A Tiger’s Leap into the Past; Walter Benjamin and the Power of Looking Back
Introduction
As a German-Jewish academic running from Nazi terror in Central Europe, Walter Benjamin’s residence in Paris was characterized by a period of double exile. A fierce opponent to fascism, Benjamin observed the triumph of fascism with shock and dismay, a sentiment that echoes throughout his final work, ‘On the Concept of History’. The issue that Benjamin explores in his famous work is that of the malevolence of historicism, and instead advocates for the virtues of the historical materialist tradition. Benjamin rejects historicism on account of its particular conception of historical time; in this tradition, time is conceptualized as ‘empty’ and ‘homogeneous’, a vacant linear continuum, through which the history of humanity unfolds as a string of irreversible progress towards some imagined endpoint. To Benjamin, the conception of historicism as this progressive historiography, driven by a hidden theology of redemption of the world by the proletariat in power, is the very root of fascist triumph and indoctrination of the German working class into the Nazi agenda. Determined to counterpose this ideology, Benjamin — in line with the ideology of his Jewish heritage — suggested that instead of seeing history as something that’s simply based on a progressive flow of events in a homogenous ‘empty-time’ model built around an eternal present, history unfolds as a disruptive set of events interspersed throughout the present and the past. Benjamin refuses the notion of the present as a transitional period towards a future that is free and saved, and instead seeks to lean on the Jewish tradition of being forbidden to look into the future, to look only to the past and remembrance of the past. But when it comes to practical application of this ideology, an analysis of whether the objectives he suggests are functional is necessary. I argue that yes, when we ground Walter Benjamin’s argument in a real historical context, like that of the feminist movement, his insistence on uncovering, recognizing, and appreciating causal historical narratives in the past to the present movement of the oppressed is essential, but more important is the present application of those lessons in revolutionary practice.
The Problem with not Looking Back
Evidence of the origin and lasting impact of the historicist tradition goes back such works as Hegel’s Philosophy of History, in which he suggests history is conceptualized as the unstoppable progress of human consciousness toward a freedom, albeit constrained, which the individual learns to accept as his ‘second nature’ with the guidance of God’s hand. Later, Adam Smith reiterates the same ideology in a more materialistic conception of the ‘invisible hand’ — he argues that the hand allegedly guides humans in fulfilling their own selfish needs, whereby they also contribute to the general progress of humanity without potentially even realizing the progress being made. As implied before, historicism threatens to mark the past as a series of events progressing linearly to an end that benefits those in power, thereby validating the supremacy of the rulers that be. But this linear conception tacitly justifies each event in the causal chain as a necessary link toward progress. To redeem the past is to deny that the injustices of the past. as well as the reign of past and present rulers, are implicitly justified as causal necessities for progress. And it is this conception of automatic progress that Benjamin believes to be the most harmful to the politics of the working class, and he models his own understanding of history (under the guise of historical materialism) in opposition to it. Given that Benjamin’s thesis alludes to the problematic nature of writing history around a false consciousness, he posits that the success of workers movements is contingent on their ability to look back and acknowledge the severity of past transgressions, that which creates a sense of motivation and urgency to make change. In this sense, Benjamin’s idea of historical materialism as a powerful agent of change is applicable to a number of oppressed groups beyond the German worker’s party that he writes about.
“A tiger’s leap into the past,” Benjamin’s famous remark, reflects the approach that understands the present as a resonating body of the past. The expression suggests that a genuine concept of identity cannot be obtained, and that identity is a process in constant becoming, characterized by the gaze of the other, the appropriation, and instrumentalization on a variety of levels. With this in mind, we can look to Angela Davis’ work on the unique story of black women in the broader feminist movement of the 20th century as it relates to the generations of antiblack violence in the U.S. that have been plagued with different modes of forgetting and outright neglect. As a result, absence, silence, and breakages mark a particular layer and structure of memory that contextualizes this form of neglect.
The Forgotten Few of the Feminist Movement; Looking back at Black Women in America
The womens’ rights movement has a unique place in the history of radical political movements in the way in which it diverges from the pattern of male-led, liberation-for-all ideology of previous movements. While movements of the past overwhelmingly cast emancipation as avenging and recapturing something of a lost manhood, where the revolutionary agent of both anti-capitalist and anti colonialist struggle was organized by their oppression itself, the story of the oppressed in the women’s rights movement was strikingly different. Women were never organized and concentrated by their oppression, instead scattered among private homes and families, traversing class and race lines. But with such a wide, spread out array of revolutionary agency (women), Davis argues that one specific segment of the group had both the most potential for instrumentalizing change, and was simultaneously given the least consideration. It was Black women’s historical position under slavery, and then under Jim Crow, which gave them an epistemic and political advantage as agents of radical change, that which was dismissed by the ‘change-makers’ of the feminist movement.
To support her claim, Davis executes a differential historical analysis necessary to identify those portions of the women whose experiences and histories best suit them as the leading fighters of the feminist movement. First and foremost, she suggests that Black women in America experienced a negative equality of oppression under slavery and Jim Crow. Black women, as enslaved women, were treated as equals of men, in the sense that they were equally subjected to the physical demands of slavery. They were put to work shoulder to shoulder with men, and were punished equally. “The special abuses inflicted on women facilitated the ruthless exploitation of their labor. The demands of this exploitation caused slave owners to cast aside their orthodox, sexist attitudes, except for instances of repression.”(Davis, 7)Moreover, this suggests that black women were never subject to the same ideology of femininity that white women were, already positing them in a unique place outside the forthcoming feminist movement. Instead, black women were able to “transform[ed] the negative equality that emerged as a result of the oppression that they suffered as slaves into a positive quality; the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.” (Davis, 17)
This early reimagination of negative experience into positive change in the black community is symbolic of the potential of black women as changemakers in the feminist struggle, which Davis goes on to suggest was never truly recgonized as it should and could have been. Instead, the major white feminist movements of the 20th century (fights for suffrage, birth control, abortion rights) failed to appreciate this history that black women carry with them, and the experience and achievements that black women have had, and instead centered the concerns of upwardly mobile and upper class white women.
By highlighting a lot of the early and persistent failures in the women’s rights movements — in that many of the goals of feminism did not always fully acknowledge the degree to which racism shaped the experiences of black women in the United States — Benjamin’s notion of historical materialism can be directly applied to this story. By leaving out many women of color and working class women from the feminist movement, thereby undercutting the feminist movement itself, the movement has undermined its attachment to those who could have been the most skilled and advanced fighters for feminist aims; black women. Davis argues that the failure of the abortion rights campaign to conduct a historical self-evaluation undercut the relationship between abortion movement and black women; “The abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they might have understood why so many of their black sisters adopted a position of suspicion of their cause. They might have understood how important it was to undo the racist deeds of their predecessors who had advocated birth control, as well as compulsory sterilization as a means of eliminating the unfit sectors of the population.” (Davis, 215)
With this, Davis implores that the feminist movement has failed in being attentive to the different histories of the individuals behind the movement itself, and of the different fragments of the class women. And it is for this reason that they haven’t been able to compose a class of radical feminist women that would be sufficient to achieve the aims of the movement. Through Benjamin’s framework, the root of these failures can be attributed to an insufficient nourishment of consciousness of the legacy of slavery; through the lack of ‘looking back’ in remembrance and empathy towards all of the movement’s oppressed forebearers, the women’s rights movement largely overshadowed the plight of the black community. Davis argues that the white feminist movement did not understand the needs of the black community; application of Benjamin’s ideology suggests that the ‘present society’ didn’t look back at the past hard enough in their plight for liberation of their present state and avengement of their forebearers.
Modern Commemoration; Using Hindsight in Service of the Tradition of the Oppressed
We can also look to today’s culture industry of commemoration to see how Benjamin’s concept of the tradition of the oppressed remains relevant. In an effort to instill a strong national identity in its people, the modern nation-state seeks to ritualistically remind its constituents of the memory of its origin, thereby founding the basis of national solidarity in affect and emotion. Through rituals of commemoration, the nation-state seeks to create a sense of the sacred, which is then attached to the group itself in a phenomenon known as collective effervescence, defined as a highly excited, ecstatic state of emotion. Its roots stem from Durkheim’s idea that any form of unique, commemorative activity or ritual stimulates a significant emotional response and is thus marked as ‘memorable’ by its participants in their collective memory (Misztal, 15). In fact, the very reason group members can have memories of a nation’s origin is due to the continually reinforced collective memory of the group, which is given power and significance through its emotional origin. And the conferral of distinctive, sacred status to a place or day introduces the possibility of its use as a sight of protest or dissent, as an agent of change, something that we can see in events like at the Chelton Town Memorial, or through the dismantling of confederate monuments throughout the US during the 2020 BLM protests. Again, Benjamin’s recollection of the battleground of history as a site of repressed possibilities of the present rings both true, and effective. But the real instigator of change is the repurposing of that imagined, collective memory, in practice, through revolutionary challenge to state-set norms.
Challenges to national identity can manifest in a multitude of ways, one of which we can observe in the changing nature of museology. Historically speaking, national museums enjoy a privileged place in influencing national collective memory; their purpose in and of itself is to define a community’s shared past and present, in a highly curated, orchestrated fashion. And they’re highly successful in this mission; Gardner notes that a wide array of the public selects museums over many other sources of knowledge for their trustworthiness, so much so that he likens the public trust of museums to that of their grandmothers (Gardner, 8). But despite this high level of trust, the purpose of public museums isn’t as simple as just educating the citizenry of their nation’s history. In broadcasting and inscribing the messages of state power throughout society through grandiose displays of power, the central purpose of museums is to convince and remind the citizens that they are, indeed, members of a shared, larger group.
In this sense, museums act as an exemplar of Bennett’s idea of the exhibitionary complex, a framework that identifies museum construction as a tool in legitimizing state order.In essence, national museums serve to reinforce the notion that people are actually, tangibly part of the social construct that is ‘the national identity’ — and they’re highly successful in doing so. Nonetheless, the magnitude of the responsibility conferred to museums opens the door for their use in retaliatory practices against the state. For example, when the White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day failed to explicitly mention Jews, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement explaining that “the elimination of Jews was central to Nazi policy. As Elie Wiesel said, “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
In other parts of the world, smaller so-called community museum openings have become tools of resistance against state manipulation of the past; in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, community museums like the Museu da Limpeza Urbana (Urban Clean-up Museum) built in Caju stand in stark contrast to Brazil’s state-funded museums that have traditionally left out marginalized groups. Instead, such community museums serve to preserve local history and the memories of the community to address their lack of representation at a national level (Gardenswartz). In this sense, the revered and trustworthy status conferred onto museums by the state and internalized by the public can actually backfire when these sites take agency over themselves and use their influence on collective memory in resisting the very state that emboldened their existence.
Closing Remarks
It remains true that focusing too much on the past has its downfalls; not only does doing so cloud the forward looking vision of a movement and its creativity and constructive strategies, but is also simply insufficient in serving as the foundation of a movement. Revolution necessitates more than just looking back with great focus and recognition;, revolution, or the resurgence of a movement, happens when the past is put into practice. Through cultivating solidarity with all relevant parties, revolution is contingent on the reimagining of practices of the past more than simply the memory of the past. Angela Davis’ exploration of the failures of the women’s rights’ movement to do so is evidence that remains true today. That despite the seemingly endless cycles of prejudice, oppression, and hate spewed against Black Americans, and subsequent condemnation of such behavior only for it to repeat just as quickly as it’s condemned, is evidence of this truth. And at the nexus of revolutionary protest and progress sits the spirited potential of commemorative sites as epicenters of protest and change. Their effectiveness is proof of the consequential importance of looking back at the past, recapturing its lessons, and practicing its lessons. To truly capture the revolutionary potential of an oppressed class is to strike a balance between hindsight and foresight which both acknowledges past suffering and allows the revolutionary objective of a movement to not be forgotten or eroded through practice.
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