>I like Benjamin's general approach on this one thesis
>
>However, in order to make the connection among oppressed classes
>down through history that he does below, one must accept some
>connection among the slave, feudal and capialists modes of
>production, rather than consider these connections between oppressed
>and oppressor classes of different epochs as anachronism.
>
>The proletarian revolution overthrows all class exploitative
>society, and this historical sweep, cleaning house, is part of the
>historic inspiration of socialist revolution. The notion of
>"anachronism" in this regard robs the proletariat and its allies
>among the peasantry and middle strata of the very elan that Benjamin
>fires up in his essay below. The unity of the workers and peasants
>is built partially on such an historical link. Historical
>materialism unites the generations of the downtrodden, including the
>generations centuries dead. This is the culture and history of the
>revolutionary class. Things have changed , but the past class
>struggles are sublated in the class struggle of the present, the
>final conflict , as the Internationale puts it.
>
>The conquest of the globe by the European bourgeoisie makes the
>coming revolution qualitatively emergent in geography as well as
>history, place as well as time.
One can't properly recognize "the qualitatively emergent" when one falls for anachronism or a "history of Progress" (Whig or Hegelian) or historicism.
Benjamin again:
***** XIII
Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.
Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie
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. 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). 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. 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. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself....
XV
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. 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. 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. *
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. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
XVII
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. 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. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. 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 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. 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. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
XVIII...
...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. 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. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
(Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," at <http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html>) *****
Avoid historicism.
Yoshie