Social democratic theory, and still more the praxis, was determined by a concept of progress which did not hold to reality, but had a dogmatic claim. Progress, as it was painted in the minds of the social democrats, was once upon a time the progress of humanity itself (not only that of its abilities and knowledges). It was, secondly, something unending (something corresponding to an endless perfectibility of humanity). It counted, thirdly, as something essentially unstoppable (as something self-activating, pursuing a straight or spiral path). Each of these predicates is controversial, and critique could be applied to each of them. This latter must, however, when push comes to shove, go behind all these predicates and direct itself at what they all have in common. The concept of the progress of the human race in history is not to be separated from the concept of its progression through a homogenous and empty time. The critique of the concept of this progress must ground the basis of its critique on the concept of progress itself.
Why is Benjamin so taken for granted here? I don't think I've ever seen a thread about him. It's even more surprising given everyone's love for Fisher here, whose Hauntological projects couldn't exist without Benjamin and Derrida. In any case, Walter Benjamin's critique of historical materialism hasn't ever really been countered, and his idea of history seems to have pretty damn far-reaching implications for the left, but have never been put to use other than in English and Critical Theory academics. Why is this?
Walter Benjamin seems more like a prophet than a theorist at times. His work on film theory was fantastic. He's probably the greatest "critical theorist" ever.
Noah Harris
I totally agree, which is why I've grown a bit obsessed with him as of late (that and I'm doing my undergrad thesis on him). I've just never understood why he's so underplayed in contemporary leftist circles though compared to, say, Adorno.
Easton Gray
haven't read him so correct me if I am wrong but it seems the quote you posted is directed against socdem "whig history" rather than histmat
Angel Parker
It's just one of eighteen theses concerning the philosophy of history. Other theses are more explicitly aimed at histmat, like the first:
It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.
Benjamin's whole thing in this text is to critique genetic theories of history while maintaining that history contains in essence a mythological/theological character. One reading I've been developing is that Benjamin wants to think of history not simply as a dialectic of material conditions, which for him is seemingly pretty fatalist, but instead history as a dialectic between the individual subject and a collective/individual past (this isn't developed so much here as it is in his other texts.)
John Roberts
Adorno went on to publish more contemporary works after the end of the circle, including Negative Dialectics which was, arguably, his most important work - Benjamin's life was cut far too short
Jonathan Morgan
I wonder if it also has to do with the current left's general rejection of aesthetic theory, for reasons that I've never been able to understand. I partially blame the failure of the Situationists, who probably paid the most attention to Benjamin out of any modern leftist movement, but were also honestly poor readers of him.
Adam Reed
That is because you are a relatively new fag. As an oldfag I need to inform you that I've personally made at least 2 (non-shit-tier, like your's) threads about him, and have seen like 5 troll threads about Benjamin before, you total faggot.
Maybe lurk more before you dare to comment on our history (the history that doesn't include you), you idiotic shit.
Again, you have no idea about leftypol's history. There were like two? one? fucking thread(s) about "Mr. vampire?" The only reason why he is popular in the US is because he gave a rather obvious criticism of idpol, and because that talent-less, under-read, hack-of-a-shit Douglas Lain from burgerstan kept shilling him.
That you made this thread makes me think the following of you: you are either 1) a complete noob to this radical shit, lol, or 2) you are the typical superficial faggot from the US.
Either way: kill yourself. We don't make threads here without context, without relating the quote to the current state of capitalism.
Fuck off, lurk more, or kill yourself.
(p.s. there's 0 political potential in W. Benjamin: he intentionally left out this topic. Adorno is 100% applicable to our current predicament, and Benjamin is a crock of shit.)
Adam Howard
Jesus Christ freudposter what's up your ass today. Why dont you try to encourage posting about actual theorists that you are intimating you know so much about
So I should get back to Negative Dialectics instead of engaging in Heidegger's Introduction to Phenomenological Research?
Since part of why I read Heidegger is because of the refutations to him offered by Adorno.
Gabriel Butler
Edge & cringe. Fuck off. Benjamin's critique of histmat is worth talking about and taking seriously. Contribute or don't post.
Don't see why you shouldn't pursue both, although Benjamin in particular hated Heidegger (there was a book about it recently called "Sparks Will Fly" that my prof recommended, I haven't read it though.)
I tried reading this but I'm too dumb to understand the second thesis.
I mostly don't even get what he's saying, can someone explain what he's trying to get across?
Aaron Hughes
Honestly the history theses is probably among his most difficult works. I've taken the second thesis to mean that, well, firstly that everyone lives within a certain time, and that their life (as they think of it) cannot be in any way separated from that time or the "air" of that time. Happiness in particular here is being articulated as not merely the joyful fulfillment of experiences, but also in the potential for experiences. We find ourselves happy because of things that could occur. In studying or looking back upon the past, in nostalgia for example, we hope for not for the experiences we once had, but hope for the air of possible experiences to return, resurrect itself. "Breathing in the air of he past" is a breathing in of the past's hopes and possibilities. What is being drawn here is a dialectic between past hopes and ideals which have themselves become our present, or, if they haven't been realized, are latent in our present via our reading of the past. The past contains wishes, I think Benjamin wants to say, that have be realized and grasped by he present.
Now what these dreams are exactly becomes a difficult topic, because I don't think they're as simple as Revolution or Communism for Benjamin.
Oliver Wilson
bump
Ryan Hernandez
Agreeing with the Freud user here. Benjamin is so obscure and once you understand him it's so useless and not worth the effort you put in. Why do people think Messianic time is a worthwhile contribution?
You'd be better off reading Heidegger and trying to get some kind of left-wing praxis out of that, that's how big of a waste of time Benjamin is.
Justin Turner
>marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm Ah, but isn't thy bosom like a pudding of passion [original: Leidenschaft: leiden = suffering, schaffen = create] in whichtowhomst I shall happily drown? (I talk like that because I'm an intellectual, you see.)
Wyatt Gutierrez
It changes the whole landscape on which orthodox marxism is founded. Even just taking seriously his works on aesthetics goes against the grain of most marxists on here; that media and aesthetic principles are in fact essential to building a movement and are themselves material conditions determining reality. Most people on here just kinda laugh that off. Messianic Time itself couldn't have been developed until Benjamin had expanded the realm of what we even mean when we say "material conditions" into memory and that "material" itself isn't such a solid or innocent term.
We're in a camp whose originator uses ghosts, "melting into thin air," and unrelenting contradiction to make his points. The same guy whose description of commodities is "abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" Just a bit late to start complaining now about difficulty.
Michael Robinson
muh Agamben. some say our times really are messianic but I don't entirely see why it is so. they might point to the diagnosis of modernity given by Heidegger but I cannot make the full connection.
Perfect timing on this post. Concerning aesthetics, Agamben also notes that the political sphere hasn't evolved past the Nazis.
I wonder if there ought to be more critical theory reading threads. I feel like I haven't seen that many theory threads recently.
Christopher Brooks
Thanks a lot. Although I understand what he's saying about the paradox of "fatalism" I'm still a little hazy. The prophets of enlightened doomsaying are akin to the new messiahs? What really struck me was The Blob. It's a metaphor for the mysterious aspect (subjectless process, but still somehow 'the enemy is us') of capital accumulation. It can't withstand the cold, the freeze. From the wiki, "Dave requests authorities send an Air Force heavy-lift cargo aircraft to transport the Blob to the Arctic, where it is later parachuted down to the ice and snow pack. Dave says that while the creature is not dead, at least it has been stopped. To this, Steve Andrews replies, "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"." That last line is seriously fucking chilling to me.
Keep in mind that Dupuy is a liberal and Benjamin – at best – anti-capitalist. The chapter I put forward from Dupuy is – more than anything – an expression of the internal contradiction of the capitalist market. Even though Dupuy evokes a kind of enlightened messianism, the communist counterpart is missing (we are not libs).
Eli Ward
le wrong flag
Asher Green
Totally legit observation: the very mode of posing this problematic is idealistic at best. Communists should 1) understand this as a contemporary mode of expressing the (scientific-ideological-philosophical) conjuncture, representing how 'things are'; 2) undivorced from the modes of practices that could actually attempt to solve it…
Dylan Rodriguez
That's all pretty close to normal contemporary German though. People don't need to believe in ghosts to call a situation 'ghost-ish (gespenstisch) when they were alone in the dark and felt some other person or an animal was observing them. Talking of promises that amounted to nothing in the real world is to say that they dissolved into air (sich in Luft aufgelöst). You can just read the sentence right before the melts-into part in the Manifesto, and it's clear what it refers to. (And in the German version, the sentence that got the melts-into translation explicitly refers to the feudal class order as evaporating. It's just that Ständische doesn't seem to have a corresponding word in English, unless you think feudal-class-society-ordery'' is a word. I'm sure Fred and the other guy translating were more concerned with how the words flow when read aloud in English than with absolute autists not getting simple metaphors.) And the German word that got translated as contradiction (Widerspruch) has a broader meaning that also can mean disagreement.
This also looks like an anti-Marxist text, so I don't get what you mean by our camp if you include Benjamin in that. Can you provide the German original?
Luis Parker
Sorry. Again, with un-fucked (I hope) formatting: >People don't need to believe in ghosts to call a situation ghost-ish (gespenstisch) when they were alone in the dark and felt some other person or an animal was observing them. Talking of promises that amounted to nothing in the real world is to say that they dissolved into air (sich in Luft aufgelöst). You can just read the sentence right before the melts-into part in the Manifesto, and it's clear what it refers to. (And in the German version, the sentence that got the melts-into translation explicitly refers to the feudal class order as evaporating. It's just that Ständische doesn't seem to have a corresponding word in English, unless you think feudal-class-society-ordery is a word.
David Gomez
I'd actually need to think about that. Wouldn't it be implicit in calling an even ghostly that, to a certain extent, the "reality" of ghosts is being affirmed? The weird, the eerie, the not-apparently material? Where Benjamin and, later dwn the road, Derrida take off on Marx's language is his focus on almost transcendental elements of capitalism, alienation, and fetish. These early Freudian-Marxists (though Benjamin eventually found Jung more appealing) is comparing Fetish in Marx and Fetish in Freud, both of which are building off of its tribal connotations.
That makes sense. My point was simply that oblique metaphor is part-and-parcel for marxist theory.
Benjamin is absolutely a Marxist, he's just a very strange marxist. This is the guy who coins "Left Melancholy" after all.
In Spanish, adiós is said for goodbye. Taken literally, it is a reference to God (Dios). But secular Spaniards say it like everybody else, and I believe they don't think about God when they say that anymore than you think of hell when saying hello. You don't have a proper etymological reason for making the connection and they do, but it makes no difference. I don't think Marx literally believed in some literal ghost or cyclops having ever existed somewhere. His metaphor usage for the most part is pretty clear. The way to achieve this clarity is not rocket science, just have the metaphor close to the context that makes its meaning clear, don't put that context in a different chapter or worse, require familiarity some detail from another book. It's so easy to do it right that I strongly suspect people who don't do it right do that on purpose.
I don't see that in the text. He's projecting his religious sentimentality onto others. If people don't overtly show any of that attitude, they must just be hiding it well (or so he thinks), requiring "analysis" (=his noodly salad of associations and intuitions) to "reveal" it.
Nathaniel Sanchez
The point here though it that language and how we use it, especially in metaphors which are particularly tricky devices, carry with them implicit meaning that constitute the explicit meaning. What people like Benjamin and, although to a lesser extent, his fellow Frankfurts did was attempt to unpack these implicit but nonetheless present relations, whether in a text or in a commodity. One could could therefore say that, in fact, adios necessarily has theological connotations, going "towards God."
His theological critique is based around the inevitably present in dialectical history, Marxist or Hegelian. The force that drives dialects forward isn't rational in character, as Hegel puts it, but instead Theological. The argument is descriptive. It's not sentimental, but instead exposing purportedly secular theories of progress as being, at the end of the day, quasi-religious in character.
And again, Benjamin is absolutely a Marxist. This is Adorno's teacher we're talking about.
Thomas Cooper
It should be noted that there's also nothing wrong with this Theological character for Benjamin, for him it opens up a whole new realm of dialectical thinking.
Connor James
Just like your soul is present, eh? One could say that you don't speak Spanish and you lack a basic grasp of how language works that people usually take for granted when they talk to each other.
Ian Sullivan
I mean one of the key functions of poetry is to make these implicit meanings and etymologies explicit. Just because most people don't intend this meaning doesn't mean the meaning isn't there. It seems to me that all literary criticism, hell all serious criticism, is making implicit and unintended meanings known. And this is certainly the case with Marx, who had a supremely literary mind; taking his language and metaphors seriously as language and metaphor is a totally legitimate project, one that Marx endorses himself.
Consider the following situation: A Spanish atheist says adiós to another Spanish atheist, and both know each other fairly well and know that they both are atheist. Nobody else is there. What's your analysis of that? God must have been there, too? But Marx wasn't deconstructing other writer's metaphors and sayings in the snippets referred to ITT. It was him using metaphors and in a rather direct way, and his usage only appears mysterious to you because you aren't familiar with the texts in question aside from second-hand memery.
Brody Bell
That inherently theological meaning is still present in their language; note that this is different from theological truth. The same is the case when we say "bless you" when someone sneezes. It's now a secular term, ritually used, politely meant, but it still carries with it religious undertones. This is all to say that the language we use has unintended meanings, the origin of the word stays with the word. But he does do this in Capital. But the metaphor itself is used to describe the mysterious qualities of commodity fetishism. There's therefore a mysterious aspect to the metaphor, which is conveying mystery. There's also nothing "direct" about metaphor and allegory, but Paul De Man can tell you a lot more about that than I can. I've read Capital, I'm re-reading it right now for a course on the work. Being a text, it has to also be dealt with on textual and literary terms; it's pretty impossible to intelligibly separate the ideas from the language used to express them.
Hunter Kelly
As in he analyses literature, I mean
Jackson Rodriguez
A particular sentence could be interpreted in a certain way by you, it is said by a person who did not intend the meaning of your interpretation, and it is said to a person who does not recognize the meaning of your interpretation. But this interpreted meaning (uttered in a language you do not speak) exists in some higher eternal realm because you believe so? That's like saying the word for the color blue must have an aspect of that color to it. I don't believe that.
Jacob Thomas
It wouldn't be in any "higher" realm, it's within the language itself. It's literally right there. It's analogous, in this case, to how marx even talks about commodity fetishism, where the use-value of the thing is, simultaneously, right there, but also hidden and transfigured into an economic value. It's now not that the use value has somehow disappeared, or is no longer relevant because what we mean by "value" is really now in terms of economic value. You can believe whatever you want.
Jack Fisher
>it wouldn't be in any "higher" realm, it's within the language itself. Language doesn't exist in itself. Humans make language as a part of their social life. >It's analogous, in this case, to how marx even talks about commodity fetishism, where the use-value of the thing is, simultaneously, right there, but also hidden and transfigured into an economic value. The use value is not hidden. The use value does not turn into economic value, an object having a use value is a necessary condition for it to have exchange value. Like hitting a switch being necessary for the lights to go on. You wouldn't say that the switch becomes light. False. Example: I literally cannot choose to believe that you have read Marx, given what you say here.
