I've just finished an obscure essay of Walter Benjamin's about art history, and approaches to the study of art (but also the study of literature and also history and even, somehow, botany) that may turn out to be among the most profound, and, at our current moment in history, among the most important of all of his writings.
At first glance, he seems just to be in the weeds of an argument about whether a new 'modern' interpretation of how to do art history has replaced the 'classical approach' of antiquity in the early 20th Century, but I think he is more gesturing toward his eventual theories of conceptualizing history and the great potential of the fragment, which are already in his mind, but he hasn't clearly articulated in 1932 when he's writing this essay.
"So began a train of thought that I am no longer able to pursue. But its last link was certainly much less banal than its first..."
"..., and led on perhaps to images of animals." (is perhaps less than the conclusion for the pull quote that I was hoping for, but there it is). This quote is actually not from the essay I was talking about, rather from the subsequent one in the collection I'm reading, "Hashish in Marseilles", but it hits on (or is at least adjacent to) what I am finding here (here in this post, and all around the whole blog generally). That is, that when I start to write a post that is trying to get across an idea (rather than one that's just a response to something or a compilation), I begin a train of thought that turns in to a (compelling) black hole of ideas that starts to connect to and pull in whole bunches of texts and ideas that I'm reading now or have done in the distant or recent past, and the connections and rhymes and implications become bigger (and yes, less banal), and better, but begin bouncing beyond my basis from back at the beginning of the post. And so I pull up short in all of these begun, and possibly one day done posts, which I occasionally open up, and ask myself, "what was this one going to be about again, really?"
But maybe not this time - if I just decided to say what I meant to say, instead of going back and being sure I was saying the best way I could or should -
And so, Walter Benjamin was writing in the early days of an era of crisis, 1932 in Germany, and he was of a generation of artists (and of Artists, if you subscribe to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, which I do for the moment, having recently finished The Fourth Turning is Here, by Neil Howe) who had thought to shake up and change the world with their avant-garde art and politics and thoughts only to watch it all seem to begin to unravel as they were entering middle age and the crisis era was ramping up and threatening to destroy the whole world.
That generation of, not just artists, but all walks of life, came of age just in time to witness (and largely participate in) the horrors of World War I, and then bask in the wonders of the Roaring Twenties, and seemed to be living through a time that would see things on the upswing and a world forever changed (in this case, cured of war) while at the same time harboring deep divisions and animosities that were being largely glossed over (rural poverty versus Flapper culture; Teetotalers getting Prohibition passed in America... versus Flapper culture {and mobster culture!}; race stuff...).
That era of the 1930s is having a moment, not just because it's the Nazis and World War II, and it's always what our stories turn to. Rather, Neil Howe would suggest that we are in a parallel historical moment of crisis now, starting with the 2008 Great Recession (he marks that previous crisis era starting with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and through to the Great Depression, and through the conclusion of WWII). As Benjamin, a Jew writing in 1932 Germany, he's in the midst of the crisis, but seemingly doesn't know it yet. So too we, here in 2024, can't tell what the nature of the real disaster we are about to experience will be.
We feel like we know who some of the main characters of the coming disaster might be: Vlad Putin seems a good candidate for a villain on that side of the pond, and we have our own possible seat filler over here, oranger and dumber to be sure, but not that much less menacing. But we don't have any idea, yet, how this one turns out over the next decade or so... whether it's another world war, like (and very much unlike) the last one that ended the last crisis cycle (for the record, Star Trek future history records World War III {or 3, as we may have progressed beyond a time when we can rely on most people to be able to read Roman Numerals...} as starting in 2026, and 2024 is among the most tumultuous years in all of Star Trek history), or perhaps this cycle will end in another American Civil War of some kind, like the one that ended the cycle prior. Or perhaps it's something wholly new, that we haven't even considered before that results from improved AI or Quantum Computing or ____________.
But we're here for it, and if history rhyming (or repeating itself) is indeed a thing, better days are ahead (but after a big terrible thing first... sorry.)
