The Final Post

As you said, Ben, this text is difficult to read one time and completely understand everything that Benjamin was talking about. I had to reread the text multiple times and I still don’t think I have a complete understanding of the key terms he uses such as historical materialism and historicism. From what I understood historical materialism is a different way to look at history than historicism. Historicism according to Benjamin “gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past” (262). Historicism simply makes connections between different moments in history. I think that Benjamin is saying that historicism concentrates more on telling history “the way it really was” like Ranke does. The process of empathy, which is the root cause of sadness, is another important point that Benjamin says historical materialism broke historicism. Benjamin states that adherents of historicism empathize with the victor. Cultural treasures come along with this and “a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment” dissimilar from historicism (256). Some cannot look at these historical treasures without acknowledging that they are tainted with horror and barbarism.

Historical materialism “supplies a unique experience with the past” (262). Benjamin believes that historical materialists are in control of the power and are able to “blast open the continuum of history” (262). To effectively articulate the past historically one must “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). Historical materialists want to preserve that image of the past. Benjamin describes what a historical materialist does saying that a historical materialist only looks at a historical subject where he encounters it as an indestructible entity that is the basic constituent of the universe. In this way he recognizes “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework” (263). Then, after all of this the “lifework” is preserved and at the same time canceled.

So I already mentioned how Benjamin talked about historians empathizing with the victors in history. This is one way how historicism is dangerous because “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers” (256). Benjamin continues saying, “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (256). This quote brought me back to my external writing #3 where I talked about Fort Snelling regarding why it has not been able to be given back to the Dakota people. In this example the cultural treasure would be Fort Snelling. As Benjamin said the cultural treasure cannot be looked at without recognizing the horrific and barbaric origins of the site.