The Angel of History

Though the Jewish quest for the Messiah marks a final harrowing point to Walter Benjamin's life's work it is worth contemplating his Ninth Thesis on History before drawing conclusions about his message.

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Benjamin sough to expose in the Arcades Project, by examining the time in which modernity was at its most fragile, to understand the different possible cultural trajectories it could have taken. Each velvet sofa, gilded gallery or sculpted signpost signaled to him not just the past but many possible futures. In today's political and social-science discourse a sense of determinism lurks beneath the surface, especially concerning the behavior and attitudes of 'modern man.' Seen as a rational self-optimization machine, constantly seeking his logical self-interest, the consensus cuts out the possibility that we could think it different ways or be influenced by different factors. Benjamin believed that as modernity developed and the relationship between its economic base and cultural superstructure became more complex, a mechanism was set in motion that could ensure stability by which all commodities where rendered beautiful and all beautiful things commodified.

At the end of his long essay, Paris Capital of the 19th Century, Benjamin applied Freud's theory of the dream-state to modernity. A dream uses all possible devices and motifs to create a perfect illusion in order to keep us asleep. Dreams go as far as to incorporate elements of reality in order to trick us. His final call to apply to sense of awareness the surrealist sought to apply to ever aspect of life in order to be able to re-imagine them, is a message that should not be forgotten. Self-awareness may never pause the Angel of History, but she may teach her to better make use of her wings.