Walter Benjamin is criminally underappreciated.. and I appreciate learning about his Angel of History from this short lesson. I missed your longer video on Benjamin's essay The Concept of History so I bookmarked that to listen to soon. I just went down a rabbit hole researching why Benjamin chose an image of an angel: according to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin was inspired by Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" painting.
I'm doing my Masters in Public History on the Goth subculture from a benjaminian perspective, so I can only contribute to the conversation as a historian, not a philosophy researcher. It is impossible to understand Benjamin without grasping his "mosaic" concept. Linear time *as we conceive it in the West today* is a product of industrialization, Illuminism and the ideologies of progress such as Positivism etc. But time, and especially history isn't linear. All we have of the past are fragments, and that's the historian's work: to pick up the lost fragments and try to make some sense of them, like the Angel of History. I also enjoy Löwy's analysis of his thesis, in which he proposes the concepts of Chronos VS Kairos. Chronos is linear time, which eats his sons and kills our relationship to the past. Kairos is in opposition to him, he's the messianic revolutionary representation of opportunity, the moment in history where you can take action. Based on my readings, also in relation to Andreas Huyssen (2000) writings on the fetishization of the past, the Angel of History is the embodiment of Kairos, against Progress, which is Chronos. I therefore believe he is warning us that this linear, utilitarian view of History has brought us not only tragedy, but amnesia. By defying a linear view of time, we turn to past to pick up the dead and those forgotten by traditional historiography. Getting more out of the scope of your video, but I think it's an interesting idea, what I'm exploring in my Masters is the concept of melancholy as a tool for protest and revolutionary action. The Angel of History has a deeply melancholic dimension, which relates to our detachment from our history as well. Seriously, this is one of Benjamin's top works, we could debate it for years (as many, many have)
@@immortalscienceofhauntolog6733 hey there, thanks for the question. I believe it's not a matter of forgetting chronology at all. That would be anachronism, the historian's "number 1 sin". Benjamin himself takes chronology into consideration in all of his works. But to Benjamin, fragments of the past are like worlds in miniature, when you analyze them, you can try to put them into a larger context (imo you should), but you will never be able to grasp it perfectly. Like a photograph, the moment behind it is gone. So you analyze and contextualize the fragments themselves, and depending on what you're analyzing, your use of them isn't and doesn't have to be linear. And this is a common thing in many historian works that don't even use Benjamin. We go back and forth in a timeline to illustrate our point. My professor mentioned that Hobsbawn had some pretty tough critiques on Benjamin, and that's on my reading list. Perhaps you'd find that an interesting reading :) I hope I could explain myself properly, it's tough to discuss philosophy in a UA-cam comment lol Edit: also a lot of Benjamin's critique on linear time comes from an understanding that there are different conceptions of time along history. No wonder Greek tragedies have such a cyclical time concept. So in a sense, when you let go of the pressure to be linear, that also helps you understand better different conceptions of time along history and different cultures
@@immortalscienceofhauntolog6733 thank you so much, I haven't read the Political Unconscious, I'll add it to my list as well. I believe it might dialogue with Benjamin's ideas too
Just got this recommended after watching John Akomfrah’s “The Last Angel of History” and it surely matches perfectly with the idea of Afrofuturism and the musical (but not only) research to create a different world. Really recomend watching it. It’s nice hearing you discuss Benjamin’s idea, don’t get much information on today’s historical materialism research coming from english speakers. Greetings from Brazil!
Also I love your neologism "Jeopardy-fication" / "Jeopardification".. I find it eerily relevant to Gabriel Rockhill's "The CIA & The Frankfurt's School's Anti-Communism" , a scathing critique of the Frankfurt School where he echoes Ulrich Fries who argues that Adorno/Horkheiimer were hostile towards Bertolt Brecht's influence on Benjamin and threatened Benjamin's stipend, which compromised Benjamin's ability to escape from the Nazis and lead to Benjamin's suicide. Adorno later lied by saying that Benjamin “could rely completely on us materially.” A horrifyingly haunting end to the creator of the Angel of History concept.
Ayyy, when you did that episode on the Concept of History, the content of it is the only time I've gone paragraph by paragraph in my writing. It ended up being over 50ish pages. I spent a long time on this section of it.
I think that what makes the whole idea of the Angel of History easier to understand is the following quote from Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History": "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake." How I read it is that for us to fix anything in the world we would have to halt the progress or just leave its path. Otherwise our efforts would be just swept by the constant change of conditions. I don't know... there's some anarchist vibe to it. For sure Benjamin criticises the uncritical recognition of progress as an inherently positive value. The theme of stopping history seems to pop up in Benjamin's work here and there - for example when he writes about shooting at the clocks during the Paris Commune.
The image of the emergency brake sets me to thinking - the idea of what is beyond control - like watching events ‘unfold’ in the Mideast, or the US political muddle…
Idea: rather than an angel, what if we considered history a "sail" (because it gives forward momentum to cultures), and like a sail it takes a society skills and resources to craft a lasting history. That said, a "sail" seems solid, seems real, but bear in mind it needs maintenance and history is no different. Also, what we call history isn't what happened, it's merely an interpretation of current evidence that it happened. In the same sense a "sail" is evidence of wind, not the occurrence.
I would love a video on Benjamin's Barroque Tragedy (Trauerspiel) essay. Me and a few students are gonna do a study group on this piece next month, and I would greatly appreciate your help in ellucidating this veeeery complicated essay 😂 Thank you for your content ❤
I wonder if the ‘Angel of History’ has a relationship to Benjamin’s idea of ‘weak Messianic power’? So there is movement - but it’s unexpected, and not in a grand schematic way. Maybe like Bonhoeffer suggests theologically by representative sharing in the Messianic sufferings of God? Or John Caputo’s concept of ‘weak theology.’ A little spit-balling here.
Treating history with _moral_ terms like "evil," has 100% nothing to do with historical materialism, (every class has its own morality, so morality is subjective) the point is not that everything in the past was inevitable, but that it happened and moralizing over it is worthless... but learning the trends, recurrences, and _law governed processes of social progress_ are another thing (progress meaning the new is better than the old - or a simple development without quantitative leaps + the necessary connection between links). Class based history is the first step. Because a people were vanquished in history, automatically does not make their cause just, nor does it erase their history, but logically treats them as they are, vanquished. The logic of more oppressed = more virtuous falls flat when encountering socially-necessary classes that overcome the old. "The promise of a [utopian] better future" was _never_ made by any serious historical materialist, if anything Engels, Marx, foresaw lots of blood, terror, wholesale destruction of classes, etc. A new society is just the old society with its remnant birth pangs. The neutrality of historical materialism is all sided in this way, but partisan towards the classes who move history forward. The repetition (quantitative change) of history is inevitable, in a circle, but revolutions (qualitative change) break that repetition into a spiral. To deny logic in history in order to justify accidents, brutalities and contingencies, is just another bourgeois ideologist defense of the present order as "natural" and as follows eternal.
You can't make sure it doesn't happen again and if you do it just means stagnation, the maintenance of the status quo. The goal should be to analyse past struggles and to make sure that you are the one writing history in the future. Both Karl Marx and Carl Schmitt understood this.
Progress is the Angel of History, because the Historical Materialists’ characterization of history as a march toward reason and science is ironically theological. A history in tune with the skepticism of scientific materialism would be far more ambivalent about change and would not view it optimistically as progress.
Walter Benjamin is criminally underappreciated.. and I appreciate learning about his Angel of History from this short lesson. I missed your longer video on Benjamin's essay The Concept of History so I bookmarked that to listen to soon. I just went down a rabbit hole researching why Benjamin chose an image of an angel: according to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin was inspired by Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" painting.
I'm doing my Masters in Public History on the Goth subculture from a benjaminian perspective, so I can only contribute to the conversation as a historian, not a philosophy researcher.
It is impossible to understand Benjamin without grasping his "mosaic" concept. Linear time *as we conceive it in the West today* is a product of industrialization, Illuminism and the ideologies of progress such as Positivism etc. But time, and especially history isn't linear. All we have of the past are fragments, and that's the historian's work: to pick up the lost fragments and try to make some sense of them, like the Angel of History.
I also enjoy Löwy's analysis of his thesis, in which he proposes the concepts of Chronos VS Kairos. Chronos is linear time, which eats his sons and kills our relationship to the past. Kairos is in opposition to him, he's the messianic revolutionary representation of opportunity, the moment in history where you can take action.
Based on my readings, also in relation to Andreas Huyssen (2000) writings on the fetishization of the past, the Angel of History is the embodiment of Kairos, against Progress, which is Chronos. I therefore believe he is warning us that this linear, utilitarian view of History has brought us not only tragedy, but amnesia. By defying a linear view of time, we turn to past to pick up the dead and those forgotten by traditional historiography.
Getting more out of the scope of your video, but I think it's an interesting idea, what I'm exploring in my Masters is the concept of melancholy as a tool for protest and revolutionary action. The Angel of History has a deeply melancholic dimension, which relates to our detachment from our history as well.
Seriously, this is one of Benjamin's top works, we could debate it for years (as many, many have)
ty for sharing!!
@@immortalscienceofhauntolog6733 hey there, thanks for the question. I believe it's not a matter of forgetting chronology at all. That would be anachronism, the historian's "number 1 sin". Benjamin himself takes chronology into consideration in all of his works.
But to Benjamin, fragments of the past are like worlds in miniature, when you analyze them, you can try to put them into a larger context (imo you should), but you will never be able to grasp it perfectly. Like a photograph, the moment behind it is gone. So you analyze and contextualize the fragments themselves, and depending on what you're analyzing, your use of them isn't and doesn't have to be linear. And this is a common thing in many historian works that don't even use Benjamin. We go back and forth in a timeline to illustrate our point.
My professor mentioned that Hobsbawn had some pretty tough critiques on Benjamin, and that's on my reading list. Perhaps you'd find that an interesting reading :)
I hope I could explain myself properly, it's tough to discuss philosophy in a UA-cam comment lol
Edit: also a lot of Benjamin's critique on linear time comes from an understanding that there are different conceptions of time along history. No wonder Greek tragedies have such a cyclical time concept. So in a sense, when you let go of the pressure to be linear, that also helps you understand better different conceptions of time along history and different cultures
@@immortalscienceofhauntolog6733 thank you so much, I haven't read the Political Unconscious, I'll add it to my list as well. I believe it might dialogue with Benjamin's ideas too
Just got this recommended after watching John Akomfrah’s “The Last Angel of History” and it surely matches perfectly with the idea of Afrofuturism and the musical (but not only) research to create a different world. Really recomend watching it. It’s nice hearing you discuss Benjamin’s idea, don’t get much information on today’s historical materialism research coming from english speakers. Greetings from Brazil!
Also I love your neologism "Jeopardy-fication" / "Jeopardification".. I find it eerily relevant to Gabriel Rockhill's "The CIA & The Frankfurt's School's Anti-Communism" , a scathing critique of the Frankfurt School where he echoes Ulrich Fries who argues that Adorno/Horkheiimer were hostile towards Bertolt Brecht's influence on Benjamin and threatened Benjamin's stipend, which compromised Benjamin's ability to escape from the Nazis and lead to Benjamin's suicide. Adorno later lied by saying that Benjamin “could rely completely on us materially.” A horrifyingly haunting end to the creator of the Angel of History concept.
Whoa
Ayyy, when you did that episode on the Concept of History, the content of it is the only time I've gone paragraph by paragraph in my writing. It ended up being over 50ish pages. I spent a long time on this section of it.
this is my new favorite youtube channel
I think that what makes the whole idea of the Angel of History easier to understand is the following quote from Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History":
"Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake."
How I read it is that for us to fix anything in the world we would have to halt the progress or just leave its path. Otherwise our efforts would be just swept by the constant change of conditions. I don't know... there's some anarchist vibe to it. For sure Benjamin criticises the uncritical recognition of progress as an inherently positive value. The theme of stopping history seems to pop up in Benjamin's work here and there - for example when he writes about shooting at the clocks during the Paris Commune.
The image of the emergency brake sets me to thinking - the idea of what is beyond control - like watching events ‘unfold’ in the Mideast, or the US political muddle…
Idea: rather than an angel, what if we considered history a "sail" (because it gives forward momentum to cultures), and like a sail it takes a society skills and resources to craft a lasting history. That said, a "sail" seems solid, seems real, but bear in mind it needs maintenance and history is no different. Also, what we call history isn't what happened, it's merely an interpretation of current evidence that it happened. In the same sense a "sail" is evidence of wind, not the occurrence.
I would love a video on Benjamin's Barroque Tragedy (Trauerspiel) essay. Me and a few students are gonna do a study group on this piece next month, and I would greatly appreciate your help in ellucidating this veeeery complicated essay 😂
Thank you for your content ❤
I haven't read much Walter Benjamin but this reminds me of Hayden White and Michel-Rolph Trouillot
I wonder if the ‘Angel of History’ has a relationship to Benjamin’s idea of ‘weak Messianic power’? So there is movement - but it’s unexpected, and not in a grand schematic way. Maybe like Bonhoeffer suggests theologically by representative sharing in the Messianic sufferings of God? Or John Caputo’s concept of ‘weak theology.’ A little spit-balling here.
Treating history with _moral_ terms like "evil," has 100% nothing to do with historical materialism, (every class has its own morality, so morality is subjective) the point is not that everything in the past was inevitable, but that it happened and moralizing over it is worthless... but learning the trends, recurrences, and _law governed processes of social progress_ are another thing (progress meaning the new is better than the old - or a simple development without quantitative leaps + the necessary connection between links). Class based history is the first step. Because a people were vanquished in history, automatically does not make their cause just, nor does it erase their history, but logically treats them as they are, vanquished. The logic of more oppressed = more virtuous falls flat when encountering socially-necessary classes that overcome the old. "The promise of a [utopian] better future" was _never_ made by any serious historical materialist, if anything Engels, Marx, foresaw lots of blood, terror, wholesale destruction of classes, etc. A new society is just the old society with its remnant birth pangs. The neutrality of historical materialism is all sided in this way, but partisan towards the classes who move history forward. The repetition (quantitative change) of history is inevitable, in a circle, but revolutions (qualitative change) break that repetition into a spiral. To deny logic in history in order to justify accidents, brutalities and contingencies, is just another bourgeois ideologist defense of the present order as "natural" and as follows eternal.
You can't make sure it doesn't happen again and if you do it just means stagnation, the maintenance of the status quo. The goal should be to analyse past struggles and to make sure that you are the one writing history in the future. Both Karl Marx and Carl Schmitt understood this.
Progress is the Angel of History, because the Historical Materialists’ characterization of history as a march toward reason and science is ironically theological.
A history in tune with the skepticism of scientific materialism would be far more ambivalent about change and would not view it optimistically as progress.
So angel goes back in time, tries to survey history in a nondescript way….
감사합니다.
Thank YOU!
Please make a video about Edward said
Already have :)
Duh whaaa? Thank you very much.
Haha what's that background
Photographs of friends
Jesus christ that intro