“In modernist art, obscurity can be a conscious strategy. It is one of the ways in which the artwork can avoid being consumed too easily. Poems need to thicken their textures and scramble their syntax if they are not to slip down too easily, which is the fate of the commodity. Everyday language is no longer a medium of truth. It has grown stale and threadbare, and only by wreaking violence on it can you force it to yield something of value. Literary modernism sends language on a spree, but that’s because it is so distrustful of it. Jameson has some comments here on Benjamin’s idea of an ur-language, an original speech in which things speak their own names. Then comes the Fall, in which the bond between word and thing is broken. Words become arbitrary signs of things, and language degenerates into a Babel of tongues.
If language is no longer to be trusted, you can turn instead to the image. Hence Benjamin’s passion for Surrealism, for which revelation lies in the clash between one image and another. You can take in an image at a glance, but not a narrative. Time is giving way to space, the sequential to the simultaneous. Modernism is among other things a crisis of narration, as the world ceases to be story-shaped. History is no longer informed by the plot once known as progress. Progress and continuity are fictions of the ruling class. They are also the delusions of those socialists who believed that capitalism was doomed to collapse, and that fascism was its death throes.”
“Everyday language unfolds in a linear way, and the general view is that history does too. We think of the past as finished and the present as open-ended, but this is not Benjamin’s opinion. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ it is the past that is incomplete, and the present that has a chance to bring it to fruition. What happens, happens, and does so irretrievably; but the meaning of such events is in the custodianship of the living, so that it is up to us to decide whether, say, a Neolithic child belonged to a species which ended up destroying itself. We can also ensure that those in the past who were defeated in their fight for justice and friendship did not die in vain – that in Benjamin’s phrase, the names of those anonymous men and women will be mentioned in dispatches on Judgment Day. The dead cannot literally be compensated for their suffering, but that suffering can be invested with new significance by our actions in the present. For the moment, then, the meaning of the past remains fluid, and our judgment on it must remain suspended.”
“Benjamin’s own dark political age is precisely such a moment of danger, one in which the continuity of history is violently ruptured; this opens up a space in which images of past struggles for emancipation can come flooding in. There is a trade-off between past and present: the present can rescue the past from oblivion, while the dead can be summoned to the aid of the living. Time can be looped on itself, as in Proust’s great narrative, to reveal a solidarity of the dispossessed across the centuries. It is the grandest narrative of all, though one that deflates the dream of inevitable progress for which most such tales are notorious. It is certain that the Messiah will come, but he will not arrive like the final note of a triumphal tune. On the contrary, he is the friend of all those who have been crushed and defeated in their day by such triumphalism, and his coming to power will be their victory too.
Memory, for Benjamin as for Freud, can be an emancipating force, since those who wish to move forward must do so by turning back. In the hands of this most idiosyncratic of Marxists, even nostalgia can become a revolutionary concept. It is tradition that is subversive, not the act of abolishing it. What inspires men and women to revolt, Benjamin remarks, isn’t dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. His Angel of History turns his back on the future, and hence on all false utopias, gazing with horror at the mounting pile of rubble that is the past. It is not because history is valueless that the angel wants to end it; it is because much of its value springs from exploitation, and the latter weighs more heavily than the former. Hence Benjamin’s much quoted comment that every document of civilisation is also a record of barbarism.”
“The angel can’t move because his wings have become entangled in a storm, and Jameson seems uncertain about what this storm represents. Benjamin actually tells us: it is the myth of perpetual progress. What stops the angel from waking the dead here and now, calling time on history and ushering in redemption, is the assurance that history needs no such transformation, since it will carry us into a glorious future through its own momentum. It is the colossal complacency known as historical determinism that betrays the need for change.
Baudelaire writes of the modern as fleeting and contingent on the one hand, and eternal and immovable on the other. Modernism is caught up in the random and provisional, but it is homesick for a time when (so the rumour goes) the absolute and infinite existed. There is an absence at the centre of the modernist work of art where you might just catch a glimpse of truth and reality, firm foundations and stable identities, everything the modern age has supposedly swept away. Postmodernism, by contrast, is too young and brash for such nostalgia. There is no haunting absence in the world. What you see is what you get. Truth and reality are convenient fictions, and identity is invented on the hoof. Modernism should abandon its metaphysical hankerings. As the postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty was fond of remarking: don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch.”