Geez, getting out of the small cage just to realize I’m in a bigger cage.

Just a word of personal feeling before “serious business” starts. Even though this is not a piece of history itself but a study of history (historiography), it sounds so poetic… or the language is just too “uncool” for me. I find myself going back and forth, looking through the Eng-Viet dictionary every other sentence I read. Of course the last blog post, Ben won’t give his students an easy time. And “Angelus Novus” looks more like a demon than an angel to me… or maybe I just don’t have any artistic sense, or I just fell into the trap of stereotype, which is historical related (--_,--). I also find this text harder to connect to real life than any other text I’ve read in this class, even though I try my best to connect it to a real-life-ish moment, I afraid my connections won’t be much relevant, or not ‘my’ experience.

“[N]othing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (254). In this quote, I think Benjamin says quite the same thing as Fasolt, that history moves on to the present. While we (people of the present) keep refer to the past event with the time frame (like the 40’s the 70’s…), the past events seems like it’s no longer relevant to this day. As time moves on, we tend to cut off ties with the past, like things from the 40’s will be less related to us than things from the 90’s. “[O]nly a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments… [A]nd that day it Judgement Day” (254), Benjamin says the same thing as Fasolt again, the history that does not get cut off and still flows to the present has to do with the Bible’s end of history. “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably…. To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” (255), Benjamin simply says that if we don’t connect history/past events with our development in the present, that part of history/past events will be lost, even though it’s in the history book or record… it will still be lost because we don’t consider it relevant to us of the present. The only way that history won’t be lost is to connect history with the present. Like how you are your parents’ child, your parents are the past and you (the child) are the present… but without your parents, you will not exist. This example is somewhat a poor example because it is too close in time, while the history that Benjamin says facing the danger of disappearing is the history far back in time (like the Pop/Church rule time).

“Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history” (262) (even though I don’t understand the last two sentences, I feel like they are important so I just leave them there). This quote explains the two key points nicely (though not quite nicely, I had to google them anyway). ‘Historicism’ explains/analyze the record of history base on the culture or what happen at the time, instead of explaining it the more universal way, like ‘Why did they (people of the past) do it?’. ‘Historical materialism’ explains/analyze the record of history using a more universal method, like trying to understand ‘Why did they do it? Why did this event happen?’ As of why Benjamin says that ‘historical materialism’ “beats” ‘historicism’, I think it is because ‘historical materialism’ related more with the explaining/analyzing progress of history more than ‘historicism’. History is needed because of the struggle between the people and the sovereignty (I think both Benjamin and Fasolt says so), if history just states the facts without explaining those facts in term of progress, that kind of history is useless. It is just the same as giving study of the Pop/Church (lol at my language) ruling time without explaining that the people at the time revolt to get democracy because they want better lives, the people of the present won’t know that there may be something even better than democracy to strike for in the future. (Now my story comes in.) For example, in Vietnam, students have no right to talk against teachers because they are the absolute, just like the government/authority, they are the absolute. Whatever they say, one must obey (unless you have money to bribe them though. But then they know you have money, they will try to give you more trouble so you will need to give them more money to get out of the trouble, which means once bribe, you will have to bribe forever). So that is why I WAS such an obedient girl in Vietnam. Now, after I come to the U.S._ a democratic country that gives people more rights, I look back at myself in the past, I feel like I was just a puppet, feeling nothing (I do feel things like pain and stuff, I’m just saying), caring about nothing, I don’t think I was conscious back then (not humanly conscious, of course I was, I just wasn’t conscious with my rights and all the thing that related to disobeying the authority). I think I was in an iron cage back in Vietnam, now after I come to the U.S., I THINK I’m out of the ‘Vietnam’s iron cage’ but in another ‘iron cage’_ the ‘U.S. iron cage’… (--._.--).