Brushing Thinking Against the Grain: Walter Benjamin and the Potentialities of Art and History 1

Jennifer Cooke

To elicit the laws of history we must leave aside kings, ministers and generals, and select for study the homogenous, infinitesimal elements which influence the masses. Leo Tolstoy2

It has become customary to begin papers on Walter Benjamin with admissions of how fragmentary his work is; how impossible it is to construe a systematic argument or position which runs through his oeuvre; how mystical his earlier writings are. It is as though everyone is condemned forever to repeat the opening lines of Theodor Adorno's definitively entitled 'Portrait of Walter Benjamin'.3 Additionally, there is a recent tendency to celebrate how postmodern Benjamin is, how well his works read in a poststructuralist interdisciplinary climate. Mention is usually made of the various influences upon his work of Judaism, most prominently seen in his friendship and correspondence with Gerhard Scholem; of Marxism, apparent in his relationship with Bertolt Brecht; and of his connection with the Frankfurt School theorists, particularly Adorno. Summarily, then, this paper begins conventionally. But a common theme that emerges from within the considerable body of commentary on Benjamin bears closer examination: namely, the extent to which the many commentators who express an initial admiration for his work finally admit to a sense of disappointment with it. This is typified by the apparent irreconcilability of the different influences discernable in his work, hence the varied attempts, in the first wave of his reception, to claim him for one position over and against another. While it is as true for Benjamin, as it is for numerous other thinkers, that his writing can be seen as a 'working through' of different themes and influences, in the two of his pieces it focuses upon, this paper will identify a project for a new way of thinking that is not only radical, but which takes account of the political. Concentrating on the posthumously edited and entitled 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

and the better known 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', I will suggest that these later essays can, when read together, be construed as a complementary critique of art and history which Benjamin intended as an impetus to action and change.4 Benjamin's interest in film, and his affirmation of it as an art form, were unusual among thinkers of his time. Adorno, for example, found Benjamin's theory of cinema not 'at all convincing'.5 However, it is clear from 'The Work of Art' that Benjamin was not unaware of negative aspects of the film industry, such as the cult of the movie star, the financial control exerted by moviemakers and the lack of revolutionary merit in the material tackled. Following this admission, though, Benjamin comments:
We do not deny that in some cases today's films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.6 (italics mine)

Mechanical reproductions lack history; they have no authenticity. Not being confined to churches, museums or galleries, they detach their objects from the realm of tradition to 'meet the beholder halfway'.9 As a result, two things occur: the authority of the object is jeopardised while, conversely, a reactivation of the reproduced object is enabled. This leads to:
a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are uniquely linked to the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.10

Inconsequential as these sentences may seem, they serve to highlight Adorno's misreading of Benjamin's essay on art. Adorno objects that 'the idea that a reactionary individual can be transformed into a member of the avant-garde through an intimate acquaintance with the films of Chaplin, strikes me as simple romanticization', but as the above quotation illustrates, it is not, as Adorno assumed, the content of a film that is important for Benjamin, but film as a phenomenon in itself. 7 More precisely, it is the challenge that film poses to traditional concepts of art that interests Benjamin, and from this he extrapolates the theory of 'loss of aura' as the manifest result of mechanical reproductions of art works. 'Loss of aura' is probably the most widely known and utilized of Benjamin's concepts. Often placed in relation to what is identified as his morose critique of the evils of modernity, it is frequently interpreted to describe Benjamin's negative view of the outcome of technological advances.8 However, I wish to argue that Benjamin's critique is, in fact, more sophisticated than this. Film, for Benjamin, marked a radical alteration in the continuity of art and aesthetics. He questioned whether art would, as a result of its development, ever be the same again. It is in this light that I believe 'The Work of Art' should be read: not as a crude polemic either for or against film, but as an assessment of its impact upon modern life.
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These effects are part of the emancipation of art objects from ritual and tradition, as a result of which the 'total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.' 1 1 It is not that the content of the art work is now political, which is the argument Adorno objected to, but that the function it serves is politicised, and this effect is uniquely linked to power. Benjamin never signals whether it is fundamentally problematic to have art based on ritual and embedded in tradition. However, as will become clear by what he does emphasize, namely the new experiential possibilities for the masses and the alterations this effects upon them and upon reality, the resultant detachment from traditional aesthetic classifications and uses allows art to become more exoteric. In this context, Benjamin notes that changes in sense perception are not new occurrences, the reception of an artwork having always been circumscribed by the sense perception of society, which is in turn invariably influenced by nature and historical circumstances.1 2 Thus, reception of pieces is different in different periods. The 'loss of aura' is a loss of reverence for the original:
To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.13

Importantly, at no point does Benjamin posit the experience of looking at, for example, a postcard of Michelangelo's David as being the same as seeing the original statue in Florence; similarly, it is accepted that pictures in newsStudies in Social and Political Thought Page 21

Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

reels differ from the images available to the unarmed eye.1 4 What is central to Benjamin's identification of this new experience of art is that it carries with it no condemnation of the desire to bring things closer, to open them up to a wider audience. What other theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse and Adorno, would label and dismiss as the commodification of art is, for Benjamin, an emancipation from tradition.15 There is superficially a questionable naivety in this position, though. Whereas Adorno would argue that the masses are produced by the dominant culture, their responses being proscribed by these mechanisms of domination, Benjamin apparently sees more potential within the new sense perception.1 6 Bearing in mind that 'The Work of Art' essay was written earlier than either Adorno's or Marcuse's expositions of culture, Benjamin shows perspicacity in anticipating their later arguments. Through the rising importance of the exhibition value of a work, as opposed to its cult value, the 'work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental'. 17 In the preceding paragraphs, he has delineated the functions of art which have characterised earlier epochs, incorporating cult and ritualistic values, and demonstrated how, only with the Renaissance, had the 'cult of beauty' arrived and given rise to what we know as aesthetics. What is named 'art', in both its production and its reception, is, after all, contingent upon the society doing the naming; in a footnote to this discussion, Benjamin cites Brecht, writing about the alteration of art once it has become a commodity. It is not the case, then, that Benjamin is unaware of the commodification of art, but rather that he sees how it effects a transformation both of the art work itself and of the way in which it is perceived.1 8 The new medium of film is, for him, the primary example of this: it can 'extend our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives' and liberate perception by bursting apart the 'prisonworld' of 'locked-up' reality. 19 The accessibility of cinema makes everyone into 'somewhat of an expert', 20 allowing the 'audience to take the position of a critic'.2 1 Furthermore, each person has, potentially, the opportunity to be filmed, albeit probably only as an extra. This last point is elucidated by an assessment of the rising opportunities for publication theoretically available to all. Although the tone here is initially ambiguous, a revealingly vitriolic footnote is provided in which Aldous Huxley is cited, condemning the expansion of publication possibilities inherent in the explosion of print culture. Benjamin's commentary on this lengthy extract is concise: 'this mode of observation is obviously not progressive'.2 2
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The potential for participation in film is not only manifested in the possibility of being filmed, but also in the viewing experience. Whereas established forms of art, such as painting, require 'free-floating contemplation'2 3 and were originally created for the individual to experience alone, cinema offers the opportunity for a collective reaction resulting from the conditions in which it is experienced:
With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other.24

This observation alerts us to the danger inherent within the medium of film. 'The distracted masses', writes Benjamin, 'absorb the work of art' contra to the contemplative man who is absorbed by the artwork.25 Thus, film can be a tool of power utilized for control purposes, and it is this notion that informs the warning contained in the epilogue of the essay. Film reveals new ways of seeing the world through such techniques as slow-motion and the close-up; it allows us to travel without moving; it can help those who watch it adjust to the dangers inherent in modern life by means of exposure to the shock effect of constantly changing images. Nonetheless, it also represents a medium for manipulation.2 6 Benjamin notes this dual potentiality most markedly when explicating the mode of distraction in which new art is absorbed. Architecture serves as an example of a form of art that is collectively experienced in a state of distraction, and it underlines the habitual nature of sense perception formation. Changes in perception wrought by changes in society and, especially for Benjamin in the 1930's, by increasing technologization, have to be absorbed by the individual. This is not achieved by contemplation, but by tactile and habitual appropriation; in other words, by use. It is precisely the inattention of the masses that enables them to assimilate these new sense perceptions so easily, allowing change to occur more rapidly:
Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to motivate the masses. Today it does so in film.27
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

It is fitting that the warning about the potential for a Fascist appropriation of film follows this insight, for, while Benjamin asserts that this new experience will help man with 'the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history', Fascism too can utilize film. 28 In the propaganda images of monster rallies, the masses can be confronted with themselves aestheticized.29 Fascism can produce politics as aesthetic; Benjamin suggests in the final line of 'The Work of Art' that communism will respond by politicising art. Clearly, film is a political tool. In my reading of 'The Work of Art', Benjamin offers neither a lamentation, nor a celebration, of new art forms, but an analysis of film: its historical precedents; its effects; its potential. Ultimately, the essay is about the power that can be exercised by those in control of art: a power which now, thanks to art's increased accessibility via new forms of mass enjoyment provision, has had its traditional ritual and cult form expressions altered, and its potential for appropriation by Fascism as well as by Hollywood considerably extended. Adorno, who cannot see beyond the banality of Charlie Chaplin films, misses this critique and thus, I argue, misapprehends the thrust of both the warning, and the suggestions for reappropriating the medium, that Benjamin lays out. If 'The Work of Art' is to be taken for its stated purpose, 'as a weapon' against Fascism, then the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', to which I will now turn, can be read as no less of an attack upon complacent thinking. 30 Many interpretations of the 'Theses', the huge variety of which at the very least demonstrate the richness of the text, unearth earlier works of Benjamin's to illuminate his conceptions of remembrance, history and time. While these are undoubtedly useful, it is outside of the scope of this close reading of just two texts to investigate other parts of Benjamin's oeuvre. There is also a reluctance, on my part, to transplant themes that Benjamin identified in the writing of others and employ them reflexively to interpret his own work, although concomitantly, denial of the immense influence that Proust and Baudelaire exerted over Benjamin would be impossible. The 'Theses' is essentially about thinking: how to think the past, the present and the future. It provides, in some respects, a perfect example of a Frankfurt School critique of positivism and instrumental reason, and it is therefore no surprise that an essay which shares many of the concerns of the 'Theses', 'Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian', was first published in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, the journal of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.3 1
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However, in its mobilization of Messianic themes, the 'Theses' is not a piece that one could imagine Max Horkheimer allowing into print in the Institute's name. 32 More than a critique of current thought, the 'Theses' proposes a new way of thinking that is, I will argue, deeply committed to the political. However, although theorists such as Susan Buck-Morss and Michael Lwy are right in identifying a revolutionary aspect to the 'Theses', they are wrong, I think, in positing Benjamin as someone who was awaiting the 'revolution' in the practical terms envisaged by his contemporaries.3 3 Ironically, Lwy himself notes, with some surprise, that Benjamin was 'attracted neither by the Russian October Revolution nor by the German Revolution of 1918-19'.34 Unless thinking is to change, the 'Theses' informs us, the revolution will always be within the wrong terms and will ultimately lead to a 'servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus' such as that Benjamin recognised as having effectively disempowered the politicians attempting to oppose Fascism at the time of his writing. 35 To elucidate the type of thinking that is being advocated here, it will be helpful to turn to the polemic against traditional historicism contained within the 'Theses'. History that is construed as linear and causal leads implicitly to a belief in progress. The problems with progress are twofold: firstly, it constructs the movement of history and the present as part of the 'infinite perfectibility of mankind'; and, secondly, it appears irresistible, unstoppable.36 The first of these postulates, for a German Jewish thinker writing under the shadow of Nazism in the late 1930s, is obviously a lie, while the second leads to an inconceivable and fatalistic apathy. History, Benjamin perceived, is only concatenated retrospectively, establishing causality a posteriori ; and yet it is presented factually, as truth. Traditional historicism provides the narrative of the victors, and does so as if there were no other narratives to be recounted. This leads to Benjamin's much quoted formulation: 'There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'.3 7 However, neither traditional historicism nor historical materialism, the latter advocated by Benjamin as a replacement for the former, will ever be able to recount 'the way it really was'.38 The role, then, of this reconceived history is not to tell us about the past as something knowable in all its moments. Such knowledge, Benjamin believed, would only be available to a 'redeemed mankind'.39 This critique of historicism has led some theorists, such as Axel Honneth, to recognise in the 'Theses' a project for recouping the past of the oppressed; but this view can be misleading. 40 As careful as the historical materialist is
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

exhorted to be about the dangers of empathising with the victors, a historical narrative which instead recounts the details of those crushed by history's victors will not escape the problem of linearity, but merely invert it. For, 'The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant it can be recognized and is never seen again.' 41 To acknowledge this interruption of the present by the past is 'to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger'.42 Yes, memory of the past is important, but not in a static sense of retelling: rather, in the dynamic possibilities it has in relation to knowledge of the present. It is, indeed, the 'tradition of the oppressed' which teaches that the 'state of emergency in which we live' is not an exception, as in Carl Schmitt's right wing formulation, but a rule; memory can reveal the present state of politics.4 3 The remembrance spoken of in the 'Theses', in connection with Jewish prayers for the dead and calendar days which serve as a 'time-lapse camera', is an action and a particularised activity, not a memory in the sense of something passively received or transmittable.4 4 It is in this sense also a preparation, a being ready for, so that we are in a state to recognize the past when it flashes up at that moment of danger. Once remembrance is interpreted as an active state of preparation, the Messianic references in the 'Theses' become less esoteric. If the final message with which Benjamin closes is directly Judaic, it is a clear one, for all that: the state of preparation in which the Jews exist provides the threshold over which the Messiah may cross at any moment. This is not an otiose waiting but an active being. It is a being open to the future without predicting it or predicating it upon past events. Having criticised the 'empty, homogenous' time of historicism, Benjamin introduces the concept of Jetztzeit, the 'now-time'. Kia Lindroos is right to quibble about the gloss given to this word in the English translations of Benjamin's Illuminations; it is simply wrong to equate the term with the mystical nunc stans.4 5 Attention to the text demonstrates that Jetztzeit is neither an entity outside time, nor a condition in which there is no future and no past. Following on from this, a second alteration by Lindroos to the English translation of Thesis XIV throws into sharper relief the montage element inherent in Benjamin's conception of Jetztzeit . With her amendments, the text reads as follows:
History is the object of a construction 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
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now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate.46

History, to reiterate this central point, is a construction filled by the presence of 'now-time'. Thus Jetztzeit is not, as could have been mistakenly assumed, the time of the future that is to be ushered in by the Messiah. Robespierre, a man in a moment of danger, sees in Rome the France of the Eighteenth Century and this impetus of Jetztzeit propels Rome out of the annals of linear historicity. It is a constellation of the past flashing up into the present and thus revolutionising present time and the present conception of the past. Montage is a good description for this constellation, which is powerful enough to throw linear time into stasis; Benjamin calls it variously a 'monad', a 'Messianic cessation of happening', and a 'revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past'.47 In this sense, then, the historical materialist is an activist. For him or her, the present is a place which offers the opportunity of a 'unique experience with the past' when s/he 'grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one'.48 A relationship with the past must include the two times, past and present; being thought simultaneously, they will be imbued with the Jetztzeit that will arrest linear thinking and time. The Social Democrats are reproved for making the working class think of the future, thus displacing the remembrance of their oppressed ancestors which would enable a 'with' experience to erupt. For the 'with' moment can consolidate time. Perhaps the best explanation of this is given as an anecdote in Hannah Arendt's introductory essay to Illuminations, in which she describes Benjamin's fascination with two grains of wheat displayed in the Jewish section of a museum, upon which someone had inscribed the complete Shema Israel .49 These pieces of wheat, nourishment in seed form, additionally encapsulated nourishment for the Jewish soul. Similarly, when the historical materialist blasts a specific life or time out of the continuum of history:
the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled [Aufheben]; 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.5 0

Thus the present, when it is Jetztzeit , can contain 'the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement'.51 The Judaic practice of preparative
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

remembrance, which allows the recognition of this blast when it occurs, illuminates why it is that the puppet representing historical materialism in Thesis I is secretly aided in his game of chess by the wizened hunchback of theology. To win at chess one needs to be attentive to the moves of one's opponent. As Arendt and Irving Wolhfarth have highlighted, the figure of the hunchback who inaugurates the 'Theses' was not new to Benjamin.52 He is the little man who punishes one for inattention, for clumsiness, and thus it is that he can provide the winning moves in a chess game, for as theology he is prepared, and as the hunchback he is observant and alert. Elements central to the Judaic tradition are thus demonstrated as being essential to the project of historical materialism. A second allegorical figure, the angel of history in Thesis IX, has stimulated much commentary, and even lent itself to several book titles.53 Paul Klee's painting, Angelus Novus , which served as its inspiration, was in Benjamin's possession. Interpretations of the angel tend to focus on one particular aspect, but when considered together these various accounts do more justice to the complexity of the allegory. For Gillian Rose, following the Messianic allusions of the Theses, the rising debris which the angel contemplates with horror is the product of a world without redemption.5 4 For others too, the description of the angel highlights loss, but also constitutes an invocation to remembrance.5 5 Robert Alter, however, interprets the storm from paradise that represents progress as a bitterly ironic image. All these emphases are important. But I would disagree with Alter's contention that the angel has been robbed of its traditional function as a result of its removal from the 'realm of revelation and divine messages'.5 6 I would argue that a conception of the angel as messenger, as harbinger, is essential to a faithful reading of the image. The angel of history-as-catastrophe serves as a warning of how the situation will continue unless we begin to think history differently. Directly after this section comes the reproof directed towards the Social Democrats and, implicitly, towards the politicians of Communism in Russia, all of whom 'betray their own cause'.5 7 Benjamin is not suggesting that the angel's view of history should be adopted, but rather the condition of prepared remembrance, detailed in Theses XIV-XVII, that has been discussed above. In his essay 'Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism - The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin', Jrgen Habermas questions Benjamin's ability effectively to marry historical materialism and theology:
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This attempt must fail, because the materialist theory of social development cannot be simply fitted into the anarchist conception of Jetztzeiten which intermittently come crashing through fate as if from above. An anti-evolutionary conception of history cannot be tacked ontoa historical materialism, which takes account of progress not only in the dimension of the forces of production, but in that of dom ination too.58

Unhappy as I am about the terminology utilized to describe the movement of Jetztzeit in this excerpt, there is a legitimate point being made here about forms of history. For Habermas is arguing that, if traditional historical empiricism is dismissed, then the ability to judge the changes in society is also lost. Returning to the 'Theses' will clarify this point. 'Historicism rightly culminates in universal history', Benjamin writes, and, if we return to the contention that the 'Theses' is about thinking, then it can be argued that Benjamin is not seeking to condone the abolition of 'additive' history; he is not suggesting that history books be destroyed.5 9 What he is in fact calling for, in warning against a nave belief in the narratives of victory that comprise historical accounts, is a method of thinking history that presents it as something other than a causal chain of events. Habermas is not alone, however, in exhibiting reticence towards Benjamin's work. Darko Suvin has seen, in the arrested moment of thought, a block to the future,60 which Gillian Rose also recognises when she writes that Benjamin's thinking 'is restricted to the stasis of desertion'.6 1 However, others have noted how recent theorists' works seem often to echo many of the concerns which Benjamin recorded in the 'Theses'. Both Matthias Fritsch6 2 and Maria Sepulveda Santos,6 3 for example, have identified similarities between Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, with regard to the latter's stress upon responsibility towards a past that can only ever be experienced in the present; while Lindroos notes that Benjamin's critique of universal history prefigures Jean-Franois Lyotard's heralding of the collapse of traditional grand narratives.6 4 However, although generally interesting, the question as to whether today's critical theorists can collaborate with Benjamin is not the topic under scrutiny in this paper, which has been shaped, in part, as a response to Gillian Rose's claim, in The Melancholy Science , that 'missing from the Marxism of both men [Benjamin and Adorno] is any notion of human activity or praxis'.6 5 Reading Benjamin, it is clear that he was not a Marxist in any simple sense of the term, despite the efforts of Buck-Morss and Terry
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

Eagleton to rescue this aspect of his thought.6 6 However, this was probably also the case with several other members of the Frankfurt School. As Suvin notes, Thesis X is critical, without naming any group in particular, of the vulgar Marxism practised in the 1930s and reflects the general sense of disappointment with the uses of Marx which underpinned much of the work produced by the Institute for Social Research.6 7 But, in the 'Theses', Benjamin offers a new, and I think persuasive, form of thinking which reconceives history as a tool for the present, and also for the future. In order that processes of societal change may escape the conditions that lead inevitably towards a reincorporation into the 'uncontrollable apparatus' which presents history as part of the long road towards progress, a new thinking of past, present and future is proposed. If society were really to think in that manner of preparative remembrance that the 'Theses' advocates, then thinking would itself be a form of action, a form of active remembrance that contains both a 'with' experience of the past and an openness to the future. Both the 'Theses' and 'The Work of Art' can be read as warnings about conventional forms of thought, and interpreted as calls to uncover the motives of those who offer us images of the way things are, as in the aestheticized politics of Fascism, or records of the way things were, exemplified by narratives of linear causal history. 'The Work of Art' fulfils performatively Tolstoy's demand, as expressed in my epigraph; it examines the influences that pertain to the masses and, in so doing, exposes the potential for change, for both oppressor and oppressed, that technology can bring to bear upon the construction of these influences. In 'The Work of Art', Benjamin steadfastly refuses to condemn film as a trivial art form, demonstrating his awareness of the potential for a misuse of the medium that any political mobilization of aesthetics would entail. Today, when broadcasting relies increasingly heavily upon images to support reportage and convey pathos, this remains just as pertinent a warning as it was in the 1930s. It is the function of art, in addition to possible changes in its form, which alters in each different epoch of society, and the functional aspect of art cannot be considered without a concomitant consideration of power and whom it is wielded by. In the 'Theses', the annals of history are exposed as being clandestinely inscribed with the power of the victors, which renders them a record of civilized progress as opposed to a remembrance of oppression. Benjamin's anti-evolutionary conception of history throws into relief this one-sided and linear tendency. Through their analyses of aesthetics and history, both essays propound interpretations of the present moment as one to be utilized. On the one hand, the aestheticization of film by Fascism must be responded to while, on the other, history
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must be rescued from historicism and turned from an impotent retelling of events into an active form of thought and preparation. To be aware of the ideology concealed behind presentations of art and of history is to open a door to criticism which embodies an impetus to think differently and thereby to exploit the potentialities of both phenomena. It can be argued that Benjamin failed to outline a project for revolution. But it was his hope, I contend, that to think differently, to brush thinking against the grain, should be a proactive preparation, an enabling of the past radically to interact with, and alter, the present, which might, at the very least, allow the possibility of a genuine revolutionary moment. Jennifer Cooke , having completed an MA in Critical Theory, has recently embarked upon a DPhil in English Literature at Sussex. She is researching the ways in which optical instruments, such as mirrors, glasses, telescopes, magnifying glasses and kaleidoscopes, reflect and refract the concept of looking in the literature into which they are incorporated. Notes
1. This title is taken from the line: '[A historical materialist] regards it as his task to brush history against the grain' in Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 248. 2. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace , Vol. 2 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 977. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, 'A Portrait of Walter Benjamin', Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 229. 4. Both essays appear in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999). From herein they shall be referred to as 'The Work of Art' and 'Theses' for the sake of brevity. 5. Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 , ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 130. 6. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , pp. 224-225. 7. Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, p. 130. 8. See, for example, Michael Lwy, 'On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin' (London: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 178-179 and Axel Honneth, 'A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation Between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin', New Formations, No. 20, Summer 1993, pp. 88-89. 9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , p. 214. 10. Ibid., p. 215. 11. Ibid., p. 218.
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

12. Ibid., p. 216. 13. Ibid., p. 217. 14. Ibid., p. 217. 15. See, for example, Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' in Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972) and Herbert Marcuse, 'The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation' in One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). 16. For Adorno's position see Theodor W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, p. 130. 17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , p. 219. 18. Ibid., footnote 9, p. 239. 19. Ibid., p. 229. 20. Ibid., p. 225. 21. Ibid., p. 222. 22. Ibid., p. 241. It should be noted here that the use of 'progressive' in this context is different to the concept of progress criticised below in connection with the 'Theses'. 23. Ibid., p. 220. 24. Ibid., p. 228. 25. Ibid., p. 232. 26. Ibid., pp. 229-230 & footnote 19, p. 243. 27. Ibid., p. 223. 28. Ibid., p. 223. 29. Ibid., footnote 21, pp. 243-244. 30. Ibid., p. 212. 31. Walter Benjamin, 'Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian', The Frankfurt School Reader , eds. Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982). 32. Interesting in this respect is the speed with which it was published posthumously by Adorno and Horkheimer, despite the Institute's reticence towards Benjamin's work in his lifetime. This might be due to Adorno's observation on the 'Theses' that: 'none of Benjamin's works show him closer to our intentions than this. This relates above all to the conception of history as permanent catastrophe, the critique of progress and mastery of nature, and the place of culture.' Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 311. 33. See Susan Buck-Morss, 'Walter Benjamin - Revolutionary Writer (I)', New Left Review, No. 128, August 1981, pp. 50-75, and Susan Buck-Morss, 'Walter Benjamin Revolutionary Writer (II)', New Left Review, No. 129, September-October 1981, pp. 77-95. For Michael Lwy, see On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (London: Humanities Press, 1993). 34. Michael Lwy, On Changing the World, p. 147.
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35. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 250. 36. Ibid., p. 250. 37. Ibid., p. 248. 38. Ibid., p. 247. 39. Ibid., p. 246. 40. Axel Honneth, 'A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation Between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin'. See in particular p. 91 and Honneth's concept of the 'moral debt' towards the past. 41. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 247. 42. Ibid., p. 247. 43. Ibid., pp. 248-249. 44. Ibid., pp. 255 & 253 respectively. 45. Kia Lindroos, 'Scattering Community: Benjamin on Experience, Narrative and History', Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 27 (6), footnote 7, p. 39. 46. Kia Lindroos, 'Scattering Communities', p. 39, and Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 252-253. It is the first clause that is altered. In Illuminations it reads 'History is the subject of a structure'. 47. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. 48. Ibid., p. 255. 49. Hannah Arendt 'Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940', Illuminations , p. 17. 50. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. 51. Ibid., p. 255. 52. Hannah Arendt, 'Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940', Illuminations, pp. 11-13, and Irving Wohlfarth, 'On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections', Glyph 3 (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978) p. 159. 53. For example: Karen Remmler, Waking the Dead: Correspondences Between Walter Benjamin's Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann's Ways of Dying (California: Ariadne Press, 1996) and Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 54. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 9 & p. 209. 55. See in this context: Karen Remmler, Waking the Dead , p. 33, and Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise , p. xvi. 56. Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 114. 57. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 250. 58. Jrgen Habermas, 'Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism - The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin', New German Critique, No. 17, Spring 1978, p. 50. 59. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. 60. Darko Suvin, 'The Arrested Moment in Benjamin's "Theses": Epistemology vs. Politics, Image vs. Story', Neohelicon , Vol. 28 (1), 2001, pp. 192-193.
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Cooke: Walter Benjamin, Art and History

61. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity , p. 209. 62. Matthias Fritsch, 'History, Violence, Responsibility', Rethinking History , Vol. 5 (2), 2001, pp. 285-304. 63. Maria Sepulveda Santos, 'Memory and Narrative in Social Theory: The Contributions of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin', Time and Society, Vol. 10 (2), 2001, pp. 163-189. 64. Kia Lindroos, 'Scattering Communities', pp. 33-39. 65. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 37. 66. Susan Buck-Morss, op. cit., and Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1981). 67. Darko Suvin, 'The Arrested Moment in Benjamin's "Theses"', p. 192.

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