Historical materialism as history
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. German Ideology
No one was more sensitive to the domination of history (as expressed in the history of domination) than Benjamin.
If history is the never-ending wheel of progress, then Benjamin’s concern was, how to save the ground that has been run over from the wheel’s dominion, even after the wheel’s traces have long since transformed the earth into the path of necessity. In the Germanic historical form of the foundational text of historical materialism, it manifests itself as a dangerous compounding of the earth and the wheel: on the one hand, Marx is unmistakably aware that the perceptual intuitions that we see are all determined and accumulated by the realistic and historical past of the society, which is usually the triumph of the ruling class. On the other hand, Marx optimistically believed that the expansion of alienation of humans (and alienated relations of production) would transform a large part of the world’s population into the proletariat, from which the fruit of revolutionary class consciousness would surely be born: “This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” This is both the destructive and optimistic sides of the dialectics.
But Benjamin was more aware of the decline of historical materialism than any of his leftist contemporaries: the invincible chess player leaned on the dwarf under the table, “which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.” According to Benjamin, philosophy is the science of the text as well as the theology of reality. Isn’t the core of “scientific” historical materialism, those conditions on which it provides us with all the triumphs of necessity – that theological dwarf – precisely a trust in dialectics, a trust in its positive outcomes of its destructive side? And the mighty dialectics, in Benjamin’s time, lost its necessary truth. The destructive force of the First World War, and the rise of fascism, reminded Benjamin that those victories never came inevitably: before the classless society arrived, we might have been destroyed by the self-destruction of capitalism.
Marx’s dialectics contain the characteristics of his time, a solid belief in the ideality of science, i.e., in the cognitive power of philosophy (both for the natural and the social sciences). These ideas belong only to the nineteenth century. This is another layer of the withering away of theology: science is no longer a solid support for historical materialism; on the contrary, today’s science has long since been removed from the grasp of philosophy, and its social values have been melted down into technology. Historical materialists must learn to act in the absence of science, or even in opposition to science/technology…
This is the context in which Benjamin wrote his thesis. One hundred years after the German Ideology, Benjamin asks the question: what kind of historical materialism should belong to our (his) time? What kind of theory, or even consciousness, will be chanted from the face of the inevitable failure of faith in history and the imminent threat of fascism? Benjamin reads (Marx’s, the German Ideology’s) historical materialism as the opposition between historical materialism and historicism. Historicism, which means recognizing the past as pure, independent of the present. Homogeneous time originates in the juxtaposition of these planes of history, each of which is given the same place by the empathy of the historicist of the now (because it is empathy for the dominant materials circulating from the past to the present, and therefore it’s the empathy for the dominant). Benjamin describes empathy as the “unlimited tendency to represent the position of everyone else, every animal, every dead thing in the cosmos” Thus, the historicist fails to realize that this homogeneity is created precisely by themselves, and not by the nature of time or history itself. We become aware of its close connection with the faith in progress: in the empty and drained historical/temporal representations of the historicist doctrine, its flaws, or the part of consciousness which is false – the hollowness of causality, the lack of structure – precisely set the conditions for the notion of inevitable progress. This is where Benjamin’s insight comes into play, that the idea of historical progress can only represent itself as the subjugation of homogenous and de-structured historical material by alien forces. “Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.” What may come is not a classless society, but the destruction of the human race. “Not the least reason that the latter(fascism) has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm.” Thus, in order to redeem all the oppressed, in order to save things from the risk of disappearing, it is necessary for historical materialism to break off from historicism. It will acquire its own normativity from its antithesis. It will have to explore the path of speech and emancipation of all that has been repressed by historicism. It would sublate the linear and empty view of progressive history. Thus, it was expressed by Benjamin as a messianic time.
Of course, just as Benjamin’s re-questioning of Marx confronts us with a similar question: does historical materialism, as the doctrine most qualified to ask this question, require us to reconsider the historical conditions under which it arose in order to decide whether it is still valid or needed? If possible, this would constitute a self-criticism of historical materialism. From this, we can delineate the four quadrants of historical materialist criticism, its four possibilities. The horizontal and vertical axes are historical materialism as a theory of history and historical materialism as a meta-theory, respectively. Quadrants one and three are opposites: historical materialism is either masculine truth, which is invincible, and the specific turn it takes is precisely the self-correcting function of truth, its secret recipe for evergreen. Or it is a theory that is profoundly wrong from beginning to end. Neither of them is the point of our concern. What I want to focus on is in the atmosphere within the uncertainty shared by the two or four quadrants. Historical materialism and the communist movement were once a sense of historical necessity, but in its retreat it is also a result of history; historical materialism as a meta-theory can only acquire its pathetic truthfulness in its own decline. What I see is exactly the opposite of this pathetic truthfulness/certainty. The important thing is not to assume that historical materialism is a history that has passed and rush to bring it to a conclusion; rather, it is to come first to the present. This concern is more radical than the full details of historical materialism: it is the consciousness of politics itself. We have to begin by asking questions that belong to the now/this moment – by problematizing the present. In this process, we may hear echoes of historical materialism from the past (and there is an equal possibility that we will not). But this is the only way to relate to the fragile legacy of historical materialism, but its request does not come from this theory, but from politics itself.
Is Walter Benjamin a tankie?
In The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, a 1986 essay, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to complete a critical reading of the sexualization of the arcade project. She wrote, “the flaneur was simply the name of a man who loitered; but all women who loitered risked being seen as whores.” The prostitute is a form of Benjamin’s developing critique of the commodity, but also a subject silenced by (male) critics. Similarly. Shouldn’t we reconsider its Benjaminian connection between the proletariat and revolution in the same way? The topic is summarized by a somewhat ridiculous query: is Walter Benjamin a tankie?
I will begin with a text from around the same time as that written by Susan Buck-Morss. Jacques Rancière wrote Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France in 1981.
He describes the enigma surrounding the identity of the workers: we have the infamous statue of the worker, which is the result of the left’s assimilation of bourgeois discourse: labor is noble and valuable, seen as the backbone of historical progress and the transformation of reality; and the other left discourse that sets up the archetypal worker as destructive of production and oppressive work, who grasps the truth about the connection between their own production and capitalism, a truth that gives them the power to destroy capitalism. The first view is not new to Benjamin, or even to Marx. Marx noted long ago in his critique of the Gotha Programme that the praise of the social value of labor “has at all times been made use of by the champions of the state of society prevailing at any given time.” The second opposing view, on the other hand, has been frequently criticized by liberalism and historians. Their research aims to show that class struggle, and the left-wing narratives that drive them away, are not self-evident to the concrete lives of workers. Rather, these narratives suppress and distort the reality of particular lives. The ideal of this section of historians is to rescue the truth of ordinary life from the hands of the so-called “tankie”.
“But neither is there any true portrait of the worker that does not immediately disappear, by virtue of the power conferred on the identifying image,. into the spiral ranging from the meaninglessness of children’s hieroglyphics to adult dreams of another life. A question of identity, of image, of the relationship of Self and Other, both involving and concealing the question of maintaining or transgressing the barrier that separates those who think from those who work with their hands.”
The removal of the ideology imposed on the image of the worker by all non-worker intellectuals, politicians or historians, the search for the unspeakable truth of the worker – this spiraling movement goes on and on until no meaning is allowed to remain, and the unspeakable truth turns into the wreckage of the wordless. It is here that Rancière perceives a fetishistic obsession with the truth of the workers：
“The modern “reversal” of truth, you see, is really a matter of dividing in two. It has not done away with the old scholarly discourse that excludes the artisan locked in the circle of material needs and labors. It has simply doubled it with a discourse of truth, incarnating the latter in the very same subject who can know neither it nor himself but who cannot help but manifest it in his words and his actions.”
The hidden desire of this truth fetish is precisely that of keeping the worker in its truth-workplace.
The real problem for workers, Rancière argues, is not to use concrete truth or suffering, life, to oppose vain bourgeois diseaseless ness-but rather, on the contrary, isn’t the most brilliant insight of early Marx, the alienation, precisely that: the workers can understand the suffering of all the other classes, but they can’t directly locate or understand their own suffering? This is the very pain of the alienated nothingness (rather than the reality). Workers do not grasp themselves as the truth of the world; on the contrary, they feel themselves to be the shadow of the world. Before claiming that the workers’ struggle will surely prevail, don’t we need to answer the workers, what is the meaning of the struggle?
Here is the appropriate moment to return to Benjamin’s critique (and to a critique on Benjamin). Benjamin’s account of the opposition between historicism and historical materialism also describes the relationship between the repressed and the repressor, ”according to the standard interpretation, Benjamin’s concept of the messianic event or revolution aims at, as Žižek has often argued, the “redemption-through-repetition” (Žižek, Parallax View 78), that is, it aims at redeeming-through-repeating of what virtually existed in history but was then betrayed and repressed in every individual historical actualization of revolution.”
Was Benjamin within the scope of Rancière’s critique? Was he also obsessed with the place of proletarian truth in the Theses as well as in his earlier writings?
Of course, I am happy to defend Benjamin in this regard. For Benjamin, the proletariat is never a stable, not even ” repressed ” position, but on the contrary, it is a meteoric image of the past, defined by the impossibility of being. Instead of saying Benjamin’s historical materialists engaging in a battle between the repression and the repressed of truth, historical materialism is more concerned with the last remnants of this spiraling movement, the ashes of which nothing remains. The redemption against repression is also not about speaking the unspeakable and erased word. There is only one kind of discourse that enables the speech of those who never come into existence. That is the discourse which never existed – it is the only discourse which allows all the repressed to express themselves with total freedom, i.e., pure language itself.
Days and Nights of the Proletariat
I said in Part I that I wanted to discuss the politics of our present moment. But it is impossible for me to accomplish this; all I can do is to write such a beginning to the question:
Rancière himself explores issues that go further than the fetishization of truth.
”Workers need the secrets of the Other in order to determine the meaning of their lives and struggles. Not the “secret of the commodity” – isn’t that clear as day in every little detail? What is at stake here is not day but night, not the property of the Other, but their “misery”, their fabricated sorrow which contains all true sorrow. In order to “hold his head high in the face of that which is ready to devour him”, the worker needs more than the knowledge of exploitation. What he lacks and needs is a knowledge of the self, which reveals to him the existence of a commitment to something other than exploitation.”
In Rancière’s eyes, this self-knowledge is the dream of the bourgeoisie. It is foolish to mourn the workers blinded by bourgeois desires, for no one knows better than the workers themselves the sorrow of not being able to have this leisure. The proletariat dreams of becoming painters and poets, “Such is their venture as they seek to appropriate for themselves the night of those who can stay awake, the language of those who do not have to beg, and the image of those who do not need to be flattered.”
Perhaps this is the full significance of Benjamin’s discussion of mass media and art. For as Benjamin says in his Fuchs essay, “The bourgeoisie did not need consciousness to establish this class morality as much as the proletariat needs consciousness to overthrow that morality.”
And domination, whether realistic or historicist, was founded on the scarcity that the bourgeoisie, which did not need consciousness, possessed the most of knowledge, while the proletariat, which needed it most, had nothing. The massification of the media opens the door to possibilities, like the imagery that suddenly appeared in the sleep of the workers in the nineteenth century: they are able to take over the dreams and knowledge of the bourgeoisie. And it is precisely in this translation that the first brick of the Messiah as pure language is placed on the earth.
References
Benjamin, W. (2006). Walter Benjamin. selected writings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Buck-Morss, S. (1986). The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the whore: The politics of loitering. New German Critique, (39), 99. https://doi.org/10.2307/488122
Marx, K. (n.d.). Critique of the Gotha Programme. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (n.d.). The German ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
Rancière, J. (1989). The Nights of Labor: The worker’s dream in nineteenth-century France. Temple University Press.Rendall, S. (1997). The translator’s task, Walter Benjamin (translation). TTR : Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 10(2), 151. https://doi.org/10.7202/037302ar
