Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

from Paradise; it has got caught in his

wings with such violence that the an-

gel can no longer close them. This

storm irresistibly propels him into the

future to which his back is turned,

while the pile of debris before him

grows skyward. This storm is what we

call progress.^59

History is not the story of the advance of hu-
manity but one of a heaping up of wreckage
and debris. History consists of blood and suf-
fering, and there is no such thing as a docu-
ment of culture that is not at the same time a
document of barbarism. Our cultural tradition
is produced in a social setup that is rooted in
exploitation and repression. One should
never forget this when analyzing the past.
The task of the historical materialist, therefore, is not to write history from the point
of view of the victors (which is what is usually done) but from that of the victims. It
is his task “to brush history against the grain.”^60
The past and the suffering of the past call for redemption. The present has a
duty toward the past. This is because the different epochs do not relate to each other
in a purely chronological order. There are, as it were, underground links that relate
certain ages to each other. The French Revolution, for instance, experienced itself as
a reincarnation of ancient Rome. Between different historical moments there is a re-
lationship of correspondences and responsibility; but this is in fact an understate-
ment—according to Benjamin, each specific moment of history contains everything,
both the entire past and the virtual realization of the utopian final goal of history. It is
the task of the historical materialist to make that plain. It is his task to freeze time
with a constructive gesture, illuminating the subject of his research as a monad in
which the potential for “blowing up” the historical continuum is already contained:

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with ten-

sions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a

monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only

where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the

sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revo-

lutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cog-

nizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous

course of history.^61

3

Reflections in a Mirror

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.
(The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.)

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