On the Concept of History - Walter Benjamin (1940)

Available online, in full.

One feels few writers have appeared besides Benjamin to have such a sensitivity for the breadth and quality of issues that needed to be addressed by Marxism for any Marxist-influenced thought to continue to have any legitimacy, beyond the inert barbarism of force, proletariat in name only, of Stalinism and its successors.

Paradoxically, the realpolitik of Marxism, always Marx's professed aims of his "theory" (not to interpret the world, but to change it), was the aspect of Marxism that stopped it dead in its tracks. The actual Marxist (-Leninist) state became incapable of interpreting the course of events in any way other than to paroxysm in knee-jerk, farcical enactments of its own party line, whether those solutions rang true or untrue before the tactical dictates of time: a petrified totalitarianism. As a result, its economy parodied liberalism (i.e. Napoleon) at its most appallingly imperialistic (having no example of economy of its own, only a critique), and the barbarity of its anti-humanism reached fiats of slaughter only debatably second to that of Fascism.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

The immediate problem that put Benjamin so far outside the purview of (and even hope for detection from) his Western Marxist contemporaries was that he recognized some sort of engagement needed to happen between Historicity and myth. When History was continuously being rewritten to suit the aims of the powerful, one could not, as dialectical Marxism seemed to rely on, posit simply that, on the on hand, the bourgeoisie conceptualization of time was ahistoric, and, on the other hand, an absolutely unequivocal discipline of Historicity existed.

Compounded with this problem was Marxist intellectuals own cupidity in relying on prognostication: that a salvation in the form of the total revolution would resolve "contradiction." Rather than perform the tortuous gymnastics needed to deny that myth, a literary trope even, was being invoked in these claims, or to dismiss the yearning inherit in the discipline of history, or worse (from a Marxist lens), to disavow history in favor of a transcendental, out-of-time conception of timeless fate (as in Heidegger), Benjamin begins to give an account of Historicity, expressly sensitive to myth, that includes the avowal of the mythic themes invoked in any accessing of the past, part and parcel of the writing of any history.

He begins to address the actual theological and mythic underpinnings of the writing of history, not to find the project out as an absurdity, but to flesh out its serious aims, those necessary to our cognitive and humane survival. He writes an actual myth, a myth that posits body and public before the forces of its actual gods, who are, in fact, non-deities: progress, labour, organization, power (capital) and the future.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

That is, he revisits Marx to save what is salvageable in Marx but needing articulation in the light of the  present--the present, which is always a surprise. Not accidentally, then, one of the themes that take relief in this concept of a cumulative, progressive (not transcendent, timeless) history is: garbage. But the dustbin of history (Marx's phrase) is not, precisely, just oblivion. It is the storage of ruins by which, in a process akin to the archaeological dig, we may yet illuminate our way to the future. It is, then, a myth for the progressive. At that, it is only marginally an optimistic one.

Perhaps its most serious philosophical critique lies in the sketch of a world of facts-- a view given articulation in the 20th century famously by Wittgenstein--rather than one of base materials. This is where Liberalism consistently outpaces radicals, in political terms: is it a fact, does it yield real world feedback capable of being reduplicated in real time? Or is it a theory, strictly surface interpretation, in the mode of detail-oriented, world-renouncing monks? A question I am really not equipped to deal with but recognize it is there; and for radicals: The Begging Question.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

Objections aside, this is the climate and background I imagine to have been part of the writing of this mesmerizing, intellectually fervid document. To my mind, it is to seek in a history grounded in base materials (history's trash) our fate, but interpreted backwards through history's long train of wrecks.