in the same way. Well we should. I mean,
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  it's good to have context, right, you know. Rise of Hitler to
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  Power in nineteen thirty three. Benyman is Jewish. He's fled Germany and he's
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  staying in Paris, and he's kind of staying as long as possible, Like
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  he doesn't seem to want to leave. He's got the Arcades Project in the
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  works. He's got all these big intellectual projects, the most famous one is
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  the Arcades project, and he doesn't want to leave, right He's got all
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  this stuff there. He ends up handing it all off to Battai, I
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  think, and Battai ends up keeping it for him, And so whatever survives
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  of that is thanks to intervention of his friends in that way. But otherwise,
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  Yeah, he stayed pretty much as long as he safely could before he
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  tried to flee France into Spain, but there was some problems with the exit
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  visa and he couldn't make it over the border. They were going to send
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  him back, at least that's what they told him, and then they led
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  everyone through the next day after he'd committed suicide. But he was also really
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  bad health. He had like an inflated heart or something like that. He
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  was in his fifties, but in very poor health. He could barely even
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  make the walks that he had to do to get to the Spanish border.
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  So there was a lot going on with this guy, and he's very complicated.
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  That's some of the context around this. Yeah, and I don't know
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  the actual month that this was ritten. I mean one Thing said nineteen forty,
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  when Thing said nineteen thirty nine, probably nineteen thirty nine, because it
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  seems to have been thought through. But at least he saw the start of
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  the war and the Blitzkrig and all that. I don't know if he saw
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  France, No, probably not, probably not. He didn't as soon as
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  completed in the spring of nineteen forty, and then it was first published in
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  nineteen fifty. He pleaded these in nineteen forty he wrote he had time to
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  write a letter to Adorno that may about this and Frank Dornell in June of
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  nineteen forty. I think so he was right on the edge of that big
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  invasion. Yeah, and so this is like some last minute stuff. This
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  is one of the last texts he was able to write, besides maybe some
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  letters afterwards and whatever he had in his suitcase with him when he was walking
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  towards Spain. Right. And he's also you know, there's a lot more
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  context to be given about Benymin's life. Right. He never really had an
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  academic post. He wasn't able to make it. He failed his second thesis.
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  You had to write two theses back then, one one to pass your
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  studies and then one to become a professor, and he failed the second one.
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  But that's because it was kind of incomprehensible. That's just not a surprise.
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  It was very it is a very, very difficult text on the origin
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  of I think it's like German drama, the and baroque German drama that the
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  the examiners found it incomprehensible, much like much like Wickenstein when he sort of
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  baffled his his his examiners and then slapped them on the shoulders and said,
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  you know, don't worry about it. But they passed him. He's privileged
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  fricking Viennese people. Well that was mostly because Bertrand Russell just like believed in
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  him and decided to take him under his wing. Yeah, he had some
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  help on the inside. Apparently Adorn. Knowing Adorno in Horkheimer wasn't enough for
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  Benymine. Yeah, and as you said, this is the beginning of what
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  we now call cultural studies. But it wasn't really a thing. So you
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  can imagine why this would seem, you know, incomprehensible. It's not really
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  philosophy, it's not really history, and it's super complicated because he has like
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  this is all about time and relevant to some of the stuff that we've discussed
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  so far. There's a theological implication that he's not giving up on. But
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  he also says everyone's doing theology wrong. Here's how we do it. And
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  he introduces this term Messianic time, owing I'm assuming to his Jewish upbringing,
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  but belief in Messianic time can go the wrong way, so don't be crude
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  with it. But we need some of the messianic or the prophetic literature,
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  but not too much prophetic in theological theological literature. So it's hard to parse
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  exactly what this means. I think you can say, in short, there
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  is no such thing as a messiah for him, but there is such a
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  thing as Messianic time. So there's no specific theological end of history, but
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  traces of the end of history exist within history as you're observing it and studying
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  it. Yeah, he almost posits like, uh, I guess a redemption
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  arc to history, and he calls a weak MESSI weak Messianism. Yeah,
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  I'm ashamed to say I have not chased down you know, his connection to
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  Gersham Scholem and his interest in Jewish mysticism in the Kabbala. I haven't chased
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  down chased down those connections, and that would definitely shed some light on some
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  of the more I don't know, religious sounding elements he appears to be mixing
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  with sort of Marxism he picked up in the twenties from going to Russia,
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  and he picked up Marxism there a lot of and he combined that with his
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  earlier interest in Romanticism and German drama Gerta and the Romantics, and that combined
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  with him not having this university to career, so he's got to forge himself,
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  as you know, and he's got to write about things people are interested
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  in, and he's becomes this critic instead of an academic, he's becoming a
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  critic. So this goes by multiple names. I've been saying the thesis on
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  history. I think it's also sometimes called the concept of history, but it's
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  really not actually on history as much as the philosophy of history. Like now
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  today, these terms are very distinct. We have history and then we have
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  historiography. They're separate. He's one of the first to kind of separate these
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  two and try to say, what are we studying when we study philosophy of
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  history and what is the picture we're producing and how does that affect the present.
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  Yeah, so the one enemy that goes throughout these theses, the one
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  thing that he thinks is crude simplified is historicism. And this is going to
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  take a bit too unpack because it's a bit of an idiosyncratic use of historicism.
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  Victor, what did you think about this? This term, Well,
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  you know, in the Strosian meaning they talk about, historicism is like a
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  claim about basically relativism, just like the idea that like human consciousness or human
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  subjectivity or nature is malleable and relative to the historical time. And like you
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  know, they talk about hegel as being like a historicist who thinks that like
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  human consciousness changes over time. And the Strosians are kind of opposed to that
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  because they think that there's you know, eternal human problems, that human beings
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  basically don't change that much and they just face the same problems over and over
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  again that have to do with politics and social struggle, and it's just the
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  technology that changes, but humans don't really change. Obviously, he's not doing
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  that here, right. He means it in a very different way, which
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  I think you said, is like just the sequential order of events, that
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  there's like a kind of clean line of history of one event happening after another.
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  That's and you know, he appeals to the concept of pro progress a
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  few times and talks about how, you know, politicians and people who believe
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  in progress that it somehow seems to well to claim, as I read him,
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  seems to be that you know that that faith in progress is somehow linked
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  to historicism, I'm guessing, and that's something that he's worried about, but
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  I'm not exactly sure how. Yes, And I want to clarify right off
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  the bat, he's not an idealist about history in either sense of the term.
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  Idealist. History is neither the history of ideas. And he's also not
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  very optimistic about how history develops. There's not like a progress through line.
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  But would also for him be vulgar to think that all events are of the
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  same order, you know, being a materialist historicist even right, that's to
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  say that everything that has happened is this long straight line of cause and effect,
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  And for him, that's a representation. Representations are ideological when we say
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  that there are events of different orders, which is what he gestures towards one
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  of those orders is this thing he calls Messianic time and Messianic time, I
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  don't know. It's hard to get a full picture of it, but it's
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  a minor bunch of events that if you could somehow extract these breakthrough events of
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  Messianic time, you could create an image of some transcendent force that is also
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  there happening and here happening. And it's not a very strong force, in
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  fact, he says, it's weak. But those little, weak trace events
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  in the otherwise conformist, big line of cause and effect are what may give
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  us some faith in something about history. But historicism misses that. Historicism is
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  to say that history is a line of beads on a string, and that
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  we now study and look at them as an explanation for why things are the
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  way they are.