The connections and similarities between Bloch and Benjamin are still, I think, under-appreciated — reflecting the wider lack of interest in Bloch’s work. The two were contemporaries, knew one another and had a deep appreciation for one another’s work and methods. Just on the surface there are some interesting polarities — Bloch, the exegete; loquacious, modernist and verbose versus Benjamin, the master of compression and form. But those differences seem productive tensions, the possibilities of which I think are worth working with. I’ve been thinking about the two — again– after reading my way through The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s vast unfinished perfect ruin of a book. In the (rightly) famous section “On The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” comes this interesting comment from Benjamin.
A remark by Ernst Bloch apropos of The Arcades Project: “History displays its Scotland Yard badge:’ It was in the context of a conversation in which I was describing how this work-comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom-liberates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the “once upon a time” of classical historiography. The history that showed things “as they really were” was the strongest narcotic of the century.
The final sentence is a good way of showing the shared ground that exists between Bloch and Benjamin in the context of a philosophy of history. Both were concerned with the past though in Bloch’s case, thinking of him as a philosopher of history is perhaps a slightly counter intuitive position. He was, after all, a philosopher of hope and thus a philosopher of the future, but as Ivan Boldyrev points out in their excellent book on Bloch and his contemporaries, for all Bloch’s philosophy of the future, he spends all of his time writing about the past. Adorno described Bloch’s philosophical style as a groping towards something, a hermeneutics for a world which is not-yet present and can thus only be glimpsed fleetingly, through a darkness of the lived moment and the traces that are found in the history we inherit. Bloch’s philosophy of history is predicated on a double gesture, looking back at the past in order to find a trace of a yet to appear future. As Douglas Kellner puts it, Bloch’s philosophy of history is “a red path weaving through history, revolting against alienation, exploitation, and oppression, struggling for a better world.”
The point for Utopian historiography is not to establish what “really” happened through an accumulation of data but — as Bloch said to Benjamin — to break out the detective badge and underscore the essentially unknown of history. To put this in another way, history is not about getting to the truth, it is about investigating a crime. Bloch’s concept of the non-synchronous (which I’ve written about before) allows for the past to be seen as bound up within the present, breaking open and apart what Benjamin would call empty time.
This brings up Benjamin’s “Theses on The Philosophy of History.” Theses Six,
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.
To think of history as simply a recitation of facts and the practice of history being the accumulation of data is to do two things. One — it is to give up theory, and two it is to naturalize the successes of the ruling class. On this Bloch and Benjamin are in complete agreement that it is only in historical materialism that you get close to beginning to understand the incompleteness of history at all.
Benjamin also introduces a useful distinction between empty time and the presence of the now. This is theses XIV
Origin is the goal.
Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
The links to Bloch are even more clear here — the epigraph from Kraus echoes Bloch’s own understanding of Utopia, which was Heimat — to be at home in the world, to arrive at the place where all have hungered for and yet never arrived. Revolutions repurpose the incompleteness of history not simply on the level of aesthetics (the realm where the ruling class give their demands) but on the level of political struggle. In other words, a revolutionary rupture is a chance for actual human history to find a beginning point. Not for nothing do revolutionaries institute new calendars — the Utopian future always begins again at Year Zero.
Read the Theses on the Philosophy of History here.
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